You know there are less than two weeks before the Fall semester begins when you are awake at 4 a.m., staring at the ceiling and mentally writing your yearly review narrative, trying to figure out how you will represent the fact that your book manuscript received two contradictory reviews. (Note: the yearly review isn’t due for MONTHS — but try telling that to your monkey mind when it latches onto an anxiety in the middle of the night.)
Or, that you are still awake at 5 a.m. because you finally got out of bed and read blogs for an hour in the vain hope that either you would wake up completely and just start your day, or get tired enough to go back to bed.
Sigh. Insomnia sucks.
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August 12, 2008 at 3:35 pm
squadratomagico
Clearly, you will have to be honest about where you are in the publication process, but all that means is acknowledging that you are at a revise-and-resubmit stage. I would think about it in terms of amounts of critical versus laudatory pages in your readers reviews. I think you said you received 8 pages of helpful critical feedback from the positive reviewer, and about two pages of rude critical feedback from the un-yogic reviewer. That’s a 4:1 ratio. So, in your review you clearly state that (A) You have received a positive and a negative response to the ms. But then give some discussion of each reviewers’ attitudes and comments; if you go into detail, presumably it should take more time to describe the positive one than the un-yogic one. This gives a proportional representation of their comments. You can even mention that positive reviewer wrote quite a lot more than un-yogic reviewer, which seems to me quite significant for your situation. (B) Emphasize that you have on ongoing relationship with the press, which is interested in working with you to bring the ms. to their list. Revise-and-resubmit cases are the norm, not the exception, in academic publishing, so you have no cause to be anxious about this particular setback. As long as the process is still open and ongoing, you are still moving forwards: emphasize this.
August 13, 2008 at 12:26 am
Mel
Just now catching up on the story of your book ms — such split responses are I think more the norm than the unusual situation. Editors often pick one reviewer who’s Old Guard and one who is not; or one who’s thorough and one who’s not. They have their own internal political reasons for selecting reviewers (i.e. placating in advance someone on the editorial board who says “but wait no one from the Old Guard has seen this”) . Plus of course the simple mathematics of it, which can get complicated depending on your subfield (of 10 potential ms reviewers, 5 have too many other commitments, 1 already read it for another press, 2 are likely to be slack or late, and 2 are careful and thorough).
(is this just a regular annual review year or a tenure/promotion year for you? iEspecially f the former you really don’t need to sweat it. Follow squadromatigo’s recommendations suggestions.)
August 13, 2008 at 12:27 am
Mel
why the damn winky smiley in my comment? i guess that was my closing parenthesis plus something else. I wasn’t trying to be cute.
August 13, 2008 at 1:26 pm
bsgirl
Thanks Squad and Mel for taking my silly worrisome self so seriously. Of course, in the bright light of day, I can see that it’s not a big deal — not an unusual situation — nothing to worry about. And, it’s only the annual review — I’m not up for tenure just yet. But … it’s a testament to how stressed out I am about the book revisions that I would even be thinking about the stupid annual review two weeks before classes start. Grrr.
BTW, Mel, I just realized yesterday as I was dismantling my class websites from the past year that all of my online syllabuses had that damn winkly smiley on them — because of the closing parentheses. What unnecessary techology! My students must have thought I was a nut.