“Fit” is paramount when looking for a publisher, but equally important, fit is mutual. That’s been a common refrain of this series on writing and publishing, for good reasons. My fellow acquisitions editors and I are looking for books that fit our list. But we’re also looking for a personal fit — writers with whom we see the potential for a good working relationship. In turn, as a writer, your needs, hopes, and timelines (e.g., your tenure clock and institutional expectations) necessarily factor into your search for a press.
Earlier this year, when I wrote about how to approach an editor, I mentioned some factors that affect an editor’s assessment of fit, such as our sense of a book’s market and of how well poised we and the author are to reach it. My aim here is to show how the process of assessing fit works in practice — to shed light on what editors do and how we think.
What Do Editors Want?
Admittedly, “fit” is a pretty lackluster term. Don’t editors want books with groundbreaking arguments that will radically reshape fields and conversations, if not society writ large, and become best sellers? I mean, sure. But scholarly contributions take many forms.
Above all, when I talk with a writer or read your book proposal, I want to know your central topic or driving idea. That is the foundation of fit, and a compelling, well-defined argument is far more scintillating than vague promises of a big splash.
I also want to know what your book brings to the table that wasn’t already there. Yet to fully appreciate what’s new or distinctive about it requires some basic, broad-stroke information: I need to know the who, what, where, when, and how of a project in order to grasp the nature and scope of why it will matter and to whom.
What Are Some Examples of a Strong Fit?
Rather than a general description, the best way to answer that is with specific examples. In selecting three broadly representative examples, I have:
- Focused on monographs, although my central points apply to edited volumes, translations, and other genres, too.
- Pulled from across my areas of acquisition to highlight the wide range of fields and subfields in which editors often acquire.
- Tried to draw out portable lessons that reflect general acquisitions practices, although there will inevitably be some differences from editor to editor and press to press.
Some of what I say here — e.g., about gauging the particular strengths of a press — could be gleaned from perusing a publisher’s website or its booth in a conference exhibit hall. A press’s website should always be an author’s first stop to see if it has published other books like yours recently, say, within the last five years. At the same time, there are inevitably things on the editor’s mind and projects in the pipeline that you can’t know about in advance — and that’s OK. You can control only so much of this process.
Jeannine E. Dingus-Eason’s proposal to write A Thousand Worries: Black Women Mothering Autistic Sons (published in January) arrived in my inbox in December 2017, just a couple of months after I started working at the State University of New York Press. Education — her home field — was an area of growth for us and a priority for me. It’s also a highly competitive field, with university presses often up against big commercial publishers (e.g., Routledge). I wrote to offer Dingus-Eason an advance contract within a few hours of receiving her proposal. (We offer advance contracts based on our internal review of proposals; all manuscripts under advance contract must, upon completion, go through peer review and ultimately be approved by the editorial board.)
I knew I wanted the project as soon as I saw the topic — the experiences of Black moms of autistic sons. Sometimes editors really do know that immediately. We read a few words and think, “Yes, please.” But Dingus-Eason also wrote a strong proposal. She powerfully showed that, while more research was being done on autism and gender, particularly the experiences of girls, it was focused on white children and families. Her project also effectively wove together the personal and the scholarly, integrating her own experience as a mom, all of which added to its appeal.
Over all, the book was — and is — representative of what I thought we did well and what I wanted to keep doing more of. While new editors bring new ideas, focuses, and connections to a press, we are largely looking to maintain, reinforce, and expand on existing strengths and relationships. From the start, I appreciated the social-justice bent of our education list and our strength in work at the intersection of Black studies and gender studies. Earlier in 2017, for example, we had published Black Women’s Mental Health and Being Black, Being Male on Campus. As a new editor, I could take zero responsibility for those books — as my editor in chief says, we stand on the shoulders of giants — but I was eager to publish more like them. Later, I started a series called Black Women’s Wellness with Stephanie Y. Evans, the lead editor of Black Women’s Mental Health. Although the series didn’t exist when Dingus-Evans submitted her proposal, it eventually became the home of her book.
Everyone knows the scholarly-publishing process is long. So, too, is the process of list building. It happens over many, many years, and editors are often thinking about not only a project’s individual merits but also what else it might lead to. When I offered Dingus-Eason a contract, she mentioned hearing good things about the press. Part of an editor’s job is to make sure people keep hearing good things.
Claus Elholm Andersen’s book proposal for Knausgård and the Autofictional Novel (published in December) didn’t come in totally cold. As he noted in his cover email, and as I recalled upon seeing his name in my inbox, we had interacted a couple of times on X (aka Twitter), including about his topic — autofiction, a genre of novel that pulls from real life. We had expressed different views at the time, though quite collegially. That in itself is useful for authors to know, lest you worry that editors and scholars need always have the same take.
I received his proposal in 2021. A few years earlier, I had started acquiring manuscripts in 20th- and 21st-century literary studies. We’d always published some books in that area, but I’d wanted to formalize our efforts. I wrote a description for our website, and Andersen referred to it in his proposal. I knew right off the bat that I was interested in the phenomenon of autofiction. While I knew of Karl Ove Knausgård — who writes in Norwegian but has been translated into English and is now well-known globally — I hadn’t read him. Would a book about his work be right for our press, especially given our established strengths in interdisciplinary fields such as gender studies? Would it feel representative of our — and, more specifically, my — interests?
Books about a single writer’s work can feel like an especially high-stakes commitment — at least to me. They don’t necessarily have a smaller potential readership. In fact, the opposite can be true. Some canonical writers have scholarly societies and conferences devoted to their work, helping to ensure an audience. Others have avid public fan bases. It’s by no means a given that writing a book about, say, Jane Austen will attract the so-called Janeites. Devoney Looser, an Austen scholar and public intellectual, has underscored the importance of building an author platform to help your book reach its intended audience.
In the case of Andersen’s project, I wasn’t worried about its market, just mindful of its focus. The very first sentence of the proposal helped convince me of the book’s breadth and fit for us and me. It read: “This is a book about the novel in the 21st century.” That was it! His proposal said much more to back up that claim — about the development of autofiction and the 2008 financial crisis; about other contemporary writers, including some women; about his expertise and public engagement. But that first sentence helped me immediately get my bearings despite my limited firsthand familiarity with Knausgård. It also showed me that Andersen was, in part, using Knausgård’s novels to take the temperature of our current literary moment. His book had broad relevance for readers interested in the personal turn of recent fiction.
I’m not suggesting that you all start your proposals that way. If I were to read a pitch that opened with “This is a book about higher education,” I’d think, OK, but there have been a million books about that. Higher education when? Where? I need a bit more detail to help ground me and give me a sense of your project’s unique contours. Still, that kind of very straightforward scene-setting and basic information — as long as it’s not too simplistic and has some specificity — can be a big help in guiding and enticing your very likely overworked, overtired editor-reader.
The proposal that led to Theatres of Value: Buying and Selling Shakespeare in Nineteenth-Century New York City (to be published in July) came to me via yet another common route — the editor of a book series. Series books focus on a particular topic or subfield within a general area of acquisition. As an acquisitions editor, I work with many series editors — scholars who provide feedback on proposals and projects. Even if a series editor decides a project is not a fit for the series, it may still be a fit for my list.
The author of Theatres of Value, Danielle Rosvally, had reached out to the editor of our Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, who very much admired the project but ultimately felt it wasn’t a fit for the series, which focuses more on British literature. Yes, Rosvally’s book is about the value of one very famous Brit — namely, Shakespeare — but for New York City audiences, so it was not transatlantic per se.
Nevertheless, the book’s regional focus made it an excellent fit for the press and my list in 19th-century studies. While I don’t personally handle our list in New York studies, all of us in the editorial department have published books that dovetail with it. And, in general, there’s lots of overlap among the books we acquire. We all forward to one another proposals that aren’t right for our list but may be a fit for another editor’s; we also display one another’s books at conferences we attend.
I love when projects have multiple points of connection to the strengths of our press — when a book bridges education and queer studies, when a book in Victorian studies resonates with my colleague’s list in music and sound studies, or when a book on Cuban film in our Afro-Latinx Futures series complements work in our Latin American Cinema series. Sometimes we co-list a book in two series. Drawing those kinds of connections — saying, “Look how your book is like this one and that one, and fits in these many ways” — is a central part of how editors pitch their press to authors.
In the case of Rosvally’s book, I was also struck by the fact that she was teaching at a SUNY institution. Academic presses love working with faculty members at our university — including nontenure-track ones — and often track how many we publish in reporting to administrators. While Rosvally is now on the tenure track at the University at Buffalo as an assistant professor of theater and dance, she largely did the research for and wrote her book while in a contingent position, as so many Ph.D.s do these days. To be sure, academic casualization is a scourge, not a selling point. But it’s important for scholars to know that editors are attuned to those issues and are impressed by the work you do, under increasingly challenging, if not near impossible, conditions.
What Are Some Final Takeaways for Writers?
- While you should do research on presses and look for titles relevant to your work, you can’t possibly know everything an editor is thinking about — which is one reason why talking to editors and even just following us on social media can be so valuable. That’s where Andersen and I met.
- Sometimes editors really do know if we’re into a project based on the topic. It’s not so much a gut feeling or vibes but an intuitive calculus grounded in our knowledge of a field and the press and its strengths. At the same time, a topic alone does not make a great book. Execution is everything. But if we’re excited about the topic, we can give you feedback on and help develop the execution. Peer review can also help with that process, depending on what needs work.
- Often editors don’t know what we’ll be into until we read more (a proposal, a sample chapter) or talk with you. I was recently chatting with a scholar, and after telling me about her project (which sounded great), she asked me what I was looking for. I said, with 100-percent seriousness, “your book.” We are constantly learning from you about where fields are headed and the fascinating, important work being done in them.
- A project that’s not a fit for a series may still be a fit for an editor’s list. By the same token, I often send proposals to series editors to see if they’re interested in the manuscripts for their series. My in-house colleagues and I also share and discuss proposals.
- If a project is not a fit for a particular editor or press, that’s not necessarily a commentary on its significance or worthiness. Indeed, you may decide that a publisher isn’t the right fit for you. While I’m of course disappointed if a scholar whose book I wanted goes elsewhere, it happens. I always say that the door is still open — to let me know if things change with this project or to keep me in mind for future ones. For editors, sustaining those relationships is vital.
