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GETTING AND USING HELPFUL REVIEWS
Posted September 16, 2003
| SUMMARYA publisher should arrange for reviews of your textbook prospectus and of sample chapters to guide your development of the book. Reviewers include potential adopters. For introductory or survey texts, with some chapters at the edge of your range of expertise, you will want a specialist among reviewers. Rule of thumb: Three reviewers per chapter minimum. When reviews come in, be open to recommendations for improvement but don't feel obliged to accommodate every stray comment.
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By Mary Ellen Lepionka
Atlantic Path Publishing
An important step in textbook development is to send out revised draft for professional peer review, which the publisher should manage for you. The acquisitions editor has already had your prospectus, table of contents, and sample chapters reviewed and has available a ready database for selecting reviewers. A common misconception is that reviewers are paid to provide quotable material for marketing. In textbook publishing, however, reviewers aid product development, and you might legitimately be asked to revise to address reviewers' concerns. If you are sincere about providing intellectual and educational value to instructors and students, you will want critical reviews.
For each chapter of your manuscript, develop a list of specific questions you would like your reviewers to address. The editor can include these questions with the general reviewing guidelines that go out to cover the publisher's concerns. Your questions should reflect your informed concerns and should be worded neutrally; that is: no leading, loaded, or rhetorical questions. If your textbook is a revision, develop two sets of questions, one for past users of your book and one for nonusers (potential new customers). Also identify chapters that you think should go out for expert review, aside from the general reviews by instructors who teach the course. Expert reviews are critical reviews by specialists in a field. Especially in an introductory or survey text, you would be wise to select chapters at the edge of your range of expertise that a specialist could check for you.
Be an advocate for publisher responsibility to have your book reviewed adequately and reviewers sufficiently remunerated. In some houses, skimping on reviewing is a solution to overstretched editorial budgets. Ask how many reviews are being commissioned and what the honorarium will be. As a rule of thumb, every chapter should have an absolute minimum of three generalist reviews, and selected chapters should have additional expert reviews. Five to eight reviews per chapter are more typical. The more reviews you have to work with, the easier it is to identify areas of critical consensus, and the surer you can be of crafting a successful book. Your publisher usually pays the honorarium for each review (a paltry $35 to $75 per chapter) and should not disclose to you the identities of reviewers until your book is in print.
For commercial textbook publishers, reviews are everything. Editors typically are not content experts, though they may become so, but count on reviewers to give them an idea of whether or not to publish or revise a manuscript. You do want positive reviews, therefore, in addition to critical ones. Helpful reviewers both guide you in improving your manuscript and also make you look good in the eyes of the publisher, and finding and cultivating these reviewers is an art. You can help yourself best in the process by proposing reviewers and providing selected reviewers with complete manuscript--no missing figures or references--that you have at least spell-checked.
When the reviews come in, perform your own analysis of them as objectively as possible. Analyzing reviews can be difficult. It is natural to focus on laudatory remarks, tempting to dismiss criticism, easy to become defensive and to discard wholesale the comments of people who seem to disagree with you philosophically. Reviewers do sometimes have axes to grind and may not communicate in ways that are helpful or kind.
Review analysis also can be confusing. Positive and negative reviews have a way of canceling each other out, leaving you with no clear direction. However, your natural resistance must be balanced with openness to the possibility that the chapter is imperfect and can be improved, that improvements can be made without compromising your views or intellectual integrity, and that such improvements can lead to greater success for your book. At the same time, avoid trying to accommodate every stray comment that every reviewer has to offer. Often, these are the books end up "vacillating and bland."
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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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