Your Career

It’s easy to get caught up in the pressure to exaggerate the relevance of your manuscript

“Timely” is one of those words that gets used a lot in scholarly publishing. Many books are quite explicitly about contemporary culture, events, or politics. They may be rooted in ethnographic observations or provide practical tools (e.g., for teaching). Other books are not about the present, and that’s OK. They do, however, still need to be timely in a scholarly or discursive sense — i.e., they need to have up-to-date references and be attuned to conversations in pertinent fields, if only to upend them and break new ground. A scholarly book’s timeliness — its feel of urgency — depends then, not just on its topic, but on how it’s framed. Here are some dos and don’ts for making your book timely throughout its life stages — proposal, manuscript, and marketing — whatever its subject matter.

• Don’t confuse current conversations with current events. Scholars are under immense institutional pressure to produce high-impact research in order to get a teaching job or tenure. That pressure can leave a mark on proposals, leading writers to make sometimes unconvincing claims of their book’s relevance to, and even power to fix, real-world crises. But changing how your fellow specialists think about something is already a major feat without also expecting your book to change the world. Don’t fixate on — or worse, force — your book’s ties to current events.
• Do have a clear sense of what you’re arguing and for whom. There are many ways for books to be good and valuable and have “impact” within and beyond different fields, whether or not they touch on current events.

Continue reading: “How to Publish a ‘Timely’ Scholarly Book,” by Rebecca Colesworthy

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