Step Ten:
Your Work/Volume
Now that you have found an editor and publisher willing to "look at" your work, you need to produce it.
As has already been mentioned, no one "writes books." However, volumes are put together.
What, you may ask, does this phrase refer to?
Take all of the material you have composed in your young academic career: your dissertation, articles, book reviews, coursework, your comprehensive exam essays, your undergraduate thesis, idle notes on bar napkins -- and put it all in a 10 x 13 clasp envelope preprinted with your academic institution's address.
Insert a cover letter explaining that you have pitched your monograph to the editor, and have included it for consideration. Explain that the editor invited you to submit this manuscript.
Add to your c.v. an item stating that you have a work under review.
It just occurred to me, all these years after I first read this, that work/volume could be taken as a formula for work-density. It's a whole new metric for hiring, promotion, and tenure, on the model of a pollen count: units of research effort (ergs?) per meter squared . . .
ReplyDelete(I spend too much time around social scientists, some of whom do something mysterious that goes by the name "bibliometrics.")