Get ready to publish a book

Whether you are looking to write a book, read our ethics guidelines, find out about your rights as an author or learn about editing a book series, we are here to help. 

Prepare to submit your book proposal

  • Be realistic about proposed delivery dates.
  • Set realistic deadlines for any contributors. We suggest an extra 6-8 weeks ahead of your manuscript submission deadline.
  • A typical word count for an academic monograph is around 80,000 words, or 20-50,000 words for Emerald Points titles and exceeding these may impact pricing and marketing your book.

  • Provide a list of possible external peer reviewers in your form. Reviewers should be based at a different institution and, if your book is an adaptation of your thesis, they cannot be one of your PhD supervisors.
  • You are welcome to submit a sample draft chapter with your proposal and we can provide you with some helpful feedback.

Our publishers

Get in touch with our publishing team to discuss how we can help your book-length research achieve real impact.

Please note: we are not currently accepting unsolicited book manuscripts.

Charlotte Maiorana
Books Commissioning Lead
General and Professional Business, General Social Science, Library Studies
[email protected]

Fiona Allison
Editor
Accounting, Economics, Entrepreneurship, Management Science, Operations Research, Sustainability
[email protected]

Daniel Ridge
Editor
Diversity & Inclusion, Policy
[email protected]

Nick Wallwork
Books Commissioning Lead, Business, Management, and Economics
HRM, International Business, Marketing, Organizational Behaviour, Tourism
[email protected]

Katy Mathers
Senior Commissioning Editor, Social Sciences
Sociology and Criminology
[email protected]

Kirsty Woods
Editor
Education and Science & Society
[email protected]

Types of book

We publish in a variety of formats, designed to offer you choice and flexibility. Visit our Bookstore to see if your idea brings fresh knowledge and is a good fit with our publishing programme. 

Visit Emerald Bookstore

Monographs

Detailed written studies that focus on a single, specialist aspect of your field. We publish single-authored monographs and edited collections, both as part of an existing series, or as a single title.

Professional business titles

Applied content across a broad range of subjects including marketing, leadership, and human resource management.

 

Handbooks

Comprehensive and authoritative works on topics across social sciences and business.

 

Textbooks

Academic textbooks targeted at upper undergraduate and postgraduate levels. 

Emerald Points

A short form, quick-to-publish book format, peer reviewed research of between 20 and 50,0000 words, published within 12 weeks of acceptance of the final manuscript.

Information to read before you submit

Read through our publishing ethics guidelines before you submit your proposal. Find out about your rights as an author and what permissions you must clear before you can submit your manuscript. 

Publishing ethics guidelines

Make sure your book or book chapter follows our ethics guidelines. 

Read our ethics guidelines

Your rights

What are your rights as an author? Find out everything you need to know on our author policies page. 

Find out about author rights

Permissions

Before you submit a manuscript, you should make sure you have permission to use any third-party content that you have not created.

More about permissions

Write or edit a chapter, book or series

Whether you want to write a book yourself or contribute a chapter, edit a collection or an entire book series, find out how you can submit your book proposal.

Submit a proposal

Book editors FAQs

We look for topics that address obvious, or emerging, research gaps in your subject community. You may want to target a particular market. Our series present in-depth research in clearly specified fields, written by leading experts and researchers.

We are looking for editors with the ability to:

  • Network: Connect with and commission from a wide range of academics and experts.
  • Persuade: Convince busy people to spend time writing for your volume/ series.
  • Organise: You’ll need to keep your authors to a strict timetable.
  • Be diplomatic: You will have to critique and edit the work of friends and colleagues, even senior figures.

Being an editor can be very rewarding, giving you the opportunity to help shape or develop your field, support and champion new scholars, and work with some of the leading experts in your community. You will also learn how to select, shape and review manuscripts, all of which are important skills in the scholarly world.

You will be supported throughout by a dedicated, subject-specific editorial team, consisting of a commissioning editor and editorial assistant. They will work with you to:

  • Agree individual book topics and scope and assign writing schedules and contracts for each volume
  • Encourage submissions and send calls for papers to prospective contributors
  • Process submitted manuscripts for production

  • Be quite clear why a book is the best format for the collection and not, for instance, a journal special issue. View alternative ways to publish
  • You will need to supply a list of contributors and chapter abstracts in your proposal, even if this is subject to change as the book develops post contract. 
  • How will you source submissions? You may want to directly approach other scholars in the field whose work you think will fit your volume’s theme. You could also consider doing an open call for submissions, ask colleagues at a relevant conference, or use Listservs and social media. Think about attracting a global spread of relevant contributors as this will help maximise international sales. It’s also good to have a mix of early career/ established scholars contributing to the volume. 
  • You might want to consider asking a well-known scholar to contribute a preface.
  • As editor(s), you should write the introduction to the volume and also consider adding a concluding chapter. 

More for book authors and editors

Understand the publishing process

See all the steps in our book publishing process and download our helpful infographic. 

View publishing step by step

Alternative routes to publish

Publish a case study, in a journal or on our open access platform, Emerald Open Research.

Publish with us

Author how-to guides

Read our expert how-to guides on planning, structuring and revising your work.

Read our author guides

Everyone with whom I worked at Emerald from the senior editor to marketing was highly professional. The copy edits were done in a timely manner and the cover design exceeded expectations. I hope to work with Emerald again on future books.

H. Kent Baker, Professor of Finance, American University, Kogod School of Business. Author of Investment Traps Exposed