Ups and downs in publishing
This summer has had its ups and downs in my various efforts to publish books and articles. I did get one book sent off to the press, an artifact report from excavations done long ago. But my agent is having trouble finding a commercial publisher for my popular book manuscript. I just received an acceptance on a paper co-authored with my student, Angela Huster, but not too long ago I got my second recent rejection from American Anthropologist ("This is a definitive rejection, without the possibility of revision and resubmission." Wow.). So, what have I learned? Here are a few things. If a disciplinary journal is edited by a scholar whose publications have involved policing the boundaries of his or her discipline, then perhaps that is not the best place to send an in-the-face interdisciplinary paper. Both of my rejections from American Anthropologist this year were interdisciplinary papers, each with an explicit message of "anthropology has something to learn from this ot...