How to Edit a Book with Confidence and Creativity
By Donna Lanclos (with Gearóid O Súilleabháin, and Tom Farrelly)
Among other things I am an author, and have written one single-authored book, as well as one co-authored book. I write articles, contribute book chapters and also (evidently) blog about various topics. But up until recently I had never edited a book. I’ve always considered book editing to be a daunting task, not least because of the eyerolls and sighs about the work of editing that I’ve witnessed from friends and colleagues who have served as editors themselves. The cliché is that editing a volume is (like many things in academia) like “herding cats.” I love cats, and I am also very fond of our authors and my fellow editors, and I think this was a much better experience than attempting to get a group of cats to get with any given program.
Last year, Gearóid O Súilleabháin, Tom Farrelly and myself had the great pleasure of introducing the world to our edited volume (and the work of our authors) to the world: How to Use Digital Learning with Confidence and Creativity. That book is now out in paperback, and I wanted to spend some time talking about our process for editing the book because 1) I enjoyed it, and 2) I think it was really effective, and I’d like to see more good edited volumes out in the world.
The three of us have been working in our own work to make teaching practices more open, thoughtful, and backed by evidence. Gearóid had the idea to collect the knowledge of our network into one place as an edited volume, as a contribution to the scholarship of teaching and learning. We wanted our authors to demonstrate reflecting critically on practice, using ideas from the literature, and ultimately for each chapter, as well as the entire volume, to contribute to the literature of teaching and learning.
Between myself and Tom and Gearóid we had access to scholars and practitioners from a variety of places and perspectives, and we were confident that collecting their expertise would be of real use to people looking to start, or to improve their practices around digital education. We know, as people in the field of digital education, education technology, and learning design, how hard it can be for some people to get advice and reflection from experts, especially if they are isolated in their institutions, or are new to the field. We envisioned a handbook, a reference volume, that could be picked up and referred to as and when needed. We wanted thoughtful and also plain-written chapters that would not just be about the Tech of the Minute but also about how and why to use tech tools of any kind, and overall philosophies of digital in education. We didn’t just want an accumulation of “how to push the button” chapters, but something that would have a bit more longevity, that would be useful to think with even as the specifics of the technology inevitably changed.
We had to decide what we were calling our context. Was it “edtech?” Was it “learning design?” We settled on “digital learning” because it was an expansive label that we thought signaled our emphasis on practice and pedagogy, even as our interest is also in the tools and platforms that digital can provide to educational contexts. We also thought “learning” rather than “education” signaled our desire to talk about teaching and learning that happens outside of institutional boundaries, as well as within them.
We also had to recruit our authors. Would we target people for particular topics? Let our expert friends and colleagues choose their own topic?
At some point in 2022 we had sent out “would you be interested” feelers to people in our networks. That allowed us to make a successful proposal to our press (Edward Elgar Press), and once we had the proposal accepted, in September of 2022, we took our list of desired author names and assigned an editor contact for each author, and contacted them again to make sure they were still interested. Some people in our collective networks are shared, and some not, so we divided up as best we could so that no one was emailing more people than the other. We assumed along the way that we might lose some authors, or add some, because life happens and projects cannot always be finished.
We pitched the volume as
This introductory book is envisaged as a jargon-free, hands-on introduction to key topics and practices in the area of digital learning. It is written primarily for early career academics and other academic staff who are now expected to show an engaged familiarity not just with key technologies and software in the field but with a range of associated ethical, pedagogical, ideological, and strategic issues arising at the intersection of digital technology and teaching and learning practice. A conversational, no-nonsense style will differentiate the book from many other sources and publications in the field. Entries will focus on the ways in which digital learning practitioners think and talk about digital learning as a practice and the ways in which digital learning both answers and provokes questions which respect to the ways in which we facilitate and support learners and learning.
I had never done this kind of work before, and it was difficult for me to visualize what any of this process would look like. Fortunately, Gearóid put together this table. It helped guide us through the entire 18 month project, and gave us something to come back to even as we had to adjust our initial timeline because life isn’t a table or a spreadsheet.
Timelines
(TL;DR: you are not just editors, you are project managers! Have a system and use it to keep yourself and your authors organized!)
Many of our authors had already proposed specific topics that they wanted to address in their chapters. And at that point we were trying to figure out what kind of topic coverage we had among the current contributors, so that we could identify where we might need to invite additional folks.
So we had our authors send us:
- working title
- a brief abstract
- which section (Technology, Theory, or Practice) in the proposed structure of the volume they thought their contribution would fit (understanding the overlap in the sections)
Our initial guidance was that the chapter length should aim to be no more than 2,000 words. In the end some chapters were a bit longer, but overall we wanted the length to be part of the accessibility–we were not asking for an exhaustive account of everything about a topic, but for our authors’ specific perspectives given their own expertise. We wanted each chapter to feel like a conversation between someone who needs to know, and the expert sharing their knowledge.
We had an ambitious timeline and our goal was to meet once a week as editors to see how we were doing (and we managed it, for the most part). Each week we touched base with each other about whose authors were doing what, and what work we were going to do in addition to managing our authors’ chapters (two of us were also chapter authors!), and how we were doing in meeting our timeline goals. We also had conversations about voice, what our shared voice as editors was going to be (in the Introduction), and how we wanted our individual perspectives to be reflected in the section introductions we wrote. We also wanted to make sure that the individual voices of our authors remained distinct, while still complimenting each other and clearly belonging to the same whole (our edited volume). Some of that work was just in sharing terms (such as “digital learning”). And some of that work was in not trying too hard to smooth or homogenize the voices of our authors–we invited them for a reason, and most of all we invited them to be themselves on the page.
Our organization of the volume into themes was also a kind of storytelling on our part, a way of signaling to our authors what kind of guidance they might be finding in each location. Our job as editors was not just to collect our authors’ work, but to contextualize and signpost it. That was what our section headings and introductions did, and that is what our introduction, where we were not just co-editors, but co-authors, to the volume as a whole accomplished.
Once we had our first drafts, we engaged in two rounds of reviews per chapter, with two editors reviewing each chapter, and in that phase our weekly meetings were all about chapter feedback, what to communicate to authors, and setting deadlines for next drafts. We set up 3 draft deadlines, knowing that not all authors would submit three drafts, but to give us the time we all needed to get the chapters to where we wanted them to be as a whole. Each editor had “our” authors who we communicated with initially, but eventually we shifted to the authors in our section of the book: Tom was Technology, Gearóid was Theory, and I was Praxis. Once chapters were assigned their final section, each responsible editor became the correspondent with those authors for the rest of the process.
What all of this allowed us to do was have as individuals a broad view of the content of the book without having to read every chapter 3 times. We divided and shared the work of editing and corresponding and therefore made the work manageable, and even enjoyable. Authors received several rounds of feedback, and from different editors at different stages of the project. By co-reviewing the chapters we allowed ourselves time to reflect on how best to encourage our authors, to improve their chapters organizationally and in terms of content, and to connect their work to our larger digital learning project.
This was one of the most ambitious writing projects I’ve ever engaged in, in terms of reach but also logistics, and quotidian tools like spreadsheets were an essential part of that project not getting away from us. Our project spreadsheet contained multiple sheets, one for the initial chapters and sections, one for the eventual table of contents, one for the tasks that each editor was taking on after each meeting, and one for the process of editing and finalizing each chapter. At the end of it all we never wanted to see “that spreadsheet” again, but we would never have finished as promptly or with as little chaos as possible without that tool. Professional project managers might roll their eyes at my insights here, but I want to share it with you anyway because I truly didn’t know how else we were going to get through it all until we started working with spreadsheets and tables. Whatever tools you find useful as editors, the important part is having useful tools that allow you to plan and manage your edited volume for the entirety of the project.
Our book was published in the Spring of 2024, just as we planned. It was well-received at the time, and I hope it has proven useful already in its first year in the world. I remain amazed that we had such a consistent shared vision in a writing project that did not emerge from a conference panel, or some other event. I think our process, and in particular our practice of communicating with each other and our authors early and often, has a lot to do with that.
And I’m so pleased that this work is out in paperback now, in a more affordable and accessible form for people who could not get the hardback (or, who didn’t know we did this!). Not only is our Digital Learning book our own contribution to the scholarship of teaching and learning, but also is a tool that I hope will be a resource for academics and staff alike engaging in SoTL, looking to use literature to inform their practice, and to write up and add to our collective knowledge.
Want to hear even more? Some of our authors have also blogged about their experiences with their chapters:
About the author:
Donna Lanclos is an anthropologist who has been working with libraries and higher education as her field site since 2009. Her first fieldwork was in the late 1990s in Northern Ireland, which prepared her well for dealing with the fragmented and fractious landscape of universities, libraries, and conflicting and confounding identities, practices, and priorities therein. She writes, thinks, and speaks about the nature of information, digital and physical places, and higher education generally. Her work is relevant not just to libraries or universities, but to conversations about how we as a society make sure that people have opportunities to learn how to think critically, to practice those skills, and to find their voices. She regularly presents workshops and talks on issues of digital practices and institutional change, and blogs about her work at www.donnalanclos.com.