Notes on publishing an academic book in economics

notes on publishing an academic book in economics

author

introduction

These notes are based on my experience with three books in economics. In some other fields (history and literature?), that amount of experience is minimal. But economists publish almost all of their research in journals; the number of books published by the median economist—even the median economist in a research-oriented department—is probably zero. Consequently, I'm often asked about the mechanics of book-publishing, so perhaps economists will find these notes useful.

choosing a publisher

My experience lies mostly, and most recently, with academic, nonprofit, publishers, a group that includes Cambridge, Oxford U.K., Oxford U.S.A., MIT, Princeton, Harvard, Michigan, and Stanford. If your book is an undergraduate textbook, you'll probably want to consider a for-profit firm. Norton is one such company; I have a hard time keeping track of the others, which seem to be constantly merging and splitting up. If you're writing a research monograph, then you're pretty much limited to the nonprofit sector.

The two types of publisher operate according to similar principles, though firms in the for-profit sector are, as one would expect, more intent on making money—out of both you and their customers—and, in my experience, are likely to try to drive a hard bargain. One dimension in which the types of publisher differ is in their marketing methods. Many for-profit firms employ sales forces that visit colleges and universities in the USA and Canada (and maybe elsewhere) to promote their books; they concentrate on sales in these countries. The nonprofit sector relies primarily on mailed brochures and advertising, and puts more effort than do the for-profit firms outside the developed world. Firms of each type argue that their strategy is better for them than the alternative, and I don't see a reason to doubt that they are both right.

The for-profit firms are likely, in my experience, to regard their transaction with you as a straightforward sale: you, the author, sell them your book, which is theirs to do what they like with. By contrast, the university presses are more likely to be willing to involve you in decisions regarding design and marketing.

Simultaneous submission is the norm: you can submit your book to as many publishers as you wish, simultaneously. You'll have a lot more bargaining power if at least two publishers are interested, so submitting your work to a few companies makes sense.

when to approach a publisher?

Publishers will consider books at any stage of completion. At one extreme, you can send an outline together with the draft of a single chapter (or maybe just the outline). At another extreme, you can wait until your book is complete.

Advantages of early submission

If the publisher sends your outline and draft out for review, you'll get some feedback that may guide your writing of the rest of the book. (Or you may find out that there is no point in writing the book.)
Once you have signed a contract, your publisher will probably not sign another book on exactly the same topic, in which case your signing up early will reduce the options of others writing on the same topic.
The publisher will nudge you along with words of encouragement now and then.
You may be able to negotiate a contract in which you get an advance against royalties. This advance may free up a liquidity constraint you face, and will earn you interest while you are writing.

Disadvantages of early submission

It's hard to anticipate all the issues that will arise with the book, so that the contract you sign is likely not to cover points about which you will disagree with the publisher.
The publisher may want you to stick to a schedule (e.g. "first draft of chapters 1 to 4 by date 1, first draft of chapters 5 to 9 by date 2, revised versions of all chapters by date 3")—whereas you may prefer to be distracted by other opportunities as they arise.
You may find yourself disagreeing with the suggestions of reviewers, and may have to spend time justifying your position with your editor. If you wait until your book is finished, you can offer it to the publisher more or less "as is".

how will a publisher react to your submission?

At one extreme, a publisher will call you up on receipt of your submission and tell you they'd like to publish the book. That's not likely, however, unless you are well-known. At the other extreme, you won't hear anything (not even an acknowledgment). The intermediate outcomes involve the publisher's sending your submission out for review, sending you the reviews (usually within a couple of months), and letting you know whether they will offer you a contract. (For-profit firms may not be willing to show you any reviews they obtain unless you sign a contract with them.)

the contract

If you're offered a contract, it will most likely be a variant of a standard one. All the parameters are, of course, negotiable, and you can try to add whatever you want. If more than one publisher is interested in your book, you obviously have a lot more bargaining power. Some publishers, while not willing to include some points in a formal contract, may be willing to include them in a separate letter to you.

Put everything you care about in the contract

Make sure you put everything you care about in the contract. Once you sign the contract, you have no power whatsoever. (Well, almost none.) If you wish to do anything out of the ordinary in terms of design, for example, be sure to get the publisher to agree before you sign the contract. Even if you can't imagine that anyone would regard your ideas as unreasonable, get an agreement from the publisher in writing. (Even if you do have an agreement, you may still have to argue later on—the publisher knows that it's not worth your while suing them over a relatively minor issue—but you'll be on much firmer ground if you have an agreement.) If, as I do, you like to omit commas after "i.e." or to follow logic and put punctuation marks after rather than before a closing quotation mark, unless the punctuation mark is part of the quote, then get an agreement in writing.

Marketing

The effort and expense to which your publisher will go to market your book is important, but harder to contract on. You might be able to get them to agree, however, to produce a brochure of a quality similar to one they produced for another book, and to send it to a specific mailing list.

Price

Another important parameter is the price of the book. The publisher wants to make as much money as possible, whereas you may benefit to some extent independently from sales. (The latter benefit may be small in the case of a textbook, however.) Thus your interests may not be exactly aligned with the publisher's: the best price for them is higher than the best price for you. You may be able to get them agree to a price, especially if they are in the nonprofit sector.

Hardback versus softback

A related issue concerns the format of your book: paperback or hardback ("cloth")? A point to bear in mind is that the production costs of the two formats are only marginally different; the usual price difference is almost entirely simply price discrimination.

Prohibition of writing book on similar topic

Read the contract carefully. Beware particularly of a clause that prohibits you from publishing another book on the same topic, or restricts your ability to do so. Some publishers' standard contracts contain a very restrictive clause of this type, which you can try to get them to delete.

Clauses contingent on delivery date

Your contract may have a clause that says that all provisions are contingent on your delivering the final version by a certain date. If so, appreciate its implications!

Royalties

How much royalty can you expect? My limited experience is insufficient to make any broad claims, but rates between 10 and 20% of "net receipts" seem roughly the norm. (I have, however, seen a boilerplate contract with a rate of 5%.) The publisher's "net receipts" consist of the money it gets from selling your book. Copies are generally sold to bookstores for around 60–70% of the recommended retail price, but copies sold to other divisions of the publishing company may be sold for much less. (Oxford University Press USA, for example, sells copies of one of my books to Oxford University Press UK, for sale in Europe, for around 25% of the US recommended retail price.)

Many contacts seem to involve royalty rates that increase with sales—e.g. 15% on the first 5,000 copies, 18% thereafter. Note that these step-up rates may apply separately to different editions of your book (hardback and softback, if it is issued in both formats) and to different markets (e.g. U.S., Canada, non-U.S. and Canada).

should you think of producing the final pages yourself?

First, for-profit publishers are going to be very reluctant—probably unwilling, in fact, if your book is a textbook—to let you produce the final pages, so in this case you won't have to consider the question. Second, if your publisher is willing to let you produce the final pages, why would you want to? You're an expert on the subject about which you're writing (presumably); publishers hire people who are experts at page makeup. Why waste your time learning about page makeup? An answer to this question is provided by a book like James D. Morrow's Game theory for political scientists (Princeton University Press, 1994). Someone out there in the publishing world thinks it looks good to typeset mathematics in a Roman font, to underline headings of examples, and to use a rather skinny sans-serif font for titles when the text font is Times Roman. They may be assigned to design your book. (Let me be clear that I'm expressing an opinion about the design and typography of this book, not its content.)

Another reason for thinking about producing the final output yourself is that you can use TeX, which will allow you not only to produce output at least as good as that of any professional system, but also to use sophisticated programming, to implement intelligent cross-referencing and numbering schemes, and to produce figures that perfectly match the text. (Once you start producing your figures within TeX, labeling them in the same font as you use for your text, the ugliness of books in which the figures are labeled using an entirely different font (the author produced the figures, which the publisher pasted into text), will be striking.) You may be able to take advantage of TeX without having to deal with the nitty-gritty of page makeup, by writing your book in TeX and then giving all your code to the publisher, who uses a typesetting company specializing in TeX to do the final formatting. But if you wrote all the code yourself, you may be reluctant to hand it over to someone who will treat it as just another book.

Finally, just as integrating the tasks of doing research and "writing it up" is a good idea ("writing is research"), so too is integrating the tasks of writing and designing a book. The old-fashioned procedure in which an author wrote a manuscript, which she handed to a typesetter to turn into a book, was driven by the near-impossibility of an author's typesetting the book herself. Now that typesetting is much easier (no need to arrange lines of lead type in wooden boxes), the two tasks can be profitably integrated, leading to more beautiful books.

So let's say you've decided you'd like to consider producing the final output yourself. First you need to persuade the publisher to let you do so, which may be difficult if you have no experience with page makeup. If you succeed, what do you need to know? No standard word-processing program has the features needed to produce polished output, so you'll need to use TeX.

What exactly do you need to know to persuade TeX to produce beautiful output?

You need to be comfortable with the "fine points". These points are all discussed thoroughly in Donald Knuth's TeXbook; I discuss elsewhere some of the ones over which users of TeX most commonly trip.
You need to learn something about fonts, unless you want to set your book in Knuth's computer modern, TeX's default font. (An easy alternative is Palatino, activated simply by included the package mathpazo in your preamble. This package include all the mathematical symbols you'll need, as well as the standard text characters. But you'll probably want to use a different font for headings, chapter openings, and the title page.)
You need to get to know all the tricks needed to control page makeup. These tricks are not, to my knowledge, documented in a single place; I have collected the ones that I know in another page.

the editor

You will negotiate your contract with an editor, who will subsequently act somewhat like a contractor for your project, sending parts of it to the design department, copy editing department, and marketing department. You need to find an editor with whom you are comfortable dealing. But be aware that editors move around a lot: the one with whom you negotiate your contract may well move on to another firm by the time you complete your book.

the copy editor

"Copy editors are the secret scourge and saviors of the publishing world, insane sticklers who make your life miserable and your prose sing. Good ones are hard to find and harder to love; punctilious, detail-oriented people, they think commas have consequence, facts can never be fiction, and every sentence is capable of improvement. Never late, they are always correct."

Thus wrote Ruth Reichl, the editor of Gourmet, in the January 2003 issue of her magazine.

You'll encounter the copy editor after you submit what you think is your final version. Traditionally, the copy editor makes whatever changes she regards as necessary to make your prose sing, checks for consistency, gives you the opportunity to disagree with the changes she suggests, and then makes the final decision about what to change and what not to change. If you produce the final output, the relationship is a little different: the copy editor suggests changes, and you get to decide which ones to implement. Of course, the publisher can refuse to publish your book unless you make certain changes—you can't do just whatever you like—but your position is definitely not the same as it was traditionally.

In my (limited) experience, copy editors are obsessed with "consistency", and usually have a few pet peeves. You might find one that doesn't allow you to use "since" except in a temporal context, or one that swears that "this" is not a noun (you can't say "This is interesting", you have to say "This X is interesting"). The "rules" invoked often have no reasonable basis, as a sensible usage manual like Webster's dictionary of English usage demonstrates. There are circumstances under which "since" is ambiguous, for example, but it is almost always not, and is frequently used to mean "because" by legions of "good" writers.

You'll be lucky to encounter a copy editor who does much more than suggest you adhere to a set of rules; you may find one who finds a few sentence that can be improved, but in my experience you won't get a lot of guidance in this respect. Probably most of your sentences really are capable of improvement (certainly most of mine are), but your experience is likely to differ from Ruth Reichl's: the copy editors employed by Gourmet and by her previous employer, The New York Times, probably spend a great deal more time on her words than your copy editor will spend on yours. (Presumably the reason is simply that the increase in profit from polishing Ruth Reichl's prose that the management of Gourmet expects is much larger than the increase in profit from polishing your prose that an academic publisher expects.)

When interacting with your copy editor, you need to remember three things. First, she has excellent intentions. Second, most of the time she is right, or at least has a point. Third, she is paid by the publisher to improve your book. What will happen if she returns the manuscript without a single mark, claiming she could find no errors? Is she going to get her pay check? Will the publisher use her again? (Most copy editors seem to be free lancers, not salaried employees.) This third point of course suggests a strategy to minimize the minor points you are asked to change: sprinkle errors evenly throughout your manuscript, so that the copy editor doesn't have to get really picky to earn her pay. Needless to say, I'm not going to recommend you follow such a strategy. If you use TeX, you could even design a few clever macros so that you can correct all those deliberate errors with a couple of keystrokes. But let me be clear: I'm saying only that that's "a" strategy.

the cover

Take a look at the covers of the academic books on your shelf. I see a lot of F's and very few A's on mine. Cover-design is clearly difficult; I don't know how long an artist gets to come up with a cover, but I have to guess that she doesn't get enough time to read your book and understand it. And even if she did, some subjects are pretty hard to render pictorially. I don't have any useful advice except the obvious: if you have any idea at all, tell your publisher in as much detail as possible. If you really care about the cover, try to come up with something to which they will agree before you sign your contract.

	notes on publishing an academic book in economics
author	Martin J. Osborne
introduction	These notes are based on my experience with three books in economics. In some other fields (history and literature?), that amount of experience is minimal. But economists publish almost all of their research in journals; the number of books published by the median economist—even the median economist in a research-oriented department—is probably zero. Consequently, I'm often asked about the mechanics of book-publishing, so perhaps economists will find these notes useful.
choosing a publisher	My experience lies mostly, and most recently, with academic, nonprofit, publishers, a group that includes Cambridge, Oxford U.K., Oxford U.S.A., MIT, Princeton, Harvard, Michigan, and Stanford. If your book is an undergraduate textbook, you'll probably want to consider a for-profit firm. Norton is one such company; I have a hard time keeping track of the others, which seem to be constantly merging and splitting up. If you're writing a research monograph, then you're pretty much limited to the nonprofit sector. The two types of publisher operate according to similar principles, though firms in the for-profit sector are, as one would expect, more intent on making money—out of both you and their customers—and, in my experience, are likely to try to drive a hard bargain. One dimension in which the types of publisher differ is in their marketing methods. Many for-profit firms employ sales forces that visit colleges and universities in the USA and Canada (and maybe elsewhere) to promote their books; they concentrate on sales in these countries. The nonprofit sector relies primarily on mailed brochures and advertising, and puts more effort than do the for-profit firms outside the developed world. Firms of each type argue that their strategy is better for them than the alternative, and I don't see a reason to doubt that they are both right. The for-profit firms are likely, in my experience, to regard their transaction with you as a straightforward sale: you, the author, sell them your book, which is theirs to do what they like with. By contrast, the university presses are more likely to be willing to involve you in decisions regarding design and marketing. Simultaneous submission is the norm: you can submit your book to as many publishers as you wish, simultaneously. You'll have a lot more bargaining power if at least two publishers are interested, so submitting your work to a few companies makes sense.
when to approach a publisher?	Publishers will consider books at any stage of completion. At one extreme, you can send an outline together with the draft of a single chapter (or maybe just the outline). At another extreme, you can wait until your book is complete. Advantages of early submission If the publisher sends your outline and draft out for review, you'll get some feedback that may guide your writing of the rest of the book. (Or you may find out that there is no point in writing the book.) Once you have signed a contract, your publisher will probably not sign another book on exactly the same topic, in which case your signing up early will reduce the options of others writing on the same topic. The publisher will nudge you along with words of encouragement now and then. You may be able to negotiate a contract in which you get an advance against royalties. This advance may free up a liquidity constraint you face, and will earn you interest while you are writing. Disadvantages of early submission It's hard to anticipate all the issues that will arise with the book, so that the contract you sign is likely not to cover points about which you will disagree with the publisher. The publisher may want you to stick to a schedule (e.g. "first draft of chapters 1 to 4 by date 1, first draft of chapters 5 to 9 by date 2, revised versions of all chapters by date 3")—whereas you may prefer to be distracted by other opportunities as they arise. You may find yourself disagreeing with the suggestions of reviewers, and may have to spend time justifying your position with your editor. If you wait until your book is finished, you can offer it to the publisher more or less "as is".
how will a publisher react to your submission?	At one extreme, a publisher will call you up on receipt of your submission and tell you they'd like to publish the book. That's not likely, however, unless you are well-known. At the other extreme, you won't hear anything (not even an acknowledgment). The intermediate outcomes involve the publisher's sending your submission out for review, sending you the reviews (usually within a couple of months), and letting you know whether they will offer you a contract. (For-profit firms may not be willing to show you any reviews they obtain unless you sign a contract with them.)
the contract	If you're offered a contract, it will most likely be a variant of a standard one. All the parameters are, of course, negotiable, and you can try to add whatever you want. If more than one publisher is interested in your book, you obviously have a lot more bargaining power. Some publishers, while not willing to include some points in a formal contract, may be willing to include them in a separate letter to you. Put everything you care about in the contract Make sure you put everything you care about in the contract. Once you sign the contract, you have no power whatsoever. (Well, almost none.) If you wish to do anything out of the ordinary in terms of design, for example, be sure to get the publisher to agree before you sign the contract. Even if you can't imagine that anyone would regard your ideas as unreasonable, get an agreement from the publisher in writing. (Even if you do have an agreement, you may still have to argue later on—the publisher knows that it's not worth your while suing them over a relatively minor issue—but you'll be on much firmer ground if you have an agreement.) If, as I do, you like to omit commas after "i.e." or to follow logic and put punctuation marks after rather than before a closing quotation mark, unless the punctuation mark is part of the quote, then get an agreement in writing. Marketing The effort and expense to which your publisher will go to market your book is important, but harder to contract on. You might be able to get them to agree, however, to produce a brochure of a quality similar to one they produced for another book, and to send it to a specific mailing list. Price Another important parameter is the price of the book. The publisher wants to make as much money as possible, whereas you may benefit to some extent independently from sales. (The latter benefit may be small in the case of a textbook, however.) Thus your interests may not be exactly aligned with the publisher's: the best price for them is higher than the best price for you. You may be able to get them agree to a price, especially if they are in the nonprofit sector. Hardback versus softback A related issue concerns the format of your book: paperback or hardback ("cloth")? A point to bear in mind is that the production costs of the two formats are only marginally different; the usual price difference is almost entirely simply price discrimination. Prohibition of writing book on similar topic Read the contract carefully. Beware particularly of a clause that prohibits you from publishing another book on the same topic, or restricts your ability to do so. Some publishers' standard contracts contain a very restrictive clause of this type, which you can try to get them to delete. Clauses contingent on delivery date Your contract may have a clause that says that all provisions are contingent on your delivering the final version by a certain date. If so, appreciate its implications! Royalties How much royalty can you expect? My limited experience is insufficient to make any broad claims, but rates between 10 and 20% of "net receipts" seem roughly the norm. (I have, however, seen a boilerplate contract with a rate of 5%.) The publisher's "net receipts" consist of the money it gets from selling your book. Copies are generally sold to bookstores for around 60–70% of the recommended retail price, but copies sold to other divisions of the publishing company may be sold for much less. (Oxford University Press USA, for example, sells copies of one of my books to Oxford University Press UK, for sale in Europe, for around 25% of the US recommended retail price.) Many contacts seem to involve royalty rates that increase with sales—e.g. 15% on the first 5,000 copies, 18% thereafter. Note that these step-up rates may apply separately to different editions of your book (hardback and softback, if it is issued in both formats) and to different markets (e.g. U.S., Canada, non-U.S. and Canada).
should you think of producing the final pages yourself?	First, for-profit publishers are going to be very reluctant—probably unwilling, in fact, if your book is a textbook—to let you produce the final pages, so in this case you won't have to consider the question. Second, if your publisher is willing to let you produce the final pages, why would you want to? You're an expert on the subject about which you're writing (presumably); publishers hire people who are experts at page makeup. Why waste your time learning about page makeup? An answer to this question is provided by a book like James D. Morrow's Game theory for political scientists (Princeton University Press, 1994). Someone out there in the publishing world thinks it looks good to typeset mathematics in a Roman font, to underline headings of examples, and to use a rather skinny sans-serif font for titles when the text font is Times Roman. They may be assigned to design your book. (Let me be clear that I'm expressing an opinion about the design and typography of this book, not its content.) Another reason for thinking about producing the final output yourself is that you can use TeX, which will allow you not only to produce output at least as good as that of any professional system, but also to use sophisticated programming, to implement intelligent cross-referencing and numbering schemes, and to produce figures that perfectly match the text. (Once you start producing your figures within TeX, labeling them in the same font as you use for your text, the ugliness of books in which the figures are labeled using an entirely different font (the author produced the figures, which the publisher pasted into text), will be striking.) You may be able to take advantage of TeX without having to deal with the nitty-gritty of page makeup, by writing your book in TeX and then giving all your code to the publisher, who uses a typesetting company specializing in TeX to do the final formatting. But if you wrote all the code yourself, you may be reluctant to hand it over to someone who will treat it as just another book. Finally, just as integrating the tasks of doing research and "writing it up" is a good idea ("writing is research"), so too is integrating the tasks of writing and designing a book. The old-fashioned procedure in which an author wrote a manuscript, which she handed to a typesetter to turn into a book, was driven by the near-impossibility of an author's typesetting the book herself. Now that typesetting is much easier (no need to arrange lines of lead type in wooden boxes), the two tasks can be profitably integrated, leading to more beautiful books. So let's say you've decided you'd like to consider producing the final output yourself. First you need to persuade the publisher to let you do so, which may be difficult if you have no experience with page makeup. If you succeed, what do you need to know? No standard word-processing program has the features needed to produce polished output, so you'll need to use TeX. What exactly do you need to know to persuade TeX to produce beautiful output? You need to be comfortable with the "fine points". These points are all discussed thoroughly in Donald Knuth's TeXbook; I discuss elsewhere some of the ones over which users of TeX most commonly trip. You need to learn something about fonts, unless you want to set your book in Knuth's computer modern, TeX's default font. (An easy alternative is Palatino, activated simply by included the package `mathpazo` in your preamble. This package include all the mathematical symbols you'll need, as well as the standard text characters. But you'll probably want to use a different font for headings, chapter openings, and the title page.) You need to get to know all the tricks needed to control page makeup. These tricks are not, to my knowledge, documented in a single place; I have collected the ones that I know in another page.
the editor	You will negotiate your contract with an editor, who will subsequently act somewhat like a contractor for your project, sending parts of it to the design department, copy editing department, and marketing department. You need to find an editor with whom you are comfortable dealing. But be aware that editors move around a lot: the one with whom you negotiate your contract may well move on to another firm by the time you complete your book.
the copy editor	"Copy editors are the secret scourge and saviors of the publishing world, insane sticklers who make your life miserable and your prose sing. Good ones are hard to find and harder to love; punctilious, detail-oriented people, they think commas have consequence, facts can never be fiction, and every sentence is capable of improvement. Never late, they are always correct." Thus wrote Ruth Reichl, the editor of Gourmet, in the January 2003 issue of her magazine. You'll encounter the copy editor after you submit what you think is your final version. Traditionally, the copy editor makes whatever changes she regards as necessary to make your prose sing, checks for consistency, gives you the opportunity to disagree with the changes she suggests, and then makes the final decision about what to change and what not to change. If you produce the final output, the relationship is a little different: the copy editor suggests changes, and you get to decide which ones to implement. Of course, the publisher can refuse to publish your book unless you make certain changes—you can't do just whatever you like—but your position is definitely not the same as it was traditionally. In my (limited) experience, copy editors are obsessed with "consistency", and usually have a few pet peeves. You might find one that doesn't allow you to use "since" except in a temporal context, or one that swears that "this" is not a noun (you can't say "This is interesting", you have to say "This X is interesting"). The "rules" invoked often have no reasonable basis, as a sensible usage manual like Webster's dictionary of English usage demonstrates. There are circumstances under which "since" is ambiguous, for example, but it is almost always not, and is frequently used to mean "because" by legions of "good" writers. You'll be lucky to encounter a copy editor who does much more than suggest you adhere to a set of rules; you may find one who finds a few sentence that can be improved, but in my experience you won't get a lot of guidance in this respect. Probably most of your sentences really are capable of improvement (certainly most of mine are), but your experience is likely to differ from Ruth Reichl's: the copy editors employed by Gourmet and by her previous employer, The New York Times, probably spend a great deal more time on her words than your copy editor will spend on yours. (Presumably the reason is simply that the increase in profit from polishing Ruth Reichl's prose that the management of Gourmet expects is much larger than the increase in profit from polishing your prose that an academic publisher expects.) When interacting with your copy editor, you need to remember three things. First, she has excellent intentions. Second, most of the time she is right, or at least has a point. Third, she is paid by the publisher to improve your book. What will happen if she returns the manuscript without a single mark, claiming she could find no errors? Is she going to get her pay check? Will the publisher use her again? (Most copy editors seem to be free lancers, not salaried employees.) This third point of course suggests a strategy to minimize the minor points you are asked to change: sprinkle errors evenly throughout your manuscript, so that the copy editor doesn't have to get really picky to earn her pay. Needless to say, I'm not going to recommend you follow such a strategy. If you use TeX, you could even design a few clever macros so that you can correct all those deliberate errors with a couple of keystrokes. But let me be clear: I'm saying only that that's "a" strategy.
the cover	Take a look at the covers of the academic books on your shelf. I see a lot of F's and very few A's on mine. Cover-design is clearly difficult; I don't know how long an artist gets to come up with a cover, but I have to guess that she doesn't get enough time to read your book and understand it. And even if she did, some subjects are pretty hard to render pictorially. I don't have any useful advice except the obvious: if you have any idea at all, tell your publisher in as much detail as possible. If you really care about the cover, try to come up with something to which they will agree before you sign your contract.
	Page last modified 2010/5/5 All material copyright © Martin J. Osborne 2003–2010