Inappropriate Icon Is Inappropriate

[ajnabieh]

I love this icon; it isn't true; I can't bear to give it up. Sniff.

***

Recs needed: blog posts, articles, books, ANYTHING on:

1) How to choose a publisher to pitch your dissertation-book (or any academic book) to;
2) What the structural differences are between a dissertation and a book (which I struggle with, because I see 275 pages of prose and think "book," yes?)'
3) How to write a book proposal (apart from "to the tastes of the particular press/editor you're pitching to").

Guess what my summer project is.

Comments

[jae]

1. I turned my dissertation into articles, so I don't have any advice on looking for publishers for dissertation books specifically. But for the books I wrote/edited as a more senior academic, I essentially chose by looking at which publishers were marketing their books to the audience I wanted to read mine, and pitched it to them.

3. I asked someone else who'd pitched their book successfully to the same press to show me his. ;)

-J

[ajnabieh]

3. Well, that's one solution! :)

1. I'm waffling on the book/article question--well, no. There's no monograph on Arabs in New York City in existence; there's one really, really good literary nonfiction book (seriously, worth reading--Moustafa Bayoumi's How Does It Feel To Be A Problem), and one kind of crap edited collection, and one book that uses a national survey of Arabs and Muslims but a lot of NYC-specific examples (because the authors are in New York). There's a hole that needs plugging. But what goes into the book, and what goes into journals, and how much repetition I want to allow...that's a question I need to figure out.

First I need to decide which book is emerging from this diss, though...*vague flaily hands*