The Relationship Between Book Author and Commissioning Editor

Whether you have published with the same publishing house your entire academic life or whether you have just defended your Ph.D and are embarking on commercial publication, the first person you are likely to come into contact with is a commissioning editor, also known in some publishing houses as an acquisitions editor.

Each commissioning editor's job description differs from the next, but the one thing we all have in common is the responsibility to commission new books onto our respective lists in line with whatever our company's publishing strategy might be.

With this comes a whole myriad of specific tasks:

• researching new areas to publish in.
• keeping abreast of current market trends.
• considering speculative proposals.
• making decisions about commercial and academic viability.
• finding readers to review proposals and scripts.
• negotiating contracts.
• setting deadlines.
• answering queries from contracted authors.
• liaising with other in-house departments.
• attending conferences and university campus visiting.

Add to that all the usual bits of office administration that always need to be done and you can guarantee a commissioning editor will be a pretty busy person and very good at juggling their work! However, for all the pressures we might be under, and whether it's on the phone, via email, or in the flesh, commissioning editors spend a large part of their working week speaking with their authors.

It sounds obvious but the secret to a successful author-editor relationship is regular communication. At any stage between signing a book contract and having the finished product hit the shops, authors should not be afraid to contact their editor, no matter how small they think their query might be, because usually the queries aren't small at all. If an author is unclear as to what a certain clause in their contract means, their editor will be able to clarify. If teaching commitments have eaten into writing time and an author is not going to be able to deliver by their deadline, they should immediately alert their editor so that the editor can then go back to their various colleagues and let them know. Or, if their book is going to be significantly longer or shorter than their editor is expecting, the author should alert their editor as soon as possible. These are just a few examples of situations an author might find themselves in where they need to contact their editor. And of course this communication works both ways. Your editor should respond in a timely fashion to your queries or problems, although "timely" may not mean the same day.

Between your book being contracted and actually published there are other people, whose job titles end in "editor" that an author might hear from directly. There might be a production editor, or desk editor, whose job it is to deal with the physical aspect of turning the manuscript into an actual book. There might be a copyeditor, whose job it is to mark up the manuscript for typesetting and catch any last minute typos that haven't already been spotted. There is also the marketing department, who may well contact an author directly about the promotion they have planned for their title. This may all seem confusing but these people all bring certain specialist knowledge to the mix that will give a book the best possible start. And there's a lot that the author can do to help at this stage.

In terms of the production process, the first thing is to respond to the copyeditor's queries (and there probably will be some) and then turn proofs around by the deadline given. Any delays at these early stages can have dramatic effects on the publication schedules. From a more pro-active point of view, authors can really work with the marketing department to enhance their plans for their book's promotion.

For instance, the author can make sure their marketing contact is told about all the appropriate journals the department/university library subscribes to where a book review might be sent. Chances are they will have the majority on their radar but there are so many journals out there now that maybe some are unknown. They should also be told about any impending conferences or symposia the author might be attending - maybe the marketing department could put together a flyer for the author to hand out or leave somewhere prominent. Or maybe someone in the marketing department will be attending the conference themselves so a flyer could go on the book stand. Generally informing them about any handy contacts, associations, mailing groups; all these things give the marketing department additional avenues for promotion. If there isn't a marketing person to contact, tell the commissioning editor.

Routledge is a large publishing company where we have marketing teams assigned to each individual list, but in some of the smaller presses, the commissioning editor takes on not only the editorial, but also the production and marketing responsibilities as well.

Throughout the whole of a book's pre-publication life, the commissioning editor is an ever-present constant, who is equally as anxious to see the book appear from the printer as the author. The author-editor relationship should not grind to a halt the moment the book is published though. The hope, from an editor's point of view, is that each book will hopefully lead to the next book, or even a new edition, with a view to building up a successful list of well-established authors who have a publishing history with their particular press. As such, the editor is on hand to advise and encourage their author to get the next book underway, as well as charting the success of the book just published. When it works, there's nothing better than letting an author know their book has sold through its first print run and is going on to reprint again and again.

Stephanie Rogers
Commissioning Editor, Routledge Books