Submitting a Book Proposal
We are committed to publishing the best books in psychology, and would be delighted to discuss your ideas with you. Please use our proposal form to forward details of your planned book to our editorial department. We will contact you in due course on receipt of these details with editorial feedback.
If we wish to pursue your project, we will ask you to submit a detailed proposal, in which you describe the purpose, scope and features of your book. We will send this outline to appropriate reviewers to inform our publishing decision and to obtain detailed and constructive feedback for you.
With this in mind, your detailed proposal should include the following elements:
1. Description
In a few paragraphs, please describe the work, its approach and your aims in writing the book. Please tell us what you consider to be the outstanding, distinctive or unique features of the work.
If your book is intended for course use, what pedagogical features will your book include? Do you plan to provide supplementary material such as instructor's guide, solution manual, software or similar?
2. Table of Contents
Please provide a detailed table of contents including subheadings. Please use short descriptions as necessary to clarify the outline.
3. Market
For whom is the book primarily intended (academic, students, professionals, etc.)? At what level? Are there secondary audiences?
If your book is intended for course use, for which course is it primarily intended? For which other courses might it be used? What is your expectation of the size of the market?
4. Competing Titles
Please give us the author, title, publisher, edition, publication date, length and price for the main competing textbooks.
Please also describe the strengths and weaknesses of these texts, and tell us how your book will be similar to, as well as different from, these books in terms of style, organization, coverage, pedagogy and level.
5. Sample Chapters
If possible, please send two or three sample chapters which best illustrate the strengths of your book (please do not send the entire manuscript at this stage). Where possible, the sample chapters should represent the different features of the book, including different types of illustrations (these may be in rough form), different pedagogical features, etc.
6. Additional Information
What portion of the manuscript is now complete? When do you expect to have your manuscript completed?
What will be the approximate length of your book (either in number of words, or number of A4 double-spaced manuscript pages)?
How many and what sort of figures and illustrations do you plan to include?
7. Reviewer Suggestions
We use reviewers of our own choice, but are also happy to include people you feel might be particularly helpful in evaluating the proposal. We never reveal the names of our reviewers without their permission.
8. CV
Please include a copy of your CV, listing your degrees, positions held, and publications, together with any other relevant material such as your experience in teaching a particular course.
Submissions
Although hard copies of proposals are acceptable through the post, we prefer to receive proposals electronically as email attachments.