One of the things we’ve had to consider quite carefully at Tithebarn Press, is what the function of reviews is in our publishing and how we go about undertaking them. I’m delighted to say that this has been especially on my mind lately as our first formal book proposals are now coming in.
It’s an exciting time for us, but also one where we are establishing the pathways for our key procedures. In doing so, I’ve been giving quite a lot of thought to the purposes of the various kinds of review and how we can best make use of them. When you’re establishing processes from scratch, it necessitates reflecting on what you want the process to achieve and how it can be performed most efficiently and effectively.
We’ll only talk about proposal reviewing today, though no doubt we will address manuscript and book reviews in future. You can also read more here about the role we see reviewing as having in our aim of publishing rigorous readable books.
Accept or Reject?
The most fundamental purpose of reviewing in academic book publishing is helping a publisher to decide whether or not to accept a book proposal. This is often seen in a similar light to journals publishing, where top-rated journals like to boast of their high rates of rejection as a reflection on their quality standards.
In my time working for Routledge I was occasionally asked what my (or our) rejection rate was by the academics I met. As I would always have to explain, we didn’t keep figures on this and if we had they really wouldn’t have meant very much. This is because book publishing tends to be more collaborative – in regard to the relationship between publisher and author – and also because commissioning editors act as a kind of filter even before anything gets as far as being reviewed. In other words, if your book proposal is sent for review, it means that your editor thinks there’s a pretty good chance of it receiving a broadly positive response. Some won’t, of course, but over the long term a book programme that was rejecting more than say 20 or 30% of the submissions its editor sent for review would tend to raise questions about that editor’s judgment.
An expert’s perspective
Most commissioning editors are not leading experts in their fields. Even if they are highly qualified, with a PhD in their subject area, they can only really be specialised in the very specific topic on which they wrote their own thesis . More often, they are professional publishers, whose specialism is in all the various skills that managing a books programme entails, rather than deep specific subject knowledge. This, then, is the principle reason why we seek the perspective of expert reviewers on our book proposals. Every now and again they might give us a good reason why the proposal that we thought looked great is in fact a terrible idea, or a great idea that somebody else has already executed. Far more often, they will provide constructive (or, at least, actionable) advice for how the project could be made more interesting, more up-to-date, more relevant, more robust and so on and so forth.
Because we don’t know what we don’t know, this kind of advice can be highly valuable to editors in guiding authors. There will be times where it conflicts with our instincts — and perhaps also those of the author — and others where it confirms that we were indeed on the right track. Either way it helps us when we’re providing manuscript feedback to authors, and potentially also when we’re thinking about how to promote the book.
Quality Assurance
Peer review as such is a norm within academic and scholarly publishing, if you do not undertake some degree of peer review, whether at proposal or manuscript stage, or both, then you are not really an academic publisher. It is therefore the baseline of quality assurance for readers and part of the service provided to authors.
This can sometimes create a tension, where we have a book proposal that we know — because the author is experienced, the topic is obviously attractive, and we can see it is rigorously written — before we review a project that we are almost certain to publish it. It might even be the case that the author sees the process as a formality that they want to engage with only minimally. Even so, it’s still important that we undertake the review, for three reasons:
- Our judgement needs to take into account the views of experts, regardless of how confident we may feel;
- No manuscript is so perfect it cannot be improved, and when we’re working on editing it we want our perspective to be informed by expertise;
- It’s the standard we’ve assured our readers that we hold our authors to, and standards matter.
It’s not about catching authors out, but it can help to confirm (or not) their perspective
In our update last week I touched, among other things, upon the sometimes thorny question of related titles (competition, if you prefer to imagine book publishing as red in tooth and claw). This is a small area of the bigger picture where reviewers can sometimes really add value. In the simplest version of this, they can agree with your picture of the state of the literature currently. In which case, great, we have evidence to support your assessment and we can be confident in relying on it.
Alternatively, they might highlight titles they think are relevant but that you have overlooked, whether because you didn’t think they were relevant, or because you were unaware of them. They might also disagree with your assessments of some of the titles you have identified. In either case this can be extremely useful. Even in the worse case scenario, where there is a directly competing title to yours that you simply knew nothing about, far better to find out now and be able to take mitigating action, than to realise only when you’re half-way through writing your manuscript, or even after we’ve published.
The process is fundamentally consultative
We’d like to think this is more true at Tithebarn Press than for other publishers, as we discussed here . Even so, when I worked for Routledge I would always try and find a way through the review process with my authors if I could see a way to get there. Your mileage may vary therefore, but very often in academic books publishing, your commissioning editor would much rather be able to accept your book proposal than not. They won’t do so if reviewers are clearly set against it with good cause, but they will usually give you not only right of reply, but benefit of the doubt, where reasonably possible.
Exactly how this phase operates can vary between editors, depending on their individual temperaments, on how busy they are, and on how much more work they think the proposal requires before they (or their publishing committee) can accept it. I’ll be writing more about the response stage next week. For now, suffice it to say that your editor will usually give you some prompts as to how long and thorough of a response they need to have from you, and may highlight any points they think are particularly essential to address.
Re-Reviewing
Editors tend to prefer to avoid additional rounds of reviewing if possible. It goes against virtually all of their incentives to do it. This is worth keeping in mind if your editor says they would like you to revise the proposal (and possibly your sample material) so they can send it for further review. Sure, it means that the reviews were critical enough that your editor doesn’t feel they can take the project on as is. But it also means they can see a reasonable chance of a way forward, and they think it’s worth trying. A good editor will not ask you to revise and resubmit a proposal if they’ve been convinced that it is fundamentally unviable.
This does not mean that the second round of review is a mere formality, however. Quite the contrary, if your editor thought that it would be sufficient for you to make a few minor adjustments, they would have said so, and would not be putting themselves to the time and expense of seeking further reviews. In short, if your editor wants you to revise and resubmit the proposal for further review, it means they have faith in you and your project, but also that they need you to show that you can respond comprehensively to feedback.
As I mentioned, next week we’ll be giving you an insider’s perspective on how to manage reviewer feedback, and particularly what your editor wants to see in your response. In the meantime, if you’d like to discuss your project with us, please do get in touch at simon.bates@tbarnpress.com .
