To return to my sometime obsession about academic book writing, here's another question I have for the blogging community. When people think about writing academic books, do they generally write the book first and then shop around for a publisher, or do they court a publisher with a proposal first and then write the book after they get the contract?
I've known colleagues who take both approaches, and I suspect it's as much to do with personal choice as anything else. I can see pros and cons in both approaches. Obviously, if you write the thing first, you risk not being able to find a publisher who wants a book exactly as you have written it – so therefore having to confront the possibility of making changes/compromises after putting all of that work into the book. You can also face problems, as a colleague did recently, that a prospective publisher sends only portions of the completed manuscript out for review (rather than the whole manuscript). This can lead to odd reviewer comments from reviewers who didn't get the chance to see the chapters in the full context of the work as a whole.
Of course, if you go with a proposal first to a publisher without having written the book, you potentially run the risk of publisher/editorial intrusion into the original concept – which could theoretically make the book better or worse depending on the nature of the publisher's suggestions/requirements. A publisher may be more inclined to be proscriptive about a proposal for a book that hasn't been written yet than when confronted with a completed draft manuscript.
When I've worked on books, it's always been proposal first, then contract, then writing up. But I'm interested in others' experiences/perspectives.
I have always done it your way.
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Great question. Partly this turns on how risk averse authors are–and partly this is determined by how confident a press is in a proposal.
My sense is that advance contracts are becoming more common; the conventional wisdom used to be that if you finish the book first (and it's good), that you can get a better press than if you only have a proposal. But I've been hearing about a lot of advance contracts these days. So I'm not sure that the conventional wisdom is as true as it used to be.
But one other thing: we're living in precarious times, for university presses, as for everyone else. And it's possible that presses will be are interested in making advance contracts than they have been over the past couple of years.
Al: I'm interested in why you think advance contracts would be more common in a depressed economy. Surely it's less risk to the publisher if a book is already written because they won't have to waste time and energy following up the author to make sure all is going to plan, seeking revisions etc? And if the completed draft doesn't fit the market the publisher has in mind, the publisher won't contract for the book anyway? Of course, advance contracts are likely less risky for the author in your scenario. So is that what you meant?
Err, I left out a word there. I should have said that university presses will be *less* interested in advance contracts than they used to be.
But there is another factor here: law books seem to sell pretty well. So while humanities and social science books may become harder (indeed, quite hard) to place, perhaps law books still have a little bit of an advantage. Hard to know.
Writing for academic and work purposes is a developing skill, and most of all, a practical one. For this reason, it is not always easy to develop this skill just by writing on your own. Ideally you will need a lot of feedback from your tutors, friends and colleagues, and a lot of writing practice, in order to develop your skills and to improve them.