Proposing academic books to presses. A note on the "Competing Titles" section. #AcademicChatter

Foremost, you should list several books published AT LEAST in the last decade.

That said, what is the section for? Simply, it's not a section that is meant to scare presses off. /1

What presses mean by "competing" (some say "comparable") is that they want to be sure there's a market for your book.

So, if you have a book on X intervention in Y topic, and no one has done X before, you don't say "There are no competing titles." THAT scares presses. /2

Instead, you frame your book as an important intervention that sits alongside book in Y topic or field. If you're writing a book, it's necessarily in conversation with other books. Editors and marketing folks are smart, but they aren't (necessarily) experts in your area. /3

Yes, many editors have advanced degrees in the field you do, but our lists are quite diverse and we can't keep on top of everything, so the "Competing Titles" section helps identify what sort of books have been published that compare to yours, how they did, who published them, /4

if they won awards, what institutions their authors are from, and so on. This also helps marketing folks, who are less likely to be subject experts, figure out how to position books in conversation with your editor.

Long story short, the "Competing" section is an opportunity. /5

It's an opportunity to demonstrate that your book belongs to a robust scholarly ecosystem, one the press can help support and grow BY PUBLISHING YOUR BOOK.

Just about every press loses money publishing your book, unless your some whiz bestseller. /6

Do the work to help them figure out how to pitch, frame, and sell your book.

And look, I know, "Scholarship isn't a commodity." I get it, I really do. In fact, I write plenty of Marxist hot takes too! But academia is a market, books help you advance, and presses are offering /7

...an unparalleled set of services. The best you can do as a thank you for the work they do in making sure your book gets read and you reap the benefits of the work you did, while they're losing money doing so, is help them by demonstrating how to sell your book. //

This thread brought to you by many conversations as an editor reviewing proposals and as a scholar who has written peer review reports for proposals that all invariable say "my book will have a huge audience" and "nothing competes with my book."