For the simple fact that Getting It Published explains and emphasizes the business reality to academic writers working on their first books, William Germano's publishing guide is a must-read. This book is as good as any guidebooks could get; it's direct, succinct, and comprehensive, either as a casual reference or as a serious bible for different kinds of academic writers. With literary humors and tag-lines, the rather witty volume of no more than 200 pages addresses primarily tenure-track assistant professors and secondarily newer authors having had contacts, successful or not, with academic or trade publishing houses.

Getting It Published recognizes academics' needs for publishing books. For authors who are up for tenure/promotion or simply encouraged after a rigorous conference, Germano discusses the potentials in each foreseeable situation, while providing specific guidelines involving dos and don'ts. The processes of selection, review, and production are always, as academics need to know, closely tied to dollars and cents.

As a former humanities editor at Columbia University Press and current publishing director at Routledge, Germano is able to offer real-life narratives capturing the intricate relationship between writers and publishers. Three goals are announced: to explain how publishers select manuscripts and publish them; to help serious writers best present their work in order to enhance acceptance rate; and, to show how the process from submission to publication can be made to work, and work well, for both publisher and author. Most importantly, the book aims at saving authors' time and headaches.

These goals are met by a well-organized table of contents of thirteen easy-to-read chapters, including writing and delivering the manuscript, selecting a publisher, and understanding what a contract means. As suggested in the preface, readers can thumb through the pages for specific issues or read it from cover to cover for the broadest picture. These chapters, succinct as they are, also incorporate visual rhetoric such as sidebars, italicized notes, illustration of two letters, and chapter summaries in order to aid memorization. Issues less known to first-timers are discussed in detail, including such topics about multiple submission, sharing reviews from different houses, and contract rights. As a good manual, the book does offer much more than common sense. Chapters on "What Editors Look for," "What a Contract Means," "Collection and Anthologies," and "How to Deliver a Manuscript" could make most worthy readings even before one had a project in hand.

Getting It Published is almost without glitches. Germano's language is non-sexist, in which equal gender pronouns are used. It also affirms publishing potentials by calling writers "yet"-to-be authors in every chapter. Once, however, a sloppy printout is compared to "a grease monkey's lunch" (33; "grease monkey" sounds odd in his language of non-discrimination). Elsewhere, an italicized piece of advice under "project description" says, "Don't feel obligated to summarize chapters" in one's proposal (69); my colleague, on the other hand, has just been asked by several publishers to not only summarize chapters but also include samples. But these are minor issues. According to my colleague, the book has been very usable as he selects his publisher.

Overall, Germano's guidebook foots the bill for showing academics a business they are not in, and yet upon which their careers very much depend. I recommend it highly.