The Read: In Which I Beg For Advice About Something I Want You All to Be Able to Read
Friday's Child Is Making a Decision
I have a simple question for my readers today, and I’ll open it up for non-paid readers to answer as well.
I’m close to finished writing two very different manuscripts. The first is a scholarly monograph in my own field of specialization and I know exactly where I want to send it to be evaluated for publication.
The other is a very different kind of book. It has some resemblance to my online writing, both totally and thematically. I don’t want to go into too much detail about it, but it’s basically a work of political theory in a non-academic, non-specialist vein, intended for general audiences. It combines a fairly conventional critique of liberalism to a concern about a number of major crises facing the nation-state as an institution. The book then segues into a deeply and deliberately impossible utopian thought-experiment intended to catalyze an imagination of a world beyond liberalism and the nation-state. In the last part of the manuscript, I use the thought-experiment to argue that in our current real world, we at least can no longer accept a series of complacent tropes associated with contemporary mainstream liberalism, most urgently the proposition that we should learn to build bridges across partisan political divides or seek to reverse the “big sort” and embrace living alongside people very unlike ourselves.
My question for all of you is pretty basic: how should I go about getting that kind of manuscript published? I don’t think it’s the sort of book that most university presses take on, and I don’t really want to put it through a conventional kind of scholarly peer review because I don’t want to make it conform more narrowly to disciplinary standards in political philosophy or political theory.
Let me put this in poll form:
It’s also a fairly timely manuscript so I feel the need to move on it pretty soon.
Without going too deeply into the particulars, it’s also a book that makes me feel some degree of anxiety as I am doing the last round of revision simply because the main through-line of the argument is provocative and unsettling even to me at times. I’m at least considering the question of whether some form of separatism, broadly speaking, is both politically necessary and philosophically attractive at this point in human history. I’ve come to recognize that the book’s position has elements of left-libertarian thinking, even though there’s a big section where I try to ruminate and undercut a lot of the thought-experiment’s basic premises. I honestly don’t know how people will receive some of what I’m doing in this manuscript, which in turn makes it easy for me to push it back onto the moldering heap of almost-finished projects that already haunt my hard drives. So making myself move ahead with this is important in that sense as well.
Image credit: Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
I have an agent, so I think going that route is always smart, because it saves a lot of time and frustration. But you may have to write a proposal for a book you have already written to get commercial presses to consider it. So there's that.
The only press that jumps out at me right now is Beacon.
But also, take a broad look at academic presses that market a select list to a general audience. The good thinking about academic presses is that they have an ecumenical view about why academics might by qualified to write about a topic that is far from their field of training. So Oxford and NYU press come to mind here. If you have some presses in mind (look at their lists to see if they have published something like what you propose), then come to the AHA and meet with editors there to talk about the book, sending a pitch letter and a chapter ahead of time.
Brad DeLong often refers to your writings in his Substack updates. He's reaching the wide, politically informed audience you're hoping to interest. A brief email could be constructive.