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DO YOUR OWN DEVELOPMENT
Posted September 16, 2003
| SUMMARYDevelopment editors are being handed more tasks than ever, which means textbooks authors may not get the level of support they once did. What to do? For starters, ask your publisher for as much information as is available on your competitors and the market. Then analyze the competition. You don't want either to produce a clone or to create something so alien that nobody will adopt it. |
By Mary Ellen Lepionka
Atlantic Path Publishing
Since the mid-1980s the role of the development editor has been changing drastically -- from that of author's alter ego, mentor, critic, muse, market analyst, creative consultant, advocate, and interpreter of the culture of publishing to that of product manager. Some publishers have tried to reduce the cost of development by having DEs handle as many books as possible, and the more titles they handle, the less time and care they can devote to on each one. Correspondingly, publishers are placing a greater burden of responsibility for books on their authors. Costs that were once assumed by publishers as author perks are being passed back to authors, along with tasks that restructured development editors may no longer have time to perform.
Even if you are assigned development help, in other words, you might find yourself pretty much on your own, which is the reason for this book. Lacking substantive collaboration with editors, you need to be able to do your own development. A major advantage of doing your own development is that you retain more control over your product and what goes into it. The disadvantage is that you need to devote more time and resources to planning your book with a view to commercial success.
Following are guidelines for performing development tasks to ensure that success. These tasks guide you in developing your table of contents, prospectus, and sample chapters. If you already have signed with a publisher, the information will guide you in further drafting and revising. And if you already have published and are working on a revision, the following practices will help you to increase your market share. These practices include getting publisher input, charting the competition, professional networking, and working with reviews.
So how do you get the help you need?
Request information from the publisher about your textbook's market. How large is this market? What are the current top sellers? What percentage of the market do they control? Who orders those books? Why are those books successful? What are customers looking for now? Acquisitions editors and marketing managers constantly search out market trends, consumer demand, and competitive edges. Ask them about their market research in your subject area and to send you the results of any pertinent marketing surveys or focus group reports. How does the publisher plan to market your textbook in relation to its other related titles? Also ask about competing texts.
Acquire examination copies of the current leading competing books and compare their contents. Or study the relevant product information on competing companies' web sites. Then perform a competition analysis, including tallies of numbers and types of chapter elements, with a view to ensuring that your textbook will be competitive enough to succeed in the marketplace. A close examination of competing books will help you avoid spending a lot of time writing something that the publisher cannot sell because it's a clone of all the other books out there, or it's an alien from outer space that instructors cannot use.
So, how many chapters do other art history books have on the European Renaissance? Is it significant that all the other introductory psychology texts devote at least 40 pages to cognition? Should you also plan to have embedded calculus problems for students to solve as they read? In what primary context do the other health books discuss AIDS in detail? Do the other books in criminal justice cite Smith and Jones on their controversial new research? Should you consider adding maps showing frequency distributions in every chapter of your sociology text? Should engineering applications be treated in a separate chapter or integrated into every chapter?
At the same time as they are unique, successful books also selectively match or top the characteristics that make competing books successful. These characteristics include the organization of the book, length, topical coverage, pedagogical features, and so on. Also, anything you discover about the competition is ammunition for getting your publisher to invest more in your textbook, because textbooks must be competitive to sell. Perhaps you can make a good argument for going two-color, having more photos, or putting up a companion web site.
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MARY
ELLEN
LEPIONKA
Lepionka, of Gloucester, Massachusetts, is the founder of Atlantic Path Publishing and author of its 2003 frontlist title, Writing and Developing Your College Textbook.
Forthcoming titles include her Writing and Developing College Textbook Supplements and Frank Silverman's Self-Publishing Textbooks and Instructional Materials.
E-mail: Mary Ellen Lepionka.
Telephone: (978) 283-1531
This article is excerpted from Chapter 4, "Development and Why Your Textbook Needs It" from Writing and Developing Your College Textbook by Mary Ellen Lepionka (ISBN: 0-9728164-0-2; Atlantic Path Publishing, 2003; all rights reserved). |
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