University Presses Editing and Proofreading Services

A monograph proposal arrives with a thoughtful account of the argument, a chapter outline and a sentence saying the book will appeal to scholars and students of the field, as well as to the general reader interested in the subject. That sentence is the reason the proposal will struggle, because a press has to decide how many copies to print and there is no such person as the general reader interested in the subject.

We edit what university presses and their authors produce — monograph and edited collection proposals, readership and market statements, series and list positioning documents, peer review briefs and reader reports, contract and rights explanations for authors, author guidelines and manuscript preparation documentation, marketing and metadata copy for scholarly books, open access and funding route explanations, editorial board papers and their recommendations, and author communications about revisions and schedules. Our editors work on the statement of who will buy the book.

The readership statement is what a proposal is actually assessed on, and its failure is describing an audience by its interests rather than by how it buys books. An editorial board is deciding a print run and a price. We work through these so the primary readership is named as a group that can be counted — the scholars in a named subfield, the courses on which the book would be set, the professional group with a subscription-buying association — since a proposal that identifies four hundred and fifty specialists is more useful than one claiming a wide audience; so the course adoption case is made specifically or dropped, naming modules, levels and countries, given that a claimed teaching market with no named course is the commonest overreach in scholarly publishing; so the comparable books are cited with what they did and what this one does differently, because a press knows what those titles sold and the comparison is how they estimate; so the general reader is either dropped or a specific non-academic group is named — the practitioners, the enthusiasts, the members of a society — as unnamed general appeal signals that the author has not thought about it; so the book's length and price implications are acknowledged where the argument requires a long book, since an eighty-thousand-word monograph and a hundred-and-forty-thousand-word one are different commercial propositions; so the series fit is stated as a fit with the series rather than with the press; and so anything about the book that limits its market is stated plainly. Proposals written this way get to the board with a recommendation.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including proposals, reader reports and unpublished manuscripts. We are editors rather than publishers or acquisition editors, and we offer no view on the scholarship, the market or publishability. What we can do is describe the readership in terms a board can count.