Editing a Collection: Some Advice

Edited collections are an important part of scholarly work in the field of writing studies. The following advice may prove useful as you consider taking on the challenge of editing a collection. 

Develop Your Concept

  • Develop a clear theme for the collection. Make it narrow enough to ensure that the chapters will be able to talk to each other but broad enough to attract 15 to 20 proposals for chapters.
  • Do your research. Check to see what has been published on the theme. Determine how your book will advance the conversation about the area/issue you’ve selected. List the ways in which the new edited collection will advance the conversation.
  • Identify the likely audience for your collection. Some collections are directed at established scholars; some are focused primarily on new scholars (e.g., graduate students and early career faculty members); some are intended for a more general audience (perhaps faculty in multiple disciplines and perhaps the general public); still others speak to multiple audiences.

Select a Series

  • Identify a series on the WAC Clearinghouse that would be a good home for your collection. Get started by reading the descriptions of the various book series. Take a look at books in the series that look most promising. Don’t hesitate to reach out to series editors to discuss the potential fit and possible submission of a proposal for their series. 

Consider Whether to Solicit Contributions to Your Collection

  • Collection editors differ in their decisions about whether to issue a call for proposals before or after creating a book proposal. Some collection editors have issued a CFP before they develop their book proposal; others have waited until they have been issued a contract for their book before issuing a CFP; still others have asked for a few early chapters to include in the book proposal before issuing a larger call for proposals. Your decision will hinge on how confident you are about the overall direction of the series. If you are open to shifting that direction in some ways, submitting a proposal before issuing a CFP will allow you to receive feedback from the series editors. Doing so might help you align your collection more closely with the series you’ve selected. If you have a clearly defined focus for your collection, then issuing a CFP before submitting a proposal might help you strengthen your proposal. 

Issue Your Call for Proposals

If you decide to issue a CFP prior to submitting a proposal, follow these steps. If you decide to wait until you’ve submitted and received feedback on your proposal, look at the steps involved in the following section, Develop Your Book Proposal, and then carry out the following steps.

  • When you decide to issue a CFP, determine whether you want to receive abstracts or full chapter submissions. It can be useful (and considerate) to take into account the labor involved in drafting such submissions and whether, if a proposal or draft is rejected, the author could repurpose their submission for another publication venue.
  • Develop a CFP that reflects your theme and the ways in which you hope to advance the conversation. Use existing guides, including the WAC Clearinghouse statement on publication ethics, its statement on accessibility, and the statement on Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices, to inform the content of your CFP, your decisions about how you will review and select proposals, and your decisions about the feedback you will provide to the authors of proposals you decide to include in the collection.
  • Provide a timeline that includes deadlines for submissions of abstracts or complete chapters, expected dates for response to submissions, and deadlines for submission of final chapters. Provide word limits for abstracts or complete chapters. Keep in mind that edited collections published by the Clearinghouse should be no longer than 110,000 words in length (including material such as front matter, acknowledgments, prefaces, introductions, part openers, conclusions, afterwords, and indexes).
  • Provide contact information that will allow potential contributors to ask questions, seek clarification, and solicit your advice on their submission.
  • Circulate your CFP via email listservs, social media, and targeted email messages to potential contributors. 

Develop Your Book Proposal

  • Develop a book proposal that identifies your theme, the gap it will fill, how it will advance the conversation, and your target audience.
  • Choose writing samples to include with your proposal. If you have solicited contributions from potential chapter authors, choose one or two of them. If you have written chapters or an introduction, consider including them. 
  • If you have issued a CFP and chosen the chapters you will likely include in the collection, develop an annotated table of contents. If not, identify areas your collection will address and list them in a general table of contents.
  • Prepare a CV for each editor of the collection. If you have multiple editors, combine the CVs into a single PDF file. 
  • Visit the WAC Clearinghouse Submissions Portal at https://submissions.wacclearinghouse.org. If you have an account on the submissions portal, log in. If not, create an account. Then submit your proposal to the series you’ve identified as the best fit for your collection.

Respond to Peer Reviews and Editorial Feedback

  • Your book proposal will be reviewed by the editorial team and peer reviewers. Once you have received feedback, spend time considering it. This is a period of time when you learn how well you have communicated your ideas with the editorial team.
  • If you are asked to revise your proposal, determine whether and, if so, how you will make modifications to your concept for the collection.
  • If your proposal is rejected, consider the next suitable venue for the publication.
  • If your proposal has been approved or has been accepted with specified revisions and you have not yet issued a CFP, use the feedback you’ve received to inform the creation of your CFP.
  • The WAC Clearinghouse allows collection editors to use its submissions portal to collect and review chapter proposals and chapter drafts. If you decide to use the portal to manage the submission and review of chapters for the collection, contact the publisher of the Clearinghouse to set up a submissions site for your collection.

Review Submissions and Select Chapters

  • Develop a clear set of criteria for submission review based on goals identified in the CFP. If there is a team of editors, ensure that you are in agreement on how initial submissions will be evaluated.
  • Review submissions based on your set of criteria.
  • Finalize which chapters will appear in your collection.
  • Provide holistic feedback to authors that will allow the collection to be cohesive and take shape. You might consider at this point how chapters relate and “speak” to one another, including which chapters might fit together within sections.

Put the Manuscript Together and Prepare It for Peer Review

  • Collect revised chapters. Review each one to ensure that they are meeting the direction you’ve provided and are ready for anonymous peer review. 
  • Revise your Introduction to account for chapter changes and revision suggestions. While not absolutely necessary, it can be helpful to readers to include short summaries of the chapters in the order they will appear in the book toward the end of your Introduction. This helps readers see how the chapters relate to one another.
  • Consider how you want readers to navigate the collection and what signposts or structure is needed to support that (i.e., sections with short Introductions, a matrix or table that identifies topics discussed). It may be helpful for readers to be given this information in the introduction.
  • Begin assembling the manuscript in Word. 
    • Create a new file for this so that you keep materials separate. 
    • Rather than copying and pasting numerous files, consider using the “Merge Files” option to add separate chapters into one file. 
  • Check for consistency across chapters for titles, author names, and affiliations. While it is not necessary to apply word processing styles (such as Heading 1, Heading 2, and so on), using the Styles tool in Word can make navigation of the manuscript easier for reviewers (and will help you generate a Table of Contents). The WAC Clearinghouse Guide for Authors and Editors provides detailed guidance on the use of styles.
  • Before submitting the manuscript for review, consider sharing the manuscript with chapter authors and asking them to create cross references to other chapters in the collection. This can help increase the sense of cohesion across the entire book.
  • Before submitting the manuscript for review, consider creating section overviews, chapter overviews, prefaces, conclusions, afterwords, and so on. This can also help increase the sense of cohesion across the entire book.
  • Before submitting the manuscript for review, ensure that it is ready for anonymous peer review. For example, remove, as much as possible, any references to the names of collection editors and chapter authors as well as their institutions and programs. 
  • Submit the full manuscript for review. Log in to the Clearinghouse submissions portal and add the file to your initial submission. An email  message will be sent automatically by the portal to the series editors, but you may also wish to send a personal email message to them as well. 

Review Peer Reviews and Editorial Feedback (Part 2)

  • Series editors will usually send a review letter (typically in the form of an email message) and may include all or parts of the peer reviews along with the letter reviews that are returned,
  • Give yourself time to read and reflect on the feedback you’ve received.
  • If you are asked to revise the manuscript, determine what you will need to do as the collection editor(s) and what the chapter authors and other contributors (e.g., the author of a preface) should do. You might, for example, suggest changes such as reductions in the length of a chapter, reconceptualization of a chapter, additional citations and discussions of related work, among other kinds of changes. Be aware that some suggestions from the editors or peer reviewers may seem unkind (and may in fact be unkind). Consider whether and, if so, how to share such feedback with your contributors. 
  • If the manuscript has been accepted with specified revisions, consider how best to finalize the manuscript. The advice provided in the previous point may apply here.
  • If the manuscript is rejected, consider the next suitable venue for the book and how you might proceed in submitting it to another venue.

Prepare the Manuscript for Production

  • The production process at the WAC Clearinghouse involves copy editing, book design, and production. You will be asked to review copy edits and return a clean manuscript to the production team. At this stage, you will find it useful to share the copy edits with your contributors. Please note that this will be the last point at which your contributors will be able to make substantive changes to their chapters. The book design and production process will produce a nearly final proof that the collection editor(s) will be asked to review. At this point, the production team generally will not accept changes that will increase the length of a chapter or, in some cases, even the length of individual paragraphs. (This reflects the impact that increasing the length of a paragraph or adding pages to a chapter  can have on subsequent parts of the book.)
  • The Clearinghouse  provides a Manuscript Preparation Checklist that will help you prepare your manuscript for production. If you have questions about a specific area–such as preparing figures and tables, ensuring accessibility of the document, or creating an index–you can consult the Clearinghouse Guide for Authors and Editors.
  • The submissions checklist provides advice on submitting your manuscript for production. Generally, you can do so via email attachments or a cloud platform such as Dropbox or Google Drive. Some graphics files, for example, may be too large to attach to an email message.

A Final Note

As you consider the advice in this guide, you are likely to have questions or need clarification. When you do, please contact the series editors or the Associate Publisher for Books. You can find their contact information on the series main page and submissions pages as well as on the the Clearinghouse Editorial Team page.