This is the article I wish I had read ten years ago, that might have saved me some of the pain I experienced while I was carving Major Academic Project out of hard stone.

Chronicle: What are Book Editor’s Looking For?

I really appreciate the author’s matter-of-fact attitude — that writing an academic book is not about finding the Holy Grail but about identifying an interesting topic and making a reasonable argument about it. If only my grad school advisors had demystified the process like this, perhaps I wouldn’t have felt that if my work wasn’t “changing the shape of the field,” “intervening in a major political crisis,” “giving voice to underrepresented and downtrodden people,” “challenging dominant paradigms of race/class/gender/sexuality/nation,” or all the other lofty goals I felt I had to meet — well, perhaps, I could have valued my own work for what it was.