There is a moment in many academic book projects when the writer realizes: I don’t actually know what game I’m playing. You know your field, your archive, your argument. You’ve written a dissertation. You may have published articles and given conference papers and mentored students. And then someone says, “You should send a proposal to a press”—and suddenly a whole new set of questions opens up that no one ever taught you how to answer.
In this episode, I dig into the hidden curriculum of academic book writing: some of the professional knowledge scholars are expected to have, even though it is rarely taught directly. I focus on the front end of the process, starting with why a book is not simply a bigger dissertation, moving through how to think about press selection as a question of fit rather than just prestige, and arriving at what a book proposal actually needs to do.
This episode also makes an argument I care about: that not knowing any of this already does not mean you have done anything wrong.
The hidden curriculum is not hidden equally from everyone, and turning uneven access to professional knowledge into a private story about your own inadequacy is one of the most predictable and most damaging effects of a system that relies on knowledge it does not consistently teach.
Next week in Part 2, I turn to what happens once the book enters the publishing system: peer review, revision, and timelines that shape how academic books are received and evaluated. The hidden curriculum does not end when an editor expresses interest. In some ways, that is when the next layer begins.
