Hello Manuscript Workers,
I hope your year is off to a good start. Or a reasonable start. Not a horrible start, how about that?
Like many people do, I’ve been using this transition from 2023 to 2024 to reflect on how the last year went for me and think about how I want to be feeling a year from now when I look back. I’d like to invite you along with me as I celebrate what I achieved last year and think about how I can create the conditions for what I want to accomplish this year.
So let’s start with celebrating. In 2023, I signed a contract for my third book, a practical guide to scholarly editing. I took some long-needed steps in my business that will help keep self-employment sustainable for me (and my family) as a long-term career. I overcame my natural homebody tendencies and took a solo birthday trip across the country, where I got to see one of my best friends from grad school, get a tattoo from one of my bucket list tattoo artists, and attend my first sheep and wool festival. I was present for my kids as they navigated big transitions in their lives, and I was able to contribute material support to causes I care about, especially strike funds for academic workers and organizations like National Bail Out, Survived and Punished, and Critical Resistance.
What are you celebrating from 2023? Did you make time and space to do something that’s personally important to you? Were you able to be there for individuals and communities you care about? I hope you’re taking (at least) a moment to give yourself credit for these things and to recognize the possibly invisible and unsung work it took to make them happen.
Thinking ahead to the upcoming year, notice that I said “create the conditions” for desired accomplishments, rather than “setting goals" for 2024. As I wrote in my newsletter at the beginning of last year, I try to focus on the things I have some degree of control over rather than achievements that ultimately rely on the efforts or decisions of others. That means I’m going to be putting energy into updating my programs to make them even more useful, implementing better systems in my business, and finding new ways for my resources to reach the people who need to know about them. What people do with those programs and resources will then be up to them.
If you’re a scholar, you know that landing a job or having a manuscript accepted for publication are simultaneously very important and largely not up to you. So many factors go into hiring and publication decisions that even if you do everything “right,” you still might not get the job offer you were hoping for or receive the acceptance at the journal or publisher you had in mind.
While I’m celebrating the book contract I signed in 2023 and the positive peer reviews my manuscript received, what I’m really proud of is the work I did to make those things possible. That work included making time for sustained thinking and writing, even when other matters may have competed for my attention and seemed more urgent. I also had to make a concerted effort to push past my anxieties about proposing a new project to an editor I hadn’t worked with before and receiving feedback from a new set of peer reviewers. (Yes, you can be an expert on book proposals and still be nervous about submitting one!) Doing that work would be worth celebrating whether or not one specific press made a decision in my favor.
At Manuscript Works, I say that I help scholarly writers get their books published, but what I really do is support writers in creating conditions for their publication success. Neither I nor the writers I work with can control whether they receive book contracts or have smash-hit book releases. We can’t even control whether a busy editor writes back to an initial email inquiry! What I can do is offer insight into how scholarly book publishing works and how publication decisions get made so that my writers can position themselves to get the responses they are hoping for.
If you’re working on a scholarly book project this year, here are some “goals” you can set that are more about creating conditions for success than achieving results that are out of your control:
Block off designated time to work on your book proposal early in the year
Reach out to editors to have conversations at your next academic conference
None of these goals are things like “get a book contract” or even “meet with three editors at my next conference.” You can’t control those outcomes. But you can make the effort on your end so that the conditions are ideal for those outcomes to actually occur.
If you click on the links above you’ll be taken to resources I offer that can support you in creating those conditions. And if you take the time to work on any of these goals this year, I hope you’ll celebrate that effort as an achievement in itself.
I want to give a specific shout-out here to my Book Proposal Accelerator course (recently updated and improved for 2024). The current cohort has just started a couple days ago, so it’s not too late to jump on board. In this six-week program you can knock out a bunch of those items I listed above, if you really want to make the full push toward getting your book under contract this year.
We’ll cover how to identify and reach out to the best publishers for your project and how to write a proposal that shows off your book in the best light. The course also offers structure to help you finish your proposal in the next six weeks and get feedback from me on your draft so you can feel extra confident about submitting it to publishers. You can find a free preview here if you want to see if the Accelerator could work for you right now.
Not ready to commit to a live course? Check out my self-paced Book Proposal Shortcut for Busy Scholars, or grab a copy of The Book Proposal Book (and some free worksheets) to nonchalantly skim through in the coming months. Or, just keep reading this newsletter when you see it in your inbox. I’ll see you next week!
I just jotted down "create the conditions" in my new five-year diary! :) Thanks for your work.
I was excited to see the sheep and wool pictures. I'm hoping to one day attend one of those fiber/yarn festivals!