No one goes to graduate school to become a scholarly editor, and very few of us are taught how to edit while we’re there. Still, plenty of us can end up doing important editing work at some point in our careers.
As writers, we already know what editors do: They marshal our works to press and press us to marshal our best efforts; they commission or accept manuscripts, and then work to refine, pare, and correct them. But the specific act of scholarly editing is different. It takes three main forms — editing an academic journal, an essay collection, or an academic edition of a classic or major work — each of which involves a distinct set of expectations, requires a specific set of skills, and brings its own risks and rewards.
I have done all three, and I recommend each — provided you know what you are getting into.
Editing a journal. The first thing to know: There is always a next issue. Journal editing, more than any other kind, demands peripheral vision. You need to be simultaneously copyediting the fall issue, lining up articles and book reviews for the winter issue, and soliciting or reviewing contributors for the spring.
The journal editor is, at once, administrator, evaluator, coach, and nag. It helps if you have a reliable and engaged editorial board, made up of people you can depend on to review submissions. But because some articles will speak to specialties beyond your board’s expertise, and because you will not want to overburden board members (who, of course, also have full-time jobs), you need a second group of reliable and engaged reviewers.
Often the ideal reviewers of an essay are cited in the submission: They know the subject and have skin in the game. Seek out reviewers who are not afraid to say No and can articulate a stronger version of a given submission. They should know that stream of consciousness is not an effective way to write a critique. Much more useful is a reviewer who offers the writer a clear, weighted set of directions, especially for junior scholars, who are more likely than established ones to submit their work to a journal.
And the reviewers who consistently get it? You invite them to join your editorial board when space permits.
The opportunity to edit a journal will probably not come along until you are established in your career. And that’s what you want: You need experience submitting your own work to journals so that you know firsthand about the review process and can learn from editors you meet along the way.
Editing a journal allows you to read the most recent work in your discipline — and you have an opportunity and responsibility to shape the best of it. But before stepping into this role, you should also already have:
- Contacts in the field, people on whom you can lean to serve as readers or book reviewers.
- Knowledge of trends and traditions so that you can distinguish an essay that merely rehashes things from one that breaks new ground.
- Ideas for special issues to help advance your field and inspire further work.
- A commitment to conference-going so that you can meet and encourage young writers and offer them guidance on submitting their work.
The two nemeses of a journal editor are the procrastinator and the slugabed. During the early months of the pandemic — as so many of us felt overwhelmed, uncertain, or ill — I struggled to find people to read manuscripts for Milton Studies, the journal I’ve edited since 2019. I was receiving more essays than usual; perhaps Covid created a new urgency for writers to finish their works in progress. But potential reviewers were scarce. Some could not imagine taking on the extra work of reading a 40-page manuscript while adjusting to lockdown and shifting their classes to online.
Still, even before the global pandemic, some excellent scholars — with sterling résumés at elite universities — habitually decline invitations to review submissions. Worse are invitees who never reply to your email or who wait weeks to decline, needlessly delaying the decision process.
To keep the wheels of journal editing always rolling, I recommend giving reviewers clear, firm deadlines — and then holding them accountable with polite reminders if a due date silently passes. In my experience, a reviewer needs, on average, only a day or two of concentrated effort to read a submission and draft an evaluation. So a month or six weeks is a reasonable turnaround time.
Some reviewers, even if they often agree to evaluate submissions, may still need to be nudged about the imperative that drives the publication of any periodical: The fall 2022 issue must appear in the fall of 2022. Libraries and databases do not want to subscribe to journals with gaps in their publication record, and some contributors will balk at having their work appear in a backdated issue. Most reviewers will cooperate; be prepared to be blunt with those who don’t.
Editing a collection. What probably contributes to cases of negligence among both journal reviewers and writers are the bad habits they may have picked up from working on an edited collection. When published as a book, a collection of essays is rarely under the same deadline pressure as an academic journal that comes out semiannually or quarterly. At least that’s the assumption under which plenty of seasoned contributors seem to operate when they’re sending in submissions for an edited volume. Regrettably, experience has taught them to approach this type of deadline as a negotiation.
Putting together an edited volume is, like journal editing, an opportunity to shape the discipline, to ensure that excellent work sees print, and to guide writers as they develop their ideas. Because both types of editing require a great deal of reading, both also offer a bracing immersion in your academic field. You will become not just better informed about your scholarly interests, but also — as you help contributors polish their articles or chapters — better aware of the conventions of academic writing and the qualities that constitute effective prose.
Some edited volumes grow from a publisher’s existing list of books. In my field of early modern studies, for example, publishers such as Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press, have thriving series of essay collections. If you already write for them, you might be invited to edit — or you might pitch — a new contribution.
But if you want to edit a stand-alone volume that isn’t part of an established series, you will have to do the hard work of conceiving the book’s topic, organization, and scope. Some presses will question its relative marketability versus a single-author book, and none are interested in publishing a group of loosely related pieces. You need to show that your volume has a compelling rationale. What will make this specific collection not just hold together as a book but entice people to buy it? The goal is to create a chorus, not a series of solo performers.
While your collection needs a sharp focus and a bright purpose, it should also capture various perspectives. Assembling a diverse group of contributors will improve the force of your proposal and the quality of your book. I recommend, too, balancing seasoned contributors with younger writers: It will help you argue for your book’s value while enabling up-and-comers to get their work in print.
In editing an essay collection, you must also make a convincing case for its intended audience. Overreaching — claiming that the book will offer something for everyone — is often unconvincing. Instead, write an honest proposal that accurately identifies your target readers and candidly surveys similar books.
All of that work is worthwhile because it will help you to persuade a publisher to offer you a contract and because a strong proposal never dies: It can ultimately serve as the first draft of your collection’s introduction. Near the start of the process a well-wrought proposal also does the important work of persuading writers to contribute; you need to show them why the collection is significant and how their work will support the book’s aims.
Once the book is under contract, the next crucial task is to set up a reasonable schedule, give contributors a clear deadline, and hold them to it. You should also have an additional contributor or two on a standby list. Even the most impressive group of contributors with the best of intentions might falter as their deadline nears.
I’ve had contributors ghost me, first not responding to my emails and then ignoring my increasingly desperate follow-up inquiries. Perhaps they wrongly assumed that my collection could soldier on without them, but if your book has a set structure and a required number of chapters, you will need back-up writers if one or more drop out. Check with your publisher about ways you might entice last-minute replacement writers with additional copies of the published book or a press discount for future purchases.
Editing an academic edition of a text. This type of scholarly editing is the most solitary of the three, and differs markedly in a few other ways. In this case you are producing a new version of another author’s work for publication — preparing a new edition of, say, Hamlet, Frankenstein, or a literary work that might not yet be widely available.
Understanding the project’s intended audience is an essential early step. Do you plan to create an edition for scholars? If so, you will need to include a sophisticated textual apparatus, detailing the theory behind your method and the specific points at which you modernized or otherwise changed the various copies — called “witnesses” — that you consulted.
You might wish to prepare a reading or “noncritical” edition of an author’s work. This version of a text is mostly clean — i.e., without elaborate explanations of alternative readings and without a detailed rationale for your editorial choices. It will appeal to first-time readers or students in an introductory survey. These readers are less likely to care about minor variations in spelling or punctuation between witnesses, but they will surely need explanatory notes, thorough introductory materials, and glossaries of arcane or obsolete words.
Deciding on the type of edition you wish to create is only the first in a long string of choices you will have to make as a scholarly editor. In editing John Milton’s Paradise Lost for the Norton Library series, I knew upfront that the audience would be new readers, so I decided to modernize the spelling and punctuation. Also, to help beginning readers with the prosody, I added a dieresis or an accent mark for uncommon pronunciations such as “Beëlzebub” or “crispèd.”
But these gestures did not mean that I disregarded the original witnesses, regardless of whether they reflected Milton’s preferences or simply captured the experience of 17th-century readers. I tried to preserve what appears to be the poet’s light, often rhetorical punctuation, and then used the footnotes to highlight changes in previous editions that might have affected the meaning.
With this version of scholarly editing, you might be able to set your own deadline with the press. I suggest you reach out to other editors of similar texts to gauge how much time you will need to complete the project — then add a few months, just in case. If you were to finish early, your publisher won’t mind.
The opportunity for this type of editing could come at any point in your academic career, although publishers tend to invite established scholars to do this work. The possible impact is considerable: You can fundamentally influence how future readers will understand the text you edit. Your voice will be, in effect, the musical accompaniment that people hear as they peruse a novel, play, or poem. The goal is to complement the work without drowning it in the din of unnecessary footnotes.
One thing remains true of all three types of editing: Your institution might struggle to assess your work in terms of professional development. Is an edited and annotated edition equivalent to a monograph or to an edited collection? How much credit should each person receive for co-editing a collection? For the purposes of promotion and tenure, the answers to such questions will depend on your specific publications and your department or institution. But the responsibility will lie with you to contextualize what you have done so that nonspecialists at your college or university can fairly evaluate your work.
Regardless of the type of editing you undertake, all three require considerable expertise and effort, and all three offer plenty of intellectual and professional joy.
