I’m a level 2 peon at a textbook publisher. You know me. I email you at the worst possible time—I especially love to strike right before finals week—and offer you the opportunity to review Stanley Pinkus’s Basic Basketweaving, Fortieth Edition. I plead, cajole, and flatter. “Your opinions of Dr. Pinkus’s textbook would be invaluable to us as we prepare the forty-first edition,” I might say, even though I’m aware you’re a loyal user of Stavros Punk’s Basketweaving Simplified; my editor’s hoping that if we pay you to read Pinkus, you’ll like it enough to adopt it over Punk.
What you don’t know about me is that before I was a level 2 peon at said textbook publisher, I was an adjunct proffie just like you. (That’s when I started reading Rate Your Students, and I’ve been a lurker ever since. Call it nostalgia.) I loved the work but couldn’t bear the instability of my course load from one semester to the next. I’m as underpaid now as I was as an adjunct, but when I made the jump to the publishing industry, the liberation from constant worry about the source of my next paycheck was inestimable. A secondary motivator was the impulse to flee from the peskier administrative aspects of teaching: the grubbing for grades, the exhortations for extensions, the crashing hard drives and croaking grandmothers.
I share that part of my history with you because I want you to know that I understand that there are final portfolios to grade before you can even think about cracking the spine of Pinkus, 40/e. I realize that our offering you a $100 honorarium to read an entire textbook and answer a 25-item essay questionnaire values your time at about $10 an hour and is nothing short of insulting to your credentials. With those realities of our customers’ profession, I’m somewhat uniquely qualified to empathize.
I’m also somewhat uniquely qualified to call you out on your bullshit.
Reviews of Visions of Baskets: A Visual History of the Art of Basketweaving were due yesterday. The eleven reviewers who had agreed to review the text had a full month to complete the questionnaire. By the end of the day, I’d received five reviews. So I sent a gentle reminder email to the remaining reviewers. Here’s a sampling of the emails that were waiting in my inbox this morning. Again, the due date for the project has now passed.
- “I didn't ever get the chapters for review or the paperwork!” [I promptly forwarded this reviewer the email I had sent him, with all necessary documents as email attachments, on April 21.]
- “This format is not really working for me. Could you send everything to me in hard copy?”
- “I’m almost done. Can I get until Friday?”
- “When I clicked on the link, I was unable to type into the form.”
- “I will be out of the office from Monday, August 16th, 2010, through Monday, January 3rd, 2011. I will be checking my email about once per week during this time. If you need to reach me on an urgent matter, please call the Basketweaving Department Administrative Assistant at 867-5309.”
- The sixth reviewer, for the record, replied with her completed review attached.
Judging by the rants I read here at CM, you-all don’t suffer this tomfoolery kindly when it comes from your students. You make them responsible for ensuring—in advance of the deadline—that they understand an assignment and have the materials necessary to complete it, and you fail them when they don’t deliver assigned work on time, same as I did back in the day. But I can’t fail you. Hell, even if you decide to finish the review eight months from now, when the new edition is already being printed, I still have to pay you your $100 or risk having the sales rep for your district bawl me out next time she visits your department.
Let’s say you have eleven students in a course. Five of them don’t show up to take the final exam and consequently fail the course. Three of the remaining six turn in utterly mediocre finals that demonstrate a cursory-at-best reading of the course material. They get Cs. The remaining three earn As. What’s your chair going to say to you?
Hint: It sounds a lot like what my editor-in-chief going to say to me.
I always enjoy reading non-faculty perspectives of academia.
ReplyDeleteI review lots of textbooks. I'm prompt but your reviewers' other comments seem a little too familiar for comfort. I do prefer a printed copy. High quality paper stock, please. Full color, even for the black and white text.
If you want us to say "how high?" when you say "jump", you need to pay us more. I get a minimum of $50 per chapter and will negotiate with you up to $100. Don't expect me to work out the practice or end of chapter problems.
Do expect me to bitch about all the mistakes in the questions I assign for homework when I adopt your book.
The one thing you've got going for you is the salespeople. Sure, they annoy me but they are, in my experience, smokin' hot. You must think a chemistry prof will adopt any book that he reads if he has a boner at the same time. You are correct.
One suggestion to the publishing industry: Don't send us a check. Look up the going rate for your textbook on Facultybooks.com and send us the monetary equivalent in books. That way we get the full pay without paying the taxes.
I reviewed a textbook once. Only once. Promptly. The deal was that in return for the review, the publisher would let me select a book from some of the ones that they sell.
ReplyDeleteI did the review. The publishers failed to honour their side of the agreement. I'm not doing another review.
I have to say that I've always liked textbook reps -- this may be because I am not in the sciences, so the books are reasonably priced. But seriously, they're so much more polite than many colleagues...
ReplyDelete@C: this was my experience, too. I did the review, waited months for payment, and only got it when I threatened to get a lawyer involved.
ReplyDelete@ Ben. A guy I went to grad school with married the smoking hot textbook rep. I still ike to tease him about the lifetime discounts.
ReplyDeleteAs for the topic at hand, I've never been stiffed like C and Ladder, but several years ago I stopped saying yes to these requests because $10 and hour just wasn't worth my time.
ReplyDeleteI've never been asked to review a textbook, but once I decided that yes, it made sense to use a textbook in my 200-person-Intro-to-The-Reeds-That-Make-Baskets class, I quite enjoyed my rep. She's lovely. And like F&T, I find her to be much more polite than many of my colleagues...
ReplyDeleteps Archie Archie Rah Rah Rah
Yes, there are professor flakes. Just try to get a committee to meet or get members of committees to do the work they were assigned. Or listen to the flakes complain about how hard it is to get their grades done at the end of the term.
ReplyDeleteI used to review textbooks frequently. I met the deadlines, and was paid on time by the publishers. I stopped reviewing texts when I finally figure out two things:
1. The money wasn't worth the effort it took to review them (especially when publishers wanted me to review them during the academic year).
2. All the textbooks that I was reviewing were essentially the same. It seems that all general basketweavery texts have to conform to some industry standard. My suggestions about how to not conform were never replied to.
Oh, and I'll never write a testbank for a book again either. Even more of a rip off than reviewing texts.
I used to happily review texts because I thought maybe I'd hit on one I really wanted to adopt once it was out in print. That hasn't happened yet.
ReplyDeleteJust like with students, I wonder if there's a better way to go about doing this. If I have students who aren't functioning, I look for other solutions (often found on this blog) to engage them. Obviously, I'm going to now discount the solution to pay them $100 to come to class.
I, too, have had the experience of reading and reviewing a text and not receiving payment or any acknowledgement from the publisher that I ever reviewed the textbooks (no promised check, no promised Amazon gift card, no promised copy of another text that they publish, etc.). I'm not doing these anymore because three times stiffed is two too many. It's not the fun kind of stiff, anyway!
We don't suffer the tomfoolery kindly because we can actually make policies that stick. You don't have anything to hold over anyone.
ReplyDeleteThere's also something no one has mentioned yet--which is that in academia, you get used to the idea that deadlines seem to be more fluid. Dates for proposal submissions are forever getting extended. Then dates for submissions of papers are always getting extended. It's not an excuse, but it's a feature of academic life. Students are used to that too, which is why I always have clear policies and do not allow late submissions. You can't really say that because people would be put off.
The other thing is that no one is doing your review for the money. You aren't paying anyone enough for them to do it for the money. They're doing it for a line on their cv, most likely. And the reputation of publishers for failing to keep up their end of the bargain by coughing up the cash precedes them, so many academics assume that if publishers don't take their responsibilities seriously, they won't either.
I published a textbook a few years ago; it's in a second edition where I took on a co-author.
ReplyDeleteI get countless offers to review chapters, proposals, finished manuscripts. I never get paid on time. I get sent the wrong stuff. I get sent things past the deadlines.
I cash the checks whenever they come, and put as much work into it as they're paying for.
I've reviewed a few textbooks and have been particularly interested in one in my sub-discipline (because there aren't any good ones out there).
ReplyDeleteHowever, Ms/Mr Sales Rep: please don't send them to me if they still look like a draft. I read one that the publisher should have been too embarrassed to even consider sending for review (too many errors in just the editing and the content was too elementary for the target audience!).
I did review one last year that I was hoping I could use this year (an update of a previous edition; it was sent with the author's name redacted but I easily figured out who the author was). The new co-author inserted new stuff that was just cr*p. For example, they made a claim about a pioneer in the field, but over-exaggerated the person's contributions. They probably never expected a reviewer who had MET the person in question and knew the individual's background pretty well.
For THAT "save", I should have been given, oh, $500 instead of a couple of free books. IMNSHO.
I've done reviews now and then, and yes, I've flaked a time or two, but for the money they're offering, what did they expect?
ReplyDeleteThe funny thing about this is that I would never in a million years assign one of the books I'd reviewed. Not out of ethical concerns, but because I've never been asked to review something that wasn't warmed-over, 19th edition, zombie-errors-intact, babysitting pap.
You people who don't do it for the money either make too much or work too hard.
ReplyDeleteIf you make $50K/year, you're hourly rate is $25 for a full time job. Do you work more than 40 hours per week? Well then, you're rate is even less.
If I'm paid $50 to review a chapter, that's a couple hours work for me. It all evens out. Fifty bucks is fifty bucks I would not have earned on a weekend otherwise and it's a couple of hours that I can put off my chores around the house.
Honestly, there is something about being offer pittance that won't really help my situation (relieving stress OR finances) that makes me want to fuck with them.
ReplyDeleteI can totally see myself accepting this deal and then screwing them over. Because. Honestly. $100? for quality reviews of a textbook? Shut up, I have work to do.
That being said, I just found a textbook that I believe was written in heaven by god himself and I just won somebody an ENORMOUS book deal. Never did I think an intro book could be so elucidating, simple, and even-handed. Beautiful.
You're trying to set up a parallel - I make my students hand things in on time, therefore I should send publishers textbook reviews on time - but it doesn't work.
ReplyDeleteStudents pay to take the class. They're getting something out of it - they're learning something - plus they get a credit which will assist them to graduate. I simply set the terms which will allow them to get that credit.
I get nothing out of reviewing a textbook except a worthless line on my CV (reviews count for nothing, particularly unpublished) plus, possibly, a check for $100 or a couple of books. If I agree to do the review, and actually do it, it costs me a lot of time, for minimal reward. If I don't do the review, I'm not out much, plus I do have all that time free to do something that I will be better rewarded for (or at least enjoy more).
Any review editor of a journal will tell you that they get reviews for no more than 30%-50% of the books they send out. That's because everyone does this calculation. In advance, it looks as if you have more time than you do. Then you actually get to the time of year when you COULD do a review, but there are a lot of productive things you could do with that time, and a review is the least well-rewarded of them. If it slips to last place on the priority list, you shouldn't be surprised.
And if your editor has any experience in the field, what she's going to say is "wow, you got more than 50% return? That's excellent!"
I get nothing out of reviewing a textbook except a worthless line on my CV
ReplyDeleteYou put reviews on the c.v.? I've never done that for work-for-hire; only published stuff and peer review work (didn't get paid for that, either).
Dr. Jekyll: My dear lady, $100 will not cut it in my field. Many of us do a bit of consulting on the side and at our normal billing rates, $100 probably won't get you even one hour.
ReplyDeleteProf. Hyde: I tell all the book folks this. If they offer $600, I explain exactly how many hours of time that buys. If they don't like it, fine by me. I've never had an offer rescinded.
$100/textbook = $10/hour? What the hell are you publishing, Zip Pop Go? That would be like 28 seconds per page. Am I a retard? Does everyone read a textbook at 28 seconds per page? If I told you I read the 12th edition of The Central Science in under 10 hours, I'd be lying. Do people actually read the whole thing, or just pretend to? Does any of the feedback relate to chapters that don't exist? (You knew I was going to pull that one out, right?)
ReplyDelete