Prepare to submit your book proposal
- Be realistic about proposed delivery dates.
- Set realistic deadlines for any contributors. We suggest an extra 6-8 weeks ahead of your manuscript submission deadline.
- A typical word count for an academic monograph is around 80,000 words, or 20-50,000 words for Emerald Points titles and exceeding these may impact pricing and marketing your book.
- Provide a list of possible external peer reviewers in your form. Reviewers should be based at a different institution and, if your book is an adaptation of your thesis, they cannot be one of your PhD supervisors.
- You are welcome to submit a sample draft chapter with your proposal and we can provide you with some helpful feedback.
Our publishers
Get in touch with our publishing team to discuss how we can help your book-length research achieve real impact.
Please note: we are not currently accepting unsolicited book manuscripts.
Charlotte Maiorana
Books Commissioning Lead
General and Professional Business, General Social Science, Library Studies
[email protected]
Fiona Allison
Editor
Accounting, Economics, Entrepreneurship, Management Science, Operations Research, Sustainability
[email protected]
Daniel Ridge
Editor
Diversity & Inclusion, Policy
[email protected]
Michael Fenton
Editor, ICE Publishing
[email protected]
Viktoria Hartl-Vida
Editor, ICE Publishing
[email protected]
Nick Wallwork
Books Commissioning Lead, Business, Management, and Economics
HRM, International Business, Marketing, Organizational Behaviour, Tourism
[email protected]
Katy Mathers
Senior Commissioning Editor, Social Sciences
Sociology and Criminology
[email protected]
Kirsty Woods
Editor
Education and Science & Society
[email protected]
Aimee Wright
Books Commissioning Assistant, BME
[email protected]
Lucy Loveday
Books Commissioning Assistant, Social Sciences
[email protected]
Book editors FAQs
We look for topics that address obvious, or emerging, research gaps in your subject community. You may want to target a particular market. Our series present in-depth research in clearly specified fields, written by leading experts and researchers.
We are looking for editors with the ability to:
- Network: Connect with and commission from a wide range of academics and experts.
- Persuade: Convince busy people to spend time writing for your volume/ series.
- Organise: You’ll need to keep your authors to a strict timetable.
- Be diplomatic: You will have to critique and edit the work of friends and colleagues, even senior figures.
Being an editor can be very rewarding, giving you the opportunity to help shape or develop your field, support and champion new scholars, and work with some of the leading experts in your community. You will also learn how to select, shape and review manuscripts, all of which are important skills in the scholarly world.
You will be supported throughout by a dedicated, subject-specific editorial team, consisting of a commissioning editor and editorial assistant. They will work with you to:
- Agree individual book topics and scope and assign writing schedules and contracts for each volume
- Encourage submissions and send calls for papers to prospective contributors
- Process submitted manuscripts for production
- Be quite clear why a book is the best format for the collection and not, for instance, a journal special issue. View alternative ways to publish.
- You will need to supply a list of contributors and chapter abstracts in your proposal, even if this is subject to change as the book develops post contract.
- How will you source submissions? You may want to directly approach other scholars in the field whose work you think will fit your volume’s theme. You could also consider doing an open call for submissions, ask colleagues at a relevant conference, or use Listservs and social media. Think about attracting a global spread of relevant contributors as this will help maximise international sales. It’s also good to have a mix of early career/ established scholars contributing to the volume.
- You might want to consider asking a well-known scholar to contribute a preface.
- As editor(s), you should write the introduction to the volume and also consider adding a concluding chapter.
Everyone with whom I worked at Emerald from the senior editor to marketing was highly professional. The copy edits were done in a timely manner and the cover design exceeded expectations. I hope to work with Emerald again on future books.