Building a list

Today we learnt about building lists. Lists are what commissioning editors have which include authors, book titles and points of interest that they want to explore. As a new editor in this position it is imperative that you review this list, add to it and even delete from it. Within academic publishing, such as Manchester University Press, peer reviewing is very important. This is where you would get a proposal from an author that you want to add to your list or have already got on your list and have at least two people from the same field as the proposal review it. Obviously as an editor your field of knowledge is publishing. Peer Review just means that you have help in an area you probably don’t have that much experience in. Without this, you could be publishing books that are ancient in their view, wrong in their assumptions and ultimately be a very bad investment for you as a publishing company.

As well as learning about peer reviews, we also covered how budgets would be estimated for a proposed book. As an editor you would receive a proposal, once you have had it peer reviewed and given the all clear from an academic point of view, you need to see if it would be financially viable. We were given an Excel spreadsheet with formulas already programmed in for us. This calculated how many pages an amount of words would equate to and enable you to find the total price spent on making the book, how much you would make and then the total profit. We were informed that for a book to be viable, the margin percentage had to be at least 65%. This means that the publishing house would be making enough money to be able to re-invest into other projects.

Our task for this week was to choose one proposal out of 2 and assess where we would get it peer reviewed from and if they had the potential to be within the desired margin percentage. I’ll let you know how this progresses next week.