Author: Laura Portwood-Stacer
Year published: 2025
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Length: 264 pages
Disclaimer: I received a digital review copy of Make Your Manuscript Work from the publisher.
It feels like a handful of people, somewhere, must understand how academic publishing works … the rest of us are just trying to figure it out as we go and hope we get it right. (A tenured professor with multiple publications)
Who This Book Is For
If these words in the opening pages of Make Your Manuscript Work sound like something you would say, then this book is probably you. In the book, Laura Portwood-Stacer introduces a step-by-step method that focuses on developmental editing. By sharing this method, Portwood-Stacer provides guidance and tools for a wide range of academics, including first-generation scholars, individuals who have received little support – whether from mentors or publishers – and anyone who struggles to seek outside help.
Portwood-Stacer has used and fine-tuned the method over many years of working as a developmental editor. It is based on what she considers the “four pillars of scholarly writing” – the author’s argument, the evidence provided to support this argument, the manuscript’s structure, and its style. The pillars, which provide the solid foundation for a manuscript to go through the publishing process successfully, are tackled over four different stages, giving academic writers the opportunity to clarify their mission, assess their text systematically, and, finally, to plan and carry out their edits.
What Is Great About Make Your Manuscript Work
- While you can (and perhaps should) read all of Make Your Manuscript Work, this isn’t a book you have to read front to back. Start with the introduction to get a sense of Portwood-Stacer’s approach. After that, you can focus on what you feel you need the most help with. For example, if you have a strong argument but know that there are structural weaknesses in your manuscript, you could skip to the sections that cover a manuscript’s structure.
- Make Your Manuscript Work can be used by academic writers at any stage of their career and working in any field or discipline.
- Supplementary materials in the appendix include a “Checklist of Opportunities & Assessment Questions” for each foundational pillar, sample editorial materials, and information on how to work with “Supportive Readers in Manuscript Development” (i.e., friendly reviewers, beta readers, and professional editors).
- Although the book is first and foremost aimed at scholars who want to understand the editing process better and learn how to self-edit, the appendix also includes a short chapter aimed at those who support academic writers, like professors who mentor early career faculty, acquiring editors at university presses, or freelance editors.
What You Should Also Know
- The method is based on Portwood-Stacer’s experience as a professional developmental editor who has mainly worked with researchers in the humanities and qualitative social sciences publishing their work with “university presses and other publishers that serve the English-speaking academic market, mainly in the United States.”
- While the method can be used for working on any kind of manuscript, Portwood-Stacer illustrates her approach by applying it to book manuscripts.
- The recommendations in Make Your Manuscript Work will help you improve your manuscript significantly, but you may still need another set of (experienced) eyes to resolve some issues. With the focus being on self-editing at the developmental level, your manuscript may also still need line editing, copy editing, indexing, and proofreading. Again, for some of these a separate, fresh set of eyes may be necessary – even professional editors often don’t carry out both a copyedit and proofread of the same manuscript.
Additional Resources
- Laura Portwood-Stacer’s The Book Proposal Book (Princeton University Press, 2021) is a great resource once you have revised your manuscript and are ready to pitch it to a press.
- You can find more useful resources, ranging from webinars, workshops, and courses related to various aspects of the book publishing process, on the author’s website Manuscript Works.