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[racerboy]

OK, gang, I need some psychic support here.

Five years working on research and manuscript on a topic dear to my heart.  One dozen rejections, finally one publisher, a good one, has said (more or less) "we aren't appalled by your proposal, and if you were willing to take the 36 alphanumeric characters, sundry punctuation, and spaces that you've employed, and rearrange them into something that normal mortals would actually read, we might deign to publish said manuscript."

I know the correct answer is "how high would you like me to jump."  I know the right next move is to grovel and agree to whatever they demand/'suggest.'  I just need the intestinal fortitude to consign a couple hundred thousand words (a few hundred of them pretty good) to the literary dumpster and agree to produce the concise, readable, sellable book they're suggesting.

But, I do NOT WANT to!  I want them to publish the mammoth, overly complex, exquisitely researched and passionately argued multi-volume tome that this project has become.  Millions would be impressed by its brilliant rhetoric, I'm sure.  And I might even win the Nobel prize for Ass-Kicking Academic Manuscript.  Really!

So, um, please help me down from the cliff and remind me that any book is better than no book. 

And yes, I've had a few glasses of wine tonight.  Why do you ask?

[yellowtractor]

First, this should be in the research forum, to which I expect the Moderators will remove it shortly.

Second:  Racerboy, it all depends on what you want.  Nevermind for the moment that you sound faintly peevish, a la Gollum in The Hobbit, in your second paragraph.  You spent five years working on something for the joy of it.  Now you're done, more or less, and you want to sell it.

I hate to sound appalling, but it's this simple.

The correct answer is to ask yourself what sort of audience you envision for your labor of love (now or in the future); what are the best means towards reaching that audience; and how far you will go, in terms of revision, to reach that audience.

The heartbreak of publishing is that what a publisher wants--thinks will sell, thinks he or she can sell--and what an audience wants--wants to read--may have nothing at all to do with what the author wants--i.e., in the original writing, or subsequently.

You seem to have accepted that nobody is going to publish your impassioned, multi-volume history of toenail clippers in imperial Rome, at least not at the length and in the form that it has most recently achieved.  You either need to (a) accede to the publisher's demand (more or less graciously), (b) keep trying to find another publisher (more or less fruitlessly), (c) self-publish, or (d) not publish at all.

Understand:  All four of these options are ethically, creatively, and intellectually legitimate.  Really.  They are.  They just lead to different outcomes.  To wit:

(d) means no audience.  Period.  You can sit at home and fondle your Precious relish your scholarly achievement without any outside interference.

(c) means little or no credibility in the eyes of fellow academics.  Your career will likely go nowhere; it may even suffer, depending on where you currently stand in your school or field's T&P hierarchy.  Also, you'll have to work very, very hard to create, market, and distribute a product worth of your years of research and writing.  You'll have to find that audience, on your own.  The more rarefied the topic, the more difficult this is.

(b) almost certainly means more disappointment, and, if you're lucky, more responses like the one you've already got in hand; still, one may wish upon a star.  (a) means a great deal of hard work you find distasteful at best, for a product that will find some sort of audience--however small--and will potentially enhance your academic career, but that will also stare you in the face for many years to come as a palpable reminder of the gulf between what you wanted and what you wound up with.

If you need this book for academic T&P, or if you want to reach a wider academic audience on the academy's terms, then you need to revise the ms into something a reputable academic publisher will be willing to purvey.  You can hold your nose with one hand while typing with the other, if it helps.

If you do not need this book for academic T&P and don't care about that wider academic audience--or any audience at all--then it is yours.  Completely yours.  You can take satisfaction in the personal achievement the research and writing provide you with, without reference to publishing:  and leave it at this.  You can pay to have it produced by a vanity publisher or job printer and send it to special freinds.  You can commit it to illuminated ricepaper and fold each page into precious, delicate origami you package in the dried shells of rare crustaceans and send unsolicited to the Sultan of Brunei, COD.

It really is yours:  the research, the writing, and ultimately the disposition of the manuscript.

Beyond this, I will only say:  Do not agree, implicitly or explicitly, to the publisher's demands, hoping to argue your editor our of these provisions at some later date (by which time said editor will surely see and accede to the true nature of your brilliance, your art).  This way lieth great pain and suffering for all.

[voxprincipalis]

The heartbreak of publishing is that what a publisher wants--thinks will sell, thinks he or she can sell--and what an audience wants--wants to read--may have nothing at all to do with what the author wants--i.e., in the original writing, or subsequently.

They say a camel is a horse designed by committee.

Every book is a camel.

VP

[yellowtractor]

The heartbreak of publishing is that what a publisher wants--thinks will sell, thinks he or she can sell--and what an audience wants--wants to read--may have nothing at all to do with what the author wants--i.e., in the original writing, or subsequently.

They say a camel is a horse designed by committee.

Every book is a camel.

VP

No, not every book.  But many are, and some more than others.  Academic peer review and an innate conservativism on the part of university presses ensures a certain Bactrian symmetry in most monographs.  Again, it is about what you want, and making choices.


Just like...(interthreaduality alert)...homeschooling!

[post_functional]

I know how you feel, OP. 

I've recently received some feedback on a manuscript I've been working on for a number of years too, and told, like you, by a definitive authority in the field that the work is publishable if only I would scale it back--- a lot.  Like you, I already know I'm going to do it, swallow my pride, take my lumps, and do the right thing in the name of career development, because this is not just about my fantasy, this is about supporting a family and getting a job and doing the right thing and all that.

But, boy, my heart sure isn't in it.  I wanted to write a bold manuscript that would make a noticeable contribution and possibly resurrect a moribund subfield.  I didn't set out to write a "moderate" and "modest" paper on purpose.

Don't anybody jump down my throat.  I know I was naive.  My main field is not a publishing-requisite field (in terms of publishing scholarship, I mean). 

[larryc]

It will be a better book and gain a wider audience for the trimming. Do it.

[racerboy]

In progress.  As you could guess, as I've gone through the reviewer's comments that other, much more readable and sellable book is emerging.  I'll have a lot of chaff left on the floor, but suspect I'll have an interested publisher. 

Future post to reveal outcome...

[oldadjunct]

Doesn't chaff belong on the floor?  Shouldn't you be thanking your editor rather than chafing at the identification of the chaff?

Correct me if I am wrong, Thomas Woolf's You Can't Go Home Again was submitted as a horrifying 1,000 page plus screed.

You might want to watch a few "Director's Cut" DVD's to discover the value of an editor.

[mystictechgal]

Second:  Racerboy, it all depends on what you want.  Nevermind for the moment that you sound faintly peevish, a la Gollum in The Hobbit, in your second paragraph.  You spent five years working on something for the joy of it.  Now you're done, more or less, and you want to sell it.

I hate to sound appalling, but it's this simple.

The correct answer is to ask yourself what sort of audience you envision for your labor of love (now or in the future); what are the best means towards reaching that audience; and how far you will go, in terms of revision, to reach that audience.

The heartbreak of publishing is that what a publisher wants--thinks will sell, thinks he or she can sell--and what an audience wants--wants to read--may have nothing at all to do with what the author wants--i.e., in the original writing, or subsequently.

You seem to have accepted that nobody is going to publish your impassioned, multi-volume history of toenail clippers in imperial Rome, at least not at the length and in the form that it has most recently achieved.  You either need to (a) accede to the publisher's demand (more or less graciously), (b) keep trying to find another publisher (more or less fruitlessly), (c) self-publish, or (d) not publish at all.

Understand:  All four of these options are ethically, creatively, and intellectually legitimate.  Really.  They are.  They just lead to different outcomes.  To wit:

(d) means no audience.  Period.  You can sit at home and fondle your Precious relish your scholarly achievement without any outside interference.

(c) means little or no credibility in the eyes of fellow academics.  Your career will likely go nowhere; it may even suffer, depending on where you currently stand in your school or field's T&P hierarchy.  Also, you'll have to work very, very hard to create, market, and distribute a product worth of your years of research and writing.  You'll have to find that audience, on your own.  The more rarefied the topic, the more difficult this is.

(b) almost certainly means more disappointment, and, if you're lucky, more responses like the one you've already got in hand; still, one may wish upon a star.  (a) means a great deal of hard work you find distasteful at best, for a product that will find some sort of audience--however small--and will potentially enhance your academic career, but that will also stare you in the face for many years to come as a palpable reminder of the gulf between what you wanted and what you wound up with.

If you need this book for academic T&P, or if you want to reach a wider academic audience on the academy's terms, then you need to revise the ms into something a reputable academic publisher will be willing to purvey.  You can hold your nose with one hand while typing with the other, if it helps.

If you do not need this book for academic T&P and don't care about that wider academic audience--or any audience at all--then it is yours.  Completely yours.  You can take satisfaction in the personal achievement the research and writing provide you with, without reference to publishing:  and leave it at this.  You can pay to have it produced by a vanity publisher or job printer and send it to special freinds.  You can commit it to illuminated ricepaper and fold each page into precious, delicate origami you package in the dried shells of rare crustaceans and send unsolicited to the Sultan of Brunei, COD.

It really is yours:  the research, the writing, and ultimately the disposition of the manuscript.

Beyond this, I will only say:  Do not agree, implicitly or explicitly, to the publisher's demands, hoping to argue your editor our of these provisions at some later date (by which time said editor will surely see and accede to the true nature of your brilliance, your art).  This way lieth great pain and suffering for all.

I just came across this and, if the HOF should enshrine some of the best counsel the fora can offer, it certainly belongs there, IMO.  It will be so enshrined shortly.

[post_functional]

First, this should be in the research forum, to which I expect the Moderators will remove it shortly.

Second:  Racerboy, it all depends on what you want.  Nevermind for the moment that you sound faintly peevish, a la Gollum in The Hobbit, in your second paragraph.  You spent five years working on something for the joy of it.  Now you're done, more or less, and you want to sell it.

I hate to sound appalling, but it's this simple.

The correct answer is to ask yourself what sort of audience you envision for your labor of love (now or in the future); what are the best means towards reaching that audience; and how far you will go, in terms of revision, to reach that audience.

The heartbreak of publishing is that what a publisher wants--thinks will sell, thinks he or she can sell--and what an audience wants--wants to read--may have nothing at all to do with what the author wants--i.e., in the original writing, or subsequently.

You seem to have accepted that nobody is going to publish your impassioned, multi-volume history of toenail clippers in imperial Rome, at least not at the length and in the form that it has most recently achieved.  You either need to (a) accede to the publisher's demand (more or less graciously), (b) keep trying to find another publisher (more or less fruitlessly), (c) self-publish, or (d) not publish at all.

Understand:  All four of these options are ethically, creatively, and intellectually legitimate.  Really.  They are.  They just lead to different outcomes.  To wit:

(d) means no audience.  Period.  You can sit at home and fondle your Precious relish your scholarly achievement without any outside interference.

(c) means little or no credibility in the eyes of fellow academics.  Your career will likely go nowhere; it may even suffer, depending on where you currently stand in your school or field's T&P hierarchy.  Also, you'll have to work very, very hard to create, market, and distribute a product worth of your years of research and writing.  You'll have to find that audience, on your own.  The more rarefied the topic, the more difficult this is.

(b) almost certainly means more disappointment, and, if you're lucky, more responses like the one you've already got in hand; still, one may wish upon a star.  (a) means a great deal of hard work you find distasteful at best, for a product that will find some sort of audience--however small--and will potentially enhance your academic career, but that will also stare you in the face for many years to come as a palpable reminder of the gulf between what you wanted and what you wound up with.

In other words, there is no happy ending, ever.

You people are awfully quick to (1) assume that racerboy's work isn't a work of unique, unheralded genius, unseen by a myopic publisher, that ought to be left intact; (2) celebrate his conformity instead of lamenting the necessity of it; (3) forget option (e), the Charles Ives method: leave the manuscript in your dresser drawer unchanged for fifty years and let somebody else discover its brilliance and value.

[john_proctor]

Speaking as someone who has worked on the editorial side:

Acquisitions Editors aren't generally idiots.  There's the rare newbie or aristocrat (who's self-financed largely), but the field is highly, highly competitive and the beginning salaries are bumpkis.  Anyone who has weathered the market and the poverty to be successful (particularly at a large press) has only done so because s/he has a really good eye, a really good sense of the market, and a really good gut-instinct for how to bring a struggling manuscript to the most successful end.

Seriously.  You can't imagine how much it is a "what have you done for me lately" business.  Much more than tenure track ever thought of being.  To have survived means having a good eye.

Far more often than not, editors are right about their suggestions.

While it is, indeed, true that some are worthless, one ignores their suggestions at one's peril. 

I recommend an evening with a bottle of scotch, some time alone, and a soul-searching weekend where you at least try to sketch out in outline how the revisions would look and just see if there isn't something to the editor's remarks.

I would redouble this suggestion if, indeed, the manuscript has ever before been rejected or sent back for revision.

[dellaroux]

It's sounding as if the OP has taken good counsel to heart; for a spelled-out explanation of an approach similar to YT's, see also former CUP editor Wm. Germano's brief paperback, From Dissertation to Book.

Another approach, although not one I could apply (I tried), was in Zerbavel's The Clockwork Muse.

His idea of restarting with a new file worked for me, but I had a hard time making myself move things sentence-by-sentence.

[yellowtractor]

You people are awfully quick to (1) assume that racerboy's work isn't a work of unique, unheralded genius, unseen by a myopic publisher, that ought to be left intact; (2) celebrate his conformity instead of lamenting the necessity of it; (3) forget option (e), the Charles Ives method: leave the manuscript in your dresser drawer unchanged for fifty years and let somebody else discover its brilliance and value.

My experience, scholarly and personally, is that misunderstood, before-their-time geniuses are much rarer than some think.

[canadatourismguy]

They say a camel is a horse designed by committee.

Every book is a camel.

VP

This is my quote of the year!

[multicoastal]

There might just be a bad fit between the press and the book.  With my book, I had one (university) press recommend enough revisions to make it a different book.  Another press (one that basically markets scholarly monographs to research libraries) accepted it as-is.  I went with the second press, figuring I'd rather have fewer revisions than a potentially wider audience.  If you're feeling that resentful about the revisions you might want to consider trying another press that has a different kind of market.