Don’t Judge a Book by Its Editor

Fourteen minutes. That’s how long it took Prestigious University Press to reject my proposal to edit a book of new essays on an early-modern philosopher.

Apparently that’s the time it took the acquisitions editor to receive my e-mail message, open the 10-page attachment, make a professional judgment, and then write back with a curt one-sentence rejection stating that my proposal was “too specialized” for the press’s successful series of handbooks on individual thinkers. That’s also how long it took me to go into the kitchen, eat a sandwich, and return to my computer to find his reply.

One minute. That’s how long it took me to respond with a second message thanking him for being so efficient in the submission process and asking whether my proposal could be considered as a stand-alone volume outside of the series.

Apparently I asked the right question, because four months later I received a contract from the press to edit the volume.

By doing all of that, I was clearly breaking one of the commandments of the tenure game: “Thou shall not edit a scholarly volume before earning tenure.” Sure, I had heard all the warnings: Editing takes more time than any junior faculty member can imagine, tenure committees delight in single-authored books rather than collections, contributors can be late with submissions, and so forth.

In short, untenured junior faculty members should be writing books, not editing them.

I wasn’t too interested in listening to the admonitions. After all, I had recently cashed in on what seemed to me a triad of wild improbabilities: I had finished my dissertation, married my beautiful girlfriend, and received a tenure-track job right out of graduate school. I was three for three, so maybe I wasn’t bound by the rules that govern mere academic mortals.

Of course, I was wrong. Editing the volume has been the most stressful event of my budding academic career.

My initial euphoria over the acceptance of the book proposal, and over my new title as “editor,” was quickly tempered by the fact that I had no contributors signed up. My wife, an English Ph.D., reminded me that “edit” is a transitive verb requiring an object, so without chapters I couldn’t exactly fulfill my promises to the press.

I had included in my proposal a list of prominent scholars whom I would contact should the press be interested in the book. I had never met most of those stars of the academic firmament, so they knew nothing about me or my proposal. I sent out e-mail invitations to all of them anyway, assigning tentative titles to their contributions. Nearly all of them responded immediately, accepting my invitation and agreeing to my strict 18-month deadline for chapters.

Watching my in-box fill up with messages from famous scholars joining the project was fairly exciting. A few declined my invitation, but I quickly found replacement authors. Every six months or so I e-mailed a reminder about the approaching deadline. Everything was going so well.

Then the submission deadline arrived and I had no chapters.

None.

This concerned me greatly. The press had taken a chance on me, and I certainly didn’t want to lose my opportunity to publish there. I had a year from the contributor’s deadline to edit the volume and get the manuscript to the press, so now my editing window was shrinking as I waited for the chapters. At that point I hadn’t even finished my own chapter for the volume, so things weren’t looking good.

A couple of months later, a chapter finally appeared in my e-mail in-box. It was from one of the big-name contributors and it was of high quality. A few weeks after that several more chapters appeared. All were in fairly good shape, though they required the standard editing.

Then a chapter arrived with a note saying ominously that the author had “done the best he could” and had no more time to work on it. Hesitantly, I clicked on the attachment to discover that the chapter had no references to any secondary literature. Conceptually it was very good, but it was not publishable in that form. To save it, I added detailed footnotes indicating the secondary literature in support of the author’s various points. Surely in doing so I was going beyond my role as editor, but I wasn’t in a position to reject chapters.

The nagging fear that I wouldn’t have a sufficient number of chapters to constitute a book started to keep me awake at night. Fortuitously, my son was born at that time so I soon found myself up all night anyway.

Then contributors began to quit. That was painful. I had kept an ideal image of the completed book in my mind and it seemed like fortune’s hand was tearing out chapters one by one. Citing a fairly serious and unforeseen health problem, one contributor withdrew. I bore no hard feelings there. It was difficult, however, to be charitable to other members of the project who bailed at the last minute, despite numerous promises that a chapter was “in draft form” or “almost done.”

One such contributor opted for a bunker strategy that consisted mainly of hiding from my phone calls and ignoring my e-mail messages. The first part of that tactic required the cooperation of two departmental office managers, both of whom appeared to exhibit some embarrassment when they would not put my calls through to him. I later discovered that the would-be contributor had been busily editing his own collection of essays for another publisher instead of working on his promised chapter for my book.

When another contributor learned of my difficulty getting a chapter from him, she chuckled and told me that, as the editor of a journal in our field, she had been waiting for him to turn in a book review for several years. She, too, was familiar with his bunker strategy.

My other would-be contributor is difficult to describe. In our last bit of e-mail correspondence, he sent a rambling diatribe whose argument can be distilled into the following précis: It was unfair of me to ask him to deliver his promised chapter because he would have to avoid work on his own book on Renaissance philosophy, which was to make him “literally hundreds of thousands of dollars.” He needed that money because he didn’t have a “cushy research chair” at a university. How could I insist that he give up his financial future?

I had no idea that publishing on Renaissance philosophy could be so lucrative.

To meet my contractual deadline with the press, the volume needed to be shipped and postmarked by the end of the year. The last chapter that I received arrived in my in-box on the evening of December 30. I spent a good part of the night editing it and shipped off the volume the next day.

In the end, the edited manuscript was missing three chapters from the original 12 I had proposed. I worried incessantly that the press would reject it for coming in short.

A few weeks later I received an e-mail message from the press saying that the manuscript was in excellent shape and that the book was being turned over to the production editors. I felt as though I had magically dodged a bullet. All my work was not in vain. Sure, I was quite pleased with the quality of the book, but I didn’t know until then how the press would respond to a significantly shorter manuscript. The book came into print 10 months later, and I have to admit, it does look nice on my shelf.

So what advice would I have for aspiring editors?

With the benefit of hindsight I have to endorse the received wisdom on this one: Don’t do it until after tenure.

The risk factor for an edited volume is significant, since success is tied to other people’s work. You could toil for several years and have the thing evaporate at the last moment when contributors back out. It almost happened to me.

As editor, I made a number of mistakes, several of which nearly sank the project. What should I have done differently? First, I should have been working the phones much earlier, calling the contributors to make sure that they were progressing. Second, I should have planned for more chapters (and hence more contributors) on the assumption that some would drop out, but I would still have a sufficiently lengthy manuscript. Third, I should have built more time for editing (and late submissions) into the publishing schedule I arranged with the press. So I bear some responsibility for the stress I experienced.

Producing the volume has yielded undeniable benefits. I was able to meet some of the top scholars in my field, and I got another publication for my tenure run next year. I suspect, however, that I could have written my own book in the time it took to edit the volume.

Recently I received an inquiry from the acquisitions editor of a well-respected commercial academic press. He had seen my volume and wanted to know if I would edit a book for his press on a related topic. Without hesitation I had to decline, at least for a few years.

After all, untenured junior faculty members should be writing books, not editing them.