Essential knowledge about scholarly book publishing that every author should have. Get weekly tips on writing and publishing your scholarly book from developmental editor and publishing consultant Laura Portwood-Stacer, PhD.
A book 15 years in the making
Published about 8 hours ago • 10 min read
The Manuscript Works Newsletter
Essential knowledge on scholarly book publishing that every author should have
Hello Manuscript Workers!
Every month in this newsletter, I share newly published books by Manuscript Works readers and clients, along with a more in-depth conversation with one scholarly author to get a glimpse behind the scenes of the book publishing and promotion process.
This month, I'm pleased to bring you my interview with Dr. Nicholas L. Caverly, author of Demolishing Detroit: How Structural Racism Endures, coming out soon from Stanford University Press. One of the things I appreciate about Nick's story is that he acknowledges just how long it can take to research and write a book you're really proud of. This is especially true when national, global, and personal events disrupt our plans. If you've ever felt like you can't catch a break with your book project because the current events just keep currenting, I hope you'll find Nick's experience reassuring and inspiring.
Here's a description of the book from the publisher's website:
For decades, Detroit residents, politicians, planners, and advocacy organizations have campaigned for the elimination of empty buildings from city neighborhoods. Leveling these structures, many argue, is essential to making space for Detroit's majority-Black populace to flourish in the wake of white flight and deindustrialization. In 2013, the city set out to demolish more than twenty thousand empty buildings by the end of the decade, with administrators suggesting it would offer an innovative model for what other American cities could do to combat the effects of racist disinvestment. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research with city residents, demolition workers, and public officials, as well as analyses of administrative archives, Demolishing Detroit examines the causes, procedures, and consequences of empty-building demolitions in Detroit. Contrary to stated goals of equity, the book reveals how racism and intersecting inequities endured despite efforts to level them.
As calls to dismantle racist systems have become increasingly urgent, this book provides cautionary tales of urban transformations meant to combat white supremacy that ultimately reinforced inequality. Bridging political analyses of racial capitalism, infrastructures, and environments in cities, Nick Caverly grapples with the reality that tearing down unjust policies, ideologies, and landscapes is not enough to end racist disparities in opportunities and life chances. Doing so demands rebuilding systems in the service of reparative futures.
And now, here's what Dr. Caverly had to say about the process of publishing and promoting his book...
Laura Portwood-Stacer: Thank you for sharing your author experience with Manuscript Works' readers! Who do you hope will read this book?
Nick L. Caverly: When writing Demolishing Detroit I’ve also been teaching undergrads who ask questions like, “Is structural inequity inevitable?” or “What would it take to end racism?” These are questions at the heart of scholarship on racial capitalism. My book contributes to more fully integrating that scholarship within environmental and urban studies. If one of those students picks up this book, I hope they find a more polished version of discussions we had in seminar and office hours.
To respond to those questions, my goal’s been to do what I think ethnographic writing does well, which is to show how people navigate and transform structural conditions in everyday life. In Demolishing Detroit, those conditions include empty buildings (on the order of hundreds of thousands demolished in Detroit since the middle of the twentieth century) that are the material products of white supremacy. The book centers how program administrators and city residents alike hoped leveling Detroit’s empty buildings would wipe away the cumulative effects of racism, especially antiblack disinvestment. Ultimately, demolitions tended to exacerbate racially unequal distributions of unstable housing, economic opportunity, and environmental toxicity.
I hope Demolishing Detroit connects with readers looking to understand how structural racism runs deep but isn’t intractable. Demolitions show how structural racism endures without identifiably racist people and policies because things like urban development paradigms, heavy equipment training processes, environmental quality regulations, and neighborhood layouts reproduce the status quo. And that status quo is racist. As this happens, demolitions exemplify how structural change requires more than tearing down unjust material conditions. It takes building up landscapes that equitably distribute benefits and burdens.
Finally, I’m looking forward to sharing Demolishing Detroit with city residents and demolition workers who helped me realize what building up more equitable landscapes could look like. In a moment when the limited social welfare programs that exist in the US are being actively dismantled, I also hope the book finds readers interested in learning from folks who’ve been blunting the edges of harmful systems and laying the foundations of different possible futures for some time.
LPS: What are you doing or planning to do to promote the book when it’s released?
NLC: Promotion was a black box to me (shout out to the Q&A Laura did with Maria Whelan at Princeton University Press and Ask UP FAQs for shining a light into it). I’m fortunate to be working with the promotions team at Stanford University Press. They’ve been doing lots of work behind the scenes to get advance reviews and try to place an op-ed type essay around the publication date.
In addition to the work that press staff are doing, I’m writing an essay for Platform, which is a public scholarship venue focused on landscape, space, and power. I’m also working with a friend of mine, Marisa Solomon, whose book just came out, to organize a bookstore conversation where we talk about our books together (Marisa’s The Elsewhere is Black is out now from Duke University Press. It foregrounds Black, queer, feminist environmentalisms needed to challenge the antiblack ecological violence of waste infrastructures. You should order it.). Conversations like that are probably the thing I’m most excited about.
LPS: What has been the most surprising thing about the process of writing and/or publishing this book so far?
NLC: At the same time as I’m finishing this book, most other people are only seeing it for the first time. This is obvious and I shouldn’t be surprised by it, but I am.
Writing Demolishing Detroit was an opportunity for me to figure out some arguments for myself. And I’ve had a lot of help piecing them together. That help has come in conversations with research interlocutors, mentors, friends, conference discussants, manuscript workshops, peer reviewers, and the like.
But not everyone’s been sitting in those same conversations. So, I’m hoping arguments and stories that I’m deeply familiar with can still hold something new to people who haven’t read them yet. For this reason, I’ve been thankful for the lull of the production period. It’s helped me get some distance from the manuscript and come back to it with a perspective I didn’t have when I was in the weeds of writing and revising.
LPS: What aspect of publishing this book has brought you the most satisfaction so far?
NLC: My research for this project started fifteen years ago, so seeing it finally finished is really satisfying.
As a piece of advice for other people, though, remember that academic publishing folks do this for a living. I’ve been incredibly fortunate to work with acquiring editor Dylan Kyung-lim White at Stanford University Press. Dylan met with me, read chapters, and gave feedback to help me refine my proposal.
There were times during our initial conversations and across the peer review process when Dylan asked me to reflect on what it would take to make a particular argument more accessible to a non-academic. And my first thought was usually something like, “Dylan, don’t you know that I’m writing this book for my job, which is to be an academic?” But taking feedback from people like Dylan seriously, which comes from a place of deep care for academic books as a genre, helped me better articulate my contributions to the scholarly conversations I care about.
There’s also editorial, design, and production professionals. I had a vision for the cover (any color, as long as it was black). They came up with something different (spoiler: not black), which I couldn’t have ever imagined and actually really love. So, if I did this again, I’d trust the people who work in academic publishing. They know their stuff.
LPS: What do you think you might do differently the next time you publish a book (or what do you wish you had done differently this time around)?
NLC: I think my process with this book went as well as a first book can. Something I wish I’d figured out earlier was a strategy for making a book out of a dissertation project.
Here’s what ultimately worked for me: I opened a new word document and started writing. It took me a while to accept this, since blank pages can be paralyzing. But contending with that blank page also helped me find arguments that didn’t exist in the dissertation. Even when I went back to the dissertation file for material, writing through it again was an opportunity to refine things and shed some of the dissertation baggage.
If I write another book, I won’t have a dissertation to build from. And I know there are unique challenges to that. But I’m looking forward to those challenges being different from the ones I’ve wrestled with this time.
LPS: What were the most helpful sources of support you received in the process of writing and publishing this book?
NLC: When I started writing, I asked anyone I knew who’d written a book—especially if it was a book that started as a dissertation—for their advice. As with anything, some of their advice was contradictory (submit the unrevised dissertation for review! don’t submit until you’ve rewritten every word!). But that was clarifying in its own way, since it showed there’s more than one way to do anything.
I completed the Manuscript Works Book Proposal Accelerator in early 2021. Eleven-out-of-ten recommend to anyone who’s trying to get their arms around that genre for the first time. I also appreciate how (free to use!) things like Ask UP FAQs and Manuscript Works archive demystified the hidden curriculum of publishing an academic book. From early conversations with acquisitions editors through reviewing my contract, responding to reader reports, and copy edits, those resources helped me a ton.
Next session coming in May of 2026
Finally, I’m lucky to have had generous writing accountability partners, manuscript workshop participants, and peer reviewers over the past years. I also finished the full manuscript while on a leave supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation’s Hunt Fellowship (seriously, apply for those fellowships, you never know if you’ll win). Feedback and focused time made this book happen.
LPS: Is there anything else you want to share that you think aspiring book authors should know?
NLC: I started trying to write this book in fall 2020. I’d gotten incredibly lucky and landed a tenure-track job. To keep that job, I knew I needed to produce a book, published by a university press, within five years or so. A well-meaning mentor had also advised submitting a proposal and sample chapters in spring 2021. But, for personal and historical reasons, I had a really hard time writing that year. Simultaneously, I was a ball of anxiety, since I felt like if I didn’t pull myself together, I’d never finish the book on time and would lose my job.
A colleague of mine, Felicity Aulino, saw that I was spiraling. She encouraged me to rest and to know that even if I didn’t come back to the book for a year or two that it would still be ok. I’m really glad I took Felicity’s advice. I stepped away from my book for more than a year and held off on submitting the proposal until 2023.
Academic institutions are structurally compromised workplaces. Authoritarianism (on and off campus, in the US and elsewhere) isn’t making them better. So, for anyone out there struggling to write because you’re distracted, or sad, or tired, or sick, or scared—I’ve been there. Take care of yourself and your communities for as long as you need. Like Felicity told me, your book will be there when you get back.
Keep scrolling this newsletter for more new book announcements and other resources for scholarly writers...
This newsletter is coming to you from Laura Portwood-Stacer, PhD, professional developmental editor and publishing consultant. I help scholarly writers navigate the book publishing process with more ease and agency.
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Essential knowledge about scholarly book publishing that every author should have. Get weekly tips on writing and publishing your scholarly book from developmental editor and publishing consultant Laura Portwood-Stacer, PhD.