Ep. 52: The Trick to Finding the Right Publisher (with Dr. Laura Portwood-Stacer)

Do you ever wish someone could just tell you exactly how to find the right publisher for your book? As academic writers, we sometimes tend to make things a lot more complicated than they need to be. In this first-ever guest episode of the podcast, I had the absolute pleasure of chatting with Dr. Laura Portwood-Stacer, a developmental editor and publishing consultant. Laura and I discussed the practicalities of navigating the book publishing process and finding the best press for a manuscript.

Check out Leslie's website at www.YourWordsUnleashed.com

Transcript

How to Find the Right Publisher Laura Portwood-Stacer

Leslie Wang: Hi there, writers. You know, when I originally started this podcast about two years ago, I thought I would be incorporating lots of interviews with other writing coaches, editors, and published scholarly authors. Then I started my business and left the academy, and all of those plans got shelved while I figured out how to run my business full time.

It was just easier for me to do solo podcasts. while I created a new rhythm and structure for my life. But in 2024, I am committed to growing and expanding in brand new areas. I want to actually talk to people and learn from them. So I went and learned how to record podcast interviews, which is a whole other can of worms.

And I've invited on a stellar group of writing coaches, editors, and published authors. Don't worry if you're used to my old podcast model. I'll still be doing solo podcasts about half the time. But I'm ridiculously excited because today's episode is my very first interview for this podcast. It's with Laura Portwood Stacer, who I've talked about many different times.

She offers some of the best and most practical advice when it comes to putting together a competitive book proposal and choosing a press that will meet your unique needs as a scholarly professional. You can find the full transcript at yourwordsunleashed. com slash 52. I hope you enjoy this episode.

You're listening to Your Words Unleashed podcast with host Dr. Leslie Wong, helping women scholars master their writing habits and publish a book that matters.

All right. So I am so excited to have my very first guest interview on Your Words Unleashed podcast. I want to welcome developmental editor and publishing consultant, Laura Portwood Stacer. Welcome, Laura. 

Laura Portwood-Stacer: Thank you, Leslie. And it is an honor to be your first guest, for sure. Thanks for the opportunity. 

Leslie Wang: So before we get into our conversation, I want to read your short bio so listeners can get a sense of who you are and what you do.

So, Laura Portwood Stacer, PhD, is a publishing consultant and developmental editor who helps academic authors at all career stages navigate the book publishing process. Her company, Manuscript Works, offers regular workshops and online programs to assist writers around the world in drafting book proposals and connecting with scholarly publishers.

She's the author of The Book Proposal Book, A Guide for Scholarly Authors, published by Princeton University Press in 2021. Yay! And Laura's weekly newsletter, providing academic writing and book publishing advice can be found at newsletter. manuscriptworks. com. All right, so thanks so much for being here.

And just so listeners are aware, we met because we were both writing coaches with the Princeton University Press, supporting diverse authors book proposal development grants. And this is an equity initiative where we help nonfiction writers from historically marginalized groups in the early stages of book writing develop a proposal for consideration at the press.

And if you want to learn more, I will link to the grant's website on the episode page. So Laura, I have a lot of questions for you. So how about we just dive in? 

Laura Portwood-Stacer: Sounds good. 

Leslie Wang: Can you say a little bit about your academic background and experience in academia? 

Laura Portwood-Stacer: Sure. And it's, it's nice to be asked about this because I feel like it was so long ago that I sometimes even sort of forget about it.

But I do have a PhD in communication from the University of Southern California, which I received in 2010. Okay. And so I taught and published in media studies and cultural studies. I published a book based on my dissertation in 2013. But around then is sort of when the trajectory changes a bit.

Because I was a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. And I was invited by the editors of the journal Feminist Media Studies. to serve as an associate editor for that journal for the section where short essays and book reviews were published.

So that became sort of, you know, as much work in academia is sort of a side gig that didn't compensate very much for the labor, but I found that I really enjoyed the labor, that went into that. And that sort of involved soliciting themed essays several times a year. Then I and my co editor would help the most promising submissions get to a publishable place.

And we had a very quick turnaround. It was about six to eight weeks for each round of submissions. So we ended up being really hands on with our authors to help them develop their arguments, get their pieces structured in an engaging way. And, you know, at the time, some of the authors we were working with expressed that it was the most attention and support their writing had ever received.

So I realized that I was good at that work and I found it more gratifying than the other parts of my academic job at the time. And you know, with being on the job market, I wasn't really willing to move to any location where I might land a tenure track job if I were able to land one magically. So I figured I had nothing to lose by trying freelance editing and seeing how far I could take that.

You know, it was definitely slow at first, but ultimately I would say that the experiment worked and I really think this is the work I was meant to be doing all along. So I do feel fortunate that I somehow landed here through that academic journey. 

Leslie Wang: Yeah, and so this kind of answers my next question of how did you get into developmental editing? But maybe you can also define what developmental editing actually is, because I think that sometimes there's a lack of clarity on how is that different from other kinds of editing. But yeah, what are your thoughts on that? 

Laura Portwood-Stacer: So yeah, the work I was doing, you know, with that journal, I would consider that to be developmental editing.

You know, I wasn't the copy editor. I wasn't taking the final, final draft. and making sure it sort of fit the journal style guide. You know, my job was to look at the big picture elements of the submissions. Like, the argument the author was making, how the piece was structured, to make sure the ideas were coming through clearly, to connect with our readers.

So that's what I also do as a developmental editor. It's really about focusing on the substantive parts of what the author is trying to communicate. And then the, the more cosmetic parts of it have to happen, but they happen later on in the process. 

Leslie Wang: Mhm. Mhm. And so you wrote the book proposal book, which has been so immensely useful to me and so many other folks. Can you tell me what inspired you to write it? 

Laura Portwood-Stacer: Yeah, so, so I launched this developmental editing business in 2015 and I was working with authors on their books. And, you know, as I was working with more and more authors, especially early career scholars who are writing their first books, Many of them not only needed help revising their manuscripts, but also navigating the book publishing process.

And that, as I'm sure you know, Leslie, and many people listening, that process can be really opaque, even if you're going through it, even if you have been through it before, once or even twice, you don't always, as the author, understand what is going on, on the publisher side, and what publishers are motivated by, and what they're actually looking for, and what could actually make your work more successful when you're trying to connect with a publisher, you know, as somebody who had published my own book, who had You know, in retrospect, seeing all the mistakes I made along the way, I wanted to help the authors I was working with sort of avoid some of those missteps.

I would say about four years into working with authors on books and book proposals, I realized that I was giving a lot of the same advice over and over again to each sort of individual author. So around this point, it was like 2019, I literally opened up a document on my computer. That I called Book Proposal Advice Compiled.

And I was like, I'm just gonna copy everything I'm telling these authors into this file. And then when I, you know, work with a new author, I can draw on this file with things I've already said. And then I realized, okay, I've got, it's a pretty long file here. Maybe I could find a way to share this information with people who aren't necessarily able to work with me one on one as a developmental editor.

Or who aren't, who don't maybe need an editor for their manuscript, but do need help navigating this publishing process. That's when I started my newsletter as a way to share some of this information, and I launched my book proposal, Accelerator. which is a group program to help people write proposals and navigate the book publishing process.

Once I had that newsletter going, more people started to notice that I was doing this work. And at that point I was approached by an editor from a university press who suggested that I write a book to teach what I was sharing. in my newsletter and in my course. And when he said that, you know, of course that was flattering, but I sort of felt like, well, there's so many other books out there about writing.

There's already books about publishing. Is mine really needed? Do we need another one? Couldn't people just go you know, read those books. But he was really helpful, this editor, in saying that I had a strong voice. It was my own voice. It wasn't the same voice these other books were written in. And as many books as are out there about writing and publishing, the appetite for books like that is even bigger than the supply.

So, I took that to heart, and that sort of encouragement was what I needed to write up a proposal for a book about book proposals and then start pitching it to presses. Mm hmm. So I pitched it to a few places and ultimately Princeton University Press's vision for the book and their enthusiasm for the idea really lined up with mine and my feelings about it. So that is where I ended up publishing it. 

Leslie Wang: Awesome. Can you give listeners just like a very broad outline of how you organized the book so they would know what you include in there? 

Laura Portwood-Stacer: Yeah. So I am a very practically minded person. Like, I just want to know what to do. You know, like I don't want to like sit and philosophize about it.

I want to just sort of, what are the steps I need to take to get through this project I'm trying to complete? So that is how the book is structured. It's really step by step. You know, here's like some of the background context you need to know before you enter into submitting a book proposal to a press.

And then here's all the pieces you're going to need to assemble for this submission package. And I put them in a particular order that I think sort of helps ease into the process, like not necessarily starting with like the heaviest lift of like Writing your project summary of your whole book that you're like life's work up until this point, like that's tough.

So that's like in the middle of the book proposal book. We start by thinking about, you know, where might I send this proposal? What readers do I want to be reading my book when it's out? What are the other books I'm in conversation with? And then it sort of proceeds through other pieces of the proposal.

So that by the time you finish reading the book and working through all the steps it lays out. You will have a complete proposal that you could take to a publisher, a scholarly publisher. And then the final chapters of the book sort of deal with the next steps after that, that every author has to go through.

So dealing with peer review, promoting their books, you know, all the things that happen sort of throughout the publication and post publication process. So it's sort of meant to be a companion through that whole thing. 

Leslie Wang: So, so useful. I'm so glad that you wrote this. Thanks. So what do you think are the biggest mistakes that first time authors make when they're writing a proposal?

Laura Portwood-Stacer: Yes. Great question. I would say sort of the biggest general mistake that people make is, and it's, I can't blame people for this because the book proposal is a very specific genre and it's not like other genres of academic writing. And so I think the biggest mistake people make is they sort of confuse the way a book proposal is evaluated by a publisher for the way other academic writing is evaluated in the rest of their professional life.

So a book proposal, as opposed to other kinds of writing, is, is not about proving how much you know, how much you've read, how sophisticated your thoughts are, how rigorous your research was, how deserving you are of having your ideas, you know, distributed. Just none of that is the purpose of a book proposal.

So a book proposal is in essence about demonstrating to a press that you have an idea that other people will want to engage with. And not just any other people, but a specific well defined group of people that that publisher that you're sending your proposal to is also interested in and capable of reaching.

So how that, when people don't understand that, that can lead to certain mistakes in the writing of the proposal. I see sometimes people really dwelling on trying to prove the quality of their scholarship, the rigor of the scholarship, the originality of the scholarship. But that is not necessarily what a publisher needs to be convinced of when they see your book proposal.

They are going to take, most scholarly publishers are going to take You know, quality scholarship as a baseline assumption. What they are truly looking for is a writer who really knows who their readers are and can explain convincingly why their book will matter to those readers. So everything in the proposal has to back that up because that's what you want the publisher to be taking away from this piece of writing.

And then I said, there's like another mistake that I think people make that is maybe less about writing the proposal itself, but more about like what you do with the proposal. And that is that a lot of times people don't really know which presses. are the best equipped to help them reach the readers that they want to reach.

So you can have the best proposal in the world. You could have an outstanding book manuscript. But if you aren't pitching it to the right presses, you just aren't going to get anywhere with it. And that's going to be really demoralizing, and you're going to start to second guess yourself. But really, it's not anything about you, it's about the fit between your book and the presses that you are trying to show it to.

And a rejection based on fit is the easiest rejection for an acquiring editor to make. I want people to not even have to receive those reductions. We can bypass them if we just sort of do a little homework on the front end to get that fit right.

Leslie Wang: Yeah. Yeah. And that actually segues right into my next question, which is your best advice for first time authors, but maybe all authors when it comes to contacting presses and assessing fit, how do they know what the guidelines are?

Laura Portwood-Stacer: I guess the first thing you want to do is Do your homework, and the way to do that is to understand, you know, have your list of presses that you're thinking of, and you might assemble that list without much data to underlie it. Maybe it's who your mentor is published with. Maybe it's who your friends are publishing with.

You know, which presses seem to have good social media. Like, you just might have an idea of who you might like to publish with. But then you want to do your homework on those presses. Look at what books they have been publishing in the past three to five years. And then be ready to explain why your book will be interesting to the readers who have been won over by those previous books.

And so when you're reaching out to a publisher, if you're sending an email to an editor to just sort of introduce yourself, You want to spell out that resonance between what you're trying to do and what their publisher has already done. Say it directly. It might seem sort of awkward or gauche or something to, like, say it, but that's what they want to hear.

That's what they need to hear. Like, they don't, if they don't know you or your work at all, like, you need to give them some reference points. for something you know that they do know, the books that they've already published, to help them situate you and want to know more about your project. You know, editors receive a very high volume of email.

That's one of the biggest frustrations with author, academic authors, I think, is that while they're not receiving responses to their emails, it takes forever to get any kind of feedback from an editor. So I think the best thing you can do to help your email stand out, to help your book stand out is to show that you know what that editor does.

You know what their press does, and you have a sense already of what will interest them. And your book is sort of fits within that sense. 

Leslie Wang: So do you have any thoughts on, ... like, some folks will have other people send an email introduction to kind of vouch for them first. Have you found that there's any better way to reach out and contact editors?

Laura Portwood-Stacer: Yeah. So, so yeah, I mean, the email introduction doesn't hurt. I would say if you have those connections, go ahead and leverage them. What the email introduction does, it doesn't get your book published. Gets eyes on your email, essentially. So it lets you maybe skip that line of the dozens or hundreds of cold emails that are in the editor's inbox.

If there's somebody that the editor sort of feels more of a social obligation to vouching for you, or saying they should look at your work, so that, I mean, yes, use that connection if you have it. However, you don't need that kind of connection to get a response from an editor. If you do what I just talked about, sort of do the own work of sort of vouching for yourself by showing your work fits with that press, you are aware of what that press does, you have reached out to this editor, not because You are throwing things at the wall and trying to see what sticks, but because you sincerely believe that editor might be the right person to help your book achieve your vision, if you communicate that clearly in your outreach to editors, That's going to help a lot.

I think the other thing I want to say about the idea of, you know, having someone introduce you or connect you with a publisher, that's really good. But I will caution that the right press for somebody else might not be the right press for you as an author. What I'm really saying there is that that idea of fit, it goes both ways.

It's not just, well, am I good enough for this press? But it's also, is this press equipped to do what I need my book to do? to help me do with my book what I needed to do. You know, whether that's advancing academic career goals, trying to reach certain communities of readers, you might have certain personal goals for your book that could be as simple as, I just always wanted a really beautiful cover on my book.

You know, all of that is important and not every press is equipped to do everything that you might want. So the right press for your advisor or your friend or your colleague is not always necessarily the right press for you. The right press for your first book might not be the right press for your second book.

So, you know, even before you ask for those introductions and all of that, you've got to, again, do the homework. Make sure you understand which presses you really want to publish with and that are going to be the most promising fits. I mean, the problem, of course, is that unless you spent a lot of time observing different publishers and understanding how they work and what their reputations are, and you've talked to a lot of people who have published books already, it's not always easy to assess which presses might be the right fit. Mm hmm. That's where I come in and try to help people a little bit. 

Leslie Wang: Yeah. And so a lot of authors find themselves in a really lucky position of having actually more than one press be interested in their manuscript. And so what kind of advice would you offer to those folks? 

Laura Portwood-Stacer: Yeah. So, so that's where doing that homework ahead of time is good, because I always encourage people to rank their presses. Not necessarily according to sort of like external measures of prestige, but more like rank them based on how well you think they will support you and make your book what you want your book to be. And those rankings can evolve as you're having conversations with different presses. So yeah, let's say two or three presses are interested in your book.

Before you get pulled too far down the road with those presses, have a conversation. Get some more information about how they see your book, how they see positioning the book, who they're going to try and get in front of, how they're going to do that, because that can help you sort of figure out, okay, which press is really going to help me do what I need this book to do.

Leslie Wang: Mm hmm. So that really gets to one of the big questions that I think first time authors have, which is around timing. Like, when do you reach out to somebody? Is it when you have a proposal ready? Is it when you have a couple chapters ready? Do they wait till they have the full manuscript ready? Do you have any particular opinions on that?

Laura Portwood-Stacer: Yeah, I'd say that's the most, the number one question I get is when. When can I send the proposal? When should I send the proposal? When should I write the proposal? You know, and There is no one answer to that question. There's not a universal answer. There is not a right way to do it, which is another thing about, you know, you can get advice from mentors.

You can get advice from people who say, well, this is how I did it and it worked. It's not going to work the same way for everybody. So you really have to figure out, you know, do you want an advanced contract, which is a contract you would sign with the press before the full manuscript has been completed, before it has gone through peer review.

There can be pros to having that advanced contract. There can be some drawbacks to it. And a lot of it comes down to what's your personality. You know, do you want to go out there with sort of maybe a partially formed project that you have a press and peer reviewers comment on and help you shape? Or would you rather not have that input, work on the ideas on your own, get as far as you can, and then get a really solid commitment from a press on something that is more fully formed?

At some institutions, an advance contract counts as some kind of progress toward book publication. At other institutions, it doesn't mean anything. So You kind of have to think of your whole context and how you work to decide when you want to reach out. But there, from the publisher's point of view, there's not necessarily a bad time to reach out to tell them about a project or to say, I have a proposal.

You know, their procedures may vary as to what they're able to do with that proposal. Will they be able to just encourage you and say, yes, please come back to us when you have a full manuscript. We really think this is promising. Well, they say, we'd like to put this under contract. Let's move toward that. So you might get different kinds of responses and you won't necessarily know until you do it. 

Leslie Wang: Yeah. And so I know lots of folks who are just terrified to do it, terrified to send their stuff out. I mean, they might have a proposal from three years ago. And they are so scared, so it's not even just around, they may have done their research, they might have a ranking of presses, people willing to introduce them, but they have their own internal fears around people seeing this stuff or letting it go. What are your thoughts on that? 

Laura Portwood-Stacer: Yeah, I mean, that is so real. I mean, so I'm currently working on my third book. Wow. Which, it's, it is now under contract with Princeton. With the press I have already published with, had a very successful second book with. I arguably know better than anyone how to write a good book proposal.

And so I had all that for this book, I was still terrified to send it to the editor there. You know, it was an editor I hadn't worked with before. You know, I had no real, like, reason based reality why I should be scared. But I was. So I totally get those feelings. And I think Now we're kind of getting away from my area of expertise, which is like the nuts and bolts of writing a proposal.

I think a lot of it is like about feelings and like it's okay to feel the feelings and realize the feelings aren't necessarily the truth. And there are steps you have to take to get what you want and you just have to take the steps, even if they're scary. I mean, I guess that's my best advice. 

Leslie Wang: Yeah, it doesn't stop being scary. 

Laura Portwood-Stacer: Yeah, so sorry to everyone out there. Like, you know, maybe other people are just more confident or something. And once you've got one book done, it's easy. But I think most people, well, I don't want to generalize, but it is normal to feel those fears because we invest so much time. We see these books as a reflection on ourselves, whether that is true or correct or not.

But sometimes it can help to realize editors are also human. You know, they're not like all powerful, all knowing figures, so just connecting with them on a human level is what you need to do to get the book published. And the other thing that I hope helps people, and I always try to say this, is that editors and publishers need you.

They cannot operate without the raw materials that then they will package as commodities known as books. So you are an important source of labor and materials as a person who has written a book that they could then publish. So if you've done that work to figure out whether your book will be plausibly valuable to the particular press, you're in good shape.

They're going to be happy to receive something from you. Yes, they might have comments on it. You might have a cranky peer reviewer that you have to deal with, but you do bring something of value to the table. 

Leslie Wang: I mean, absolutely. You're, you're a necessary half of the equation. So I think that is super important for people to always realize.

I think especially junior scholars, right? Folks coming out of their PhDs, postdocs, uh, early tenure track professors often just see everything in terms of hierarchy. And, you know, the editors get put up on this pedestal that they're not actually in academia. And so we don't have to be considering them through the same lens, right?

Like these are human relationships you're setting up when you are talking to editors. It's really just like, Let's have some real conversations and let's see what we can create together. And does the vision match and does this editor have a style that is compatible with my own? Yeah. I think all of those things are super important.

Laura Portwood-Stacer: Yeah. And I want, like, I want to go back to what I said about how publishers sort of evaluate proposals differently than we are used to being evaluated for our work in academia. I've found that over and over again, the things that the authors I work with are worried about, I'm like, the publisher is not going to care about that.

They are not even going to ask you about that. Such as, Oh, I've been working on this for so long. Like my dissertation came out so long ago. Like, aren't they going to ask why it's taken me so long to finish it? Like they become concerned at the point when you're sending them the thing they're going to publish, right?

They, like, they don't care how you got there. They're dealing in the present. And, and. Again, like, to go back to what you said about, like, hierarchy, like, it's not that the same sort of BS prestige economies don't show up in academic publishing, but I think they show up less than people are worried about. I think, to a large extent, while I'm not going to say it's a meritocracy, and, like, the smartest, best ideas are the ones that rise to the top.

There's less concern about your pedigree, for lack of a better word. It's not about evaluating who you are and how good you are. It's about evaluating whether they can sell a book. So yeah, some of those sort of prestige things do come into an author's platform for selling a book, but that's not all of it by any stretch.

So having an idea that's going to be valuable to people, that you can show, like, that people will be interested in it, and here's how I'm going to connect with these readers in this book, that counts for so much. I would like to think it counts for more than all of those things that people feel, might feel insecure about on their CV or something.

Leslie Wang: Yeah, that, that is so helpful, right? And I think that we need to just be constantly telling authors that a lot of their anxieties don't need to be happening around this, right? That like, it's okay to be feeling these things, but again, like you don't really know how the editor is considering and maybe they're really trying to give you benefit of the doubt versus being reviewer number two.

And I think that that's often the case with With editors, they're cheerleaders, you know, they're gatekeepers, but they're also going to be the ones that really go to bat for you. So if they're interested in what you have to say, that is just a fantastic place to be. 

Laura Portwood-Stacer: Yeah. Yeah. I want to maybe reassure people. This is something I don't think I really understood. You know, until later on in my career. Yes, the editor is a gatekeeper, but they're like the first gatekeeper. Once they've let you in that gate, like once they have replied to your email, you're doing good. You know, if they have decided they want to send it out for peer review, They have already decided they want to publish your book.

They have already decided it's a good fit for their press. It is something they could absolutely see themselves publishing. Now they need to, like, sort of go through the official process of having peer reviewers sign off on it. And it can fall apart in peer review. It's not that peer review is not important.

It's not another, like, you know, important gatekeeping moment. But the editor really is your advocate. And, you know, they don't want negative peer reviews either. You know, they want constructive peer reviews, and they want, they should want to help you use the peer reviews constructively. So, so I'll just say, you know, we all are afraid of reviewer 2, but just because you get a reviewer 2 does not mean the end of the road for your book.

You know, be in conversation with your editor, find out what advice they have, they've been through this process many more times than you, they can sometimes put that reviewer 2 in context. So yeah, think of the editor as your partner in this journey. and somebody who you can turn to for support. And if you don't feel you can turn to your editor for support, then they're not the right editor for you. Like, they're just not doing the job that they need to do for you and your book. 

Leslie Wang: Such, such great advice. So, I know in April you're going to be offering a free five day challenge called Find the Perfect Fit Publisher for your scholarly book. So, can you tell people what they'll get if they sign up? 

Laura Portwood-Stacer: Yes, yeah. So, because of this sort of like very common I don't want to say mistake, but sort of hurdle people need to get over, which is figuring out who they should be publishing their book with and how to reduce those rejections, um, that they might get at places that aren't the right fit. I have this very short sort of mini course that's low commitment, and it just sort of walks you through how to find the publishers who are most likely to be receptive to your project and how to evaluate them.

according to your own professional and personal goals to make sure that the fit is right on your end too. Again, I'm a very practically minded person. I like things broken down in steps and very concrete. So I explain sort of how to operationalize that idea of fit with concrete data so that you aren't relying on some nebulous sense of whether different publishers would be a good home for your book.

So I sort of show you how to collect that data and then how to almost write up that data when you're writing your pitch to a publisher. So the challenge is broken into five steps, five days. You can tackle just a few minutes each day so that by the end of the week you'll have a list of your most promising publishers and you'll, you'll have done some of that key prep work to make your case for fit when you are ready to send your book proposal.

So I'm going to release one piece of the challenge today starting on April 22nd and then by the 26th it'll be wrapping up. If people want to sign up for that, it will be open for registration at courses. manuscriptworks. com. So once you sign up, then you'll get reminders from me. And I'll just ask people to check your spam folder, just in case my messages land there, as sometimes happens.

But yeah, once you're signed up, you'll be all set and you'll get all the information and you'll keep access to the information forever. So even if those five days are very hectic for you and you can't keep up with the work of the challenge, then you can do it on your own timeline anytime. 

Leslie Wang: That's so cool. I'm definitely going to sign up. Great. So Laura, I just want to thank you so much for sharing your experience and wisdom with my listeners. I've learned so much and I know that they have too. Once again, can you tell the audience the best way to connect with you? 

Laura Portwood-Stacer: Yeah. So my newsletter is definitely the best way to stay in touch. That's where I share what I'm up to, I give my best tips on the scholarly book publishing process there, um, and I also announce new courses and workshops. So if you are ever looking for support on a book proposal and want to work with me, my newsletter is where you will find out how to do that. So that is at newsletter. manuscriptworks. com. 

Leslie Wang: Amazing. All right, everyone, please sign up for Laura's newsletter and listeners, I hope you really got a lot out of this conversation. I'm so excited to be interviewing guests. I will be doing it through the rest of the year, and I will talk to you again soon. 

Thanks for tuning in to Your Words Unleashed podcast.

If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with other writers or leave a rating and review. To find the full transcript and catch all the latest from me, check out my website, yourwordsunleashed. com. I'll talk to you next time. Happy writing!