TEXTBOOK WRITING
Locating and Working with Textbook Publishers
First, it might be wise to define a textbook as a book used in schools, colleges, and universities as a standard work for instruction on a particular course or subject. Traditionally, textbooks are published only in printed format. However, many publishers are allowing textbooks to be made available as electronic books (or e-books).
Textbook writing is immensely rewarding for the depth of knowledge you gain in the area, and the reward of actually paving the way for others to teach, and for giving voice to new ideas and knowledge. It’s just something you have to want to do for reasons other than career or finances because it doesn’t really help either these days. Another gratifying part of writing a textbook is receiving compliments from complete strangers. Positive comments make you realize that you’re touching lives out there that you’ll never know about.
For authors, the key to success is self-discipline, not brilliance. Authors must have the drive, perseverance, determination, ambition—whatever you want to call it—to sit and write: day after day, week after week, month after month.
If you are passionate about your subject, know your market, and don’t mind hard work, writing a textbook could bring you much satisfaction in a job well done. Textbooks are often perceived as dry, boring, and a chore to write. But they are essential reading for tens of thousands of students, and the rewards for successful authors can be substantial.
The trick is to be informative and comprehensible while imparting a sense of excitement in the subject area; know your market. Assume that your readership will be small; that’s why you have to make sure you love the subject. Small or not, it is vital to know whether your readership exists. It is essential to research the market and find out about potential readers and competitors.
Most people believe that you need a great idea for a textbook to put your mark on the discipline. Nothing could be further from the truth! Original ideas are few and far between. My suggestion: simply blend a smidgeon of originality into a tub of the same old thing. Make the idea fresh and current and interesting for the reader.
To date, I have written several textbooks, including An Educator’s Guide to Information Literacy: What Every High School Senior Needs to Know, Learning to Learn: A Guide to Becoming Information Literate in the 21st Century, Information Literacy: What Does It Look Like in the School Library Media Center, Catalog It! A Guide to Cataloging School Library Materials, Helping Teachers Teach: A School Library Media Specialist’s Role, and Reference Skills for the School Library Media Specialist: Tools and Tips. Two more textbooks are forthcoming: Extreme Searching for Teens: Curricular Tools and Reference Skills for the School Library Media Specialist: Tools and Tips.
One attraction of writing a textbook is being able to do things your way. It is enjoyable to incorporate your own way of explaining concepts and your own bag of examples and nifty metaphors. It’s fun to share your clever examples with a wider audience than the classroom. Another plus is the self-education that you get from having to organize the material. In addition, class testing the book can be loads of fun and helpful at the same time.
As you draft sample chapters, you’ll face every textbook writer’s dilemma: do I write for students or for the professors who order the copies? Students want simplified, clear, and entertaining texts; to reach an average student, your style must compete with Facebook and MySpace. In contrast, many professors want intellectual complexity and vocabulary that announces, “This is higher education, deal with it!” From my observation, most textbook writers figure out which group butters their royalty checks. I, however, took the path less traveled and wrote directly for students. Today it gratifies me greatly when students say my book talks to them and that they really use it when they land a job.
To locate a publisher, jump online and search for similar textbooks in your area of expertise. Often, the guidelines for submitting a proposal to that publisher can be found on the publisher’s website. If not, find a contact name and e-mail that person. Follow the proposal guidelines to a T. All guidelines will have some variation of the following: tentative title, approximate number of pages, basic or general description, purpose and scope, table of contents, draft preface, books with similar content, length of final text, tentative deadline, and a copy of your vita. Occasionally (especially if this is the first book you have written) they may ask for a sample chapter.
Now, to win a contract, you must create a dazzling book proposal that demonstrates your expertise, your ability to write simultaneously to Einstein and an unmotivated nineteen-year-old. At the same time, you must show that the textbook will enhance the publisher’s reputation as a leading-edge money-maker. The proposal must explain how your textbook is unique, what makes you the only person in the world who can write it, and why it will quell competitors. In general, create the impression that you are enthusiastic, creative, and energetic but professional and experienced.
Your proposal has been accepted—hallelujah! Your publisher will then provide you with an editor who will simultaneously make your life simpler and create tons more work. Your editor is your lifeline, but he or she also has an agenda and you must be wary of it at times. In other words, stick to your guns, but choose your battles carefully! Ultimately, you will love your editor and he or she will love you, too! It can be a love-hate relationship!
A copy editor will polish your book to perfection. Copy editors are fastidious—trust them! The copy editor polices spelling, grammar, and punctuation— even the minutest of mistakes—and looks at other issues such as word usage and political correctness. A copy editor is the cherry on top of the whipped cream!
Finally, the big day. A FedEx box arrives with ten copies of your new book inside. You smile with pride, sniff the book’s newness, and crack the spine.
Most textbooks die in the first edition. But if you say the old ideas in a new-wave style, you may be asked to work on a second edition.
An urban legend is that textbook revisions are merely cosmetic. Actually, the investment needed to bring out a revision is only slightly less than that for a first edition. Much more is involved, therefore, than slapping on new covers. Your contracts must be renegotiated, you may be brought onto the team and others retired, editors apply new market research and competition analyses to develop a revision plan, and usually the book is at least partly redesigned. The degree of similarity in appearance between a revision and its previous edition depends almost exclusively on market considerations. Do people love this book and remain loyal to it? Then make it look much the same. Are people dissatisfied with it or iffy? Or is there simultaneously a major new challenge from a competitor? Then make it look different.
Industry standards dictate that a revised edition of a textbook should be approximately one-third changed from the previous edition or substantively different in some other way. This extends to replacing a third or more of the photos and figures. The real reasons for revising are to correct, update, improve, or adapt a work. However, there are other reasons. For example, teacher education texts had to be revised after enactment of the No Child Left Behind Act. Most publishers made rapid and costly revisions in selected titles after September 11, 2001. Sometimes textbooks are revised because customers object to certain content or because certain content is outdated or wrong. While some of these changes do not add up to a third of the book, they necessitate a revision.
Although it is easy to think (and not unheard of) that publishers put out new editions as often as they can get away with to reap more profits, this usually is not the case. For one thing, textbooks, especially first editions, normally need at least two years of sales just to pay for themselves, much less to pay the authors their royalties and the publisher its margin. For another, the market readily punishes publishers (justly or not) who put an older edition out of print by bringing out a new higher-priced edition after only a year. While this may look like corporate greed, it’s usually just a desperate effort to save a book with insufficient sales that otherwise would be taken off the market entirely. Such a book might even be revised heavily enough (half changed) to be brought out as a new first edition. Older textbooks often are recycled in this way, through mix-andmatch cannibalizations.
Unless it is in a series designed as annual editions, therefore, a book that is revised after one year is in trouble. Maybe it had something in it (or not in it) that was killing sales. Maybe it was late coming out and missed its sales for the first semester of its copyright year (in which case a revision can justify permitting it to continue to exist at all). In any event, the publisher risks double shortfalls by bringing out a revision before the previous edition has paid for the cost of publishing it. In light of these facts, we may wish to reexamine our prejudices and assumptions regarding textbook revisions.
There no doubt are other myths about textbook publishing. Now, however, we come to the baffling matters of how a textbook revision is built.
The worst is over, but much yet is to be done! Not necessarily! Research, data, and references must all be updated. Regardless of how long you expect the preparation of the next edition to take, it will probably take longer. The good news is that it may take less time than the first edition.
Know your (perhaps new) editor. Editors seem to come and go. If you have a new editor since your first edition was published, talk to the editor about what she or he thinks about the first edition and would like to see in the next edition. Also be sure to have a clear idea about the editor’s plan and schedule for the revision.
Your publisher may have changed since the first edition of your textbook was printed. The integration of lists after acquisitions can be difficult, as the (now-larger) publisher may have books that compete with one another. This might affect the enthusiasm that your editor will have for having your book come out in a new edition. Be aware of what makes your book different from, and better than, competing books by the same publisher, and be ready to communicate that to your editor.
Obtain (or hopefully you have kept) a workable electronic file of the publisher’s copyedited version of the previous edition. This may be less of a problem now than in years past, but your life will be a lot easier if your publisher can give you a workable electronic file of the previous edition or if you kept one handy on your flash drive.
Don’t start writing too soon (especially regarding data and statistics), but don’t start too late either. If you start writing too soon, your material will be that much more out of date by the time the book is printed, which can be as much as a year after you finish your manuscript and thus more than a year since you wrote a chapter containing the material. If you start writing too late, you won’t make the deadline for the completion of your revision.
Keep track of instructors who wrote to you, especially those who wondered when the next edition was coming out. Respond promptly to any instructors who wrote you, and let them know when the new edition is about to be published. Make clear to them that you appreciate any comments or suggestions they might have about your book.
It’s difficult to predict accurately whether a textbook will sell well or poorly. Even if your first edition did well, the next edition might not. The odds are, though, that it will do well if the first edition succeeded.