February Blogroll: Book Visions Edition

Dear readers,

As I look forward to all the new projects and possibilities that 2018 holds, one of the big things that I plan to commit myself to this year is the book proposal. I’ve given it more than a year to incubate. After conferencing more pieces of it, sharing the idea with colleague-friends, and finding success and positive feedback in those venues and publication, I’m going to reconceive the thesis into a monograph.

In the few weeks of calm between the end of term and the break for actual merry-making with family in Idaho, I’ve repeated what I did for the job market process: read and researched. If I am good at anything, it is finding, collating, analyzing, and synthesizing data about words and writing processes.  While there are indeed whole books on the subject, there seems to be a great deal of good advice, samples, templates, and personal narratives from the trenches on the Internet broadly.

Therefore, this month I give you a synthesized list of the blogs and websites I found instructive in this process, as well as other resources to support any research you may be doing on how this whole book proposing process works. The one thing nearly all of them fail to mention is the annual AAUP Subject Area Grid and Directory, indicating the subject ares in which each member press has a strong interest.

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December Blogroll: Profession(al) Reading Edition

Dear readers:

This month, I give you an actual catalogue rather than my usual annotated selections. Most of these blogrolls are about scholarly resources, writing and research techniques, or where to find theatre. This month is a writing month: I give you a bibliography I have generated useful in writing for academia—particularly in terms of cultural scholarship and literary criticism—and figuring out what the expectations are of publishers. Consider it a form of recommended reading, particularly useful at the outset of a dissertation or book project.

From the Rare Book (Pearl) Room at the tip-top of Powell’s City of Books, Portland, OR.

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