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[cranefly]

I've got my MS with a publisher who wants 6 months exclusive rights to review my work. Has anybody ever said OK and yet sent it elsewhere anyway?
6 months seems a little long to me-- I want to see some progress that I can report to my "superiors"....
thoughts?

[untenured]

Can you negotiate the time with the publisher?

I've never heard of this practice before.

Untenured

[seniorscholar]

I've got my MS with a publisher who wants 6 months exclusive rights to review my work. Has anybody ever said OK and yet sent it elsewhere anyway?
6 months seems a little long to me-- I want to see some progress that I can report to my "superiors"....
thoughts?

This does, indeed, sound like a very long time. On the other hand, before a press commits to sending a manuscript out for review (which involves paying a reading fee to, usually, two people) it does generally want an assurance that it can have the book if it wants it. I've known of presses that asked friends of mine for exclusive rights for times between six weeks and three months.

Generally, however, sending the manuscript elsewhere when you've promised exclusive rights for x time to one press is dishonest, and academic publishing is a very small world. You are quite apt to acquire a nasty reputation and find that you're not welcome anywhere. What happens, for example, when press A sends your manuscript to the best reader for a book in that subfield, and you send the manuscript to press B, and press B asks the same best reader to read it? Usually, the reader (who has good relations with both presses) will tell Press B that s/he's already reading it for Press A, and may well tell press A about it. (If the reader doesn't, the editor at press B, who is very annoyed with you, will call his/her good friend, the editor at Press A, and provide the information.) Result = neither of them will go further with the manuscript, since you're seen as "not dependable" or "not trustworthy."

The ONE exception I know when it's OK to refuse any exclusive reading at all, and make multiple manuscript submissions, telling presses that you are doing so, is when you have a truly exciting manuscript on a very hot new and/or current topic, and press editors will all realize that. I think an academic book of this nature comes along about once every two or three years.

[tenured_feminist]

If it's a book, this time frame is not at all unusual. Best to cool your heels, though if you do get a nibble from a better press, you can communicate this at around the 4-5 month mark.

Having been on the reviewing end of this, I can imagine how difficult it is to extract really good, thorough reviews from peers on full manuscripts. Without the exclusivity norm, I'd probably be getting tagged for this more frequently than I already am, and I'd say no a lot more. So while it does slow things up, it's probably the only way to keep the system up and running.

A strong word of caution here -- many top uni presses are VERY prickly about this issue.

[yellowtractor]

If it's a book, this time frame is not at all unusual. Best to cool your heels, though if you do get a nibble from a better press, you can communicate this at around the 4-5 month mark.

Having been on the reviewing end of this, I can imagine how difficult it is to extract really good, thorough reviews from peers on full manuscripts. Without the exclusivity norm, I'd probably be getting tagged for this more frequently than I already am, and I'd say no a lot more. So while it does slow things up, it's probably the only way to keep the system up and running.

A strong word of caution here -- many top uni presses are VERY prickly about this issue.

Yes, unfortunately.  In the humanities, at least, it's understood that while you may submit book proposals to as many presses as you like, whenever you like, you are only submitting the full ms to one press at a time.  As for six months:  it takes this much time--at a minimum--for university presses to process the ms, secure outside readers, send out the ms, receive the reader reports back, and make a decision.  This is the protocol in place at academic presses, and there's nothing much you can do about it.  Indeed, my first book took 12 months to emerge from this process--6 would have been just dreamy.

The outside review system is highly imperfect--especially when a "senior scholar" agrees to review a ms, dawdles for three, six, eight months, and then reneges--but nobody has come up with a better one in this age of low sales and microspecialized subdisciplines.  All I can say is it makes the bitter pill easier to swallow if you understand what's going on (in theory, at least) on the publisher's end.