This year’s research projects by my colleagues that I’m evaluating on my committee are so good that I just want to drop everything and camp out next to their offices in the hopes they’d give me progress updates.
I wonder if it’s appropriate to ask these scholars to sell me the first copy of their books in advance of publication. I’m not allowed to share what these projects are about but they are excruciatingly interesting. I feel very honored to work with people who do this kind of fascinating research.
Clarissa's Blog 
“I wonder if it’s appropriate to ask these scholars to sell me the first copy of their books …”
There’s another way through that door.
Offer to review the books and to provide useful quotable review comments for publication (aka “professional jacket matter”). You’ll probably want to check with your university about any scholarly endorsements policies, but I would think that if these are your colleagues at the university, endorsements would generally be given freely.
Typically with this sort of thing, you’ll get advance review copies of the books, either as electronic files to review or as actual limited pre-press runs of the books, so this is one way to get “cut in on the deal”, so to speak.
Then of course when they’ve finally been published, you’ll be in the queue for one of the copies of the first printing.
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This is very crafty. 🙂
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