Two of my favorite projects I’ve worked on as a faculty librarian have been the two books I’ve co-edited (one of which is still in progress).
The first of those, Critical Approaches to Credit-Bearing Information Literacy Courses, was a collaboration with Jessica Critten. We both started working at the same academic library in September 2011, both with freshly minted Masters in Library Science. We both started teaching a credit-bearing information literacy course in our first full semester here – spring 2012 – and taught regularly for years. We had a level of financial support for professional development that many (most?) librarians can only dream of, but wound up frustrated that there wasn’t much in library-land that really spoke to our context. For a while, I cut way back on library instruction conferences, and shifted to attending interdisciplinary pedagogy conferences to learn strategies for teaching semester-long courses as the instructor of record, instead of teaching one-shot instruction sessions or being embedded in someone else’s course. And the same pattern held in looking for published scholarship that I could use to improve my practice.
So that stood out to us as a gap in the literature in our field.
In fall 2015, we started bouncing around the idea of trying to do an edited book focusing on credit-bearing information literacy courses. We weren’t sure how much interest there would be. I’m not aware of any authoritative listing of all the colleges and universities that offer credit-bearing information literacy courses, so I can only guess how common it is… And it seems like a fairly small percentage of academic libraries that do.
In January 2016, we pitched the idea to one publisher with a reputation for focusing on critical approaches to librarianship – we both wanted to focus specifically on critical pedagogy and praxis, even further narrowing our little niche! I just sent an email asking whether this seemed like a topic that would be worth working up a full proposal on. I mentioned in the email that we wanted to put out a call for chapter proposals, instead of identifying contributors to invite or writing the book ourselves. This was all very informal, and felt easier because I already knew my contact at this publisher from conferences.
That publisher was concerned that we wouldn’t be able to attract enough submitted contributions to proceed as we wanted, and suggested that we write the book ourselves. That discussion may have also been influenced by the fact that, at that time, I was teaching a continuing education course for librarians on how to teach a credit-bearing course. The CE course was designed for librarians who are accustomed to teaching individual lessons on a variety of topics, but not accustomed to connecting the dots with one group over a whole semester or dealing with grading or writing the syllabus or any of that. So maybe the publisher was thinking we were envisioning a textbook for that course?
We eventually decided to pitch our original idea to a different publisher instead of submitting a formal proposal for the book the first publisher would have been interested in. We wanted to bring together a range of perspectives we could also learn from, not present our view as authoritative. That was a little scarier, since I had never met anyone at that publisher, but their website lists a contact to reach out to about ideas in development. And that person was interested in a full proposal for an edited volume on this topic.
So we submitted our proposal, it was approved, and we began work on the project. We drafted our call for proposals and our goal timeline, mapping out the stages we expected:
- Send out our CFP to various blogs and email lists
- Review submitted proposals and select which to accept and which to reject. That implies also determining how to decide which to accept/reject, since we started out with no idea what to expect or if there were even enough people doing this to build a book on this topic.
- Wait for accepted authors to send in their drafts, according to the deadline we had mapped out and included in the original CFP
- Review chapters, provide feedback on the content – how does the chapter flow, are the arguments well supported, what we’d like to see them expand upon, what is kind of going off into the weeds so could be cut, etc.
- Wait for the deadline for revisions, read over the chapters one more time, and submit the manuscript to the publisher, who then reviews it and has copy-editors check for grammar and citation formatting and all that
Jessica and I are both committed to using a feminist pedagogical approach in all of our work. So when we got to step 4 and felt that several chapters would benefit from a second round of feedback and revision, we communicated with the publisher to extend our deadlines so that we could incorporate that instead of just pushing through to meet our original deadline.
And that’s when I really fell in love with this type of work. Seeing the development of contributions from ok to outstanding was so rewarding. Helping authors more clearly and directly communicate their really thoughtful ideas was so rewarding.
Editing a book involves a lot of project management skills – mapping out a timeline, recruiting contributors, working with many different contributors with different needs, managing our time to keep everything on track… It also may mean having to be the bearer of bad news. There was a contribution that, after two rounds of revisions, we still did not feel was at the level we wanted in this project, and we had to reject the chapter at that stage. That was hard. I genuinely liked the author, and hope they were able to publish their draft in another venue, but we were responsible for ensuring this project matched our vision.
It’s a big project, but absolutely one of my favorite projects I’ve done.
I worked with a different colleague, CJ Ivory, on my second co-edited book, Using Open Educational Resources to Promote Social Justice. CJ is incredibly passionate about advocating for Open Educational Resources (OER), and I’ve been focused on scholarship related to promoting social justice for years. Of course, we’re both interested in both topics, or the project wouldn’t work, but this was a way to combine the things we’re both passionate about. We recruited more broadly for this book – we have contributors from a wide range of disciplines and hope to market the book to campus Centers for Teaching and Learning, in addition to marketing to libraries and librarians. And, keeping with the Open theme, an open access electronic edition will be published simultaneously with the print version. I’m super excited for this book to come out. We submitted the full manuscript last September, and are expecting to get the copy-edited files for review within the next month.
Some of the major lessons I would share based on these experiences are:
- Choose your key collaborators wisely. With both co-editors, we worked well together because we respect one anothers’ time and energy, communicate well, share similar philosophical approaches to this work, and bring different backgrounds to the table. I mentioned above that CJ brought a knowledge of OERs to this project that, well, I could not have done this book without her. Though Jessica and I both engaged in critical librarianship, she was coming from a humanities / cultural studies background, while I come from a very social sciences background. So we were able to cover each other’s blind spots.
- If a publisher isn’t interested in your idea, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad idea or won’t work. Maybe you need to explain your idea and reasoning more clearly. I do sometimes wonder whether I was too brief in explaining our idea to that first publisher because of familiarity, whereas my initial email to the publisher I didn’t know had more explanation behind it. Maybe there are other factors at play that affect how that first publisher reads your idea. Maybe it’s just not a good fit or the right time for that idea with that publisher. It doesn’t have to be anyone’s fault, and it’s not personal. Of course, if your idea gets turned down several times, talk with some trusted colleagues or find a writing coach to talk through how to approach your pitch or frame your idea more effectively.
- And a developmental editor who cares, who is skilled in providing actionable constructive criticism, and has time to work with authors can transform an adequate piece of writing into something to be truly proud of. Great writing is not a solo sport.