Reading Time: 8 minutes
I’m in a liminal space on my writing. It was a very busy summer, one way and another, and I was in a bit of a forced march to get projects done before it was over. The book manuscript is the longest piece I’ve ever written. I got it and a journal article off to their respective publishers. Now I wait.
There are some projects that I am only confident that I will finish them after they are finished. People talk about stretch goals and this one for me. I had reached out to a publisher and pitched my book idea to them. Fortunately for me, they were interested and I didn’t need to pitch multiple publishers. As we talked, I refined my pitch and expanded it until, three or four revisions in, it was ready to go up the chain for a decision.
This is a good example of me not knowing what I don’t know. I had been at the law school in my current role for a few months when I decided to cue up a book. I didn’t know how long it would take to pitch, to write, and to get it published. While I have been through this process before, the publisher had initiated the first conversation the first time. The rest of it is mostly a blur. I remember writing every morning on the train, and in the evenings and on weekends. The manuscript took time and then there was the proofing of the galleys, which I did on a tablet with a PDF editor. But the actual work is not something I recall very clearly.
The Bump
Now I was in uncharted waters and what experience I had was rusty. The clock had started, though, on my publish or perish timeline (most people experience it as up or out). When I have a deadline like that, I tend to try to start to fill the hopper or pipeline.
This does not mean I am task-oriented. If anything, I’m deadline-oriented. Given a known output and a fixed timeline, I tend to work towards that deadline. Some folks would call it procrastination. But since a project is almost never the only thing under way, jostling with other projects and obligations, I find that this approach works for me. The key is to not wait until the last minute and, as with everything, know what resources you have available.
The upside of signing a contract with a publisher is that you know you have the raw material for the output: the writer, the ideas, and someone to put them on literal paper. The downside is that you now have to deliver. Which is fine, if you know you can. But some projects you don’t know how they’ll work out until they’re done.
It’s a bit different with a journal article, which I had also started. In fact, I had started gathering data for it before I even switched roles. I knew I was going to need some time to gather the data and I wanted to write about the topic—law library hiring—no matter where I was working. Fortunately, because of how academic publishing works (it appears to be common that only works created while you’re on the tenure track count, so prior works aren’t of much use), I had not gotten the research done by the time I was hired. But I knew I was going to write the entire article, and sooner than later, before I pitched it to a publisher.
These two approaches caused me a bit of conflict. A contract up front with no work in hand felt like a ton of pressure. A future possibility of publishing a journal article fed my worst instincts for procrastinating, putting it in the never-never. This is a recipe for resource management problems, which I attempted to solve with time (the greatest resource) management.
The first thing was to start writing the journal article as soon as I realized the book publisher might be serious about moving forward. It’s like watching a storm line approaching. You know it’s going to pour in the near future, so better do what you can to get into shelter or otherwise prepare.
This was harder than I expected, as I had picked up a teaching assignment at the last minute. It meant that my time was already shorter than I’d expected. One of the reasons I had decided to move to academia was that, unlike my other roles, it was acceptable to do this sort of writing as part of the job. My employer at the time had made it clear that I could not use any work-related resources—time, computers, internet—for my books. It was nice to know that, if time allowed, I was able to work on tenure-related publications.
If it was a challenge for the article, I knew it would be worse for the book. The article didn’t have a deadline, was definitely going to be shorter, and was largely in order. I had the data I needed, I knew generally how I’d structure it, and could anticipate a general length. I decided not only to prioritize it (I did not yet have a manuscript deadline for the book), but to try to get it done before the end of the teaching term.
The theory was that this would give me the summer to work on the book manuscript. Also, I knew that I could submit the finished article and start that process. This was also new ground to me: how much time does it take to get an acceptance, how many publishers, and so on. Once it’s accepted, how long for peer-reviews and editorial? I had no idea. But I figured that, if I could get the article off before I started writing the book, I could have one starting to bake in the oven while the other was still being mixed together.
The Grind
Left to my own devices, I procrastinated. The article was off, the final grades for the semester were turned in, and now I needed a bit of a jolt to start writing. The beauty of the pitch process is that I had my first chapter largely finished and I had a pretty extensive outline. In the event, I only did a few expansions (adding 2 or 3 chapters) and moving two chapters around for a better flow. That may also have dampened my sense of urgency.
It was at this moment that a colleague suggested that a group of us get together to write every week. I knew one day a week would not be enough to get the book done but, like any group commitment, I knew that an overt agreement to participate would spur me along. I would not want to be the person who wasn’t keeping up. It also offered me a chance to meet some of the faculty who I didn’t really know and who were in the same boat as me in needing to publish.
I also approached it like a project and started to measure my resources and outputs. I created a spreadsheet that tracked a bunch of information. Not all of it was useful but I wanted to make sure I was making progress. I tracked the word count as well as the word count including footnotes. The footnotes added to the word count but I wanted to know how much, and to ensure that my base word count was reaching the contractual amount. I don’t know this for a fact, but I expect the word count is more of a production goal and so it’s a “give or take” number. As long as you’re in the neighborhood, you’re fine.
The spreadsheet has conditional formatting. The darker green had the higher word counts, the red the fewest. It helped me track what were good days and what were less successful. Some of the red days were due to me having to do additional research or rethinking a chapter, causing more time to be spent on mechanics. I had a couple of strong days that made up for those.
Those group writing Thursdays kept me honest. While I was very methodical and, once I had the habit, I kept on my own pace, it was good to know I was going to see colleagues weekly. We would all talk for a second about how things were going—the assumption was that it wasn’t the only day we were all writing—and frequently people swapped projects after a few weeks, just for a change of pace.
It helped, too, to block off my calendar. Not that anyone was looking for me in the summer. But I put four-hour blocks on every morning from mid-May to mid-August. I got in to my office first thing, grabbed my noise-cancelling headphones, my laptop, and my coffee and headed to a library floor. I spun up a playlist (the same one, every day) and started writing.
There were days that felt very much like mere disgorgement, emptying out thoughts that had been rolling around in my head for decades. Others were more fun, fleshing out ideas that I hadn’t realized I had already mostly finished in my head. In this way it was a lot like blogging, where the ideas are often half-baked before I start writing (and sometimes still half-baked when I’m done).
I had speculated on how I would approach it and that came back to me a number of times. In the end, I wrote straight through, re-reading the chapter as I went but not re-reading from the start. My biggest concern was that I would use my revision time to fine-tune the start to the detriment of the end. Once I was nearing the end, I did start to spend more time going back from the top and re-reading and revising the manuscript. It was a nice break from writing from scratch. Also, the writing I was reviewing was now weeks in the rearview mirror and so I didn’t feel like I was looking at something I had just written.
In the middle of the summer, the journal article came back. There was good feedback and I was going to need to rework some sections. Since I had stayed on top of the manuscript, I was able to cut out a day or two to work on the article, then let it sit for a bit. I had not planned this but the ability to switch up a bit helped, I think, in completing both projects. I was getting heartily sick of my manuscript by this time. But the August 29 deadline was fast approaching, as I was reminded when the publisher reached out to see how things were going.
I had forgotten how solitary this sort of a project could be. Once you have your contract, confirming what you think you can get to the publisher and when, you are on your own. I suppose I could have reached out if I was struggling but I treated the deadline, scheduled to clear this off my desk before the fall teaching term, as non-negotiable. In the end, I only had one question come up during the summer and it was quickly resolved. When the publisher reached out, I was glad to confirm I’d be on time. Then it was nose to the grindstone to the end.
About a month out, I sent the manuscript out to a couple of reviewers for feedback. On the one hand, it was pretty late in the process. On the other, I didn’t want to send out something too unformed, in case the feedback was mostly things I was planning to add anyway. As the clock wound down, the feedback helped me to review what I had and where I needed to make adjustments. Fortunately, the feedback wasn’t “O.M.G., what is this?” A book is a lot to ask someone to review so I was happy to get any response.
It was also when my project management was in high gear. I asked one of our kids to review my footnotes and help to ensure they were complete and properly formatted. I wrapped up the journal article and got it back to the editor for their review and, fingers crossed, final publication. I emailed the publisher and asked for a weekend extension. Note to self: next time you set a deadline, check to see if there is a holiday. I had set the day before Labor Day as my deadline, so I asked for a few days, on the assumption no one was going to look at it before the following Tuesday anyway. I used this time for the final odds and ends, including organizing screenshots and documenting copyright licensing, and putting it all in a way that the production team should be able to easily see what is what.
The waiting at the end is hard. The journal article was shorter and had shorter response times. The manuscript is a different beast. It will be published in 6 months. So while things are quiet for the moment, I expect they’ll be picking up at relatively short notice. I am hoping to be able to use the intersession for a lot of the edits, as it looks like I’ll be teaching in the spring, one way or another. The uncertainty gives me a bit of anxiety but also, out of sight, out of mind.
I am curious about what comes next. My books with Thomson Reuters and Canada Law Book were very lightly edited and indexed. I am not sure what to expect this time around. I have heard that this part of the process is highly variable among publishers, with some folks getting very little editorial support. I have to create my own index or hire an indexer. I sent a Microsoft Word automarked index with the manuscript. Apparently there is a partially automated solution after the editing is finished, so I’m curious to see what that looks like. I have seen some legal academic books with no index, so I think some authors may just punt.
For now, I’m focusing my attention on the short term and what I have some semblance of control over. As the publishing process winds on, I’m sure it’ll be manageable. I have already started to scope out my next topic, and it looks like next summer will be a good time to get it under way. I am also looking forward to using the book in a class that I want to teach, bringing the information full circle.