Earlier this year, I received a commission to write a textbook. It's both exciting and terrifying at the same time: I've never met a textbook that I liked, really, but maybe this one will be different!!
It's not.
There is something about the format of textbooks. I try so hard to make arguments that these kids will remember easily. I want them to know that the specifics aren't as important as the big picture. I can make a big picture, right? Look at all these polka-dot details, boiled down to the image of a woman! (Thanks, impressionist artists). But every single page is full of inaccuracies -- purposeful omissions that I absolutely must make in order to create a book that is both simple and accessible and under 200 pages.
I use a blend of paragraph formats and bullet-points with little vocabulary sections so that students will see this book as almost a webpage. I pepper it with pretty pictures, trying my damndest to find copyright free images and praying that there is not some sort of copyright rule that I am unaware of that will end up costing me a hundred thousand exaggerated dollars.
The points of my specialty (or my best friends' specialties) are my worst chapters of all. Having this wealth of knowledge makes brevity impossible. There is so much! Wouldn't they love to know x or y? I have to cut it down, but they need to know those basics...And without good stories or engaging examples their eyes will glaze over and nothing will penetrate their tiny little minds.
And then there is the contract. Going back and forth, we must change this, we must change that, can you include underwater basketweaving after all? But keep it at only 200 pages, so the inclusion of this new section means deleting yet more important details from earlier on.
I've never made money on anything I've published. Really, it's rare that we do. How many books do we sell, perhaps 3000 if we are popular? And 250 if it's more average? Just enough to cover the shelves of our friends and a handful of libraries. But a textbook, WELL! I could earn money off of this.
DON'T SCREW IT UP.
Oh, but it's impossible. The money keeps changing. The required content keeps changing. The time frame keeps changing. Eventually I have to start gearing up for Fall -- oh god, it's only 2 weeks away! -- and the editing, the editing is killing me a soft slow death.
If I could tell the future, I would guess that an image will be copyrighted after all, that one of my omissions will be a greater inaccuracy than I am currently realizing, and this whole project will end up costing me more than it makes me.
Perils indeed.
One of my four books was a textbook with Prentice Hall. The benefits of working with a gigantic publisher is certainly the money (I also got a new computer (which in 1998 was a big expense). But what you give up is tremendous.
ReplyDeleteI found time and time again that "accepted" methods of the publisher trumped anything the least bit innovative I had hoped to do. I was approached by a PH editor after an earlier book in a different field had come to her attention. What I was told sold her on my textbook idea was how different it was from anything else they had.
And that was the book that I started to write. But when you sign that incomprehensible contract, apparently you never see the clause that says, "Well, shit, you're going to do what we say anyway, so just sign here like it matters."
Now, the book did well enough and I loved how it looked when it came out, but what it ended up being was very much a collaboration between my best intentions, and then the ideas (and sometimes whims) of a bunch of editors, most of whom I never met.
In the end I was glad for the money and the one job I got out of it, but seriously, it felt not at all like mine when it was all over.
Two of my other books were with small UPs, and there I had so much more control. I didn't have the marketing department, and the reach of the books likely suffered, but those books ended up being pretty much what I wanted to write.
The textbook industry is truly a big, big machine. I don't know if new authors in that world really understand how much of the construct, content, and gestalt of YOUR book has already been decided before you press some words to paper.
On the brighter side, you could end up like James E. Huheey. Who's that? He is, I mean was, a chemistry textbook author who wrote "Inorganic Chemistry." Big deal, right? Well, his 4th edition book is still in use and hasn't been revised in almost 20 years and sells for $150 on Amazon. It's THE book for undergraduate introduction to inorganic chemistry. The guy's dead and nobody has written anything as popular yet.
ReplyDeleteYou could write that type of book.