Publishers

When it was time to send out the prospectus, sample chapters, and supporting materials for the textbook I've been working on, one natural question was, "Who do I send this to?"

There are, after all, lots and lots of companies that publish books. And if you run out of companies, you can always publish your manuscript yourself through amazon.com or lulu or any of a number of self-publishing companies. But publishing a textbook in today's market is a bigger project than simply putting the book together. Today, textbooks come with lots of ancillary materials: websites, instructor's manuals, student study guides, electronic homework services, and so on. For better or worse, if you want your book to be competitive with others in your niche, you need to have those materials available for the people that want them, which means that you need to work with a company that specializes in publishing textbooks.

Even more important, selling your manuscript to an established textbook company gives you access to that company's distribution network. The biggest companies didn't get that way by accident, and one key ingredient in their success recipe is that they have a sales force of representatives that make regular visits to college campuses, visit personally with instructors, and try to convince them to adopt your text. Nobody will buy your book if they don't know about it; access to a well-established distribution network makes finding a publisher specializing in textbooks crucial.

There used to  be a lot of textbook publishers, but consolidation over the past fifteen or twenty years has cut the numbers significantly. Further, textbook publishers tend to specialize in particular fields. So when I was ready to send out my materials for review, I really only had about six publishers to choose from that I felt had the resources to make my book a commercial success.

I contacted both book representatives and acquisitions editors at those six companies, and forwarded each company my materials. Within a few days, I learned that one company was already developing a text in the same area with another author (so "Thanks, but no, thanks, we won't be reviewing your manuscript.") Another already publishes a couple of texts in the field already and wasn't anxious to put resources into a third. I got a much kinder rejection letter from them, including some helpful suggestions about my materials and a reference to a person at another company. I never heard anything back from three of the other companies at all, which made me a little sad.

But I struck gold with the sixth company, and thank goodness, because if I'd been rejected by everybody, I might have melted into a puddle. They were both interested in the text and anxious to send some chapters out for review by faculty members currently teaching the course. After a few quick phone calls and email exchanged with the acquisition editor, my chapters were sent off for review.

One hurdle jumped. Many, many more to go.