I’m proud of the book I published from my doctoral dissertation, really I am. I think it’s well researched and well written. I think it does justice to the topic — the politics of subcultural lifestyle choices within the modern-day US anarchist movement — and to the people among whom I did my fieldwork.
But I have some regrets, not so much about the book’s content, but about things I didn’t do during the publishing process. In order from most regrettable to least, here are 7 mistakes I made along the way:
Mistake #1: Not spending more time on the cover copy
Cover copy is that paragraph-or-two that appears on the back of the paperback consumer edition of the book. I think I always assumed that publishers had a staff of copy writers who would carefully read the books and generate snappy, engaging blurbs for the backs. But that is not always how it works.
Authors write their own cover copy. It may be edited by someone at your press, but you’ll be the one to generate the text to begin with. When I was asked to do this, I dashed off a few paragraphs and sent them to the publisher, making the erroneous assumption that someone would vet this draft, edit it, and let me know if it sucked as cover copy.
Unfortunately, what I gave them is what ended up on the book, and I cringe every time I see it and imagine potential readers picking it up in the bookstore and then… putting it right back down, with a combination eye-roll/yawn.
And guess what else, that cover copy is also what gets posted as the synopsis on online retail sites and the publisher’s own website and the little snippet that comes up when you post a link to it on Facebook. So it haunts me. Everywhere.
What I should have done: at the very least, ask someone to look over my cover copy and tear it apart before letting me submit it to anyone who had the power to put it into print. Ideally this someone would be someone who understood that it’s less important that the cover copy perfectly summarize the academic content and contribution of the book, and more important that it gets people to read the book.
Mistake #2: Not being a little more difficult about the cover design
Sometimes I see the spine of my book on my bookshelf and think, “wait, what book is that?” Ok, not really, because I’d recognize those blurry, illegible letters anywhere. But the average customer perusing a shelf in a bookstore or library? They’re not even stopping to think “wait, what book is that?” because they’ve already blown right past it.
The front cover of my book has the title and my name in a sort of hip, two-tone, graffiti-style typeface, which honestly does look kind of cool. It is pretty readable when the letters are an inch high. It is totally not readable when squished onto the spine of the book.
I don’t know how this design got past the production team, but when it got to me for approval I should have insisted that it be changed. I probably didn’t say anything because I didn’t think I had a say, but I regret not at least making the argument.
Mistake #3: Not hiring someone else to do the index
Just as there’s probably no crack team of cover copy writers on standby at your publishing house, there’s no expert indexer waiting in the wings to pore over your text and create a beautiful catalog of all the nouns in your manuscript.
Indexing is another thing that you, the author, will likely be asked to do or arrange for on your own. I had visions of an index full of thought-provoking cross-references and clever little “see alsos,” and so I decided to create the index myself.
The secret I discovered: once your mind is numb from deciding which terms will get entries in the index and finding all their locations in the page proofs (and no, you can’t just use ctrl+F because you have to think conceptually, not literally), you will have no energy left for jokes. You will want to never look at the thing again.
Now I realize that I should have paid someone else to do the first pass. Then I could have come through and finessed it with my sparkling wit and high-level understanding of the nuanced relationships between concepts. (Of course, approximately 4 people would ever have noticed, so maybe this one should not be so high on my regrets list. Whatever; I would have been able to take pleasure in my charming little index.)
Mistake #4: Not doing more “publicity”
I think a lot of academics (especially those most vulnerable to imposter syndrome) struggle with the whole “self-promotion” thing. I’m not against self-promotion in theory, and I honestly admire the many friend-colleagues I know (shocker: mostly white guys) who promote the heck out of their new books with a seemingly endless stream of public lectures, well-placed op-eds, media appearances, and blog posts.
Why didn’t I do these things to promote my own book? Mostly, I find that stuff exhausting. But there’s a little part of me that was afraid—if I appeared to be too confident in my book and too insistent that it become well known— that I’d become a target of criticism.
This was clearly silly, since I’ve not heard harsh feedback about the book. Even the few people who reviewed the book for journals, and by definition had to say something critical, didn’t come up with anything that was so mean or unfair as to hurt my feelings.
Even if my particular personality is not suited to a full-on book tour and media blitz (it isn’t), I could have at the very least written a blog post for the publisher’s website when they suggested it. I kind of didn’t want to do it, so I told myself that if it was really important they would follow up and make me do it. But, of course, that is not how it works. Adults make themselves write their own blog posts, and I really should have done the thing.
Mistake #5: Not knowing how to respond appropriately to reader reports
Here’s the process of landing a book contract (at least this was the process for me): send informal letter of inquiry to series editor(s); send formal proposal and sample chapters to acquiring editor; wait for anonymous reader reports on proposal and sample chapters; write competent response to reader reports that communicates your capacity to address any concerns; acquiring editor uses your response to make a compelling case to her editorial board that they should offer you a contract.
Can you guess where I messed up? Yeah, when I got the reader reports back, they made sense to me and I knew I could easily incorporate their feedback into my revision of the manuscript. Except my response basically just said that, rather than demonstrating, in precise detail, how I would improve the manuscript. I realize now that “Hey guys, I promise I know what to do and the next draft will be better” is not actually enough for the acquisitions editor to build a convincing pitch around.
Fortunately, my series editors gently suggested that I might want to have another go at the response to the reader reports, and I came back with something that showed, not told, that I could produce a good manuscript.
Unanimous approval from the editorial board = book contract in hand. This mistake is very low on the list because obviously it all turned out fine, but had I been more prepared I could have saved everyone a step (and myself some momentary embarrassment).
Mistake #6: Not shopping my proposal to multiple presses
This one isn’t a full blown mistake per se, because I’m happy with where the book ended up for a lot of reasons that are more personal and political than professional (see below for one of them).
I submitted my book to the series I did partly because the series was a perfect fit for my subject matter and I (correctly) anticipated that I wouldn’t have to do much revision of the dissertation to get it published there.
At the time, I was on the academic job market and I figured having a book contract in hand as soon as possible was the key thing. With the wisdom of experience, I now see that this may not have been as strategically advisable as it seemed at the time.
Yes, I had a contract in hand, but it was with a hybrid academic/commercial press (Continuum, which became Bloomsbury Academic). My book was on a list outside of my field (my book is on Bloomsbury’s Politics list, but the jobs I was applying to were in Communication and Media Studies). It was also in a very niche series (Contemporary Anarchist Studies) that didn’t exactly screaming “marketability” to hiring committees.
Had I submitted a proposal to one of the highly respected university presses in my field, I might have had to do more work to score the contract, but I would have had the prestige, and more importantly, academic confidence, that would come from the imprimatur of one of those presses.
In the end, maybe I wouldn’t have gotten a contract from one of those presses anyway, and even if I had, it still might not have translated to a tenure-track job. I’ll never know, so I’m going to call this one less “a mistake” and more “something I still wonder about sometimes.”
If I were advising a first-time author today, I’d tell them to at least submit proposals to a few different kinds of presses and see what kind of response they get. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, etc. etc.
Mistake #7: Not publishing Open Access
Psyche! This was actually not one of the mistakes I made. One of my favorite things about my book is that it was published open access and can still be read for free by anyone who can get to the Bloomsbury website.
This was one of the (aforementioned) reasons I went with the press I did: the series editors had already negotiated with the publisher to have the books in the series be accessible and downloadable via the publisher’s website.
Because the topic of my book had to do with radical activism — and the book contains the voices of so many activists who freely gave me their time — it would have been a real shame if the kind of people I wrote about couldn’t freely access the material.
This is probably my favorite thing about the publication of my book, and it almost cancels out any other regrets I have about not shopping the proposal around. That said, more and more presses are offering options like this these days, so it’s worth asking about it wherever you end up taking your manuscript.
Reflecting on the “mistakes” 3 years later
The post above originally appeared on Medium in 2016, and had a little moment of micro-virality at the time. I never expected to have so many eyes on it, nor did I anticipate how it would be received by some readers.
While some people at the time read the post as an indictment of my editor or publisher—more on this in a minute—it was my genuine attempt to take ownership of the missteps I believed that I personally had made. I chalked most of them up to simple ignorance of the way things work in publishing, hence my motivation to talk about them publicly so that others might learn from my errors.
With the benefit of additional years of perspective and the even deeper understanding of scholarly publishing I gained working as a professional developmental editor during that time, I think it’s worth reviewing those mistakes again here.
Mistake #1: Not spending more time on the cover copy
Having worked with many clients who have published books as well as publishing my second book with Princeton University Press, I’ve learned that some presses provide more assistance with cover copy than others.
While some commercial academic presses seem to use whatever the author submits (as in my personal experience with my first book), I now know that some presses will definitely take the copy the author provides and polish it up before they put it on the back of the book.
To give you an example, I had a client recently go back and forth multiple times with staff at her university press over her book’s cover copy. At first blush, that might seem like an annoyance to an author, but what it should actually tell you is that the press cares about getting the cover copy right so that the book will reach more readers. This is the kind of investment authors should want from their presses.
Even keeping in mind that some presses will help with cover copy, the lesson from the original mistake still stands: authors do well not to make assumptions about what will happen to copy they submit in their marketing questionnaire or proposal. Ask questions and find out as much as you can about how the press operates and what staff is able to assist with, preferably before you sign your contract.
Mistake #2: Not being a little more difficult about the cover design
Another thing that’s become clear to me as I’ve gotten to know more people who work in scholarly publishing: cover art and authors’ feelings about it generate a proportionally significant number of headaches for press staff. So apparently my not wanting to be difficult about the typography on the spine of my book made me a bit of an outlier.
I stand by my advice to be a squeaky wheel if there’s something that doesn’t sit right with you about the cover proofs when you get them. You might find out there are perfectly valid reasons for the design decisions that were made, which could make you rethink your objections.
That said, you have to live with the cover forever, and a good press will want you to love it and feel great about promoting the book with that art on it. You might have to yield to the design professionals on some matters, but there should be room for compromise too.
Mistake #3: Not hiring someone else to do the index
I still urge people to hire someone else to do their indexes, but it’s also true that professional indexing costs money and not all academic authors have much of that to spare.
To me, paying a professional who understands the deep principles of book indexing is a worthy career investment, because readers often use an index to decide whether they even need to consult a book for their research. And how many times have you used an index to find a passage in a book you want to cite in your own writing?
My argument, then, is that a good index can lead to more readers and more citations for your work and is thus not a place where you want to pinch pennies.
Since I wrote the original post, I actually took an introductory course on indexing, thinking that I might add it to my portfolio as a service for authors. What I learned from that venture: professional indexing involves a f*** ton of rules that take real skill and effort to master, so much so that I decided to just skip further training and go ahead and not offer indexing to clients.
Seriously, hire an indexer if you can.
Mistake #4: Not doing more “publicity”
Yep, this one’s still a mistake. You will have spent years and years on your book by the time it exists as a bound object out in the world. Please don’t squander all that work by being shy about getting people to read it or at least know about it.
Find the mode of promotion that feels comfortable for you. If you don’t love public talks, get active on social media. If you hate social media, put your efforts into placing an op-ed in a high profile blog or print publication. If you feel weird telling people to buy the book, suggest instead that they ask their library to buy it.
You might think publishing the book is the main thing that matters for your career, but that’s not entirely true. Your peers also have to think your book is good and important for it to help your career, and they won’t think anything at all about your book if you don’t bring it to their attention.
Mistake #5: Not knowing how to respond appropriately to reader reports
This is one of those things that just isn’t uniformly taught in graduate school or anywhere else, it seems. Except for this post and in The Book Proposal Book: A Guide for Scholarly Authors!
If you’re not sure what to say in your response to the reader reports, ask your editor for help, because it truly is their job to guide you through this. And by asking for their advice in order to get this right, you’ll in fact be helping them do another big part of their job, which is to make a successful case for your manuscript when they take it to their editorial board for approval.
Mistake #6: Not shopping my proposal to multiple presses
Let me address this one with a story. One of my first developmental editing clients was a self-deprecating sort of guy who was expecting to publish his book with a niche series at a university press I honestly hadn’t heard of before.
He told me what his dream press was, but he wasn’t at all confident that he would have a chance of publishing his book there. I read his manuscript and thought it was quite well-written and marketable, so I urged him to at least try the dream press.
Guess who ended up publishing his book? I’m so glad he didn’t talk himself out of aiming high. The other press could have been a great fit too, but I bet he would have always questioned the “what if?” of trying to publish with his dream press.
I can’t think of a good reason not to submit your proposal to multiple presses, including at least one that you think might be a reach. Even if you already have an in with your top press, it doesn’t hurt to see what other interest is out there and what other presses might offer that you didn’t realize was on the table.
A good acquisitions editor will want you to feel confident in your ultimate choice and will not make you feel bad for exploring your options.
Mistake #7: Not publishing Open Access
So this was the one that wasn’t actually a “mistake,” because I was very happy to have published my book with a series that offered open access. I still think that was the right decision for that book at that time, but I’ve since learned more about the intricacies of the great Open Access debate in scholarly publishing.
For instance, one acquiring editor informed me that libraries may hesitate to purchase institutional copies of a book if readers can access it freely on the publisher’s website. Those library copies are sometimes what makes the math work out when a press determines whether it can afford to invest in signing a particular manuscript.
What I’m saying here is that the OA question is complicated for university presses, and if it’s the hill you personally want to die on that’s your prerogative. But it’s worth talking to the presses you’re interested in and being open to different possibilities with respect to how you can make some of your book’s content freely available after publication. OA is not always the only or best option for every book and every author.
I said I would come back to the idea that some of “my” mistakes could be perceived as failings on the part of my editor or press. I suppose that’s one way to look at it, but, again, I really don’t see it that way. What is for-sure true is that I signed my book with a commercial hybrid trade/academic press, and things do tend to work differently there than at university presses.
What’s more, the cool, independent hybrid press I originally signed with got absorbed by a much bigger publisher between the time I signed the contract and the time my book went into production.
My original editor—the one who knew my subject area and believed in my project so enthusiastically from the beginning—eventually moved on, and my series landed with a more junior editor at the new publisher. This is just what happens sometimes in publishing, and authors should be prepared to respond by stepping up a little bit to make sure things that are important to them don’t fall through the cracks.
The new editor was fully supportive of me in all the ways I asked for, but, as I tried to make clear in my original post, I could and should have asked for more and taken more upon myself in some cases, in order to achieve the outcome I had expected.
What general takeaways do I hope other authors will glean from my experience? There are three:
Think carefully about what you want for and from your book.
Find the press that will give you as much of what you want as possible.
Understand that you will have to put in a good deal of your own effort to make your book a success, no matter where you publish.