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[47587853]

I am thinking to edit a book on one of my research topics in Science and Engineering, i.e., by contacting several people in that area for chapters and assemble them together. At present there is no similar books published and I believe I can find a publisher interested.

Several questions I'd like to know from experienced colleagues:

1. Reviewers: Do we need external reviewers for each chapter contribution? Will the press or the Editor (to be myself) find/select reviewers?

2. Editing: Will the press provide assistance in editing the manuscripts? English may not be the native language of contributors. If I have to take care of it, will the press provide some financial support to hire such editing services?

3. Time/Efforts: Does it take a lot of time and efforts? I mean can I deal with it with regular teaching and research. Sure I will be much busier, but I don't want to be crazily busy.

4. Importance: I am in the 4th year of my academic career. Is "edited a book" a big plus for tenure, promotion, or moving to another university applications?

Also appreciate any other comments and advices in advance.

[tinyzombie]

FYI: double-posting is against the rules of the fora. You might want to ask the moderators to remove one of your duplicate topics.

[hegemony]

I don't know about your field or your university, but in my field and university, an edited book alone does not count enough for tenure.  It's a nice add-on to more primary work, but alone it doesn't satisfy the requirements.  About your other questions:

1. The press will supply reviewers.

2. The press will not copy-edit imperfect English; it will be up to you to turn it in in suitable English.  They will not provide any money for this.  (You will be lucky if you get any money out of the book -- and I mean that literally, you probably won't get any, and if you should happen to, you'd be lucky.  But in particular they won't subsidize the process of making the book ready for publication.)  If you have non-native-speaker contributors, be ready to do a lot of copy editing yourself, which will typically infuriate your contributors, who will refuse to believe that their English is not of native-speaker quality.

3. Yes, it will make you crazy-busy.  The contributors will not turn their pieces in on time, and you will have to fight to extract the pieces from several of them, and/or offend them by threatening to drop them from the project.  Several will turn in things different from the pieces they were asked to do, and bicker with you about whether they're acceptable.  Several will go over the word limit and argue about cutting.  They will variously fail to follow the style guidelines and you'll have to make all their references consistent yourself.  It will be like house remodeling: it will take twice as long and twice as much effort as you think.  And for all that, it will count for not very much on your CV.

I would only do it if tenure is a sure thing already, i.e. if you already have everything for tenure published already.  And if you don't plan to publish any more of your own work for five years or so.

[runwithscissors]

To add to hegemony's point, I think it partly depends on the size of the book and the field you are in. I recently edited a fairly slim volume with just 8 chapters plus intro and conclusions with a small but decent commercial press. The papers came from a conference session, where we all had a chance to meet at the conference, discuss the focus of the book and put it into writing. This was not too much of a headache (perhaps I was lucky), but it seems that with each additional chapter the time to completion increases exponentially. My guess is that an edited book with 8 chapters is worth the same, tenure-wise, as one with 16, so the time-to-reward ratio for longer projects is something to bear in mind.