a publisher may lead them to take a collectively unfavourable
view of your work. In addition, if you send off copies of your
proposal to ten different publishers you are unlikely to have tar-
geted the proposal sufficiently, and are more likely to receive a
row of outright rejections. And if you send the first version of
your proposal to all available publishers then you cannot revise
it in the light of feedback you get and send it off in a different
form to anyone else. So it is best to send your proposal pack to
no more than the two or three publishers who offer the best
chances of getting your thesis published, keeping other names
in reserve for a second-round effort.
If a company comes back with an offer to publish your
monograph you should virtually always close the deal. But
there are just a few safeguards to keep in mind. You must have
a proper contract not because you will make any significant
money out of a monograph, which is highly unlikely, but in
order to ensure that you are dealing with a reputable firm. The
contract will specify that you supply the publisher with a clean
manuscript, warranted to be free from libellous or defamatory
material, of a certain length and meeting the comments of the
publishers’ readers, by a certain date. In return for you ceding
the publisher the right to market and distribute your text (usu-
ally worldwide) for a certain period, the publisher engages to
deliver a book and to sell it in their normal way. A good con-
tract from your point of view will have royalty terms in it, usu-
ally promising you something like 10 per cent of the publisher’s
‘net receipts’ (that is, profits). Often such sums only kick in,
however, after the book has achieved a certain number of sales
(say 300 or 500 or 1000 copies), which may be the maximum
one might expect anyway for a high-level research monograph
in hardcover. On this kind of book these royalty terms are not
usually worth haggling over. You will very rarely get an advance
on royalties for a monograph, but if you can extract one that is
a small additional incentive for the publisher to promote your
book positively.
The key thing to watch for in a monograph contract is how
long it binds you to the publisher, and what counts as the
publisher keeping your book in print. Holding your book on a
digital server ready to print an individual copy whenever an
order is received can mean that your book is never in practice
PUBLISHING YOUR RESEARCH◆ 261