Contracting

Jason B. Jones and Dr. Crazy are discussing the path from dissertation to book contract; I thought I'd add my own tale of (mostly) non-woe. 

• I finish my rather long dissertation (it's me, so it would be long) in relatively record speed by Spring 1997. 
• 1997: I camp out at Modern Philology for a year.  While there, I revise a chapter, which MP eventually publishes.
• 1998: Look! A full-time lectureship at Anonymous Research I!
• In '98-'99, one of my committee members suggests that I send a prospectus off to his series.  At this point, I've just barely started revising.
• The other series editor kicks the proposal back, noting that it's not quite ready for prime time.  (My professor was more apologetic about this than I thought was necessary; quite frankly, I didn't think it was ready for prime time, either, and the rejection gave me some concrete suggestions for revision.)
• 1999: Look! A tenure-track job!
• 2001-02: I've revised about 3/4 of the MS, and begin to send out query letters.  Some of the queries get ignored; one of them gets a postcard; two of them get quite detailed responses.
• Another one of my professors mentions my project to an acquisitions editor.  I send off a proposal.
• The acquisitions editor is interested in seeing what I've written so far.  This is good.
• Some months pass.  I send a query to Ashgate Publishing; they're also interested in seeing the MS as it currently exists.
• Still no word back from press #1. 
• Ashgate sends the MS out to a reader.  Hooray!
• I ask press #1 where my MS is--and discover that they've lost it.  I send them another copy.
• Press #1's reader takes some time to respond.  While he's (it seems like a "he") mostly positive, he complains that the book is probably "too convincing" for the target audience.   This strikes me as...one of the odder criticisms I've received in some time.
• Press  #1 admits that they can't figure out what my book is, anyway.
• Ashgate's reader likes my book! Hooray!
• Look: a contract!

In my case, things were complicated by my book's affinities with both historiography and literary criticism.  Interdisciplinary projects are a tough sell, no matter how often interdisciplinarity is touted as the next big theme: if an editor needs to slot a book into a particular series, then a project that looks amorphous will be a tough sell.  I also had a slightly more awkward problem--namely, that my book was on a topic that was just starting to attract a critical mass of scholars.  Press  #1's reader admitted that he didn't actually have any background in the area; Ashgate's reader, by contrast, knew the subject matter intimately (enough so, in fact, that I've got some sneaking suspicions about his/her identity).

I also moved fairly slowly with the revisions process.  Had I been at a Research I, I would have been revising frantically from the get-go.  As it was, I was able to give myself enough time to make some fairly extensive alterations: among other things, I redid the introduction and conclusion, turned two chapters into one, wrote one new chapter, gave another chapter an entirely different context, and, in general, tried to get rid of as many of my grad student stylistic tics as I possibly could.  One advantage of teaching at a college such as mine is that you do have more leisure to develop your work, even though you also have less money to do the research for it...