Advice on Publishing Academic Texts
Presses that Publish CaMP Books:
Podcast interview with an agent about publishing a trade book:
Authors weigh in on how to publish a journal article:
1) When working on a book, what are the advantages and disadvantages of publishing the chapters
individually as articles as you work on them?
2) When does deciding an article’s home become important for you during the writing process?
Do you write an article knowing the potential venue(s) that it might be published in, or do you just
write an article first and then figure out where it could be published?
3) Any suggestions for coauthoring articles? Are there useful strategies for dividing up the work?
What kinds of agreements do you like to make when beginning the collaboration?
4) Is there any merit in thinking about an article submission as a way to get feedback on a work
in progress?
5) How do you react to a piece that has been rejected? Do you burst into tears, curl up into a ball,
fume at the editor and reviewers, get back to the drawing board? The possibilities are endless.
6) Do you have any suggestions for how to approach writing and publishing pieces that are more
theoretical rather than more ethnographic?
7) When you receive a revise and resubmit, how do you typically approach the reviewers’ comments?
How many of those comments should be included in the revised draft?
8) At what point do you decide that it is better to try and publish a piece in a different venue instead
of trying to resubmit a revised article to the same journal?
9) What are the spoken and unspoken metrics of publishing in your experience? Do some types of
publications or venues count more than others?
10) To what degree does publishing either in another language or an international, non-English
publication count towards your standing as a scholar or tenure and promotion in anthropology?
11) What are the pros and cons of publishing outside of anthropology?
12) How would you approach the process of publishing something in a non-anthropological journal?
What are some strategies to think about prior to submitting an article for review?
Elizabeth Chin, American Anthropologist editor, discusses how she makes a decision on an article:
Book editors weigh in on questions that authors commonly ask:
1) What type of guidance should an author expect in working with an editor?
2) How long does it usually take to get reviews back on a manuscript?
3) How should authors think about potential reviewers to suggest to presses?
4) How do authors submit to multiple presses without offending editors?
5) How should authors transform already published articles into book chapters?
6) Dissertations are often made available online through, for instance, Proquest.
How does this potentially impact the publishing process (of books based on dissertations)?
7) What sort of questions should first time authors ask editors that they often don’t?
8) When should an author first contact an editor?
9) Would you recommend that first authors try to get an advance contract? Why or why not?
10) How many chapters of a book can be already in print as articles?
11) What is the difference between a series editor and press editor?
12) How long should a nervous author wait before asking an editor if the manuscript’s reviews are in yet?
Other Resources/Questions
What to Know about Approaching Editors at Major Conferences
Niko Besnier and Pablo Morales discuss how to publish in American Ethnologist
Should Our Published Research be Used to Train AI?
The Book Proposal Book by Laura Portwood-Stacer:
A step-by-step guide to crafting a compelling scholarly book proposal—and seeing your book through to
successful publication
Priya Nelson’s (University of Chicago Press) guide to organizing a book workshop
Jonathan Sterne’s collection of advice for professionalizing in media and communication studies
Advice and examples of conference abstracts, grant applications, etc.
Yale panel on turning your
dissertation into a book:
