Behind the Scenes: Preparations for Proposing a New Book

When a potential author prepares a proposal for a new textbook, my work begins. Here's an admittedly incomplete list of the main tasks acquisitions folks like me need to complete before we can bring a formal book proposal to a decision making body.

• Work with author to refine proposal, table of contents, sample chapters, and such


• Create survey to gain feedback on project


• Find and assign reviewers to complete the survey


• Compile survey feedback and review with author


• 
  
  Request production estimate, which lists the various costs of each component of the book. To do that, I need to provide these estimates and other data:
  
  
  
  
  • Title and subtitle
  
  
  • Trim size
  
  
  • Number of book pages
  
  
  • Type of cover and binding
  
  
  • Number of colors for cover and interior (black-and-white interior is 1-color, black; black and, say, magenta interior is 2-color; what you call full color is 4-color to us, the colors being cyan [blue], magenta, yellow, and black)
  
  
  • Number of photos and how they will be supplied (film, hard copy, or electronic)
  
  
  • Number and approximate complexity of illustrations (for instance, 100 illustrations: 60% complex, 20% moderately complex, 20% simple)
  
  
  • Anticipated manuscript submission date
  
  
  • Anticipated publication date
  
  
  • Price and other business model considerations
  
  
  • Anticipated total fees for developmental editor
  
  
  • 
    
    Ancillaries to be offered, such as:
    
    
    
    
    • PowerPoints, including number of slides and images to be inserted
    
    
    • Test bank including number of test items
    
    
    • Instructor's guide, including number of pages and images to be inserted
    
    
    • Interactive software
    
    
    • Online resources
    
    
    • Image bank including number of images
    
    
    • Flash cards, including format (print, electronic on CD-ROM, electronic online), total number, and number of illustrations, if any
    
    
    • Accompanying workbook (which actually gets its own proposal and financials)
    
    
    
    
  
  
  • Estimated cost of building ancillaries
  
  
  
  


• 
  
  Complete what we call here a gross profit estimate, or GPE, for which I need to supply the following:
  
  
  
  
  • Expected unit sales over life of title (LOT) for each market (MA, PA, NP, etc)
  
  
  • Expected unit sales for first year
  
  
  • Average discount for distributors and retailers
  
  
  • Number of complimentary copies needed to properly market the book
  
  
  
  


• 
  
  Prepare formal proposal document, including:
  
  
  
  
  • Overview of the product and ancillaries
  
  
  • Why the proposed author is the right person to write the right book at the right time for the right market
  
  
  • Summary of reviewer feedback
  
  
  • Royalty rate, amount of author grant, and other author-related financial information
  
  
  • 
    
    Full competitive summary, including:
    
    
    
    
    • Title, author, edition number, publisher, copyright year, ISBN, page count, price, and so forth
    
    
    • Ancillaries available
    
    
    • Strengths
    
    
    • Weaknesses
    
    
    
    
  
  
  • Market analysis
  
  
  • Any other information we believe will help the decision making body, in my case the Editorial Board, determine whether to publish a book
  
  
  
  

Whew, no wonder I'm always behind!

Will the iPad and Kindle Kill Traditional Textbooks?

TONS of news lately on the new Apple iPad and Kindle's response to it.Some people are wondering whether traditional textbooks will be dead soon.

A blog on the British Medical Journal Group Blog asks whether recent technologies will kill off medical textbooks on paper. The blogger, Harry Brown, takes the position that yes, they will indeed kill paper texts and probably in the not so distant future.

Me, I'm not so sure.

I absolutely believe that the iPad, Kindle DX, and lots of other technologies are changing the way people buy and use clinical content, and I LOVE it. These technologies offer many features that print-on-paper (POP) products simply can't.

Yet there's something about paper, something about holding a book, about writing in the margins and highlighting key passages that make traditional textbooks important learning tools. We've seen attempts at schools going all-electronic falter because the students found the devices (the Kindle DX at Syracuse University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison) too cumbersome, especially for bookmarking, highlighting, and taking notes.

Certainly the technologies will improve and e-books will find a place in education. Absolutely. Bet the farm on it.

But they will not universally replace books just as television didn't universally replace radio, the internet didn't universally replace TV, and so on.

These devices present another option for the user, and for some applications in education, they'll make perfect sense. For others, they'll fall far short.

Same with POP products. They just don't make sense for certain pedagogical applications anymore, which is one of the reasons why all of us textbook publishers are scrambling to provide electronic ancillaries, to supplement the books with what they can't do very well, things like interactivity, rapid searchability, that kind of thing.

That doesn't mean technology will kill textbooks, it just means that the way we develop and present textbooks, and the way we link them with technology, will change. It HAS to change, the market is demanding it.

And we'll do it, we'll change. Actually we already are, and we'll continue to adapt to the technologies and we'll continue to sell paper textbooks because they offer things e-books can't.

More on that to come…