I Have Just Signed a Book Deal with Bloomsbury!
(Did writing on Substack help?)
TLDR: I’ve signed a contract to write a book called Solomonic Magic on the Early Modern Stage: Exceptionality and Power which is based on my PhD thesis. It will come out some time next year (2027) as part of the ‘Arden Studies in Early Modern Drama’ imprint at Bloomsbury.
Today’s bonus post is a little unusual because I’m writing about myself (yawn)
BUT
I thought it would be fun to tell you a bit about the book I’m going to be writing this year and explain how that came to be for anyone who is interested.
This is technically my monthly paid subscriber bonus post, but I don’t want to gatekeep useful information, so I’ll write a free section with all the key facts before the paywall and then I’ll talk more about my particular project behind the paywall.
Thank you more than ever to those of you who do pay to subscribe, that extra bit of income helps me justify taking on projects like this. (You don’t get into academic publishing for the money, let me tell you.) Now is a great time to upgrade if you are interested in supporting me this way, because I’ve got a growing library of bonus posts covering all sorts of curious topics from sexy automata to horror in Itchy and Scratchy. You can browse them here. Remember too that paid subscribers get access to my full archive of articles which go behind a paywall after a year.
Here’s a quick contents page for today’s post:
Useful
a) What is a monograph? (Monographs vs trade books)
b) How do you get a monograph published?
c) Did writing for Substack help?
Not so Useful
a) What’s the point of writing a monograph?
b) What is my monograph about?
c) What am I looking forward to?
d) What am I not looking forward to?
e) How will this affect Curiosities?
f) Where/when can I buy the book?
g) What will you do next?
Okay, here we go!
Useful
a) What is a monograph?
A monograph is a standalone book with a single focus written in a scholarly style. It should present research which is original to the author and the author should have some kind of proven expertise. These books are often based on a PhD thesis but, if so, they are expected to improve or expand upon the PhD in some way. The style and register are slightly different too: when you write your PhD, you’re trying to prove you are knowledgeable enough to be considered an expert, when you write your monograph you are writing as a confirmed expert.
A monograph is aimed at an academic audience, which really just means people who don’t mind reading something that gets into the weeds of a subject. These are readers who want to explore something in a significant amount of nerdy detail. You’d expect students, tutors, and dedicated autodidacts to be up for reading this kind of book, but not necessarily the general reader.
Monographs thus differ from ‘trade books’ which are written with the general reader in mind. Trade books will be more accessible, more conversational and will take a more direct line through the material, pruning some of the interesting branches and diversions from the central theme. Your sense of humour and flair for storytelling can step forward a bit more to make the journey entertaining as well as informative.
My fellow early modernist Tabitha Stanmore, for example (who spoke with me on a ‘Beyond Shakespeare’ panel last October), published her monograph first. It was called ‘Love Spells and Lost Treasure: Service Magic in England from the Later Middle Ages to the Early Modern Era.’
Then she wrote a follow-up book, ‘Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic,’ for trade. Most of us read a lot more trade books than monographs. They play a vital role in sharing knowledge.
Writing a monograph is usually a step towards trade books, and I am looking forward to writing these in the future…but since I have a true nerd’s interest in my own PhD subject, I’m hoping that the monograph will be its own delight.
b) How do you get a monograph published?
I’m going to say something really annoying and potentially unhelpful but it’s the truth: I only wrote one book proposal and only submitted it to one publisher. My (amazing) PhD supervisor had advised me that Bloomsbury was the ideal publisher for me, so I recommend getting advice from people who have published similar works before who can help you focus your efforts on the best places to submit your application. I started working on the supporting materials this summer, submitted by autumn, and signed the contract early in December.
This sounds deceptively simple. Remember that the step from PhD to monograph is much narrower than almost any other kind of publishing – after all, you’ve already effectively written the book and have defended it at your viva in front of experts in your field. My PhD was 80,000 words excluding references, and the monograph will by 80,000 words with references so it’s actually a shorter piece of writing.
I think it also helped that my subject (early modern magic) is objectively quite interesting and has more of a market beyond traditional academia than some theses. I was once thinking of doing a PhD on satirical (English) civil war ballads from the 1600s, and I think it would have been a bit harder to sell that to a publisher. They are trying to make money at the end of the day.
Another thing that helped my application was that I write about overlooked elements in some of the most famous works from the period. Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Middleton – all the heavy hitters are here. These are texts that every undergraduate studies and some are studied at GCSE and A Level (the UK exams taken at ages 16 and 18 respectively). Again, this helps reassure the publisher that there will be an audience.
Once you’ve picked the right editor to email, you have to send them a lengthy proposal document which outlines the structure of the book and the expected reach and audience, as well as a sample of the book itself. I sent the first 4000 words of what will be my introduction. In writing this, I looked carefully at the structure of other published Bloomsbury titles by scholars in my field, like Ella Hawkins’ book ‘Shakespeare in Elizabethan Costume.’
Ella has actually been interviewed about the whole process and the video is free to watch on YouTube. In general, Bloomsbury has some fantastic resources to help you out, so it’s worth starting with the information that the particular publisher you’re looking at has made available.
If you’re an academic at this stage of your research and want to ask questions or even see my proposal/sample, please do drop me a direct message!
c) Did writing for Substack help?
There has been much talk lately of publishers looking at your social media profile when they decide whether to make you a final offer. It would be frustrating for those of us who don’t have a big presence or history on social media to think that this alone could determine a yay or nay. The submission form did not ask me anything about social media, but in a box where I was allowed to briefly talk about my background I did mention having (at the time) 2000 subscribers here.
I think the short answer is that no, this didn’t get me the offer. My PhD from Cambridge exploring the history of magic in Shakespearean drama got me the offer, as did the fact that I had researched exactly what they needed from me in the proposal.
Then again…
I don’t think it hurt, and I expect that if/when I make the step from monograph to trade book my social media presence will matter more and more. Writing regularly on a platform like Substack and growing a readership is a great form of proof that you’re the sort of person whose research has a wide appeal and who, crucially, can communicate beyond the ivory tower. There are other things you can do that help with this. When I was chatting with Tabitha Stanmore before our panel in October, she mentioned that agents are often interested in other kinds of public engagement you’ve done, like giving talks. It’s not all about follower count by any means.
Do go and buy Tabitha’s excellent books, and Ella’s too. Fascinating scholarship from helpful and supportive people? Can’t go wrong with that!
