When you propose a standalone book to a university press, you have to specify the audience yourself. This can feel daunting - or like overreach. Here's what I learned about the audience section across four book proposals, and why it's not as hard as it feels.

Academic work can be ambitious, original, and rigorous—and still fail to advance. This essay examines how difficulty of placement, not lack of quality, often delays institutional recognition under constraint.

A reflective, experience-based guide to the five challenges scholars face when transforming a dissertation into a book—and how to navigate them with clarity, structure, and momentum.