Reading Time: 7 minutes
“Hey, publisher, I have an idea for a book. It’s called ‘Law Practice Technology.’” Not my most creative pitch, I will confess. It took more than that but I will admit to a certain amount of uncertainty when I decided to see if I could find a publisher for a new book. I had written an ebook in 2015 and self-published it on this site. It’s been a decade and I returned to academia, in part, so as to have the resources and incentives to flesh it out fully. A box arrived on the doorstep yesterday, Over 520 days after I submitted my original book proposal, the box contained copies of the printed book.
I have hinted at the project over time but I thought that, now that it is done, it might be the only time I’d want to walk through the process. A book tends to be a lot of work and requires a lot of expertise, but I am a bit surprised at how … easy isn’t the word, but perhaps accessible … the process is to initiate a book. This was my third book (fourth, if you include the one that went to a second edition) and so I knew what I was getting myself into, for the most part.
The Wind Up
A professional book is, I think, easier to pitch. There are not a lot of people publishing law practice or legal research books. If you have the expertise (and especially if you have some degree of notoriety), you can probably find a publisher who will give your pitch a listen. There are not many legal publishers, though, so you may need to shop around until you find a good match.
I had started back in academia in August 2024 and so I didn’t let much time elapse before looking into this possibility. I had known colleagues who had been on the tenure track only to find that, between teaching and running library operations, time just ran out. I knew a book would be a lot but I felt it was achievable, so long as there was enough time. I really had no concept of the time involved and I’m glad I started as early as I did.
My quest was heavily constrained. The point of writing a book at all was to satisfy a requirement for my path towards tenure. As much as I might have found a practitioner-only book easier to write—and might have pitched it to Thomson Reuters or the American Bar Association—I needed to stay in the academic market. I figured it would take a couple of pitches before someone bit at the idea. In the end, the first publisher I pitched (Carolina Academic Press) was interested. I wouldn’t have been concerned if they had not. It is a bit like a job search, which I have also done repeatedly: once you’ve made your first proposal, your second proposal is less work, and so on.
CAP’s proposal form is deceptively simple. Both for the initial pitch and as I refined it within their internal decision-making process, it requires time to research the competitors. Law school folks will engage in “pre-emption” to determine who has written on a topic recently and what they’ve said before they start to dig into a journal article. For the book, it was more market research. There really are not that many law practice technology books and so it was relatively easy to identify potential competitors. I used WorldCat with some keywords and, once I found a book that I thought was a near match, I would look at how it was described and re-run my search to see what else was unearthed.
The Pitch
I had all the confidence of a stranger in a strange land. I believed my book was different but I am not the one making the financial decision to publish a book. As we went through multiple iterations of my pitch, shepherded along in my case by Meg Mitchell, an acquisitions editor, this challenge become more and more refined. To be frank, I don’t know how successful I would have been without Meg’s guidance and I tried very hard not to be too fixated on my own vision. To a point. I had a very clear idea of how I wanted the book to end up—focused on law practice process and not on specific areas of technology—and, in the end, I think that helped to distinguish my proposal from existing books. We’ll see.
As with the initial pitch, the refining process was really helpful. The original proposal required a table of contents. For the pitch process, I also ended up drafting a sample chapter. If at any point the editors had decided this wasn’t something they wanted, I would not be starting from scratch. While the internal discussions were ongoing, the table of contents and draft chapter helped me to start to clarify in my own head what would work and what would not.
It was also valuable to be asked pointed questions about what the book would look like. It meant I had to really be confident about scope. Often, when I start a blog post, I don’t really know what the ending will look like. Book publishing can’t vibe like that. Writing a book is something I have done so irregularly, and am unlikely to do much again, that I appreciated some of this fleshing out. It gave me a head start when, in March (about 4 months after the initial proposal form was submitted) I finally got an approval, contract, and deadline.
The Swing
I won’t belabor this. I’ve written about my summer last year. I was not teaching during the summer and this was my primary focus. We hired a new person and I adapted to some new responsibilities as our financial person had left and I was absorbing that work. But the book manuscript was first and foremost.
I received an email recently from a colleague who is starting a summer writing group. I’ve signed up again even though I’m not entirely sure what I’ll be working on. I know that the group was a big reason I was able to stay committed to the deadlines I had. It’s a little thing but if you’re a procrastinator like me or are just having trouble finding the stamina for a long-term project, having a support team like that is really helpful.
Once the manuscript went in for review and editing, it was a pretty quiet period for a few months. I will own to feeling some discomfort at this point. I had sent out the manuscript to a couple of folks for feedback. The feedback was positive but I tend to not trust positive feedback! So I was worried that, in the end, after everything, I had spent a summer writing a load of unmarketable rubbish. Deep down, I was pretty confident that wasn’t true but I expect anyone who puts themselves out there feels a bit exposed and vulnerable.
This was really interesting to me because I write on this blog all the time, and more than one blog post is half-baked. Somehow the final product being a book, and one that people would have to pay for, made me feel more responsible for the whole process. I don’t think I felt this way the last time I had a book published but, there you go. If you have any imposter syndrome, don’t be surprised if it resurfaces as soon as you press send on your manuscript.
Circling the Bases
The copyedited manuscript came back and I was very tempted to see what they had changed. But I also knew I wouldn’t, mentally, want to see a sea of red. I embraced the idea that someone had made what I wrote better, and I was happy to have that collaborative output to review. There were a couple of places they had questions for me or suggested more significant changes, and we worked through those. And some of the changes were things I reverted, but overall, I took the perspective that an edited manuscript will be better than an unedited one. I think that, if people are more tied to their own writing, this may be a harder process to work through.
Then came the proofing process. I kept the same philosophy here: each iteration is more perfected than the last one. I did a full review of the proof the first time. The second go round, I only focused on changes; and the same for the third, as the last few items were ticked off. I had to laugh at the guidance from CAP staff to avoid making lots of edits as this process went forward. I could imagine people rereading the entire manuscript each time and finding new changes each iteration. At some point, I believe there is no true perfection and too many eyes had been on it to not miss a glaring error. Small changes are for second editions.
However, this was also where I needed to make a couple more contributions. First was the index. I had already started to build the concordance file for Microsoft Word while I was creating the manuscript. This was a huge help because I felt that, while I had missed some words at the end, I had not missed too many.
As I wrote on a blog post, I was curious to see if artificial intelligence would help me add words to the concordance file. This was February, only two months ago. The reason I was interested was because, although the concordance file was helpful to me as I was creating the manuscript in Word, this was not what the publisher needed. So I wanted to make sure that I hadn’t missed any key terms or concepts. In the end, the artificial intelligence experimentation was not helpful. I used my original word list, slightly adapted to the publisher’s formatting requirements, and then we iterated that once or twice. But time was moving along.
Sliding Into Home Base
There was one other artifact: a teacher’s manual. This was included in my contract almost as an after thought. I remembered seeing it and then promptly forgot. Once the manuscript was in the hopper, I turned my attention to whatever this was going to be. Unlike the manuscript, I had a lot of latitude on this, including on the delivery date. This turned out to be supremely unhelpful to me and was the one time when I was really running short on resources.
You see, the manuscript went in before the fall semester began. A lot of the editing review was before I was too far into the spring semester. But the book was going to go to the printer during the spring semester, and I needed to have the teaching manual done when the book was done.
I also struggled with what to put into a teacher’s manual. I had never used one before. I looked at some samples online but they were the full book text with annotations. I didn’t think that made any sense, although it reflects the idea that law faculty may teach things they are not expert in. I am still getting to grips with this idea, that the teaching is more important than the content, which feels very alien to me.
It turned out that, as this book was chugging towards its completion, I was able to teach the course on which the book was based. The teacher’s manual started to take shape as I thought about what a colleague, who maybe has no law practice technology or systems experience, would want to know to run each class session. This is the sort of course where you need to have some technology skills but they don’t have to be deep. Like so many other law school classes, you mostly just have to know more than the students do and accumulate knowledge ahead of them through the semester.
I am not confident that the teacher’s manual will be very useful. But, unlike the book, it’s just a PDF. There is no editorial work and it doesn’t appear in print. I am hoping that I’ll get some feedback and can re-work it or expand it if necessary. I’ve tried to make it as resilient as possible, using perma.cc links wherever I can, because it will hopefully provide some backstage information that may be less durable as it lives on the web.
The stack of books landed on the same day I finished the teaching manual. As with the manuscript, I had reached a point where I could continue to tinker forever. But the physical presence of the book—as well as a gentle publisher follow up to see if how the manual was coming along—assured me that I should stop. The manual works out to about 10% again of the total word count of the manuscript.
Dusting Myself Off
I have already started to hear from a couple of people about the book. I am looking forward to getting input or feedback or observations from consumers of the book, people whose only interest in it is whether it is useful to them and their students. I have to admit, I’m still a little anxious about that. At least for me, the book represents how I think. This may not be at all portable or transferable, although I take heart that the publisher has done this vetting or the book would never have existed.
Now I can dust myself off and head back to the bench to think about the next project. People who know me but 520 days is a long time for me to maintain my attention on a project. This one went in fits and bursts and, for the most part, the demands aligned well with when I had the resources, especially time. While I am glad to see the book, I am looking forward to working on some new projects with shorter lifecycles.