Alise Tifentale

Project Background

Alise Tifentale is a New York–based art historian and curator whose research focuses on photography. Building on her dissertation, defended at the City University of New York Graduate Center, Alise’s book introduces the global photo-club culture that emerged in the 1950s alongside better-known developments in photojournalism and humanist photography.

She contacted Flatpage when she had a draft of her book proposal ready to send to several university presses. She was looking for help with “packaging” and “selling” the book’s content to the presses, as well as line edits on her draft.

As an author aiming to publish my first academic book in the US, I was looking for a reliable and efficient editorial service with expertise in a specific field—academic publishing in art history. Having known Cara Jordan, the president and chief editor of Flatpage, from our time at the art history PhD program at the City University of New York, I was absolutely sure that Flatpage would have the answers to all my editorial questions.

Alise Tifentale

The Collaboration

The author chose to have her book proposal evaluated—a form of developmental editing—because she needed feedback on how to improve the content before tuning into the finer details of the writing style or grammar.

Once Flatpage received the author’s draft and instructions about her priorities, our book proposal expert, a former acquisitions editor at Cambridge University Press, set to work. In their evaluation of the text, the editor provided written feedback on the book’s overall argument, the proposal’s main sections, and ways she could improve the proposal and writing. Additionally, they made edits and comments on the draft itself to help the author align the feedback in the evaluation with the text she’d already written.

Following the receipt of her evaluation and marked-up draft, the author met with the editor on a virtual call to discuss the suggestions and any remaining questions she had about the proposal or the book proposal process.

As part of the book proposal evaluation, I had a chance to talk to the editor over a virtual call, and our conversation was really pleasant and productive. She is so knowledgeable about the academic publishing world. I think this format is perfect—the conversation is so helpful in addition to the written feedback and comments. Throughout this process, I felt heard, understood, and cherished, and those things don’t happen too often in and around academia.

The Outcome

The author submitted the finalized proposal to five university presses that she thought to be the best fit for her manuscript. Within a month, an acquiring editor from one of the presses reached out to her to express interest in proceeding with the manuscript. As of now, her manuscript is in the revisions stage, after the author received two anonymous reviews solicited by the press.

I find book proposals to be a particularly challenging genre of writing, and I was so grateful to have Flatpage’s editor to review, critique, and polish my book proposal. Her feedback helped me tighten up and clarify the proposal. We even came up with a new version of the book title!