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Academics wanting to make their mark in the book market need good advice.
Robin Derricourt provides just this in An Author’s Guide to Scholarly Publishing
(Princeton University Press, £9.95/$14.95, ISBN 0 691 03709 4). It
takes the form of “letters of response” to imaginary authors’ unsolicited and
commissioned manuscripts (more likely to be discs or MIME attachments these
days). Derricourt is full of humour as he pinpoints where each submission fails
or succeeds, and he holds his audience as he runs through the vagaries of the
whole publication process.