I found a publisher without one. But that rode on my established bonafides and sales and the like.

This query was ten years ago so it’s expired by now. But no, I didn’t locate any viables. But I didn’t look too hard either.

In general, you have to search anew, because the industry has completely changed since then. What agents and publishers want has wildly changed. And how you get into either contract has also changed. And I am no longer in that loop. So you’ll have to do what every author does: do a critical search online for advice and lists and approaches to secure an agent.

However, be aware, this may never succeed because books like you propose are “losers” to the industry because they cannot sell. And it’s all about making money. What sells now is an extremely narrow field, because the “physical book” market is declining and there is no moneymaking “e-only” book market. So agents are unlikely to be interested in what you are selling unless you can back it with some kind of massive celebrity (you have to bring a large pre-built audience).

Even approaching as an academic (no celebrity but a relevant PhD) is doomed without previous proof that your name sells books or would do. With no name you can go for academic presses, but they have high standards (requiring a lot of exacting and exhausting work from you to make the book acceptable) and they won’t make you any money (their contracts are terrible and their books are overpriced because they are drafting on university publish-or-perish policies to subsidize their authors, and have no intention of marketing them to the public but are instead extorting the college library market and thus contributing to rising college tuitions).

Basically, the market as-was in the early 2000s no longer exists. There is practically no market for nonfiction books anymore, and corporate America has moved on to prestige publication as their only remaining vestige of profits. The pipeline to getting published requires a fame engine (become a massive YouTube or TikTok star, get expert pundit placement on national news shows, run for office, do or suffer something that puts your name in national news, etc.) which is chicken-and-egg (or Catch-22, whichever you prefer) because you need the fame to sell books but need to sell books to get the fame. The latter model no longer exists. So the former model is all that remains. And that basically shuts nearly every author out of the market.

And that’s just that.

It’s sad, but alas.

Things were different in the early 2000s. But those days are gone.

People like me are lucky fringe cases. My career path is no longer replicable. It depended on historical moments (the nature of the internet in the late 1990s and the New Atheism splash of the early 2000s) that no longer exist (to the industry atheism is “boring” now and the internet is saturated, making standing out, or even being noticed at all, next to impossible).

That said, you don’t have to adopt by doomerism. Research agents suitable to your subject (avoiding scams—e.g. no real agent asks for money, just a cut), research how best to win over an agent with a prospect package today (what they want to see, and keep initial materials brief and few, etc.), and do the grind (build and send a zillion packages and see if any bite; though I recommend starting in small batches, as you might get feedback that you can use to improve subsequent packages).

I don’t think that will go well (per above). But in the immortal words of Jack Burton, “You never know until you try.”

It appears that publisher doesn’t take books about Western religion. Is that mistaken?

In English, my books are already available in India through kindle. I’d be interested in print distribution, though, so I’ll look into that. I would need a translator to produce a local language edition, and that could be daunting given the number of languages in India. So I’m not optimistic about that, but it’s also worth a look.

Not to my knowledge. There seems to be funding, but misguided opposition. See Wikipedia and Forbes.

Not can’t read. Won’t buy.

This is a universal fact of publishing: publishers won’t publish lengthy academic monographs with footnotes because no one (they think) will buy them. This is not a bias against Spanish readers. They think this about everyone. No such books get published by mainstream publishers. Period.

This is why academic presses have to field those books, creating a whole other problem, because they lack the budgets to mass market and to foreign market, and they have a screwed up pricing scheme that is targeted at libraries and not regular readers, and they won’t copy a book already published elsewhere (so I can’t reproduce my book through a Spanish university press).

You need to get with the program of how the real world of corporate publishing works, and stop obsessing with ignorant pronouncements.

Thanks,
Jonathan