Conducting a Market Analysis of Your Research to Lay the Groundwork for Your Book Proposal

In the third episode of Publish My Book, Avi dives into one of the most important stages of the publishing journey: writing the book proposal. Avi poses a fundamental first step you should take before putting pen to paper - conducting a thorough market analysis of your research. By identifying key criteria in your market analysis, you will be equipped to more effectively present your target acquisitions editor with a convincing proposal that not only highlights your research’s impact but also why it can sell and how it can contribute to their existing portfolio.

Related resources:

• How to Get a Contract from a Reputable Academic Publisher Before You Write Your Book
• Hear from acquisitions editors: The Authors Handbook to Academic Book Publishing
• Identify your current stage within the publishing journey (and navigate the rest of the journey with success!)

Episode transcript

Hello and welcome to Publish My Book, your one-stop podcast for navigating the publishing journey from manuscript draft to published monograph. In each episode, we'll dive into a specific topic on the road to publishing your manuscript to offer you clarity, confidence, and an increased chance of publication success. I'm Avi Staiman, host of the Publish My Book podcast. Over the past 10 years, I've had the privilege of being the CEO of Academic Language Experts, a company dedicated to helping researchers and research institutions publish their high-quality humanities and social sciences research with respected academic publishers. During that time, I've worked with thousands of talented scholars from research universities and colleges to museums, foundations, and scholarly associations around the world, shepherding their research from ideation to publication. Now I've teamed up with the incredible team at the New Books Network to share everything I've learned about the journey with you, to help you streamline your process and transfer your idea into a book published by your dream publisher. Publish My Book, here we go!

In today's episode, we're going to talk about crafting a winning book proposal. This is really the key to success with your book because if you manage to get an acquisitions editor, the acquisitions editor is the member of staff on the publishing team who's charged with finding new books and deciding which books they're going to suggest for publication, if you can get one of them to get behind your project, to get excited about it, to propose it for publication, you have won three-quarters of the battle.

Obviously, it will need to go through peer review, it will need to be carefully reviewed, but the acquisitions editor's recommendation will say a lot. So how do we get to that? And in order to get to that we need to understand how exactly book publication works. And in fact, sometimes researchers think of it in a very similar way to the way they think about journals. I put together a good study, I write up my research, and I publish it. And if it's good research, it'll get accepted. Well, actually, books work very differently than academic scholarly journals in that the incentive for the publisher is very different than with a journal.

So what do I mean by that? The number one question that the publisher or the acquisitions editor at the publisher is going to ask themselves, when you submit your proposal, is how in the world am I going to sell this book? And that might be a question that as researchers we feel uncomfortable with. Well, that's their job, not my job. Well, actually, your job as a researcher is to make it as easy for them as possible to sell your book. Now, that doesn't mean you need to all of a sudden become a star that goes on the nightly comedy shows. What it does mean is you need to make their job much easier. And I'll explain how to do that in a minute. But first of all, it's important to understand that when an acquisitions editor has a proposal on their desk, they're deciding to recommend it or not recommend it. Oftentimes these publishers will sit in the committee - the committee will include the marketing team, the sales team, an academic representative, and members across the publishing, the editorial team. If the marketing and sales team don't think that they're going to be able to actually sell the book, the book will be rejected even if it is very fine scholarship.

So how do we go about doing this? The first thing that I suggest doing is a market analysis. So what I mean by that is that as an author, you should be constantly on the lookout for what are the similar books? What are the books that are out there? Where is there a gap where there has yet to be a book written, but a book needs to be written? And that should be your motivation for writing a book, or that should give you clarity for what topics you should be writing on. Now, we are going to assume that your research is novel, is new, but it's important to be able to explain how it fits into the greater spectrum. If you can say, you know what, dear publisher, or acquisitions editor, I know you're involved in the following series within your book publishing portfolio, and I think my manuscript would be a great addition to what's already out there because of XYZ, you've done a tremendous service to that acquisitions editor because you've made it very clear to them where it is that your book fits into the greater scholarship, making it much easier for them to sell.

Now, really, what acquisitions editors are trying to understand is can I take this research that's coming in, can I turn it into a book, is it compelling, and can I then, do I know who the audience is? Can I sell it easily? Can I shoot an email out to my email list and they'll be really interested in this book? So how do we actually get there? The way to do that is within the proposal, which we're going to go through in depth in the next episode. We're going to need to define who the book is intended for, including what the academic level is. So I may be writing more of a textbook that's written for undergraduate studies or graduate studies or I may be writing a scholarly piece or scholarly manuscript which is more intended for a more scholarly audience for professors, for doctors, for doctoral students.

And once I define that, I need to explain who is going to be interested in this book. And I don't want to go too large with this explanation, too broad, but I also don't want to go too narrow. So let me explain. If I'm a legal scholar and I want to publish a new book that I'm researching on the latest controversies in abortion law, if I say this will be of interest to any legal scholars or any lawyers around the world who are interested in abortion, well, I've gone way too broad because it's going to be really hard for the acquisitions editor to know what to do with that or to start trying to sell to all those people. However, if I go, if I say, well, actually this interests a very specific group of researchers in one college and one university that would want to buy my book, the publishing team, the committee will probably get together and say, you know what? I don't think this has enough commercial potential, so we're going to reject it. So we need to find some sort of middle balance and think about how would we define it.

Maybe we want to say this will be relevant for anyone with a master's degree up until a postdoctoral degree studying the legal theories of abortion, and how it's changed in the last 10 years. And maybe we say also there's a public that might be interested in it that we can define in a very specific way. If we can say where they are, and what they're interested in, then all of a sudden we become a lot more relevant. So my recommendation to you is to take a few minutes to sit down and actually jot down for yourself “who is your target audience”. You can even pick one person, one persona, that you're imagining in your head, write that down and that could be the first steps to your successful proposal.

Thanks for joining us today on the Publish My Book podcast. Be sure to check out the show notes for links to some of the resources we mentioned and hit the subscribe button to get notifications every time we publish a new episode. Until next time, keep forging ahead with your research and moving forward on the road to publication.