Add Credibility, Establish Your Expertise, and Market Your Skills by Publishing
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At some point in your legal career, perhaps after teaching a course or upon seeing a rival’s published work, you may well think to yourself, “I could do better than that.” Lawyers, after all, are strong communicators, excellent researchers, and capable writers. After developing expertise in an area, you may indeed have something to say that hasn’t already been said. Having a book published of course adds to your own credibility in the field.
Choosing an appropriate topic for a textbook,legal treatise, or practice guide is related to your own body of knowledge as well as to the prospective audience for your textbook, the body of work already in the marketplace, the speed with which changes in this area occur, and, probably most importantly, the likely market for your work.
You will need to think about whether you are writing for undergraduate students, graduate students, law students, inexperienced lawyers, or highly knowledgeable practitioners. As a lawyer, your work may have less than a purely legal focus if your intended audience is not a law, legal studies, or paralegal studies student but someone on a different track, such as an environmental policy student or an MBA student seeking to learn about corporate compliance.
In considering prospective publishers, you should assess whether the entity issues works like the one you envision and whether that specific publisher already has.
Even if a topic may have been heavily covered elsewhere, a publisher may have a gap on its own list that needs filling — so don’t necessarily despair if you’re seeking to write about a popular subject. You will need to do a bit of market research and will probably need to read competing works to assess their weaknesses or to identify a gap in the canon of scholarship.
To the extent that you can, you should also try to determine whether others are already working on new works in this area or if updated editions of already published works are being prepared. If you have been teaching a course on a subject you are interested in pursuing, you may already be familiar with the market’s needs.
Take time to research prospective publishers and to assess whether your work will receive sufficient attention in terms of shepherding your project to publication. Remember that what might not be the right choice for one publisher could well be an ideal one for another. If legal publishers are not interested, you might consider approaching a university press.
You will also need to identify the prospective market for your work and discuss it in a book proposal you submit to a publisher. Is there a compelling reason for a work on your topic to be published in the not-too-distant future? Is this a subject frequently taught on campuses? Has this area recently been subject to a major statutory change?
Your proposal should include:
- an overview of the project and the reason for its impetus
- a short bio of you along with a description of your qualifications for undertaking this project
- a competitive analysis
- a description of the project including a prospective title, the features the work will include, its likely length, and a proposed schedule for submitting the work
- a detailed table of contents that really serves as an outline of the book
- at least one sample chapter and probably a few if you haven’t been published frequently
- a description of any accompanying materials, such as a test bank, instructor’s guide, or slides
If a publisher is interested in your proposal, you will need to negotiate a contract that includes payment terms and a schedule. You will likely need to submit more chapters for peer review during the writing process and then revise your manuscript accordingly. Your work will then need to be edited, revised, and then submitted for copyediting and production.
When you reach the stage where you are reviewing page proofs, you will probably be both excited by the prospect of having a book published and exhausted by the amount of work you have put into it. Even as you are working on the first draft of your book, you should be building or expanding your social media platform so that you are poised to market it well upon its publication. You’ll want the broadest possible audience to have access to your work. You will also want to think about working on the next edition of your book or about developing your next book project.
By: Lori Tripoli
