Lessons learned from publishing three cultural anthropology monographs

I used to work as a cultural anthropologist, first in the UK, and then in Serbia, Croatia, and Germany in that order.

Before I became a developmental editor, I wrote and published three anthropology monographs (below), and I learned important lessons each time!

The books are:

• Fan Activism, Protest and Politics: Ultras in Post-Socialist Croatia (Routledge)

• Cosmologies in Transition: Science and the Politics of Academia after Yugoslavia (Aquamarine Press)

• In the Storms of Transformation: Two Shipyards between Socialism and the EU (University of Toronto Press)

In this blog post, I’ll narrate what I learned through writing and finding a publisher for each one!

Book 1: Cosmologies in Transition

The first cultural anthropology monograph was based on my PhD dissertation research, working with astrophysicists in Serbia and Croatia. Like many PhD students, I struggled with my mental health on the PhD and fieldwork was tricky because I was learning a difficult, new-to-me language and grappling with intense homophobia in the field context.

My response to that was to take my time and to get involved in lots of antifascist and queer activist initiatives. I lost interest in my research topic, which was quite heavily linked to traditions in the sociology of science that I’d picked up during my undergraduate studies at the University of Cambridge. It felt too academic and distanced from real life events in the field context to me.

The result: by the end of the PhD I had a wonderful activist network in the Balkans but felt less than enthusiastic about the research project. I had major corrections to complete and spent an extra year writing them while living in Serbia and Croatia.

Anglo-American academia had undergone a major shift at that point (from around 2008 onward), with a great increase in precarious employment for postdocs and new demands for many to publish a book to get a permanent job (that is, not on a fixed-term contract). I experienced great external pressure to turn a dissertation I felt “meh” about into a book.

It wasn’t all bad – I found a great theoretical framework (Liisa Malkki’s national cosmology) that gave me added enthusiasm.

I wrote my first book proposal and sent it off to a US university press that publishes in this field. About two months later, I received an email that they were interested in publishing it and that they would sent some chapters out for review.

I was very passive at this stage, partly because of a lack of guidance and a lack of effort on my part, and partly because I was less than enthused about the project. I believe some formal guidance was available at the University of Manchester, but I didn’t seek it out and lived mostly in Croatia anyway when writing up. And I didn’t get on well with my PhD supervisor, so felt awkward about asking for help after finishing the PhD.

Now that I’m a book editor, I know feeling sick of, or even hating, a PhD project is a very common experience!

Over a year later, with no reply from the university press, I followed up. They had forgotten to send the chapters out for review. After this nudge, I received two reviews of early chapters two months later, telling me the chapters needed heavy revisions. This didn’t surprise me as I was clueless about the whole process at that point.

The press told me they were “going in a new direction” and couldn’t progress with the manuscript.

Back to the drawing board. At this point, I just wanted a version of the PhD out there so I could communicate my ideas to other academics.

I’d become part of the Balkan academic system, and I felt that the book didn’t really speak to Anglo-American interests: it was light on theory and quite applied, focused on possible changes to the local academic system.

A close friend and wonderful colleague had set up a small press in Montenegro for speculative fiction, queer studies, and anthropology, so I published a version of it with them. (Pipe dream: resurrecting this awesome publishing project one day with her!)

From a professional Anglo publishing perspective, this project came close to self-publishing – I received some peer review, but no copyediting help. I knew nothing about editorial services at that time and just wanted to get my work and some activist messages out there.

I was aware this publication would count for nothing in the Anglo-American prestige hierarchies, too, but I was focused on getting an academic job in the Croatian/Serbian system back then (which I did!).

Looking back from where I am now, this mini-publishing project planted the seeds for my interest in publishing and I now edit texts in precisely the areas this small press covers – so in some ways, it was an excellent fit for me, even if it broke a lot of the rules of academic publishing. I see it as an act of rebellion against the extractivism ipresent in academic publishing, which links to prestige hierarchies.

Book 2: Fan Protest, Politics and Activism

Book 2 was my passion project. While recovering from the PhD, I found a great psychotherapist who I worked with for around six months. This had a massive positive effect on me, and I made sweeping changes to my life, relationships, and career plans. I decided that if I was going to write, I’d write about something meaningful to me, and that speaks to my values. I was already involved in a queer-friendly, antifascist football initiative in Zagreb (my favorite city to live in) back then, so I wrote a journal article about this group and then got a contract for a book. One of the highlights was attending a workshop on gender in Belgrade with Silvia Federici and writing about some experiences with football hooligans when doing an antifascist graffiti run there.

I loved writing this book. I got a lot of help from my academic network and it was all much more polished than my PhD work. It was also a topic that generated a lot of interest from left-wing football fan networks across Europe, and I appreciated the platform it gave me to talk about these issues.

I knew the series editor and he really advocated for my book and this project, which helped me with contacts at the publishing house, too.

I did make some mistakes though. The biggest was not doing due diligence on the peer review process for the manuscript. I received very positive reviews of the book proposal and assumed that the full manuscript would be peer-reviewed, as that was the process outlined to me by the university press.

But this was a trade press (Routledge) and in my case, no peer review of the entire manuscript was planned. This sped up the process and took away some of the fear of a Reviewer 2 response, but I was disappointed not to have had that extra formal peer input. The lesson here is to ask the acquisitions editor questions about the process and not to accept what they say passively.

Another mistake I made was simply signing the contract. There was a clause about giving Routledge first choice on any future books I publish. This actually scared me when I figured it out because if I ever did want a job in the UK or US, I knew that some universities valued books published by university presses more highly, so my options would be more limited.

Eventually, I joined the Society of Authors (a trade union for writers) and they advised me on what to do. I had the clause struck out.

Despite these mistakes, and the fact that I would have loved to have received a developmental edit on this manuscript, this is the book I’m most proud of and it speaks to the core of my political and spiritual being!

Book 3: In the Storms of Transformation

This was an unusual beast: a multi-authored monograph – not an edited collection. This was an outcome for a project I worked on when I left Croatia in 2018 to give the German academic system a go. I quickly realized that the system wasn’t for me and that I wanted to leave academia completely. But I really enjoyed the opportunity to live and work in Regensburg, which this position gave me!

This book is about another topic dear to my heart – labor relations in a shipyard. It has lots in common with the previous book – namely, masculinities and working class cultures and subcultures. The research period in Pula, Croatia, was a tricky time for the shipyard as many workers were laid off.

I found this book challenging for other reasons, though. The main reason was that there were six authors with very different disciplinary backgrounds, positions, and traditions. There was a very hierarchical division of labor, with a superstar academic from Austria writing the intro and steering, along with the other senior academic, the style and structure of the text.

What this meant for me was that, although I enjoyed writing my chapters and doing bits of extra research alongside the project on football fans in Pula, I felt like my voice and approach was being squashed, and I felt estranged from the end product. In Croatia and the UK, I’d had a lot more research freedom to develop my own projects, although some of that freedom came from white and patriarchal privilege that other colleagues on the PhD with me hadn’t had.

This kind of freedom should be available to all in academia.

On the German research project, I felt pushed into a role of helping senior academics with their research vision rather than having the freedom to develop my own approach and work. This kind of academic freedom was important to me, so by the end of the project, I was tired of working under those constraints and asserted my boundaries – but without burning bridges.

This book was first published in German and now it’s been translated into English, Croatian, and Polish – so in some ways this was a big success on paper, but Book 2 is the one that speaks to me the most.

As for the publisher process – the senior academics had strong connections at the various German and American presses, so the publishing process was very smooth. Gone were the fears of Reviewer 2-style critiques, etc.

So what are the key takeaways for publishing a cultural anthropology monograph here?

Here’s the most important one:

Write a book about something that speaks to the core of your being: You’re going to have to talk for years about your book and the topics it covers, so it makes sense to write something you can really get behind. This might seem obvious, but it is so easy to lose touch with yourself in an academic system heavily based on prestige and external validation. And if you can’t do that on your current project – make it a goal for your next one!

And here are some others:

1. Do due diligence: Ask the acquisitions editor about the editorial help you’ll receive. Will the manuscript receive careful copyediting? A light copyedit? Will the full manuscript be peer-reviewed?

2. Don’t be afraid to ask questions: I was initially quite passive as I feared “bothering” a busy acquisitions editor. And OK, it’s normal to expect a delayed response. But do follow up and fight for your manuscript!

3. Take a look at the wider picture: I went into the shipyard project expecting a similar level of academic autonomy to what I had in Croatia and the UK. This wasn’t the case. Don’t shy from asserting yourself as much as you can if you’re in a situation that compromises you or what you stand for.

Can you relate to anything I’ve said here? If so, let me know in the comments or drop me an email!