Working with Your Editor: Developing, Pitching, and Publishing an Edited Collection

A post from Feeding the Elephant: A Forum for Scholarly Communications.

Post by Dawn Durante, assistant editorial director of the University of North Carolina Press and member of the Feeding the Elephant Editorial Team

Catching smoke. Herding cats. Herding wet cats. Harder than publishing a monograph. I’d never do it again. These are the ways I’ve heard authors describe their work on an edited collection. Edited collections almost always pose challenges for volume editors, acquiring editors, and the various people working on the book throughout the publishing process. And this is okay! But it might facilitate a better edited volume and save everyone involved a few headaches if we talk openly about some of the biggest challenges to anticipate and minimize them. 

In assessing the viability of the collection you are developing, there are two particularly important things to assess: the collection’s contribution to literature and its value to you professionally.

First, consider if the edited collection you are conceptualizing is a viable book project that has specific value. When an acquisitions editor talks about viability, they are talking about whether the conception of the project is best served by becoming a book, and specifically, in this case, if an edited collection is best. In some cases, the idea for the project may be better served (and more quickly go to print) with a special issue of a journal. In assessing the viability of the collection you are developing, there are two particularly important things to assess: the collection’s contribution to literature and its value to you professionally. For all of their challenges, edited collections can be particularly compelling contributions to the literature for a number of reasons. For example, a collection can cover a breadth of topics and perspectives that would be impossible for a single author to represent or have expertise in. Or, in other cases, an edited collection is an expression and outgrowth of a feminist collaborative ethic that prioritizes a multiplicity of voices and perspectives. When considering the professional value of editing or contributing a collection, if the book doesn’t count toward your professional tenure or promotion goals, it might be better to put the project on a backburner and focus on work that “counts” more. The calculus here will vary by discipline, individual circumstance, institution, and even department. 

Once you’ve determined that a collection is intellectually and professionally viable, you need to develop a structure. There are nearly endless possibilities when considering how to develop the topic, scope, and structure of an edited collection, but there should be a guiding logic. Whatever development path you choose, it should be intentional. I’ve received drafts of edited collections where chapters were organized by the last name of the author, and this rarely creates a purposeful flow for the volume. Instead, chapters should build on one another–either chronologically or thematically, for example–just as you would have a clear organizational structure for a monograph.

Length is also a major point of practicality. More pages simply adds more costs to the book’s production, and I encourage editors to consider length from the beginning stages of the project.

While planning your editing collection, it can help to have key characteristics like audience, length, and balance in mind. When you determine your audience, try to be precise, because the audience sets the stage for many other decisions for the volume. For instance, a cohesive volume will clearly frame and articulate its argumentation in a way that its core audience will understand. Length is also a major point of practicality. More pages simply adds more costs to the book’s production, and I encourage editors to consider length from the beginning stages of the project. As many acquiring editors will tell you about any book, it can be advantageous to keep the book under 100,000 words (including frontmatter, notes, and bibliography). If you have a 7500-word introduction, and a 5000-word conclusion, this means you could have about 10 essays with 8750 words. If you want to have more collaborators, you’ll want to guide them (often wrangle them) to write shorter pieces. Speaking of collaborators, successful volumes often feature balance among the contributors in the volume. There can be all sorts of balance, including but not limited to a similar number of chapters written by men and women; a variety of perspectives from historically marginalized groups within the academy; and an equilibrium between early career, mid-career, and late career scholars.

When you’ve conceptualized the intervention, scope, key details, and contributors of an edited collection, you’ll naturally begin to pitch the project to editors to find a publishing home for the project. The process for approaching editors and submitting a proposal for an edited collection is very similar to the submission process for a monograph. Generally, you’ll still want to send a cover letter, proposal, annotated table of contents, CVs for the editors, and sample chapters (and any other submission materials outlined on the publisher’s website). Some additional information you will want to provide is short bios for your proposed contributors. Contributor bios will usually be three or four sentences, typically included following the summaries for their contributions in the annotated table of contents. In order for an editor to effectively consider the proposed edited collection, it is important only to list people who have committed to write for the volume.

The volume editors I have worked with who have had the most straightforward time publishing their collections have had the same thing in common: clearly communicated deadlines to contributors and the readiness to move forward without pieces that are holding up the entire volume.

After conceptualizing the project and book proposal, editors come to the challenge of the logistical and intellectual work of pulling the chapters together. When working with all of those contributors, there are a lot of moving parts. The volume editors I have worked with who have had the most straightforward time publishing their collections have had the same thing in common: clearly communicated deadlines to contributors and the readiness to move forward without pieces that are holding up the entire volume. This is not to say that editors shouldn’t accommodate authors and factor in individual differences and associated needs. However, in most cases when contributors are late, it is because they are prioritizing other projects. We can all commiserate, but I’ve seen firsthand how this choice can derail the entire timeline for a project that other contributors are counting on. To stay on track, volume editors should be prepared to move forward without chapters that are excessively late, drop images when permissions are not coming through, and take over copyediting checks for an unresponsive contributor.  

Successful volume editors also do the intellectual work to make the collection cohesive. In my experience in acquiring edited collections, it is imperative that the book has a very good introduction. If you are publishing your edited collection at a university press, it will go out to external peer review the same way a monograph would. Peer reviewers tend to have the most feedback on introductions to edited collections, because the introductory chapter must do the heavy lifting of making it clear why what could feel like insular or discrete chapters are actually part of a cohesive whole. One of the questions I consider when reading a proposal for an edited collection is: Is the whole greater than the sum of its parts? In other words, does the volume achieve something more with all the book elements (introduction, argument, individual contributions, structural organization) synthesized together than if they were singular? A strong proposal should preempt this question for an editor, and then the introduction should preempt the question for the potential peer reviewers.

Peer reviewers tend to have the most feedback on introductions to edited collections, because the introductory chapter must do the heavy lifting of making it clear why what could feel like insular or discrete chapters are actually part of a cohesive whole.

Many publishers are leery of edited collections because they believe that they don’t sell as well as monographs. Sometimes, this is true. But, a good edited collection can get steady course adoption, have a major impact on a field, or sell reliably–if it’s well conceived and realized. Often editors pitch a collection with a claim that the contributors will be active promoters of the work, and then that doesn’t happen. Volume editors should provide their publisher with the contact information for all contributions, encourage course adoption, ask their university libraries to acquire the volume, and to remember to promote the collection when they promote their monographs. It can also be fun and exciting to plan a conference panel around the volume, then invite contributors and session attendees to the press booth to chat after the panel and perhaps pick up a copy of the book. 

Edited collections present unique challenges from other book projects, and I’ve tried to share some specific strategies that can help facilitate a smooth publication process. As with any other book project you are working on, your acquiring editor will be a key resource through all your questions, development, and publication of the book! Despite all the potential pitfalls when working on edited collections, they can also be some of the most rewarding and fulfilling collaborations when well conceived and carried out with intention and care from everyone involved.

Dawn Durante is an assistant editorial director at University of North Carolina Press and is a member of the Feeding the Elephant editorial collective. You can follow her on Twitter @dawnd.

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