An overview of how trade book proposals differ from academic ones, with a focus on projects that balance scholarly depth with public appeal.

This is the fifth workshop in the Secrets of publishing series by Ed Simon. Simon is the Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University and the founding editor of The Pittsburgh Review of Books. In addition, he is the founder and director of the Steel City Institute for Social Research and a staff writer at LitHub.

Simon is the author of more than 20 books. His essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The Paris Review Daily, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Poetry, McSweeney’s, Aeon, Jacobin, Salon, The New Republic and The New York Times among dozens of others, while his anonymous reviews appear in Publishers Weekly.