Last week I wrote about what the review process is for, this week I’m going to talk about the response stage. This is the part of the process where we send you your reviews, and ask you to provide us with a response. This is a vital stage in the process, and also illustrates how distinct the book proposal review process tends to be from the journal article review process.
I talked a little last week about what the implications are of your editor asking you to revise and resubmit your proposal and/or sample chapters. Far more often you can expect your editor to send you your reviews and ask for a written response to the reviewers’ comments. This is your chance to have your say, and more importantly your chance to make the case for your book project in response to whatever your reviewers happen to have said.
Who is this response for?
The first thing to know about about these responses is that they are not shared with the reviewers themselves. There are exceptions to this, but they are uncommon and we would expect to inform you of this before doing it — and would be careful to mediate if we thought there was any risk of causing offense. Rather, your response is for our benefit, that is to say, for your editor and whatever collection of colleagues or stakeholders your publisher may deploy for making publishing decisions.
As you will appreciate, this has significant implications for how you write your response. I’ve talked before about how editors are not typically leading experts on your subject area, and certainly not on your specific topic. In the context of any kind of internal committee meeting, however, they will be the person in the room who knows the most about both your planned book specifically and, in most cases, the broader subject discipline generally. This doesn’t mean your whole response should be simple, but it does mean the gist of it needs to be clear to someone not highly engaged in the subject.
You can tell a lot from how your editor glosses your reviews
Your editor will usually provide you some guidance as to what kind of response they are looking for. They will, or should, explain this clearly themselves, but I thought it might be instructive to elaborate on what they’re thinking about as they do this.
I’ll walk you through a few possible response scenarios. Real life is rarely quite as neat and tidy as this, but these are the three major variants.
If they think it is very straightforward…
In the simplest scenario you will be sent your reviews with a request to respond to a couple of key points that your editor has identified. You might even just be asked to write a “brief response” to the reviewers, with the implication that this is just a formality.
When this happens, it’s likely because your editor is more or less satisfied the reviewers’ comments give them sufficient support to proceed, and they just want to dot the i’s and cross the t’s. They don’t need you to spend a lot of time on the response, and have highlighted any specific issues to which they’d like to have your response.
If they think it’s viable but needs some issues addressed…
This might look a little like the previous scenario, the main difference is that instead of breezily asking you to respond to a couple of points, your editor has gone through the reviews and pulled out a series of points for you to address.
When your editor sends you an email where they go into some depth on several points they’ve extracted from the reviews it usually means they are anxious that you should respond to these points in particular and probably in some depth.
The bad news is this means they think these issues might be quite critical to the project’s viability. They won’t be able to present the project to their committee or board without clearly demonstrating that these points raised by the reviewers have been addressed.
The good news is if they’re pulling out the specific points to address for you, then they anticipate that you’ll be able to do it. It also means they are eager to enable you to respond quickly and easily, so they can move ahead and make you an offer. You’ve probably got some work to do, but they are keen to help you through it.
If they want to see how committed you are…
You have to be a little careful with this one, but when your editor sends you your reviews, explains that the reviewers had a number of criticisms, and says they’ll need to see quite a thorough response, this is probably what’s happening. Sometimes editors can see that a project is going to need quite a bit more work, and that it won’t be enough to try and help you through it. They want you to demonstrate your commitment to the project, and more specifically to ensuring the project meets the standards of the reviewers and the needs of its prospective readers.
At times an editor may frame their message to you along the lines of “if you want to proceed with this project, you’ll really need to show that you’ve engaged with the reviewers’ comments”. That’s our way of saying that if we’re to go ahead, it’ll only work if we can really see that you’ve considered the feedback and are prepared to make some changes. Of course, it’s not always just about making changes…
Types of response to reviews
There are a number of ways to respond to critical feedback from reviewers. All of the following are valid in principle, although you will have to use your judgement (or ask your editor for help) to decide which is most appropriate. Most of the time you should be ready to consider a combination of all three, though inevitably the quantum of each will vary according to the specifics of your project and reviews.
Propose changes
On its face this is the most obvious kind of response, though typically also the most difficult. Where your reviewers have suggested changes and you agree that they are necessary, or at least desireable, the task is to explain how you will make those changes. You’ll need to identify broadly which changes you will make and how you will incorporate them.
It’s wise to indicate at this stage whether this will require additional work that you hadn’t anticipated in your original timeline. You might also need to explain whether this changes the overall picture of the book, whether there are trade offs, and so on. While you absolutely should listen to your reviewers, you should not make every change they ask for only because they have suggested it. It is still your book and you need to make changes that you believe in.
Push back
This is the other extreme, where you respond that no, actually this book does not need to be twice as long and refocussed entirely on one particular reviewer’s personal obsession.
In fact this can be rather more measured than my initial example suggests. It might be that you think a reviewer has slightly misunderstood the argument of your book, or you might agree that the additions they have suggested would be a good idea, but impractical given space or time constraints, and not strictly necessary. Yet another option is that you have a strong difference of opinion from the reviewer. Perhaps you think their analysis is simply incorrect, or maybe you respect their perspective, but argue that your alternative is equally valid.
Pushing back is easiest where you have reviewers who disagree with each other. If one of them supports your position while the other wans significant changes, you can certainly point this out, though it might not always render everything the dissenting reviewer has said moot. It could also be that the reviewers are, in effect, pulling in opposite directions, where both would like major changes, but those changes are mutually contradictory. This will often give you some justification for maintaining a median position, although you should keep in mind that the best solution is not inevitably halfway between two extremes.
Few authors would need to be told this, but it’s smart to always keep your tone as respectful as possible when disagreeing with reviewers. Your reviewers are unlikely to ever see what you write about them, but we editors tend to be wary of authors coming across as shrilly defensive. If you suspect that your reviewer — who will likely be anonymous — is someone with a grudge against you, then only highlight this where you believe it is germane to the substance of what they are saying. Even if you believe a reviewer is writing in bad faith (which in my experience is very rare) it is nearly always better to, as we say, play the ball and not the man. Also, we do know who your reviewers are, and you will look very silly if you write a long rant about how Professor So-and-so has always hated you and wants you to fail, when we know that the reviewer is somebody else entirely.
Clarify
Here we have the middle path option when it comes to writing review responses. Sometimes you’ll find your reviewers asking for things you were already planning to include. Or apparently misunderstanding some of the points you tried to make. In this case your task is to explain where these elements will be covered, or restate your points to clarify what they are and how you believe they have been misconstrued.
This can sometimes be a frustrating part of the process, particularly if you feel that these clarifications should not have been necessary if reviewers had read the proposal more closely. Perhaps they should have, but then again perhaps you did not make your points, or explain your contents, as well as you thought you had. In the same way that editors will often ask apparently silly questions, misunderstandings can be illustrative of areas where your writing could be clearer than it is.
I hope this relatively in-depth description of the proposal response stage has left you feeling empowered and raring to write your proposal, knowing that there is nothing to fear from the feedback, and that your editor will have your back. If so, please do drop me a line on simon.bates@tbarnpress.com and I’d be happy to discuss your project with you.
