24/09/2025
Today, Acquisitions Editor Iulia Ivana had the opportunity to give a presentation at Meiji University on publishing academic monographs and edited volumes with us at De Gruyter Brill.
It was a pleasure to meet in person authors previously known only through email exchanges across the Netherlands and Japan, to hear about the progress of their research, and to discuss the practicalities of publishing—what the process involves, the expected timelines, and the various stages a book moves through from submission to acceptance and beyond.
The session covered many of the questions we, as publishers, hear most often: What makes for a strong book proposal, and how detailed should it be? Does a manuscript need to be complete at the proposal stage? What does peer review involve, and how should authors approach revision requests? And what follows in terms of production, publication, and the often-overlooked work of marketing?
Sincere thanks to our colleague Kentaro Okawa for co-presenting and for facilitating translation whenever necessary, to Prof. Emiko Ochiai for sharing insights as a series editor, and to Prof. Liping Shi for arranging the logistics that made the session possible. A big thank you as well to all the authors who attended, both in person and online.
Sessions like this highlight how crucial face-to-face conversations between an author and publisher are, alongside regular email exchanges, and how important they are for making the publishing process more transparent.
