Stanford University Press Blog

The Path to Publishing Your First Book

Want to get published? Want to make a strong debut? Know your audience.

by MICHELLE LIPINSKI

Photo by Nic McPhee. CC BY SA-2.0 via Flickr.

Helping launch a first-time author into what I hope will be a career-long scholarly conversation is one of the most satisfying aspects of my job. My advice for them?

Don’t just try to get published. Try to get read.

That means that for you, the author, the actual “publishing” part of working with a press isn’t and shouldn’t be the main focus of your attention. Publishing, after all, is an intermediary step on the way to building and sustaining a meaningful readership.

Taking this as your point of departure, you need to first think about how your research might attract readers, or why it should be read. When you’re drafting the book proposal, or just trying to conceptualize how your research will be reworked as a book, the most important thing to think about is pivoting the research towards your audience.

Find an editor that is not only enthusiastic, but also willing to work with you in order to get the readership right.

An idea for a book manuscript can’t just be interesting—it also has to do something for its readership. As the author, you should bring a fresh voice to a conversation that audiences haven’t heard before, one that can speak to a number of people in the appropriate field and share something valuable, or force readers to think in a new and innovative way. Take a hard look at your proposed manuscript, and think about how you would characterize it as a reader. Is it a unique and fascinating case study? Perhaps it stretches the bounds of a theoretical debate? Or maybe it’s a beautiful ethnographic narrative. Zero in on what about this study makes it required reading.

Galaxies of Memory in the Americas

What mysterious deaths and memory struggles in Chile can teach the U.S.

by ADAM ROSENBLATT

Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, recording his poetry for the Library of Congress in 1966 (public domain). New evidence may indicate that the poet did not die of natural causes.

The week after I took my children trick-or-treating on the streets of our Philadelphia suburb turned out to be a time of ghosts in another place where I once lived: Chile. On November 5, Chile’s Interior Ministry released a public statement calling it “highly probable” that Pablo Neruda, the Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet, died of poisoning soon after the coup that ushered in Augusto Pinochet’s 27-year dictatorship, and not from the natural progression of the prostate cancer for which he was being treated at the time. If true, this would confirm years of suspicion that Neruda, like the singer Victor Jara and thousands of other Chileans, was a victim of Pinochet’s violent efforts to suppress political dissent.

Chile’s Interior Ministry released a public statement calling it “highly probable” that Pablo Neruda, the Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet, died of poisoning.

The retelling of Neruda’s death began when the poet’s former driver stepped forward in 2011 to allege that after treatment in Santiago’s Santa María clinic for his cancer, and only hours before his death, Neruda confided that he had been given a strange injection in his stomach. The path to an official investigation—which would result in the exhumation of Neruda’s corpse from his seaside grave and posthumous travel to four different forensic laboratories in as many countries—has been contentious.

Despite the Chilean government’s bold declaration, the tests thus far don’t offer conclusive evidence. The Staphylococcus aureus bacteria found in his body has no relation to cancer, but this does not conclusively prove that Neruda died from poisoning. Further tests are still needed to clarify the origins of such a potentially lethal microorganism (healthy individuals can be perfectly asymptomatic carriers of the bug), and even then we may never know for certain. For those inclined to think Neruda died of cancer—possibly accelerated by grief at seeing his country fall into the hands of a brutal dictator—and those who believe he must have been poisoned, there is no reason yet to significantly alter their version of history.

Uncovering the Cover Design

A behind-the-scenes look at the artistic process behind book jacket design.

A Q&A with ANNE JORDAN & MITCH GOLDSTEIN 

A still from one of Anne and Mitch's process videos.

In the past two years, Anne Jordan and Mitch Goldstein have designed over a dozen covers for SUP under the direction of resident Art Director, Rob Ehle. Their visually stunning covers—textured, layered, and inventively rendered—have garnered an enthusiastic fan base not only within our office and among our authors—but have also been routinely lauded by outside commentators as well. The husband-wife duo met in Typography class at Rhode Island School of Design in 2004 and have been working together ever since. We caught up with them to ask about their process, their style, and the intricacies of book jacket design.

 

Q:

When designing a book cover, where do you begin?

We always begin with the text. Rob Ehle, Art Director at Stanford University Press, sends us a brief including a summary of the book and any loose art direction or concepts he wants us to consider. We read through the brief carefully and make two lists: first, a list of things we need to learn more about and, second, a list of key words. Then we go off and research everything on the first list until we feel like we understand the material. We keep adding to the second list during this process, and making rough sketches of anything that comes to mind. We usually spend an entire day or two doing this research. When we’re done, we have a long list of key words that we use as visual directions. These words tell us what processes and materials to start with.

French Theorist: René Girard

A brief note on the life and works of a seminal philosopher, historian, and literary critic.

by EMILY-JANE COHEN

René Noël Théophile Girard, 1923-2015. Photo by Norris Pope.

On November 4th, venerated Stanford French Professor René Girard died in his sleep at age 91. The historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science was known around the world for his hypotheses of “mimetic desire” and of “the scapegoat mechanism,” which have been taken up in fields as disparate as anthropology, sociology, theology, and economics. Entire foundations exist to further the insights and implications of Professor Girard’s research. His impact is such that he was hailed as “The Darwin of the Human Sciences” upon his election to the Académie Française in 2005.

Stanford University Press is proud to count René Girard among its authors. His seminal Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, a controversial bestseller in France, was published in English translation in 1987 and remains highly influential today. The same year saw the publication of his Job, The Victim of His People and Violent Origins, to which he was a key contributor. More recently, the press issued two collections of his essays, Oedipus Unbound and Mimesis and Theory. Professor Girard’s work has also been the impetus for that of other Stanford Press authors, including Stanford Professor Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s Mark of the Sacred and two books by UCLA’s Eric Gans.

The staff of Stanford University Press extends its deep condolences to the family, friends, and colleagues of Professor Girard. He was a vital asset to the Stanford community and to the broader community of scholars and students we serve, and his impact will endure through all of his books and those of the many people he continues to inspire.

 

Emily-Jane Cohen is Executive Editor at Stanford University Press, acquiring in literature and literary criticism, philosophy and theory, and religious studies and theology.

Flunking Out In China

How high stakes exams create hurdles that many Chinese students will never overcome.

by T.E. WORONOV

Public domain.

Debates about Chinese education feature regularly in the global media, particularly since students in Shanghai ranked first in the world in the 2009 and 2012 student assessment surveys from the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development. The results of the survey—which tested the abilities of fifteen-year-old students in 65 countries worldwide—led some pundits to argue that Chinese educational methods, especially in math and science, should be exported internationally so that students elsewhere can “keep up” with their Chinese age-mates. At the same time, however, others within China and abroad have strongly criticized the Chinese education system, arguing that it places too much pressure on young people, relies on rote memorization, and forecloses student creativity and independent thinking. 

This image of the test-taking, studious young person is hardly representative of all Chinese youth.

Notably, both sides of these debates are predicated on an image of China’s high-performing students. Indeed, the dominant image of China’s youth in both China and the West is of studious, academic young people, with their heads buried in books. I was often told in China that this is simply what kids are expected to do every day; As many Chinese parents informed me when I first began researching Chinese education: “All Chinese kids do is study.”

Yet in reality this image of the test-taking, studious young person is hardly representative of all Chinese youth, for it erases almost half of the nation’s adolescents who never even make it to high school. A large proportion of China’s youth—up to 50% in some localities — fail to pass through a crucial bottleneck in the Chinese educational system: the High School Entrance Examination (HSEE), a high-stakes standardized exam that all graduating ninth graders must take before they can move on to senior high school. Once students fail this exam, their academic careers are finished.