Book-writing advice?

So I've written drafts of the introduction and first four-and-a-half chapters of the book I started about a month ago.  The manuscript is already about 50,000 words, and given that I intend for it to be 6 chapters, I shouldn't have any problem -- after revisions -- getting it to the 75K+ word minumum that academic publishers apparently prefer books to hit.

Now, the chapters I have so far are pretty rough -- they're first drafts after all -- but I've already begun to edit them in earnest, and for the most part I feel like the chapters I have "say what I want to say" and say it pretty well.  Chapter 1 is by far the roughest, as I'm trying to situate my view amongst a vast variety of other theories in the literature. It's been tough knowing precisely how much "scene-setting" to engage in, particularly when I lack expertise on a lot of the other views out there (which doesn't really matter for the sake of the book, since its purpose isn't to refute every other view but offer what I take to be a new, better alternative).  Does anyone who has written a book have any advice on this?  I have a feeling (just a feeling) that this part of a book is in general the most difficult to write, and gets taken care of better once one gets others to read the manuscript (as people who read the manuscript can help correct one's literature review). Is this right?

Anyway, the big question I have -- and would really appreciate anyone's thoughts on -- is this: what now?  Here's the situation I find mysef in.  I think to myself, "Look, I have no idea whether this thing is going to fly. Either the first four chapters show that I have are a good book project, or they don't. I think they do, but then again, I could be wrong. So what am I do?"  It doesn't strike me as a good use of my time to spend the rest of the summer writing and revising all six chapters when, for all I know, the book could be a dud, dead on arrival.  So, what then?  Should I revise the first four chapters a bit more and ask some trusted sources to read them?  If so, who should I ask: friends? Mentors? (I worry a bit about the latter because if the book is a dud, I don't want my mentors to see what a turd it is!) 

Anyway, because this is my very first time venturing into these waters, I feel quite uncertain about how to proceed.  Anyone have any helpful thoughts?  Thanks in advance to anyone who does! 

Comments

[Lisa]

I guess it's the same as with papers, just bigger: trying to get feedback early on is crucial, but there is also some risk involved which you simply cannot get rid of. I'd suggest giving the first chapters to "trusted sources", as you say. Another strategy is to have an extended, analytical table of contents that you can discuss with friends or colleagues. I once did this on a mutual basis, with a colleague who works on *completely* different things (we basically had *no* idea what the other one was doing). It did not help for discussing details, but it helped a lot for thinking about the overall structure of the project and the reasons for why we want to engage with these topics at all, how we hope to change the terms of the debate, etc.
What I do with my book project at the moment is to present individual chapters as papers at conferences or seminars, and then take the opportunity of saying a few words about the project as a whole - and usually I get a few questions, and sometimes quite useful comments (and a general sense that the whole thing is worthwhile and addresses a gap in the literature). Initially I also wanted to try to publish individual chapters as papers, but I'm not so sure any more that this will work, because it is hard to make clear what this is all about if you don't give readers the context of the whole book, and usually you can't do this in the context of a paper, for mere lack of space.
As to the first part and the literature review problem: I think you need to state very clearly what your purpose is and then find categories for how other people see things. Then you can say things like: "Views x,y, z are basically variations of view v, and for this or that reason, I think v fails." Or you can discuss one view that you take to be exemplary for a certain position. Not sure how much this helps, but it worked quite well for my first book (which was my PhD thesis, so I had lots of feedback, which made things easier…).

[Martin Shuster]

I think your best bet is to revise until you have 2-3 chapters extremely polished and ready to share. Then, write up a book proposal and send it out to presses informing them that you have 2-3 chapters to share and have a draft of almost the entire book finished.

Then see where the chips land.

Best of luck!