Publishing a book, post-academia
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Publishing a book, post-academia
Behind the scenes with a Manuscript Works author
Happy August, Manuscript Workers!
With the slow-motion implosion of a certain social network where a lot of authors and academics used to hang out, I’ve been thinking about how I can use this email newsletter with over 10,000 subscribers to fill in some of the resulting gaps in new book discovery that we used to rely on places like Twitter for.
I’ve published interviews and guest posts with Manuscript Works authors in the past. For instance, you can read this post about how Jennifer McClearen published a book based on her dissertation, or this one about how long it took Betty Lai to write The Grant Writing Guide, or this one about how Helle Strandgaard Jensen faced her fears around writing a controversial book about Sesame Street.
I love these posts because they give an insider look into aspects of the publishing process that many authors experience—and struggle with!—but that aren’t often talked about publicly. I hope that by bringing transparency to scholarly book publishing, we can both celebrate what these authors have achieved while acknowledging the very real ways in which the process can be difficult.
I’ve tried to time these posts around the release dates for these authors’ books, since that’s the ideal time to make readers aware that a new book exists. While scholarly books often have a long tail and will hopefully continue to reach readers for many years after their release dates, the weeks right around publication day still remain important within the publishing industry for assessing how “well” a book seems to be doing in garnering publicity and finding its audience.
For this reason, I want this newsletter to continue to be a space where I share new books by the authors I’ve been working with. I’d also like to cast an even wider net so that more authors who have benefitted from Manuscript Works resources can make use of this platform. That means I’d love to share your new book if you:
are a subscriber to this newsletter
used The Book Proposal Book to land your contract
have attended any of my online workshops or webinars
and/or have been through my Book Proposal Accelerator or Book Proposal Shortcut programs.
I’ll be sharing new books at the beginning of each month, so just email me at least a month in advance of your book’s release date. You can reply to any of my newsletter emails you receive in your inbox. In your message, include a link to your publisher’s purchase page (not Amazon, please) and attach a jpg of your book’s cover.
I will also be using these monthly posts to share more insights from the authors I’ve had the pleasure of working with directly. Today, for instance, I’m sharing a conversation I recently had with Tamara Kneese, author of Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond, coming this month from Yale University Press (you can preorder it right now here).
Before I share my conversation with Tamara, I just want to quickly remind you that I will be running my Book Proposal Sprint again in just a couple weeks. When you register, you get access to a time-tested system to guide you through drafting your book proposal, and I’ll be providing live coworking support and personalized advice via Zoom every day from August 21–25. If you need some structure and motivation to get that proposal done before the school year and conference season hits, I welcome you to join!
And now back to talking about publishing a scholarly book after leaving academia….
Tamara and I worked together on her book proposal way back in 2018 and then again on her full manuscript in 2021. Since that time, she has transitioned out of academia, so I wanted to ask her about the experience of starting a book while seeking a tenure track job, writing much of it while on the tenure track, and then finally publishing it after leaving her university job. I know many people who read this newsletter are also experiencing career flux, so I thought it might be interesting to hear how one author has managed the process.
Before we get to that, here’s a quick summary of Death Glitch, from the Yale UP catalog:
Since the internet’s earliest days, people have died and mourned online. In quiet corners of past iterations of the web, the dead linger. But attempts at preserving the data of the dead are often ill-fated, for websites and devices decay and die, just as people do. Death disrupts technologists’ plans for platforms. It reveals how digital production is always collaborative, undermining the entrepreneurial platform economy and highlighting the flaws of techno-solutionism.
Big Tech has authority not only over people’s lives but over their experiences of death as well. Ordinary users and workers, though, advocate for changes to tech companies’ policies around death. Drawing on internet histories along with interviews with founders of digital afterlife startups, caretakers of illness blogs, and transhumanist tinkerers, the technology scholar Tamara Kneese takes readers on a vibrant tour of the ways that platforms and people work together to care for digital remains. What happens when commercial platforms encounter the messiness of mortality?
Pretty fitting that we’re discussing Tamara’s book in the wake of a commercial tech platform’s demise, I’d say! Our conversation below has been transcribed and edited for clarity.
Laura: Can you talk a bit about how this book began and some of the changes that have happened since you started it?
Tamara: The book began in 2007 as a master’s thesis, when I was initially researching Facebook and surveillance. And then the Virginia Tech shootings happened. And I was really fascinated by how conversations about Facebook were materializing in the mainstream media, and how there seemed to be a shift in how people were talking about Facebook as a thing. I used my master’s thesis to apply to PhD programs and continued working on the general problem of platforms and death for my dissertation.
From there, I knew I wanted to turn it into a book, but I didn't feel quite ready to dive into that right away. I published a couple of journal articles that were connected to arguments in the book. I also published some things that were kind of similar to the kinds of arguments I was making in the dissertation, but that didn't make it into the final dissertation itself. Some of those pieces ended up making it back into the book, even though I couldn’t fit them in the dissertation.
But the book took a really long time. I started the master's thesis when I was 23. And in the time that it took me to actually write, and now finally publish the book, I have been through many career changes. I've been through many relationships, I've been through divorce, I've been through having a kid and making it through the pandemic with a young kid at home. And I've gone through several career changes now.
As a graduate student, I was always told the book would be the ticket, that it would help me get a tenure-track job. But I wasn’t really ready for that after finishing the dissertation. I knew that I should be thinking about it. I felt guilty that I wasn't doing anything with my book. But I was an adjunct before I started my tenure-track job, and before that, I was just really broke and kind of cobbling together various odd jobs like working in a vintage shop and doing contract work at a tech company (which I would later work at full time when I left my tenure-track position). And so I just didn't have the capacity to even think about looking at my dissertation and trying to make it into a book.
When I did get a tenure-track job, I still didn't feel immediate pressure to publish the book right away, but I knew that I had to do it in line with a tenure clock. It was the main focus of all my meetings with deans and conversations with colleagues. The book was definitely the main currency of the tenure-track job.
Laura: How did you end up finding a publisher for the book?
Tamara: I was approached by an editor at a university press. She asked me if I had a book proposal ready, which I didn’t at that time, and I kind of panicked. That’s when I reached out to you to find out what to do, because I had no idea what the genre of the book proposal even was, really.
I wrote a book proposal pretty quickly, and the editor was so interested that she was willing to give me an advance contract. Then I learned from talking to other people that I should actually kind of shop around to figure out which press would be the best fit for my book. That was when I started talking to editors at other presses.
Around that time, I also learned that I was pregnant. I became obsessed with the idea that I really needed to have a book contract before the baby came and maybe even have the book mostly written before the baby came. That also didn't happen. I think I technically had the advance contract with Yale University Press right before the baby came, but I really hadn't managed to do nearly as much work on the manuscript as I would have liked.
Laura: What was the process of completing the manuscript like after you’d gotten the advance contract? [Note from Laura: for more on advance contracts, see this post]
Tamara: I knew that the book still needed a lot of work, because it was still a dissertation. The two sample chapters I had submitted with my book proposal were my attempt at updating and refashioning everything, but I really didn't feel confident yet in the full manuscript being ready by any means. I wrote a lot more and did more research while pregnant. And then while on maternity leave I was making pretty good headway, but then the pandemic hit, and I didn't have childcare. So that delayed things.
And then there were changes at the press. The editor who had acquired my book left for another press, and I didn't really know who my editor was for a while. I no longer really knew what my relationship with the press was because I just wasn't really talking to anyone for a while, and nobody was nagging me to turn anything in. And I was like, my life is a mess. I can't worry about this right now.
I finally did deliver a full manuscript after I was able to take a pre-tenure sabbatical and had childcare again. That gave me the space I needed to actually finish the book manuscript fully. Then it took quite a while to get reader reports. They were positive but it still was pretty daunting, because I knew that there were still a lot of issues with the manuscript. I didn't feel that it was really quite ready.
The other thing that made it hard to finish the book is that I study a field that is constantly shifting. There is always new information coming out about various platforms and how they are dealing with dead people, and new scandals all the time. And then I had to also incorporate COVID into the book manuscript somehow. There was this push to talk about COVID, even though it was and is still ongoing. When I read the book now, the parts about COVID feel dated because the way I was talking about it in 2021 (when I finished the manuscript) doesn’t totally work in 2023.
So, that might be a bit of warning against not feeling pressured to talk about things in your book as they're unfolding, even if it seems like you really need to address them, even if reviewers or editors tell you that you have to. Because by the time the book actually comes out, given how long the publication process takes, you might not totally like how it reads.
Laura: Good advice! Can you talk about some of the career changes that you were going through around this time and how that has affected your publishing experience, if at all?
Around the time I finished writing the book, I went on leave from my academic position to take a research job at a tech company. The person who hired me was also a scholar who had written books and was very supportive of me writing a book and publishing in general. It really was not part of my job, though, to the point where I was a bit worried that writing a book would be seen as a distraction from my job. At that point my book was sort of like my secret thing that I did. People at work kind of knew about it—I was even able to give a presentation about it to some of my colleagues—but it wasn’t a big part of my day-to-day work identity as it had been when I was on the tenure track.
I was recently laid off from the tech job, and it was actually really nice to know that my book was coming out. I had been worried about what would happen at work if I promoted the book too much and attracted too much attention, but this was no longer an issue. The one weird tension I had in my brain was about what to have in my author bio on the book jacket. When I had the tech job, I did have a visiting scholar designation at a nearby university, just to have access to the library and to feel like I was still part of an academic community. So my author bio just says that I’m a visiting scholar and nothing about my other positions.
I just happened to start a new job at a think tank that is very willing to help amplify the book and wants to help me put on a book talk. They are totally cool with me going to give book talks at other places and will help promote that, so that’s very nice. But it’s just total coincidence, luck, that I happened to get laid off and happened to switch jobs right as my book is coming out.
Laura: So this book ostensibly started as your tenure book, and now it’s not that. Did that change anything about how you were thinking about the book in the final stages of revision and as you prepare to promote it?
Tamara: One thing about my former academic job is that my institution was very service and teaching oriented. So I never really felt pressure to write a particular kind of book or to go with a particular press. They were happy with the presses I was looking at and the book was an important part of my research profile, but tenure didn’t fully hinge on the type of book I wrote or where I published it.
After I left my job, I did want the book to be more readable for a general audience. Being in a tech job and learning how to translate academic concepts to a very diverse audience in terms of background and expertise made me really want to be able to reach a wider group of readers with the book. I wouldn't say that I changed the style too much, but I definitely tried to simplify the language and edit out some of the literature review to make it more accessible. I wanted it to make sense with my current position and the reality of my life.
Laura: Does this way of thinking about your audience affect how you are thinking about publicizing the book now that it’s coming out?
I think my audience is still probably plenty of academics and people who are academic-adjacent. I have so many friends at this point who are working various tech jobs. So many people just never got tenure track jobs or left their academic jobs like I did. But I feel like the majority of people who are probably going to be most interested in the book are still going to be around the academic milieu in some way, even if they're not officially at a university. I've already been asked by a number of people at different universities to give book talks. It would be nice to also maybe try to reach slightly different audiences, such as people working in the tech industry. I think that there is a path for doing that, depending on what is going on in the tech ecosystem.
Laura: Has your press had anything to say about your changing position or changing the way the book is marketed or anything like that?
Tamara: Not really! After my original editor left, I was assigned a new editor. And there have been some other people along the way who have been added in, in terms of the editorial team. The people working in production at the press have been amazing—the managing editor and the copy editor—all of the folks behind the scenes at Yale have been so helpful and really responsive. I was surprised that I never had a meeting with anyone in marketing, but the marketing person is great. She knew what to do, apparently, because she reached out to a bunch of people who then reached out to me to say that they have received ads about my book being forthcoming. And every time I've emailed her with other people to send the book to, like people who might want to review it, or people who are interested in getting advanced copy for whatever reason, she's been very, very responsive.
I do think there's an understanding at the press that the book is a bit trade friendly, meaning that it’s potentially of interest beyond a scholarly audience. I get the impression that the press is viewing it that way, but I've never had a conversation with anyone about whether it’s a trade book or what kind of audiences we’re targeting, other than filling out my author marketing questionnaire. The questionnaire is a blur at this point. I can’t remember who I even mentioned or what I probably left out.
[Note from Laura: For more on how presses use the author marketing questionnaire and how to stay in touch with your press’s promotions team, see this post.]
Laura: Are you planning to write more books? How will you be thinking about your writing differently now that you’re not employed in academia?
Tamara: My next book is going to be a trade book, because I want to make some money from it. I want an advance. That’s just where I’m at now in my life. I’m taking inspiration from people like Ruha Benjamin and Biella Coleman, full professors at research institutions who wrote second books that aren’t traditional academic books.
The nice thing is that now I don’t have to write anything I don’t want to write. I don’t feel pressured to write for peer reviewed journals anymore. I would only write for a peer reviewed journal if it was something really special that I just felt really compelled to do for whatever reason, but at this point I’m focused on popular audiences and open access. Also, I would like to get paid when I write things. I’m kind of done with writing for free.
My plan is to write a book proposal for my next project and get an agent. I've been having conversations with some friends about that, who would like to help me make those connections. And so yes, absolutely, agent, trade book, advance. I know I'm not going to get rich that way, but I’ve realized after leaving my academic job just how much work academics do that is just not really part of the job description but that ends up taking up so much time. I enjoy writing, but that doesn't mean that I want to write for no compensation.
I hope you found Tamara’s experience illuminating! Again, you can check out her new book, Death Glitch, here.
I also want to share two other newsletter readers’ books this month.
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd’s new book, Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America comes out soon and you can preorder it from the University of North Carolina press right here.
Alda Balthorp-Lewis’s Thoreau’s Religion: Walden Woods, Social Justice, and the Politics of Asceticism is out in paperback tomorrow from Cambridge University Press, and you can get it here.
Do you have a scholarly book coming out in September? If you’d like to see it featured in this newsletter next month, reply to this email with a link to your publisher’s purchase page and attach a jpg of your book’s cover. If you have a discount code you’d like to share, feel free to throw that in too.
If your release date has already come and gone this year, not to worry. In December I’ll share a round-up of new books from all of 2023. I’ll put a call out for those in November, so keep an eye on your inbox then.
I’ll be back next week with some tips on reaching out to acquiring editors and making the most of your conversations with them. If you have a graduate student or early career mentee who could use this advice, please let them know about this newsletter so they can check it out!
Quick reminder before I go: I will be running my Book Proposal Sprint again in just a couple weeks. When you register, you get access to a complete system to guide you through drafting your book proposal, and I’ll be providing live coworking support and personalized advice via Zoom every day from August 21–25. If you need some structure and motivation to get that proposal done before the school year and conference season hits, I welcome you to join!