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Edited collections of academic essays are an integral part of the academic publishing world, as well as of any academic career. Next to writing journal articles and perhaps your first monograph, authoring a chapter for an edited collection is probably one of the first things you will do early on in your academic career. But at some point, you’re likely to become an editor yourself: later in your career you might get invited to edit a volume, but early on you might choose to embark on such a process yourself. But what exactly is involved in being an editor of a collection of essays? Having recently co-edited such a volume myself (which Lex Academic did a masterful job of copy-editing, proofreading, and indexing), I’d like to share some insights about this process, primarily with first-time prospective editors in mind, to help make it more transparent and easier to navigate.

Before I get started, a preparatory note: the real first step of editing a volume of essays is picking a topic for the book and inviting contributors to write individual chapters. This could form a blog post in its own right, but I’m going to assume that you already have a topic and list of contributors set. Perhaps you’ve even held a workshop where the contributors presented draft versions of their papers (something I highly recommend as it enables you to hear early versions of the chapters and gently direct authors in particular directions while their chapters are still in development). All of this work is not unique to editing a volume – in many ways it’s quite similar to organising a conference, the workings of which are a bit more transparent and well understood. It’s what happens after this stage that I’d like to focus on here.

Writing a Book Proposal

So, you’ve nailed down your list of contributors, and, in consultation with them, you’ve determined what their topic will be and how they each make a unique contribution to the edited volume. One of the things that is especially important in an edited volume is the lack of overlap in subject matter: there would need to be a very good reason for two people to write on the same subject in an edited volume, because you’ll have to justify this to a publisher. And this brings me to stage one of editing a collection of essays: writing a book proposal to approach publishers. There’s so much to say about writing a book proposal that people have even written entire books about it! For now, let’s note that book proposals usually include the following:

• a description of the project and a justification of its importance
• titles and abstracts of all the chapters
• brief biographies of the contributors
• a tentative timeline to completion.

Writing a book proposal and approaching your desired publisher is an important stage because without at least some promise of the book being published, neither you nor your contributors will feel any urgency to complete their chapter, let alone see any need to be involved in the project in the first place. Part of an editor’s job at this stage is thus not only to solicit tentative titles and abstracts from all the contributors, as well as write impressive bios for them, but to write a proposal that helps sell the project to publishers. Indeed, it’s your job as editor to help publishers see the need for publishing a volume like yours, and to build a lineup of contributors that will draw readers to your volume for authoritative information on the topic. Speed is of the essence here: it will probably take months for the proposal to be reviewed, and your contributors won’t appreciate being in publication limbo for too long. So, once you have your topic and your lineup settled, writing the proposal and approaching publishers should be your number one priority. (A tip here: if you’ve never written a book proposal before, take this opportunity to build a professional relationship with one of your more senior contributors who has been successful with edited volumes by asking them for advice: seek their feedback on your proposal and perhaps even ask for their advice on which publishers to approach.)

Preparing the Manuscript

Once the book proposal gets accepted, now comes what is perhaps the most unpleasant part of being an editor: ensuring your contributors submit their contributions in a timely manner. The obvious first step here is to set a reasonable deadline in the proposal itself. Even if you’ve already held a preliminary workshop, a deadline of less than a year from when the proposal gets accepted is risky. In general, you want to be considerate of your contributors and their other commitments. Regardless of what deadline you set, make sure you communicate this to all of your contributors very clearly.

Two important notes here: 1) expect more than half of your contributors to submit after the deadline, and 2) always give your contributors a deadline that is at least a few months in advance of your deadline with the publisher. There’s nothing disingenuous about this: you need time to prepare the contributions after receiving them from the contributors, so you need to factor in some extra time. If you have, say, 10 chapters to format in line with the press’s style guide (even if you sent this to your contributors in advance), ensuring all the chapters are consistent will take lots of time (on top of your other commitments at that particular moment). Making the entire manuscript as polished as possible before you submit it to the publisher is extremely important because the book will then require less work at the copy-editing stage or later, when changes are more difficult to make. Above all, make sure your own chapter and the introduction (which you are also responsible for, of course), as well as the acknowledgements and any other additional sections, are in tip-top shape in advance of any contributions being submitted to you, so you can focus exclusively on them as they come in.

Picking a Cover Image

One of the best parts about publishing a book has to be picking the cover. But beware: many publishers pick the cover for you, or your book will belong to a specific series whose cover is already set. Keep this in mind at the contract stage: do whatever you can to negotiate the ability to pick your own cover. Why, you might ask? Because even academics judge books by their covers. Or, at the very least, a good cover can only enhance your book and make it that much easier for you and your contributors to show it off.

Apologies for tooting my own horn here, but I’m especially proud of the cover for the book I mentioned above. The book is about Christian Wolff, a somewhat forgotten but profoundly important eighteenth-century German philosopher. The cover image is a painting of him returning to his home city of Halle (Saale) after being expelled from Prussia by Wilhelm I. I chose the image as a metaphor for my hope that Wolff’s philosophy will once again be given the scholarly attention it deserves. The image is beautiful, and the press did an excellent job with it. And the best part: it was under a creative commons licence and so could be used free of charge. Make sure when choosing your own imagine you pick one that you don’t have to pay for, and which will make your book shine.

Post-publication Marketing

Once the book is printed, your job as an editor doesn’t end. Now it falls on you to promote the book. Individual contributors might do a bit of this too, but if you want the book to be reviewed, for instance, then it is your job to reach out to journals, request that it be reviewed, and perhaps even suggest some possible reviewers. Nobody else will do as good a job of this as you. The press might say that they will do some promotion, but whether they actually will, and how aggressively, is an open question. And you don’t want to leave the promotion of your book up to chance. Presses will usually send you a discount flyer, so be sure to distribute this at conferences and even e-mail it to people you think would be interested in the book.

University libraries are probably the primary ‘customer’ for your book, so making your colleagues aware of the book who might then order it for their library is important. You should also try to make posts about the book online. Marketing in these ways might feel foreign to you, but don’t underestimate the importance and the effectiveness of it. Some presses, like Cambridge University Press, have a nice policy of publishing a blog post about your book on their website (see here for an example of the blog post I wrote for a different book I recently completed). This is a really great way for you to describe your book to a more general audience, which you can then use to spread the word about your book online. Take advantage of these opportunities: not only do you want people to take notice of what you’ve accomplished, but your contributors will appreciate it too, which in turn strengthens your relationship with them. Indeed, if there is one thing that makes editing a volume a really rewarding experience, it’s that it allows you to work with people you admire (your contributors), and thus either build new or strengthen existing professional relationships.

Michael Walschots is a philosopher who specialises in the history of modern philosophy and ethics. He is the editor and translator of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason: Background Source Materials (Cambridge University Press, 2024) and the co-editor of Christian Wolff’s German Ethics: New Essays (Oxford University Press, 2024). His research has been supported by numerous grants from organisations such as Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. For more information, please visit his personal website: www.michaelwalschots.com