Ok, wow

The upcoming session of the Book Proposal Accelerator filled up unexpectedly quickly. Here are some alternatives.

Hi Manuscript Workers,

Before anything else, I want to acknowledge how hard the situation in India is right now for those of you who are there or who have family and friends in the region. It’s difficult to plan ahead when the future looks uncertain-to-grim, so I recognize that this newsletter about planning for future work on a scholarly book proposal might feel particularly dissonant at the moment. If that’s the case for you, do feel free to tuck it away for now — there’s nothing truly urgent here.

Getting to my reason for sending this out today…. I opened enrollment for the June-July 2021 session of the Book Proposal Accelerator over the weekend and I was pretty shocked when it filled to capacity in under an hour. I am of course happy with the interest and for the opportunity to guide a lot of people through their proposals this summer. But I’m also conscious that many people who wanted to sign up weren’t able to. Sadly, I’m not able to raise the enrollment cap, because I do give responsive feedback within 24 hours to all participants who want it, and there’s only so many hours in a day I can devote to that. It’s a significant time commitment when I run the Accelerator synchronously, which is why I’m only able to do it twice a year.

But! I’m working on some alternative offerings that will hopefully fill the gap for at least some of you who had hoped to participate in the Accelerator this time around. None will exactly mirror the experience of the Accelerator, but I’m going to break them down by which aspects they replicate most closely so you can figure out which one(s) might be a good option for you.

If you were hoping to gain lots of insider knowledge about the scholarly book publishing process and you like working on your own…
Luckily for you, most of the curricular content of the Accelerator ended up going into my forthcoming book, The Book Proposal Book: A Guide for Scholarly Authors. There’s actually even more info in there than in the Accelerator curriculum, and it’s much cheaper too! It officially releases on July 13th, but if you preorder now there’s always a chance you’ll get it sooner. I don’t have a discount code to share in the newsletter yet, but if you reply to this email to tell me you plan to preorder, I may be able to hook you up. ;)

If you were looking for some basic info to jumpstart writing your proposal draft along with some curated tips on what makes for an effective pitch…
I’m offering a 90-minute workshop via Zoom on August 20th, 2021, called Outstanding Academic Book Proposals. It will include the most important info and tips from the Accelerator condensed down into an hour-long presentation, plus plenty of time for Q&A to get your specific questions answered. You can register for that right now if you like.

If you were looking to get the publishing process demystified and talk about how to strategize for meeting with editors, seeking an advance contract, and submitting to multiple publishers…
I’m offering a second workshop on September 24, 2021, called Set Up for Publishing Success. It’ll cover everything I just listed, plus answers the perennial questions of how to identify the right presses for your book and how to make sure your pitch makes clear you’re not trying to submit an unrevised dissertation. You can also register for this one now.

If you were looking for the structured guidance of a course to break down the proposal step by step and help you get to a finished draft on a timely schedule…
I’m working hard to develop a new self-paced program that will keep the structure and step-by-step guidance of the Accelerator, just without the live interaction and feedback from me. It will include prerecorded “lectures,” which the Accelerator doesn’t presently have. This format will allow me to make it available to a lot more people than I’m able to accommodate in the synchronous Accelerator sessions. Some people prefer to work on their own anyway, so I hope a lot of you will like this. I’m currently planning to call it the Book Proposal Shortcut for Busy Scholars, and I hope to have it ready for launch by September 1st, 2021. If you’d like to be notified directly if I end up being able to make it available sooner, just reply to this email or click the button below to let me know!

If you had your heart set on the full Accelerator experience, and can wait a little while for it to come around again…
I plan to run the synchronous Accelerator again in January-February 2022. I’ve set a tentative enrollment date of November 11, 2021. I will confirm that date and the time when enrollment will open as we get closer to it, so watch this space.

If you were hoping for the opportunity to ask me questions directly about things you’re encountering in the publishing process or in drafting your proposal…
You can always do that right here through this newsletter! I respond to every email I get from readers, and I use some of the questions in my Q&A posts (with details anonymized). Don’t be shy about reaching out if something’s going on in your publishing or writing process and you need some perspective on it.

If you’d like a private one-hour consultation to discuss your situation, I offer Ask Me Anything sessions, which you can schedule by filling out the form here. The AMA sessions aren’t for proposal evaluations; I don’t read any documents in advance. They’re really just for seeking advice and strategizing, which is sometimes all you need!

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I hope there’s something for everyone here and that we can still find a way to work together on your book proposal if you want to. In the meantime, I’ll keep chugging away with this newsletter to try to address some of the most common issues and questions around scholarly book publishing. I’ll be sending it out on Fridays for the rest of this month, so see you next Friday!