Textbook from Heaven--Part 2
Textbook from Heaven: Exegesis1. "The three-man author team seemed ideal—two experts, one hard side and one soft side, and a hand-on practitioner. Their idea for an introductory textbook, merging theory with practice, was innovative and exciting, and the house, known at that time for its small list of first-rate products, commissioned it. They sent a staff development editor to work with the team at their site on an urban campus in the Southwest. The situation was perfect. Development went very well and the group forged a strong and efficient author team. They worked together on four communicating computers, and manuscript flowed. The few reviews that were done, based on author contacts, glowed."
What a great start! What could possibly go wrong?
2. "Reviewers described the book as novel, brilliant, revolutionary, and much needed, challenging instructors to change the way they teach the course. Concerned that the book seemed quite different, the development editor requested information about the course and competition from Marketing. The marketing manager had left the company, however, and the position had not been filled. If a market survey had been done for the course or content area, nobody could find it. The company had three directly competing titles for the course, including one, the Cotton, which sold in excess of 50,000 copies annually. The inexperienced sponsoring editor, however, did not question market placement in relation to the internal competition."
Oh, oh. The development editor is right to be concerned. Publishers’ dustbins are full of books—even excellent books by excellent authors with excellent publishers—that were too different for their markets or too far ahead of their time. In addition, research consistently confirms that instructors do not adopt textbooks that force them to change fundamentally the way they teach their course. The sponsoring editor should have questioned this goal when it was first expressed. Heaven forefend, too, that instructors should have to discard desiccated and discolored lecture notes that crumble to the touch (I know, because after 40 years I still have mine--correction: I just threw mine out!).
This is not to say that publishers cannot risk innovation. Without a with-it marketing manager, however, and a long lead time for a marketing campaign, innovation of any magnitude is foolhardy. First editions are challenging enough! This project is starting dangerously without marketing input of any kind. Where is the cumulative intelligence on which successful lists are built? Publishing houses make a great mistake in decentralizing to the extent that everything connected with a worker disappears or is made irrelevant when the worker moves on.
And what about that internal competition? The sponsoring editor should have checked or asked the DE to perform a competition analysis that included the inhouse titles. Where does the sponsoring editor think this new title will fit in her list? What makes her think that the sales force will want to take market share from their own market leader? Where is this editor’s manager? (And why was this editor promoted?)
3. "A lot of money went into the project. The authors planned to provide original high quality supplements to accompany their textbook, encouraging the company to invest even more. Their package actually applied (rather than simply talked about) all the very latest research-based information on the most effective teaching and learning. The work also reflected a particular theoretical orientation of which the authors were quite proud. They felt that their treatment would scoop an emerging critical consensus and sweep the field. The company heaped praise on the authors and invested in a four-color design and a web site, at a time when text-dedicated web sites were new and not yet obligatory components of textbook packages."
More indication that this product’s excellence may not be able to overcome its singularity! Beware of book plans that boast impeccable intellectual descent, emerging critical consensus, and eponymous paradigm shifts. These often are euphemisms for point-of-view books or those with radical or reactionary approaches. Also beware of house-generated positive spin, which begets positive mind block, leading to what I call “the snow job effect.” Nothing is more embarrassing (or costly) than having everyone from the CEO down in love with an albatross in the guise of a technicolor angel. This is the “textbook from heaven” syndrome.
4. "The manuscript went into production complete and ahead of schedule, and production flowed smoothly. However, a marketing plan still did not exist except in the broadest outlines. When prepub sales figures came in below projections, this was attributed solely to the absence of a marketing manager’s ministrations. Sales figures did not improve, however, and efforts to jumpstart the book during the winter national sales meeting bombed. The sponsoring editor, who had recently been promoted and was duly distracted, excoriated the sales force for failing to sell what she claimed had to be one of the best books the company had ever published. The situation was summed up later, as one junior sales rep, unaware that he was chatting with that book’s development editor, said, 'I feel so sorry for those authors. Their book is just not getting sold. It’s so different that it makes it hard to present. And we’re doing so well with the Cotton. We all lead with the Cotton and then go to the other book we’re used to selling—the Freeman. A lot of profs use that one too. That new book just doesn’t come up.'”
Thus, the concept that books fail because they are not sold is not an urban legend circulating at corporate coffee kiosks or golf tees. In fairness, though, this book failed foremost because it was divorced from its market from the very beginning. At no point was it informed by market intelligence. And at no point was the market prepared for its introduction as a product. The sales force—the people in the trenches who really can turn things around—also was not prepared to field this product. In this case, the sales managers took the fall, and the book was never revised.
The idealistic authors, too, were not prepared for this outcome. Stunned, they accepted a Canadian edition and the slice-and-dice reuse of their content as online learning objects. They ended their collaboration, and none of them ever again attempted to write another textbook. I hope you understand that this is not right either. In addition to sparing stockholders bad news, I believe that publishers have a responsibility to spare authors this kind of experience.
Labels: commercial success and failure in textbook publishing, textbook publishing
posted by Mary Ellen Lepionka @ 8:00 AM
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