Who Wants to Buy Your Book?
Dayaneetha De Silva, Fireflybooks, Malaysia
fireflybooks@gmail.com
It may seem to readers of this Newsletter who have been desperately trying to get their work published, that there is some kind of secret society of Asian studies publishers, with just a few gatekeepers who have secret handshakes and give the nod to one title while surreptiously burying another for no discernible reason.
You may have struggled painfully with reshaping your doctoral or master?s thesis based on advice from supervisors, examiners, and kind colleagues. You may have read the writing on the wall, have counted the dead (fellow researchers? theses lying in crypts, or the dreaded Reject Piles), and be envious of the lucky few. In general, you will not have been trained to write directly or elegantly?to express ideas without the props of extensive referencing, for instance. After all, the whole exercise of researching and writing a thesis has very little to do with the finished product being an exciting read, or having broad, cross-disciplinary appeal.
Mindful of the generally disproportionate impact your first publisher will have on your academic career, you start touting around your book proposal, aiming as ?high? as you can?established, prestigious US or British university presses or, more realistically, a good, commercial institutional or regional press. After a polite acknowledgement, you may have to wait for weeks for a reaction, and then, if you are fortunate, you will be asked to submit chapters or the entire manuscript.
After you have submitted your material, it may disappear from sight for several months, seemingly into thin air. In fact, it is probably languishing in some peer reviewer?s reading pile, under her or his own backlog of marking, writing or research. And the rejection, when it finally comes, rarely tells you much about why this particular publisher cannot take on your book or what you could do to improve your chances of getting it published. Most publishers have little time to give you personal feedback and advice, and peer reviews are often not written with a view to making helpful suggestions.
ML: set this as a text box? ?Thank you for submitting your manuscript. Unfortunately, we are no longer taking on monographs by unknown Southeastasianists, unless they are about why fishermen from failed states may turn their boats into explosive devices or touch in some significant way upon the lives of Tibetan Buddhist nuns.?
If you are lucky, a senior or commissioning editor will follow through and support you in making revisions or finding an alternative publisher, but this is becoming rare. Financially challenged and poorly staffed, publishers are too busy preparing those manuscripts that they have accepted to spend much time on those that they have rejected. Publications with separate funding or institutional links often have to take priority, which doesn?t make it easy for publishers to hold on to at least some degree of independence. Even established scholars writing seminal work can get less than the care and attention their work deserves before, during or after publication.
The entire system seems overstretched, unkind, and under-productive ? but not, generally, for lack of competence or from any ill will. There is just so much slippage between what could be and what actually is, and we are all hostages to the economics of book publishing.
What is to be done?
But economics only explains part of the malaise in academic publishing on Asia, and in particular that on Southeast Asia. There is room for much more imagination and collaboration, more bridging between languages, more writing against the grain.
We need more readers, writers, good editors, translators, book collectors, erudite librarians, bibliophiles, book designers, publishers, specialist and general booksellers. We need to buy more books and sustain the entire spectrum of the culture of the book. We need to publish more intellectually engaging, accessible and productive books on ?Asia?. We need to inject more boldness, brilliance?and fun?into publishing on Asia. Here are a few places where I think you could begin:
Write better book manuscripts
- Go through your notes carefully: there may be something that captures the spirit of your research and would make a far better book than a reworked thesis. There may be someone you interviewed or discovered who deserves an entire biography, images which could be annotated and published, one thesis chapter that could be expanded to book length, or?
- Writing is difficult, writing well is a craft and an art, a lifelong learning process; you should be prepared to work hard at your writing
- Please: don?t produce another edited volume. They suck up time and funding and are generally a waste of energy: 90 percent of them are hastily put together as a postscript to a conference or workshop, need a huge amount of editorial work to be turned into books, and then hardly anyone buys or reads them. The vast majority could be more fruitfully be published electronically.
Support your colleagues? efforts
- If you are asked to peer review a manuscript, set aside time to do this as soon as you can, within reason. If you are too busy, let the publisher know right away. And when you produce your report, try and make it useful for the author by giving clear recommendations on revisions and changes you think are needed
- Promote the work of other scholars, buy copies, use them in your teaching, review them in major newspapers as well as in specialist journals
Support those outside the mainstream
- Discover and approach publishers in India, China, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Europe ? there are scores of great (small) publishers struggling to survive in countries other than the United States and the United Kingdom.
- Try to insist on affordable paperback editions of your book. And try to find ways to make sure some copies are donated to poorer institutions, libraries and researchers in the region you write about
Support publishers in general
- A polished book is a collaborative effort and needs a good publisher and an experienced editor, working with a painstaking typesetter and designer, perhaps an indexer, an efficient printer, interested marketing people and booksellers. Consider it your job as an author to support them all
- Get involved in editing, translating, book binding and publishing
- Read for pleasure and rediscover favourite writers, read outside your field, read (and write and publish, if you can) in languages other than English
- Buy more books for yourself and as gifts. Order and buy from publishers? backlists and from smaller and specialist bookshops rather than just sourcing everything from chainstores and large online stores
And above all, challenge the status quo, spread the word, and (just occasionally) switch off the TV and the PC and the iPod ? and just read. |
