Over at the Inverse Square Blog, Tom Levenson is doing a series of blog posts walking through the steps involved in getting a book published. Unfortunately, there isn't a compact way to link to the whole series, but the posts to date are:
- Part 0: Introduction to the Series
- Part 1.0: The Proposal (with an example to look at)
- Part 2.0: Agents
- Part 2.5: Agents and Publishers
I'm not all the way through the publishing process for my first book yet, and my path into the whole business was sufficiently idiosyncratic that I'm not all that comfortable giving advice, but I don't have any hesitation about recommending that you read these posts if you're interested in looking inside the sausage factory of non-fiction publishing.
Also, the advice about agents is really good.
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More and more human conversations are taking place online. While I don't do instant messaging the way my kids like to, I'm much more likely to contact a friend via e-mail than to pick up the phone.
Picture in your head one person throwing a ball to another. How were the two people oriented spatially? Was one on the left, and the other on the right? If so, which one was on the left, and which on the right? Chances are, the thrower was on the left, and the catcher was on the right.
Ever since my first book, Written in Stone, found a home at Bellevue Literary Press I have had a number of people ask me how to publish their own books.
tags: Disappointing Torture, cultural observation,
Many thanks for the kind words. I'll put together a link to the whole series as soon as I clear my desk of some of the 4 deadlines (2 of them for print. Dead trees! Yippee) I seem to have stacked this week.
The next substantive post (as opposed to my whinge about the bottom feeding types who sell off their review copies for chump change) comes tomorrow, most likely, and will talk about dealing with the editing process. If you've a mind to share that part of your experience, it would be great to hear about it.
Again, thanks for the shout out -- and great news on the translations of the book. My favorite is a Czech translation of my Einstein book. It looks cool and makes exactly zero connection with any pattern recognition programs stored in my wetware.
Thanks for the links! Just wonder to which extent this applies to the purely scientific books (I mean monographs and such for the purely professional readers or graduate students). And by the way, how does one get through with a book proposal to a good (academic) publisher and all without already being a star in the field? Any constructive tips are greatly appreciated.