Transcript: Good morning and welcome back to Academic Writing Talk, brought to you by Indelible Voice! I’m still Dr. Aure Schrock, your guide to academic writing and publishing. If you’re a professor based outside the US, I’ve been thinking about you lately! Because most of my editing hours are clocked on book projects! Just this year, I’ve worked on twenty different book projects, most of them for international clients. I’m a huge data nerd so I track all of my hours worked on different projects and how much I’ve invoiced for them. I thought it was about time that I produced an episode just about the needs of international clients who are thinking about publishing an academic book. So let’s get started! 

My message is: international professors, don’t sell yourself short! US-based publishers are well aware of the need to diversify their publishing pipeline, and I don’t think there’s a stigma against being an international professor. This is true both demographically and intellectually; Non-Western approaches, Southern theory, and decolonial approaches are trending right now. And I always advise my clients to reach for top-tier publishers first! Unless time is really of the essence, you can always send your writing projects to second- and third-tier publishers later. However, rarely does that happen among the clients I work with. 

With the right proposal and manuscript, most of them can secure a book contract in a top-tier publisher. Just to put some numbers on this, out of hundreds of clients I’ve worked with over the last six years, a grand total of one did not get their book published in the top three academic presses they targeted. So while it happens, it’s extremely rare, in my experience, if you know what you’re doing. That said, international academic writers do face different sorts of publishing barriers. 

Over the last six years, I’ve worked with international clients working outside of the US—professors in the UK, Germany, China, and Australia—on their books and articles. Over time, I’ve noticed that they confront particular challenges when trying to publish in US-based book presses. These aren’t barriers intentionally imposed by press editors, who generally want to publish compelling scholarship. Rather, they exist due to institutional constraints and the way publishers have evolved. And this is just one point in time when the US is dominant in this area. For example, Germany at one point used to be an intellectual hotspot, and if you were seriously interested in sociology, you would be expected to read a book in the original German. 

Academic publishing is a strange sort of business. Sometimes, my international clients find it challenging to understand how US-based academic publishers work. US-based book publishers often have unspoken expectations about what they want to see in a book proposal. And the “packaging” of a book proposal is everything! When it comes to the book manuscript, there are less and more compelling ways to sequence chapters and the paragraphs therein. This is the type of “gray-area” knowledge that’s tough to find online or in books, but I try to pick up wherever I can. 

International authors can also encounter unexpected cultural barriers in publishing. International academics can even be working with an entirely different set of theories than my US-based clients, even if they’re in the same field! For example, “media studies” looks very different in Germany than it does in Australia, and some German publishers have a higher reputation in that country than in the US, among US-based academics. Even what qualifies as a top-tier publisher can be in the eye of the beholder—it can differ by country and institution. Understanding these differences in publishing cultures is vital for academics, because the last thing you want to do is waste your book manuscript on a publisher that won’t count for your tenure advancement. 

Another common need among international academic authors—and this may have been what you thought of first!—is line editing by a native English speaker. There is still an unfortunate bias towards English-language proficiency in academia, maintained by disciplinary norms in the United States and expectations of reviewers. I don’t really think this is fair to international clients, to be clear, but realistically, if you’re trying to get a book published you need to be thinking about these things. 

Particularly if you want to connect with a more general readership, you’ll need to think beyond “US English” and about if you prefer US idioms and a more colloquial writing style. However, cut-rate editors often lack the appropriate experience to hone language in this way. They might make decisions that don’t align with an author’s vision or make your writing voice sound wooden and artificial. That’s not what you want if you want to secure a more general readership! Instead you probably want an editor whose comfortable writing in a drier more analytical mode, but also slightly more conversational modes where you get some of those idioms and colloquialisms that characterize a more readable manuscript among a general audience. 

Thanks for listening! If you’re a professor who would like more free content on academic publishing—I promise, your Dean will never know!—just go to indeliblevoice.com. If you sign up for my free membership, you’ll get access to free videos and articles. I’m also here if you’re looking for an academic editor who works on these types of books, and also book proposal packets. I even have a set price packages for these services on my website right now! Until the next episode, happy writing, and I hope to hear from you soon!