Eric Schwitzgebel writes the blog The Splintered Mind, a romp through the world of philosophy, with a side interest in snails. He has a couple of posts about how to go about getting your book published, which are full of sensible advice. Here is Part 1 and here Part 2.
Think about who publishes the books you most use: among them will doubtless be the publisher you need. If that doesn’t clarify things, look at the book exhibit at conferences you go to, and if this or that press’ list looks good to you ask if the editor is present. Remember publishers want/need authors. Once you’ve made contact, and if some expression of even the mildest interest has been expressed, write an outline. This might seem unnecessary to you; after all you know what the book’ll be about, but doing an outline will force you to think about the structure and purpose of your book, and of course enables you to show the evidence to others. Putting things down on paper makes a big difference to your attitude towards it — I often claim not to know what I think about something until I’ve written it down — and this may of course be part of the reason for your resistance to the idea: once it’s on paper it’s no longer that potential work of genius, it’s just what it is. An outline isn’t a vast document; and after all, you’ll have to write the damn thing sooner or later. Showing the outline to an editor might even prompt useful feedback: these people live to be helpful.
Professor Schwitzgebel recommends sending your outline to a few presses simultaneously. OK, but we should bear in mind that it may be sent out to advisors whose time is limited. This is perhaps less true of a bare proposal than of an outline accompanied by a few sample chapters. Most academics are doubtless aware from personal experience just how much time can be eaten up assessing manuscripts for publishers: they do it basically for “the good of the subject”. And to release the self-same project to three or four publishers at the same time is to risk tying up limited resources and to court duplication. Better, I’d say, to go seriatim in submission.
The second part of his advice is mainly taken up with the contract. I think he exaggerates publishers’ reluctance to discuss and give guidance on contracts. As the author of an academic monograph you are probably in any case going to be dealing with a boilerplate standard contract, but there’s nothing stopping you asking for anything, including help. There may be a bit of reluctance to move off the terms of the standard contract, but if you really want to retain movie rights for your monograph on panpsychism a special clause can be added to the pre-set contract.
In his defensiveness about contract negotiations I suspect that Professor Schwitzgebel is falling victim to that diffidence that overcomes us all (almost all) when it comes to discussing money. Different societies at different times have different attitudes towards this sort of thing. As a young publisher I lived in an environment where it was not at all unusual for a dinner guest to ask you how much you paid for your house, or how much you earned. But of course that was in another country and besides the trait is dead.
So try to discuss finances as calmly as you might illustrations or structure. It’s important to bear in mind that your relationship with your publisher is fundamentally a mutually beneficial collaboration, not an arm-wrestling contest. Respect your publishers’ expertise in the publishing process, just as they respect your knowledge of the subject. Your interests ultimately coincide. Publishers might be regarded as in an existential struggle with competing publishing houses, but they need their authors more than their authors actually need them. An author can always try next door: a publisher with no manuscripts is a publisher with no future.
If like Professor Schwitzgebel you’re a philosopher, here is his ranking of the best presses at which to pitch your manuscript. The analysis is admittedly a bit circular, ending up more or less concluding that those presses who publish most of the books will tend to end up publishing most of the best books.
Making Book 
This gives me the opportunity to report some happy, if tentative, news. I was contacted by an editor at University of Missouri Press who had read my book on the evolution of the baseball rules. After some preliminary discussion, he has invited me to submit a formal proposal for a revisionist history of the origin of American football. This is all very preliminary, but when the editor initiates the discussion, the rest of the process is “don’t screw it up.”
This is how I hooked up with my previous publisher. An editor contacted me based on an article I had in Baseball Research Journal. So for, the only successful strategy I have found is to produce good work and wait for an editor to notice. This has the feel of sticking a note in a bottle and tossing it in the ocean, but the same is true of every other approach I have tried. It probably helps that, not being an actual academic, I have no outside pressure to publish. It is also interesting that my not being an academic does not seem to hurt the process any.
Oh, and I totally agree about the necessity of an outline, at least for nonfiction. I am entirely lacking the fiction-writing gene, so I can’t speak to that. But with nonfiction, there are far too many moving parts to keep in the air juggling, lest you end up with hopelessly mixed metaphors.
Congratulations. As an ex rugby player I find an explanation for the origins of American football to be an absolute necessity.
Not being an academic can even be an advantage: writing style springs to mind. Perhaps if you were writing about something like nuclear physics an academic affiliation might be an advantage, but there are of course lots of excellent books which could be written about that without an academic job. Still, as I wrote, publishers always need manuscripts, so they’ll tend to be on the lookout for people who might deliver one. Glad you were found.
The usual explanation is that the conversion from the scrummage to the uncontested scrimmage sprang forth from the forehead of Walter Camp. I was skeptical as soon as I learned about general sports history to have an idea of how these things actually work. The Camp story did not stand up to scrutiny. It was spread by a hagiographic biography commissioned by his widow. So far as I can tell, it has been credulously repeated ever since. As is usual in these things, the actual history is far more interesting, but you have to dig into how rugby was played in the 1870s. There is a body of British academic literature on early football, but it is mostly done as a skirmish in the broader fight about social class. Fortunately, I can mostly dodge that. American football explicitly derived from rugby, which explicitly derived from the game played at Rugby School.
Actually the story about the birth of rugby football we were always given is remarkably similar in its vagueness: “William Webb Ellis picked up the ball and ran with it”. I just saw a TV series about the origins of football (soccer) in England, and the game, prior to the introduction of a Scottish ball-player by the Darwen club, seemed to consist of a sort of ruck almost more reminiscent of rugby than today’s football. (If you are interested I’ll try to remember what it was called. Or more precisely I’ll ask my wife if she can remember!)
I actually give the Ellis story more respect than is typical, but only in its long form. The short form, on the wall at Rugby, is the one everyone knows, and is rightly ridiculed. The long form is the report of the Old Rugbeian Society. It is not only longer, but nuanced. This is why no one reads it. You can find it on Google Books. Its central argument was that the game played at Rugby in the 1820s was the kicking game, and the carrying game evolved at the school. The Ellis story of catching the ball and running is accepted only very tentatively, and isn’t really the point. Some forms of the game even in its kicking form allowed a player to catch the ball and kick it. Some allowed him to take a step or two. My suspicion is progressively greater fudging. This is how baseball went from underhand to overhand pitching. I suspect cricket bowling was similar. Ellis is listed essentially as a notable fudger. Sure, why not? In practice, the process took a few decades. Go re-read the game described in Tom Brown’s Schooldays and look for a description of a player running with the ball.
And yes, early soccer and early rugby were much more similar than their modern versions. When they talked about srummages, they usually meant what today is a ruck. What is a ruck other than a bunch of players clumping together to get at the ball? Modern rules elaborate on this, but that is the essence. Note also that the idea in the early scrummage was to kick the ball forward, not backward. Clumping together around the ball is the natural tendency. Youth coaches work hard to get kids to stop doing that. So imagine an early version of the game where the tactics had not yet been worked out. Now add in more players, often many more. The historical trend was to gradually reduce the number.
Now put these together. Rugby originally included kicking the ball about just like in soccer, though no one was passing yet in either. If there were a bunch of players around the ball, they called it a scrummage, and developed strategies to have players behind it in case the other side got through. What set rugby apart from soccer was that it also allowed, under limited conditions, a player to catch the ball and run with it. This gradually grew in importance. Of course the usual fate of the ball carrier was to be tackled. In the early days this resulted in yet another scrummage (ruck). The difference between rugby and American football was that rugby developed a combination of rules and techniques for the ball carrier to hand the ball off to a teammate before a scrummage developed, while American football stopped play, reset, and restarted with the same side controlling the ball.
A good point in the linked blog: The people manning the book tables at conferences are editors. I had initially assumed they were flunkies who had drawn the short straw. It took me a while to realize that they are editors on the prowl.
Oh no, though the person standing there at the minute may actually be a marketing assistant. Editors often (not quite possible to say always, but more often than not) will attend these meeting expressly with the intention of meeting potential authors. If they are successful in that aim, you will not see them at the booth — they’ll be off somewhere talking to another potential author. So asking is always a good idea. Even if they aren’t at the meeting they’ll probably have given the marketing assistant a bunch of business cards so that enquiries can ultimately reach them.
Now I am kicking myself. University of Nebraska Press was at the last SABR convention. This is not intuitively obvious, but they are the class act in sports history. I bought a book (volume one of a three–count them, three! volume biolgraphy of Connie Mack) when I should have been schmoozing. I have an intermittent shy streak, and had not yet fully figured out the game. Oh, well. Next time. And it seems to have worked out anyway.
Unfortunately schmoozing seems an essential ingredient of successful authorship. For me, the conclusion would be that “successful” should be measured on a scale compatible with my reluctance to push for it. So UNP may be the one for your next book: UMP will no doubt do a fine job with this one.
And thanks for the history of rugby/football.