I'm taking a little break this week to spend time with my family, with just a couple of bits of manuscript to look at. A significant proportion of my regular readers won't be celebrating Christmas, but for those who are -- whether you're roasting chestnuts on an open fire, or throwing another shrimp on the barbie -- have a peaceful and refreshing break.

I should begin this week's update by being clear about my terms. In recent years the word "blurb" has commonly come to refer to what most of us in the industry call "endorsements", that is to say recommendations by third parties that are reproduced on or in your book in order to help sell it. This is not what we are talking about today -- although we doubtless will talk about them in future.

It probably won't surprise you that this can be one of the thorniest questions for publishers and authors to discuss. Authors often get very set on a particular title that appeals to them, whereas publishers typically have a very prescriptive view of what a title should and should not say. Alternatively, some authors don't have a strong sense of what their book should be called and while this can be less diplomatically challenging, it can also lead to remarkably long exchanges batting ideas backwards and forwards between author and commissioning editor.

We've been talking about proposals and reviewing for some time now, and so I thought this week we'd go into a bit more detail on manuscripts. Specifically, what it is that we at Tithebarn Press do with manuscripts once they arrive. I should stress that whereas in some of my recent updates I've talked in quite broad terms about how academic publishers in general behave, this post applies particularly to us.

Last week I wrote about why you should say yes as often as you can when asked to review book proposals. This week, on the basis that if a job is worth doing it is worth doing well, I thought I'd write about what this actually involves, and how to be a model reviewer. As always, your mileage may vary with different publishers, but most of these points will be fairly universal.

Over the past few weeks we've talked about how the proposal review process sits at the core of academic book publishing. The entire process depends upon academics giving up their time to enter into good faith criticism of book proposals. This week I wanted to talk a little about why reviewing is a good thing to do, what editors are hoping to see from their reviewers, and answer some common questions I've been asked about this over the years.

Last week I wrote about what the review process is for, this week I'm going to talk about the response stage. This is the part of the process where we send you your reviews, and ask you to provide us with a response. This is a vital stage in the process, and also illustrates how distinct the book proposal review process tends to be from the journal article review process.

One of the things we've had to consider quite carefully at Tithebarn Press, is what the function of reviews is in our publishing and how we go about undertaking them. I'm delighted to say that this has been especially on my mind lately as our first formal book proposals are now coming in. It's an exciting time for us, but also one where we are establishing the pathways for our key procedures.

I've written previously about when to propose your book and of course you can always refer to our book proposal form as well as our guidance notes to help you complete it . After last week's tips on writing your manuscript I thought it would be helpful to highlight some major do's and don'ts for putting together your book proposal.

This is in an area where I've picked up quite a few tips over the years. As always with such things your mileage may vary and there is no right way to go about writing a manuscript. Getting advice from a publisher about writing is rather like getting advice from a Catholic priest about sustaining a happy marriage: we've never done it ourselves and yet we spend our professional lives trying to help other people do it.

For some readers, the answer to this might seem obvious, or irrelevant. At a certain point in your career you can have the confidence that whenever you're ready to talk to a book publisher they'll be ready to talk to you. For others, though, I know this can feel like a fraught question. Too early and you might not be taken seriously, or find yourself committed to something major before you're ready.

This is a question that, as a Commissioning Editor, I was asked with some frequency. It's easy when your job is to commission books to take it for granted that writing and publishing books is a good thing to do. As a bibliophile my instinct is to see books as a self-evident good. That said, I do think there is value sometimes in taking a step back to ensure that the path we are on is a sensible one.

When we were first trying to articulate the kind of books we wanted to publish "rigorous" and "readable" was the most succinct form of words we could come up with. As you can see from how often our website and other public facing materials use them, they still are. So what exactly do we mean by them? Perhaps it's worth starting by saying we originally formulated them as "rigorous but readable".

If you've read through our brief summary of why you should publish with us, you'll have seen a reference to our personalised approach to publishing. Sure, that sounds great - who wants an impersonal approach to publishing - but what do we really mean by it? You work one on one with me throughout I am the commissioning editor, content editor, copy editor, typesetter, cover designer, inventory manager, marketing manager and salesperson for your book.

I’ve long been fascinated by the paradox of the sea - and really this applies to any large body of water, be it a great lake, or a navigable river, as well as the open ocean - that it is at once a barrier and a conduit. From a military point of view, sea borders tend to be defensible because of the high cost in blood and treasure of attacking across open water, but also vulnerable when an enemy is prepared to deploy in strength potentially with war machines that would be unthinkably large to manoeuvre on land.

Migration I am myself a migrant. I am less of one than I used to be, if that’s possible to say, but I remain a migrant. I spent most of the first 24 years of my life within about fifteen kilometres of Oxford, and then proceeded to spend the next twelve and a half years about eleven thousand kilometres away in Singapore.

The great joy of the English literature degree course I took was that it gave us a great degree of freedom to read whichever authors we wanted, as long as we could write something halfway intelligent about them. Much of the time we were constrained only by time period, and when it came to thematic papers, not even that. I would take every opportunity to read and to write about the funniest authors I could find.

This will be the first on a series of blogs going into a little more detail to outline our Themes. Each Theme is intended to be a kind of mega-series, allowing for quite broad interpretation of a single core idea across a range of disciplines. To kick us off, let me try and explain what I was thinking when I selected Power to be one of our initial Themes.

Rigorous, Readable Academic Books