Celebrating Client & Reader Books of 2023
So many beautiful new books!
Hi Manuscript Workers,
This time of year is always a bit tough, and this year in particular has a been a struggle for many. I do think we have a couple reasons to celebrate, though. First, I’m looking back on some significant academic labor victories in 2023; shout out to workers who organized, fought, and won at Rutgers University, the University of Michigan, UCLA and a number of other institutions.
Second, I want to raise a cheer for all the scholars whose books were released this year. Completing and promoting a scholarly book is never easy, but the destruction of a certain social media platform has made it even harder to share new work and make sure the right people see it. I’ve therefore made it a personal goal to regularly promote new books by Manuscript Works clients and readers in this newsletter, not just as a service to the authors but as a service to everyone who wants to stay abreast of new scholarly books. I will be sharing new book releases at the beginning of every month, so do get in touch if you have something to promote in 2024.
Below, you’ll find a beautiful collection of books released by clients and readers in 2023. I’ve worked with some of these authors closely as an editor over the course of several years. Some have received support on their book proposals through my Book Proposal Accelerator and Book Proposal Shortcut programs. And some have simply been avid readers of this newsletter or The Book Proposal Book.
If you’re currently working on a scholarly book manuscript that you hope to publish in the future, I have one little piece of homework for you as you scroll. Pay attention to the titles of these books. Notice what you find helpful in terms of how the titles are structured and the keywords they include. Think about how these titles invite you in as a prospective reader. (Then try to apply some of the lessons you learn to your own working title.)
You can also note which publishers’ cover designs you’re particularly drawn to, and even click through to check out the publishers’ websites. As you make a list of potential publishers for your own book, visual design and online promotion are important elements to consider. Even if you’re not ready to finalize your target publishers now, it can be helpful to start paying attention to this kind of thing so you’re even more prepared when it comes time to choose your own publishing partner.
If you are ready to start seriously strategizing about publishing your own scholarly book, please do check out my upcoming programs, including my free webinar, How to Publish a Book from Your Dissertation, on January 3rd.
Note: this post might get cut off in your email client — just click through to see the complete list of books on the web.
Books by Manuscript Works clients
Helle Strandgaard Jensen’s Sesame Street: A Transnational History (April 2023)
From the Oxford University Press website:
In Sesame Street: A Transnational History, author Helle Strandgaard Jensen tells the story of how the American television show became a global brand. Jensen argues that because the show's domestic production was not financially viable from the beginning, Sesame Street became a commodity that its producers assertively marketed all over the world. Sesame Street: A Transnational History combines archival research from seven countries, bolstering an insightful analysis of how local reception and rejection of the show related to the global sales strategies and American ideals it was built upon.
To read about Helle’s trepidation about publishing a book that could be seen as controversial, please visit her guest post from April of this year, “The Fear of Being Misread.”
Tamara Kneese’s Death Glitch: How Techno-solutionism Fails Us in this Life and Beyond (August 2023)
From the Yale University Press website:
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….
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?
Tamara published The Death Glitch after leaving academia and reflected on this experience in an interview with me in August. I encourage you to revisit our conversation by reading “Publishing a Book, Post-Academia.”
Betty S. Lai’s The Grant Writing Guide: A Road Map for Scholars (January 2023)
From the Princeton University Press website:
Grant funding can be a major determinant of promotion and tenure at colleges and universities, yet many scholars receive no training in the crucial skill of grant writing. The Grant Writing Guide is an essential handbook for writing research grants, providing actionable strategies for professionals in every phase of their careers, from PhD students to seasoned researchers.
…Betty Lai focuses on skills that are universal to all grant writers, not just specific skills for one type of grant or funder. She explains how to craft phenomenal pitches and align them with your values, structure timelines and drafts, communicate clearly in prose and images, solicit feedback to strengthen your proposals, and much more.
Betty contributed a guest post in January, unpacking the time she spent on each step of her manuscript writing process after securing an advance contract. Want to see how many hours it took? Read “How Long It Takes to Write a Book” to find out.
Juan Llamas-Rodriguez’s Border Tunnels: A Media Theory of the U.S.-Mexico Underground (October 2023)
From the University of Minnesota Press website:
Border tunnels at the U.S.–Mexico border are ubiquitous in news, movies, and television, yet, because they remain hidden and inaccessible, the public can encounter them only through media. Analyzing the technologies, institutional politics, narrative tropes, and aesthetic decisions that go into showing border tunnels across multiple forms of media, Juan Llamas-Rodriguez argues that we cannot properly address border issues without attending to—and fully understanding—the fraught relationship between their representation and reality.
…Focusing on tunnels to show how media representations can influence all kinds of audiences—even those physically near the border—Border Tunnels helps us make sense of this pressing social issue, ultimately advancing understanding of the U.S.–Mexico border in all of its complexity and precariousness.
Juan graciously agreed to sit down with me to talk about his experience choosing a publisher for his book. You can check out our conversation in “Choosing the Right Publisher for Your Book,” originally posted in November.
Christoph Becker’s Insolvent: How to Reorient Computing for Just Sustainability (June 2023)
From the MIT Press website:
The deep entanglement of information technology with our societies has raised hope for a transition to more sustainable and just communities—those that phase out fossil fuels, distribute public goods fairly, allow free access to information, and waste less. In principle, computing should be able to help. But in practice, we live in a world in which opaque algorithms steer us toward misinformation and unsustainable consumerism. Insolvent shows why computing's dominant frame of thinking is conceptually insufficient to address our current challenges, and why computing continues to incur societal debts it cannot pay back. Christoph Becker shows how we can reorient design perspectives in computer science to better align with the values of sustainability and justice.
Joel E. Correia’s Disrupting the Patrón: Indigenous Land Rights and the Fight for Environmental Justice in Paraguay’s Chaco (April 2023)
From the University of California Press website:
In Paraguay’s Chaco region, cattle ranching drives some of the world’s fastest deforestation and most extreme inequality in land tenure, with grave impacts on Indigenous well‑being. Disrupting the Patrón traces Enxet and Sanapaná struggles to reclaim their ancestral lands from the cattle ranches where they labored as peons—a decades-long resistance that led to the Inter‑American Court of Human Rights and back to the frontlines of Paraguay’s ranching frontier.... Joel E. Correia shows that Enxet and Sanapaná peoples enact environmental justice otherwise: moving beyond juridical solutions to harm by maintaining collective lifeways and resistance amid radical social-ecological change.
Feng-Mei Heberer’s Asians on Demand (August 2023)
From the University of Minnesota Press website:
Surveying a contemporary, cutting-edge archive of video works from the Asian diaspora, Asians on Demand uncovers the ways that diasporic artists challenge the narrow—and damaging—conceptions of Asian identity pervading mainstream media. Rather than accepting the notion that inclusion requires an uncomplicated set of appearances, the works explored in this volume spotlight a staunch resistance to formulating racial identity as an instantly accessible consumer product.
Emily Hund’s The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media (February 2023)
From the Princeton University Press website:
Before there were Instagram likes, Twitter hashtags, or TikTok trends, there were bloggers who seemed to have the passion and authenticity that traditional media lacked. The Influencer Industry tells the story of how early digital creators scrambling for work amid the Great Recession gave rise to the multibillion-dollar industry that has fundamentally reshaped culture, the flow of information, and the way we relate to ourselves and each other.
Robin James’ The Future of Rock and Roll: 97X WOXY and the Fight for True Independence (April 2023)
From the University of North Carolina Press website:
In the 1990s, as alternative rock went mainstream and radio grew increasingly homogeneous, WOXY gained international renown as one of Rolling Stone's "Last Great Independent Radio" stations….
In The Future of Rock and Roll, philosopher Robin James uses WOXY's story to argue against a corporate vision of independence—in which everyone fends for themselves—and in favor of an alternative way of thinking and relating to one another that disrupts norms but is nevertheless supported by communities. Against the standard retelling of the history of "modern rock," James looks to the local scenes that made true independence possible by freeing individual artists from the whims of the boardroom.
Shenila Khoja-Moolji’s Rebuilding Community: Displaced Women and the Making of a Shia Ismaili Muslim Sociality (July 2023)
From the Oxford University Press website:
Over the course of the twentieth century, Shia Ismaili Muslim communities were repeatedly displaced. How, in the aftermath of these displacements, did they remake their communities? Shenila Khoja-Moolji highlights women's critical role in this rebuilding process and breaks new ground by writing women into modern Ismaili history.
Rebuilding Community tells the story of how Ismaili Muslim women who fled East Pakistan and East Africa in the 1970s recreated religious community (jamat) in North America…. By emphasizing women's care work in producing relationality and repairing trauma, Khoja-Moolji disrupts the conventional articulation of displaced people as dependent subjects.
Hieyoon Kim’s Celluloid Democracy: Cinema and Politics in Cold War South Korea (September 2023)
From the University of California Press website:
Celluloid Democracy tells the story of the Korean filmmakers, distributors, and exhibitors who reshaped cinema in radically empowering ways through the decades of authoritarian rule that followed Korea's liberation from Japanese occupation. Employing tactics that ranged from representing the dispossessed on the screen to redistributing state-controlled resources through bootlegging, these film workers explored ideas and practices that simultaneously challenged repressive rule and pushed the limits of the cinematic medium. Drawing on archival research, film analysis, and interviews, Hieyoon Kim examines how their work foregrounds a utopian vision of democracy where the ruled represent themselves and access resources free from state suppression.
Julia Leyda’s Anthroposcreens: Mediating the Climate Unconscious (July 2023)
From the Cambridge University Press website:
Anthroposcreens frames the 'climate unconscious' as a reading strategy for film and television productions during the Anthropocene. Drawing attention to the affects of climate change and the broader environmental damage of the Anthropocene, this study mobilizes its frame in concert with other tools from cultural and film studies—such as debates over Black representation—to provide readings of the underlying environmental themes in Black American and Norwegian screen texts.... Working across film studies, cultural studies, Black studies, and the environmental humanities, Anthroposcreens establishes a cross-disciplinary reading strategy of the 'climate unconscious' for contemporary film and television productions. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Julia and I discussed publishing in a series for shorter books. You can read about the pros and cons, and find a list of relevant series, in “Publishing a ‘Short Book,’” originally posted in September.
Kalyani Ramnath’s Boats in a Storm: Law, Migration, and Decolonization in South and Southeast Asia, 1942-1962 (August 2023)
From the Stanford University Press website:
For more than century before World War II, traders, merchants, financiers, and laborers steadily moved between places on the Indian Ocean, trading goods, supplying credit, and seeking work. This all changed with the war and as India, Burma, Ceylon, and Malaya wrested independence from the British empire. Set against the tumult of the postwar period, Boats in a Storm centers on the legal struggles of migrants to retain their traditional rhythms and patterns of life, illustrating how they experienced citizenship and decolonization…. These accounts, often obscured by national and international political developments, unsettle the notion that static national identities and loyalties had emerged, fully formed and unblemished by migrant pasts, in the aftermath of empires.
Annika Schmeding’s Sufi Civilities: Religious Authorities and Political Change in Afghanistan (November 2023)
From the Stanford University Press website:
Despite its pervasive reputation as a place of religious extremes and war, Afghanistan has a complex and varied religious landscape where elements from a broad spectrum of religious belief vie for a place in society. It is also one of the birthplaces of a widely practiced variant of Islam: Sufism. Contemporary analysts suggest that Sufism is on the decline due to war and the ideological hardening that results from societies in conflict. However, in Sufi Civilities, Annika Schmeding argues that this is far from a truthful depiction. Members of Sufi communities have worked as resistance fighters, aid workers, business people, actors, professors, and daily workers in creative and ingenious ways to keep and renew their networks of community support.
Enter code SCHMEDING20 at checkout to receive 20% off Sufi Civilities when purchasing through the Stanford University Press.
Adrien Sebro’s Scratchin’ and Survivin’: Hustle Economics and the Black Sitcoms of Tandem Productions (November 2023)
From the Rutgers University Press website:
The 1970s was a golden age for representations of African American life on TV sitcoms: Sanford & Son, Good Times, The Jeffersons. Surprisingly, nearly all the decade’s notable Black sitcoms were made by a single company, Tandem Productions. Founded by two white men, the successful team behind All in the Family, writer Norman Lear and director Bud Yorkin, Tandem gave unprecedented opportunities to Black actors, writers, and producers to break into the television industry. However, these Black auteurs also struggled to get the economic privileges and creative autonomy regularly granted to their white counterparts.
Scratchin’ and Survivin’ discovers surprising parallels between the behind-the-scenes drama at Tandem and the plotlines that aired on their sitcoms, as both real and fictional African Americans devised various strategies for getting their fair share out of systems prone to exploiting their labor.
Firuzeh Shokooh Valle’s In Defense of Solidarity and Pleasure: Feminist Technopolitics from the Global South (September 2023)
From the Stanford University Press website:
Including women in the global South as users, producers, consumers, designers, and developers of technology has become a mantra against inequality, prompting movements to train individuals in information and communication technologies and foster the participation and retention of women in science and technology fields. In this book, Firuzeh Shokooh Valle argues that these efforts have given rise to an idealized, female economic figure that combines technological dexterity and keen entrepreneurial instinct with gendered stereotypes of care and selflessness…. In Defense of Solidarity and Pleasure examines how women in the Global South experience and resist the coopting and depoliticizing nature of these scripts.
Nina Lager Vestberg’s Picture Research: The Work of Intermediation from Pre-Photography to Post-Digitization (June 2023)
From the MIT Press website:
Picture Research focuses on how pictures were saved, stored, and searched for in a time before scanners, servers, and search engines, and describes the dramatic difference it made when images became scannable, searchable, and distributable via the internet. While the camera, the darkroom, and the printed page are well-known sites of photographic production that have been replaced by cell phones, imaging software, and websites, the cultural intermediaries of mass-circulation photography—picture librarians and researchers, editors, and archivists—are less familiar. In this book, Nina Lager Vestberg artfully details the range of research skills, reproduction machinery, and communication infrastructures that was needed to make pictures available to a public before digitization.
Tristan A. Volpe’s Leveraging Latency: How the Weak Compel the Strong with Nuclear Technology (February 2023)
From the Oxford University Press’s website:
In Leveraging Latency, Tristan A. Volpe argues that having greater capacity to build weaponry doesn't translate to greater coercive advantage. Volpe finds that there is a trade-off between threatening proliferation and promising nuclear restraint. States need just enough bomb-making capacity to threaten proliferation, but not so much that it becomes too difficult for them to offer nonproliferation assurances. The boundaries of this sweet spot align with the capacity to produce the fissile material at the heart of an atomic weapon.
…As nuclear technology continues to cast a shadow over the global landscape, Leveraging Latency provides a systematic assessment of its coercive utility.
Samuel Woolley’s Manufacturing Consensus: Understanding Propaganda in the Era of Automation and Anonymity (January 2023)
From the Yale University Press website:
Until recently, propaganda was a top-down, elite-only system of communication control used largely by state actors. Samuel Woolley argues that social media has democratized today’s propaganda, allowing nearly anyone to launch a fairly sophisticated, computationally enhanced influence campaign. Woolley shows how social media, with its anonymity and capacity for automation, allows a wide variety of groups to build the illusion of popularity through computational tools (such as bots) and human-driven efforts (such as sockpuppets—real people assuming false identities online—and partisan influencers)….
Drawing on eight years of original international ethnographic research among the people who build, combat, and experience these propaganda campaigns, Woolley presents an extensive view of the evolution of computational propaganda, offers a glimpse into the future, and suggests pragmatic responses for policy makers, academics, technologists, and others.
Lin Zhang’s The Labor of Reinvention: Entrepreneurship in the New Chinese Digital Economy (March 2023)
From the Columbia University Press website:
From start-up founders in the Chinese equivalent of Silicon Valley to rural villages experiencing an e-commerce boom to middle-class women reselling luxury goods, the rise of internet-based entrepreneurship has affected every part of China. For many, reinventing oneself as an entrepreneur has appeared to be an appealing way to adapt to a changing economy and society. Yet in practice, digital entrepreneurship has also reinforced traditional Chinese ideas about state power, labor, gender, and identity.
…Shedding new light on global capitalism and the digital economy by centering a non-Western perspective, The Labor of Reinvention vividly conveys how the contradictions of entrepreneurialism have played out in China.
Books by Manuscript Works Readers
Christina Dunbar-Hester’s Oil Beach: How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life in the Ports of Los Angeles and Beyond (University of Chicago Press, January 2023)
Christina joined me to discuss her experience participating in and running writing groups, and how they have helped her maintain her publication output since grad school. Read “How to Run an Effective Writing Group” for her insight!
Christine Abely’s The Russia Sanctions: The Economic Response to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine (Cambridge University Press, December 2023)
Ada T. Cenkci, Megan S. Downing, Tuba Bircan, and Karen Perham-Lippman’s Overcoming Workplace Loneliness: Cultivating Belonging for a Remote Workforce (Emerald Publishing, November 2023)
Use code EME30 to get 30% off the e-book on ebooks.com or off the print book when placing an order via booksales@emerald.com and quoting the code EME30.
Gulzar R. Charania’s Fighting Feelings: Lessons in Gendered Racism and Queer Life (University of British Columbia Press, October 2023)
Jennifer Greenburg’s At War with Women: Military Humanitarianism and Imperial Feminism in an Era of Permanent War (Cornell University Press, February 2023)
May Hara and Annalee G. Good’s Teachers as Policy Advocates: Strategies for Collaboration and Change (Teachers College Press, April 2023)
Georgina Hickey’s Breaking the Gender Code: Women and Urban Public Spaces in the Twentieth-Century United States (University of Texas Press, December 2023)
Enter code UTXGIFTS at checkout to receive 40% off print books and 50% e-books. Offer good through January.
Naa Oyo A. Kwate’s White Burgers, Black Cash: Fast Food from Black Exclusion to Exploitation (University of Minnesota Press, April 2023)
Sarah O’Brien’s Bits and Pieces: Screening Animal Life and Death (University of Michigan Press, July 2023)
Celeste Winston’s How to Lose the Hounds: Maroon Geographies and a World Beyond Policing (Duke University Press, October 2023)
Use code E23WNSTN at checkout to get 30% off How to Lose the Hounds directly from the Duke University Press.
Joana Pais Zozimo, Kate Sotejeff-Wilson, Wendy Baldwin’s Women Writing Socially in Academia: Dispatches from Writing Rooms (Palgrave Macmillan, December 2023)
Thanks for scrolling this far and hopefully finding inspiration in all these new publications. I hope to work with you and/or hear about your own newly released book in 2024!