This week I have been getting a book ready for publication. The book contains eleven conference papers presented by eleven different authors so managing this project is difficult. I have to juggle my needs and desires with those of my co-editor, the authors and the publishers. This balancing act is one that many academics will experience during their careers and my advice to postgraduates is to try to produce an edited collection as early on in your career as possible.
The relationship between editors and publishers can be a difficult one. As we all know, academic publishing makes very little money, especially edited collections which have a less obvious audience than a monograph (ie a book authored by one person). If you can get a publishing deal though, you may find that your publisher wants you to do more and more of the work in order to save costs their end. So, for example, the lovely task of indexing will not be farmed out but will be your responsibility!
In my case, the publisher also wants us to typeset the book. This means preparing what’s known in the trade as ‘camera-ready copy’. It’s a great skill to have, being able to turn a normal word document into something that looks like the page of a proper book…but it is so time consuming! It took me nearly six hours to prepare one essay (and I had eleven of them to do!).
That wouldn’t be so bad, but the pay you get for editing a book like this ranges from nothing to a pittance! You do days and days of work for no material gain. So why do it? Well, even the most modest scholar feels pride at seeing their name on a finished book. And for those creative minded people interested in book layout and design, this is the chance to improve on what is normally churned out by academic publishers.
But more importantly, it is great for your career, for two reasons. First any publication will be admired by job application panels and by funding bodies. And second you will make networks within your field. You will be liaising with colleagues at all sorts of institutions and showing them how efficient and professional you are! Who knows when they might be sitting opposite you interviewing you.
as long as you are using Word documents, if you put your six hour’s hard work on the first essay to good use by saving it as a template, it should be a lot quicker getting the others into line by applying the same styles. I may be telling you something you already know of course, in which case I apologise…
One of my other jobs is working as a copy editor for a respected journal and publishing house, so I found this post interesting. Authors/editors can do a lot to help themselves and speed up publication by presenting their work in the correct house style and responding promptly to enquiries in a polite and courteous manner (which I am sure you do). The problem of providing camera-ready copy is a big one. I do this as part of my publishing job and I would argue that it is best left to the publishing house. Never let a publishing house talk you into providing camera-ready copy before your very final MS has been accepted.
As for indexes, these should always be done by the author in my opinion, with guidance of course. Indexing acts as a useful double-check after proofreading and can pick up errors (people with name variants for example) that proofreading won’t necessarily.