This is Writing It, the podcast about academics and writing. I'm Rachel Gordon. Here we aim to make the process of writing and publishing a bit more transparent and a bit less overwhelming. Through conversations with editors and academics at all stages, from full professors to graduate students, independent scholars, and postdocs, we share stories, lessons, and helpful habits from our writing lives. We are really excited to get to speak with Sandra Korn today. She is an acquisitions editor at Wayne State University Press in Detroit, Michigan. She works on both scholarly and trade books in Jewish studies, African-American history, labor studies, and books about Detroit and the Great Lakes region. I actually have not realized Wayne State had both academic and trade. This seems like it's the tendency now with trade. 
many academic presses? Has it become very common to also have a trade division? A lot of university presses do publish general interest or what we call trade books. It's different for different presses. So it's pretty common for a university press to publish books that are of regional interest to that region. So you'll find that like UNC Press publishes books about the South and the Southeast. I think University of California Press has a a lot of books about the wines of California. And so one of the things that we do at Wayne State is publish books that are for general readership, interested in Detroit, Michigan, and the Great Lakes region. And a lot of university presses also publish literature, poetry, short stories from authors in their region. 
And that's something that we do as well. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. One of the reasons I was thinking about you as a guest is that You are now an editor at this press, Wayne State, that has this really long, rich history of Jewish studies. And a lot of people in that field have talked about this comeback that Wayne State University Press seems to be making. I don't know that there was necessarily a low point or something, but we're all very aware that it has this real history of great books in Jewish studies. And perhaps people weren't as sure if in the past decade or so it was something still is into that, but it feels like it came back. And I wonder if you could speak to this history and whether you are part of some kind of new resurgence there. 
Yeah, definitely. So I have been at Wayne State University Press for just about exactly two years now. So I cannot claim responsibility for the resurgence of Jewish studies personally at Wayne State, but the strength of the Jewish studies list is part of what drew me to want to take this job. I had previously been working as a religion acquisitions editor, and I was really particularly interested in the field of Jewish studies and really seeing how this is a field where there's a new generation of scholars who are doing really exciting and new and different things that are really pushing Jewish studies into conversation with other academic fields, with cultural studies and American studies, and was excited to be part of that and had long admired Wayne State University Press. 
And so when I saw that there was a position open there. That's like the Jewish studies list is what drew me to the job. But no, this is something that I'm sure your listeners know, but different presses have different specialties. And for whatever reason, Wayne State University Press has long published a lot of books in Jewish studies. And I'm not totally sure the history. I know that we published some really seminal books, including... The Hebrew Goddess, which I think is by Raphael Patai, which is like a book about Shekhinah, sort of like the idea of a feminine divine, which I think was on my parents' bookcase when I was growing up. And that was published by Wayne State University Press. But sometimes what we call a list, like the book publishing program in a certain area, ebbs and flows a little bit based on the activity of a series editor or the interests of a particular acquiring editor. 
So I feel lucky to sort of have stepped in as a Jewish Studies editor at a really exciting time, like the year that I started my first AJS, Association for Jewish Studies, conference. We had a whole table full of really exciting new scholarship by mid-career authors, first books by really, really smart authors. And so I've kind of gotten to step into that and grow the list from there. So that's been really exciting. I'm sure. Yeah. I mean, since you're new, I don't know if you can... Tell this, but I wonder if this new, all this new energy, do you know if that's translated to more publicity of your books, of your list? I'm wondering how this is helping the authors currently at Wayne State. 
Yeah, definitely. I started sort of around the same time as a cohort of newer staff, also at Wayne State University Press, and we have a really, really excellent team. publicity and marketing team. I mean, Wayne State University Press is, they were technically a mid-sized press, but we have a pretty small team. There's just 11 of us right now. So we have a publicist and a marketing director, both of whom have started around the same time as me. And they've done such a great job of getting our books out into the world, not only bringing them to conferences, but we also pitch publications to publish reviews of the books. We pitch potential, like Publishers Weekly, for example, is a venue that bookstores and libraries look at to try to decide what books to acquire. 
And we've just had a string of really amazing reviews of our scholarly books and publishers weekly, which is not always a given. You know, this is the same venue that reviews like the books coming out from the big five New York publishers. And they recently reviewed two of our books just in the last month, both of which are revised dissertations. You know, what we call a first book started from a since it was a dissertation and went through an extensive revision process. But both of the reviews were glowing. One said it was accessible and engaging. And the other one, you know, recommended for anyone interested in the history of Jewish masculinity. And I think that's like a real testament to the quality of the writing, but also to our like kind of go-getting publicist and getting pitching, you know, these academic books to a publication that reaches general readers as well. 
Yeah, that is wonderful. I mean, I, for instance, I think my manuscript was actually not even ready at the press in time for it to even be eligible for Publishers Weekly. I think they require it like three or four months before publication to be considered. So the fact that your press actually has the manuscript ready and they actually have someone on staff there who's trying to submit them is a big help to authors. Yeah, definitely. And I think that also sort of what you were speaking to of like when there's some some energy around the list. I think we're like particularly strong in Yiddish studies, in American Jewish studies, in sort of Israel-Palestine and film and media and visual culture. And so I think people, and as well as humor. 
And so those are sort of the subfields of Jewish studies that we're known for. And people who are publishing in those fields know that their friends and their mentors and their colleagues have published at Wayne State and had a good experience. And that's also part of how we... generate energy and how I, as an acquisitions editor, attract authors to work with me. When you're an academic author whose book is on a subject a bit outside one of those main areas of strength, is that likely to be a challenge then? Are you as interested in considering these books that lie outside that cluster of areas it seems like you're specializing in right now? Yeah, I think... For Wayne State, Jewish studies is a core part of what we publish. 
So we're interested in most projects in Jewish studies. And there's always really incredible, smart scholarly work that we simply can't publish because it doesn't seem like a great fit for us. Or we've published something similar recently on a similar topic, and it doesn't make sense for us to publish another book about this subject. Or we've... signed up enough scholarly Jewish studies books for the next few years, and we're really focusing on other areas. And so we're not taking on new projects unless they're a few years out or something like really, really like unique and different than what we've been seeing before. So there's various reasons why like things that are in my head as an acquisitions editor, when I see a proposal that might make me say like, oh yeah, this is of course a perfect fit. 
I totally understand why they submitted it here, but we still can't take it on. Or maybe it's hey, this is a little bit outside of what we usually do, but it's moving in a really cool direction. For me personally, for example, as well as Jewish studies, I also work on African-American studies and labor studies. So I'm particularly excited about books that cross over between those fields. So when I see a project that may be on its own as a Jewish studies book, when it seemed like a obvious fit for Wayne State, but it also is drawing in Black studies or also is considering labor or it's about a community in the Midwest. Those are like reasons why, for example, it might actually be a perfect fit for Wayne State. 
But I think for an author trying to figure out which press is the right fit for their book, I would definitely just recommend kind of looking at the books that the press has published in the last few years and seeing like, does my book, could I see my book sitting on a shelf next to these books or in a conference exhibit hall next to these books? And if your book is really image heavy and that press only publishes books that seem to be in black and white and have one to five images, then it might not be the right publisher for your project. And if that's the press where everyone on your dissertation committee and everyone you've ever been on a panel with has published their book with this press, then it might be a good press for your book. 
So some of it is just finding the right fit and it never hurts to send a query or a proposal to an acquisitions editor and see what they think as well. Many academic writers have gotten this line back, which I guess you sort of included, which is, it's not a right fit for us. And we're often trying to make sense of that. You have just helped us understand some of the reasons. It sounds like, ironically, it could be the case that I see your list of books, and they look really similar to mine. And so that's the reason I send it. But then it does sound like a reason for the not fit reply could actually be, yeah, we've actually, we've already published a ton like that. 
And you want to also... cover some of your other areas. So it's because that not a fit language is something that many academics have had to struggle to figure out what that means exactly. Yeah, I think that's maybe we have been... I was trained to say that. It's a kind and polite way to say, your project is great. I know it will get published somewhere. I can't be the one to publish it. It's sort of like an encouraging... continue to look for the right home for your book. It has a home, I promise, sort of line. And yeah, I think one of the things about being an acquisitions editor that's so cool about our job is it's very curatorial. And sometimes it feels like it's an art, not a science to figure out the right balance of every... For example, I work on 15 books a year. 
I can't publish every smart, well-researched book in Jewish studies. It simply wouldn't be possible. And so, okay, if I'm working on 15 books a year and 10 of them are in Jewish studies, how many books can I take on in Yiddish studies? How many books can I take on that are edited collections? How many are first books? How many are books by a really senior scholar? And having a good balance of that and finding people who I personally work well with, who I communicate well with, and will be excited to be doing this huge project with me. Those are all things that I take into consideration. So I definitely think that turning people down or telling somebody that their project is not going to be able to be published at the press I'm working at is by far the worst part of my job. 
It's really disappointing and it's hard to disappoint people. But most of the time, these are projects that will find their home and they will find their readership. And it just might not be me right now at this moment. Yeah. And your reminder that it can sometimes be just a numbers issue is actually kind of comforting. I think we forget that, that actually there's probably a limited number of books that this editor can take on. So you might be reaching them when they're already at their sort of 15 or 14, and they just, it's not an unlimited amount they can accept. You also mentioned something interesting we don't always hear discussed, which is that the editor is also maybe thinking about who can I, who seems like a good person for me to work with. 
There's personalities involved here. Not every writer, I'm sure, actually meets their editor in person, but many times this happens. So is this just sort of an assessment you kind of might unconsciously be making if you get to meet them at that book exhibit hall or just what it's like communicating with them over email? Yeah, some combination of those. One thing that I feel lucky at this point in my career, I am fairly junior to being an acquisition or fairly new acquisitions editor, and I have The time to basically set up a Zoom meeting with each one of my authors when we first decide to work together, where I get to talk to somebody, talk through the process, answer their questions in real time. 
And sometimes I even have the opportunity to get on Zoom again with somebody when we're working on the images and permissions or when we're talking about the contract or something a little more tricky that's harder to do over email. And not every editor has the time for that. But that is really helpful for me and communicating with people. But also I know that for some authors, especially someone who's published a number of books already, maybe it's balancing their writing projects with a lot of other things going on in their life. They're like, I know the process. I've done this before. I just want an acquisitions editor who's going to send my book out to the right readers and is going to send me the reports on time. 
And they might not enjoy that more sort of hands-on experience. And so there's surely a different acquisitions editor who is happy to just be extremely streamlined in their communication. So I think that's something where the balance can, can kind of, you can kind of figure it out pretty easily in the communication, whether an author is like, you know, I have a lot of questions. I would actually like my hand held a little bit because I've never done this before, or I've never done an edited collection before. Or if the author is like, I got this, could you, these are my suggested readers. Do your job. So that's, that's one of the things that I can usually judge and, One of the other sort of aspects of this is also how much feedback we as acquisitions editors can offer our authors. 
And we, you know, working on 15 books a year, I read proposals for many, many more than that. I simply can't read every book that I work on cover to cover. I try to, you know, I read basically the introduction for each of my books, sometimes a couple of times at different stages in the process, and I'll skim the chapters. And sometimes I'll be able to read a chapter where an issue has come up in peer review around a specific part. chapter and the author needs some more support in thinking about that. But for most of my projects, I'm not able to be like really in the text with an author the way that, you know, you're like, you know, the fiction editors at the big, your publishers might be or whatever. 
So university press acquisitions editors rely on our peer reviewers to do a lot of that, of that work. And some authors are, want a greater amount of engagement with the acquisitions editor in their texts. And some don't, some are really happy to just rely on the peer reviews and would actually rather not have the acquisitions editor adding a third opinion to the mix. So that's another sort of part of the balance. I've had authors who I think would have preferred if I could have read and get feedback on every single chapter, and that I haven't been able to do. And then I have authors who are like, you can tell that they would prefer not to have my feedback at all, which obviously makes my job a little bit easier, but I always appreciate somebody who is interested in being in conversation with the acquisitions editor about 
the shape of the manuscript, because although we're not field experts in the scholarly fields, we do read a lot of academic books, and we have an eye towards readability and the flow of a chapter and how narrative structure works in an introduction that sometimes the experts in the field might not be paying attention to. Yeah, thanks for bringing that up, because it's something that's come up in a lot of our conversations. Academics have said they are skeptical that their read the book at all. There's been a lot of questions about what do academic or university press editors, what do they actually read? And most of the academics we've spoken to have said they'd love to get a bit more engagement feedback and that everyone sort of imagines that this is part of the benefit of if you go to trade press is that someone will actually read and edit as opposed to just kind of shepherding the manuscript through the reader's reports process and all of that. 
So I It's interesting to hear an editor actually speak about what they're able to do. And I don't know if your sense of what you do is sort of common with other editors too. One thing that I will say is for my trade books, so I'm working on four trade books right now. And for those, I do set aside a different amount of time. My goal is that I would read every chapter in a dream world for those projects, although sometimes it's not possible because I'm balancing so many. different things in my job. But for those, the language, the readability, the accessibility of the book is a lot more important than for a scholarly book where obviously we want this to be something that an undergrad reader might be able to understand, but we're not expecting 10,000 high school students to potentially pick this off the high school library shelf and read it. 
And so if it's written by a professor for an audience of mostly graduate students and other faculty, that's generally okay for a scholarly book. And generally the people reading a scholarly book are going to be willing to read a slightly dry narrative because they're interested in the information. Whereas that's not always true for a trade book, a book for a general reader. But I do think that what I mentioned is pretty common across acquisitions editors. Like we will pay extra attention to an introduction because that's the most read part of a scholarly book. It's usually what our faculty editorial board will read. It usually has an overview of the book's intervention as well as like a chapter overview. So we really focus on that and getting that really clear. 
And usually if the intervention is really clear in the introduction, it's also really clear throughout the chapters. And we'll work with our authors to figure out how to respond to complicated peer review questions. So if reviewer number one says chapter three makes no sense at all and it should be slashed and reader number two says no, chapter three is the most brilliant part of this whole book. I think that that should be actually like foregrounded in the introduction and that should be woven throughout the whole text. Like we would probably go look at chapter three and see what it was about because that's a case where having a third opinion could be really helpful for this author. But most acquisitions editors simply don't have time to read and do like track changes or comments on an entire text. 
The press will find a copy editor who will do, you know, give you comments on the whole text, but their focus is really grammar and, clarifying a confusing sentence and making sure the citations and bibliography are, you know, kind of consistently formatted. Their focus is not on the argument. And we really rely on the peer reviewers to look at the argument. You mentioned earlier, and I'm glad you did, that academics shouldn't hesitate to reach out to editors to pitch an idea. I'm wondering about that approach to an editor like yourself. Is the book exhibit hall appointment or just sort of cold call walk up the best or an email? People really do kind of try to strategize, like, should I go over and just say hello? 
Should I make the appointment? Should there be an email first? What's your sense of all these possibilities? Yeah, I don't think that there's like a perfect science. And also every acquisitions editor has their own personality and level of introverted or extrovertedness. And like, the reaction when somebody like walks up to you in the exhibit hall and is like, Hey, do you have five minutes to chat about my book project? Like, I know some people are like, Oh my God, perfect. I didn't have to sit down and make small talk for 45 minutes with a stranger. I'll tell them yes or no in five minutes. It will be great. And some people are, you know, it's like a deep dread to be confronted. So I think I don't, I can't speak for everyone, but yeah, 
Yeah, I mean, I think the thing that's helpful maybe to say is that acquisitions editors are just humans with our own interests and finite capacity of time. And so sometimes somebody approaches me in the exhibit hall while there's nothing else happening. And it's really fun and exciting to get to hear about a new project. And I leave the conversation and say, like, I would love to read something. Could you send something to me in an email whenever you have it? Or maybe you're just... a grad student, you have no book proposal yet, you're working on your dissertation, but let's stay in touch. I'll see you next year at the conference. And that can be really amazing. Sometimes we're the only person in the booth at the exhibit hall. 
We're also trying to run some people's credit cards. There's clearly a whole line of people. You have an appointment in 20 minutes and somebody approaches and wants to give you their whole spiel. And that can be very stressful. So I think just that, I mean, my advice would be to just be considerate when approaching acquisitions editors. But I think if someone has a book proposal ready, it's always helpful for us to see the book proposal. It's a form that we're very familiar with and gives us a really good sense of the project. And hopefully I like to tell people if I think a project is really not going to be a fit, like there's no version of this book that I could publish at Wayne State, I would like to tell somebody as quickly as possible so they can go find another potential publisher for it without waiting to hear from me for months or whatever. 
But if the question is just like, do you publish edited collections? Or how does your peer review process work? Or what's the usual timeline for a scholarly book? If a 10-year review is in four years, am I already too late to move forward with Wayne State or something like that? Those are really easy questions to answer in an exhibit hall or to answer over a quick email. And it can be a good way to just initiate a relationship. even if you don't have a formal book proposal yet, for example. But yeah, I always enjoy when people write to me before a conference, especially Jewish Studies is a huge conference for us. I'm always really busy there, but I go to some smaller conferences. 
For example, I'll be at the African American Intellectual History Society in a couple of weeks, and I don't have a lot of meetings set up for that conference. So if somebody wrote to me to meet me there, I'd be really excited because I have two days at an academic conference with a pretty open schedule. And so it's really nice when people want to reach out. But sometimes someone writes to me at a conference and my schedule is already booked. And I know that I need to give myself an hour for a lunch break and to catch up on my emails in the afternoon. And I'm not going to fill that hour for anybody. So in that case, I might say, sorry, I'm not available at this conference, but I'd be happy to look at a proposal over email whenever you have it. 
I didn't really answer your question. I just said, it depends in like a million different ways, but hopefully it kind of gave a sense of If an acquisitions editor replies and says, I'm not available at this conference, or sorry, I can't answer whether or not this is a project we can take on based on just this one sentence email, but please send me the proposal when it's ready. It's usually not that we're trying to blow you off. It's that we just simply don't have the time or we're just waiting for the right moment to read the materials that are prepared. Yeah. I know some academics feel like, gee, if I could... get this editor's interest, that would also provide the inspiration I need to, whatever, finish the manuscript or even get going more on the book proposal. 
And so I wonder if there are pitches or emails that work for you, that excite you, that make you want to stay in touch with this writer, this academic. Definitely. There are times when I get a picture, an email, and I get really excited. A lot of it honestly has to do with either my personal interests. I am personally really excited about this project. It's something I would like to read in my free time. Absolutely. You've hit on my special interests or something that feels like it's a direction I've been trying to grow in and really looking for a project in. And now here's a project that's landed on my doorstep. So for example, for me, that might be a labor studies book where labor studies, Detroit is such a bastion of labor history. 
And I've been sort of tasked with restarting a labor studies list that has in many ways stagnated for 10 years. We used to publish a lot about Detroit labor, about the UAW, and we haven't for some time. And so I'm trying to sort of re-revive that list. And so when I get a, what we call over the transom or like out of the blue proposal or pitch in labor studies that feels new and different and contemporary and exciting, I get like really excited because that's what I've been keeping my eye out for. Personally, I was a women, gender and sexuality studies major as an undergrad. And so gender and sexuality is something that I'm like extremely fascinated by. So when I get a Jewish studies proposal that incorporates a gender and sexuality studies lens, I get really excited. 
It doesn't mean that I can publish every single one of those books, but that definitely is something that I'm keeping my eye out for. And I think every acquisitions editor probably also has their own interests. Yeah, another thing I wanted to ask you about at a different point in the process is the reader's reports, how to respond to these. So we academics have to write a letter responding to what usually these two or sometimes it's more experts in the field have said about the manuscript. And I have actually heard a range of opinions on as to whether you should address most or all points or how brief or long this letter should be. What's your sense of how to do this response to the reader's reports? 
It's such an interesting form of writing. It's an open letter, sort of like you're writing in response to the reader's reports, but you know that your letter is going to be read by your acquisitions editor and by the faculty editorial board. So you're sort of trying to like show, you know, dear readers, thank you for reading my book. Also, I disagree with you in this way. And it's kind of a funny form, but I always prefer... when the response letter is more narrative. And I do not suggest that people go line by line or point by point in response to the reader reports. You know, often reader reports, often you've got a really engaged reader who's like found every typo and corrected your dates and been like, oh, by the way, have you seen this new book that's coming out on your topic? 
And that's awesome. Like a blessing when you've got a peer reviewer who's given you like a bullet point list of comments. But there's absolutely no need to respond to each of those. No one wants to hear, you know, no one wants to read a letter that's like, I will correct that typo. I will incorporate that citation. That's not an interesting letter. I think if there are sort of bigger issues that the reports raise, either like structural ones about the shape of the manuscript or a concern about a claim made or like a disagreement with a claim that you're making with part of your intervention or like a concern that you've left out a aspect. You're talking about disability, but you have not engaged with anything in disability studies, for example. 
Here is not just one citation, but a whole scholarly field that has relevance to your work. And I think your chapters would be a lot stronger if you had read a couple books in this field. I think that's the sort of thing that's really important to respond to in the letter and to respond to thoughtfully. And it's totally fine for the response to be a that's out of scope for this project. Or, you know, that's like, that's not what I'm, my argument clearly wasn't clear. If you think I was saying this, I was actually not trying to say that. And so I will clarify what I was trying to say, but I'm not going to change my argument. That's a totally valid response. 
You know, responding to say, I'm going to incorporate your feedback and really shift the way my book is structured also is a totally valid response. It's very normal to have a mix of like yes and no responses. the feedback over the course of the response letter, but I would generally just encourage people to do it in a narrative way, in a way that feels like, you know, you're taking the reports seriously. These are people who spent many hours, undercompensated hours, engaging with your work, and they probably did so because they care about this field. They might teach your book in their class someday, and they want it to be the version of the book that they are excited to teach. And you don't have to write the version of the book that they're excited to teach, but 
The feedback is there because they are invested in your work. And so I think a letter that sort of recognizes that and takes the report seriously is helpful. Of course, sometimes we get a sort of bad faith report, like a reader's report that's really unhelpful. They didn't get the project. They don't like the project there. It's unredeemable for them. And that's hard to respond to thoughtfully. But usually that happened because either the author or the acquisitions editor thought, this person must be the right audience for the book. Maybe they're a scholar in your field and we missed the mark. That was not the right reader for the book. So maybe that means that you need to like make it clear in your introduction who your book is for because we got it wrong. 
Either the acquisitions editor got it wrong or you suggested that person to us as a reader and they were incorrect. So I think those can be, even those unhelpful reports can sometimes be a helpful sign. Like, okay, my book title says it's a cultural history book. But this historian found that I didn't do sufficient archival research for it to be called a history. Actually, maybe what I'm doing is not history. My book is not going to be taught in a history class. It's going to be taught in a cultural studies class. And that's totally fine to find out through the peer review process. But you should just say it explicitly in the response letter. Like, I realized that this was not the correct, you know, this book is clearly not for readers like reader number two. 
I hope that answered your question. And it's helpful to hear that. I mean, with those prerequisites, problematic reviews, especially the ones that are so negative, they can be really painful and embarrassing for the writer. The writer feels embarrassed and is wondering what the editor is thinking. But it sounds like sometimes you're also thinking, ugh, we didn't get the right reader. It's not like our author is terrible. But as you said, we might have missed the mark in sending it out to this person. Yeah, the author is never terrible. But I mean, occasionally we'll get two reports that agree that the book is not ready for publication. And that's, you know, it's just helpful information for us as an acquisitions editor. The reports might say, you know, this book is really not a good fit for a university press. 
There's a different type of poem for this book. Or they might say, this really reads like a dissertation. It needs a lot more shaping before it reads like a book manuscript. And if you get two reports that both say something like that, that's just helpful information for us. We as acquisitions editors can then make a decision like, Do we want to offer this as a revise and resubmit? Or do we want to say, you know, this is really not the right, based on these reports and the amount of work you have to do, this is not going to be the right home. I think the easiest pathway would be for all of us would be if you took it elsewhere. So we'll try to be direct if that's the case. 
But in the situation where you get like one really engaged, thoughtful, helpful report, and then one really curt, unhelpful report, usually we are also unhappy about that. because it's not moving the project forward. So sometimes in those cases, if I have the time, I'll find a third reader to sort of break the tie. And maybe that third reader can tell me, is this actually just a project that we can't move forward with? Or is it a totally valid project, but I just found somebody who was not interested in it? Yeah, Sandra, I wanted to ask you about something really different, but that's come up with a lot of academics, which is about book promotion and book events. It seems like these have become a lot more 
common among even first time and early stage career authors. And there's a bit of a question of like, what are these for? What do they do? You know, what's the best way to go about organizing these? What's your sense of, are these worthwhile? What can they do that's good? Why might an author think about organizing some kind of book events? I'm not a publicist, but I can tell you everything I know about book events, which is, for me, as a person with a lot of interests, I am curious about a lot of things, but simply do not have the time of the day to read books about all the things I'm interested in. But if someone who's written a book on a topic I'm interested in comes through my town, is doing an event at my local bookstore, at my university, I would totally be interested in attending that event. 
Especially if they're like a friend of a friend, and my friend invites me to their friend's book talk. So in some ways, a book talk or a book event is a way to just get your... project, your research, your scholarship out to a broader network of people. People who might already be interested in your topic but wouldn't have come across your book otherwise. And it's also a way to get your own community, your department, your committee, your friends in your field excited about your project to give them something to invite their friends to and to get the word out. And a way to make them notice, like, my book is out. You can put it on your syllabus now, for example. So I definitely recommend 
that authors think about, like at the very least doing some sort of like book launch event at their own home university or in their own hometown. I have a couple of authors right now who have co-authored a, it's one of our trade books, but they are organizing a book tour and they literally have like a suitcase full of their book and they're doing events at like bookstores, universities, and like community organizations throughout the Northeast. And they're like about to come to the South and then they're going to go to the Midwest. So these are people who have really invested a lot of time into planning their book tour and connecting with every single friend or connection they have at different universities to see if people want to bring them. 
Not every academic book needs to go on a book tour, and most university presses don't have the resources to pay for your plane flight for you to go on a book tour. But thinking about a few key locations to do book events at, maybe it's at your field conference, at your home university, and at the university where you got your PhD, for example, doing events there can be a really important way for you to get your platform out as an author, for people in your field to know that there's a book that they can assign in their courses, a book for them to read. And it also helps increase book sales, which is part of what sustains university presses and maybe means that you might receive a royalty check at the end of the year. 
Right. Thank you. And there's a couple of questions we've been asking most guests. One is about something that People wish they had known about writing earlier in their career. I wonder for you if you've noticed with your academic writers, them learning or realizing something about writing and publishing that's been helpful. I really love an academic book that reads like a story when a chapter is really like storybook. starts with a character and some character development and maybe like returns to that character at the end of the chapter, even when the chapter is structured around an intervention and argument books that, you know, that tell a story really stuck in my head as a reader. And I think they're more likely to be, you know, to stick in the head of somebody who might teach it to their undergrads or recommend it to a friend or might your policy, you know, a policymaker might, you know, keep it in their head, that sort of thing. 
So yeah, One advice that one of my authors told me is that she took creative writing classes. She was a religion scholar, but she was like, I want to be a good writer. I want my book to be readable. And so I'm going to take an undergrad creative writing class at the university or take an online Zoom creative nonfiction class and really learn from fiction writers and creative nonfiction from journalists about how to tell a story. That's an incredible tip that stuck with me. that could be really useful for academic authors as well. Oh, I totally agree. Yeah. I've taken creative writing and poetry classes at different points of my academic training and career. And I, yes, I completely agree on this ability to tell a story and kind of have that in mind. 
I think it's really helpful. We're also asking folks about writing practices or habits that are working. And I wonder if you hear from your writers about what they do. One author who has a Zoom chat, book group and, or a zoom writing group rather. And they, it's like she and a few of her friends and every week they get on zoom and they go on mute and keep their faces on and write together. And they have to like, you know, tell each other, this is what i'm working on today. And they're, hold each other accountable. And she is such a fast writer. Like she powers through. It's very incredible to see. And It seems so easy to organize this accountability group, but they take it really seriously. 
They don't miss weeks. And I think setting aside that time and having some accountability buddies is a writing practice that I have seen really work for people. I also have, with a couple of my trade authors, have been setting them intermittent deadlines, like chapter deadlines. And to me, these are kind of fake deadlines. I don't really care when you finish chapter seven. We talked about the whole manuscript being done in spring 2025. And so the fact that I've sent you a calendar invite for chapter seven being due in October is a little arbitrary to me. But being accountable to somebody for that writing, I think, makes you feel like... I've seen it make authors feel like, okay, I need to get something done and somebody else is looking over my shoulder a little bit. 
I want to do my best work. Yeah, I also respond well to that. deadline sense of urgency. And the Zoom writing groups are, you know, sort of something the pandemic gave us. Yeah, those can be quite effective. Thank you so much. This has been really helpful, Sandra. Really appreciate your taking the time to talk with us today. Thanks for listening to Writing It, the podcast about academics and writing. Sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Florida.