Things That Worked: Book Proposal for The Second Book (Part 2)

Sample materials to simplify your life

Gooooooooood morning, afternoon, or evening, wherever you happen to be! And welcome back for another round of ‘Things That Worked’!

This week, I’m sharing something a little unusual: the written response I wrote in reply to the reader reports for my second book.

What the heck is a ‘response’ to reader reports?

Every now and then during the academic publication process, authors of articles or books are given the opportunity to respond to the feedback they got from the anonymous reviewers of their material. That response is usually meant to establish and justify what suggestions the author intends to take on board, and what suggestions the author intends not to follow.

Obviously, this requires a certain amount of diplomacy on the author’s part! The author wants to get published! The reader reports are a useful tool for revision, but they are also one more hurdle standing between the author and publication.

Agreeing, and agreeing to disagree

As I hope you’ll gather from my response, the bulk of the reader reports were very positive. And they had excellent suggestions for how I might go about strengthening my book. One of the first things I had to do when drafting my response was getting all their feedback clustered around the most important points that needed to be addressed (you’ll see them listed as actual bullet points at the top).

You’ll also notice that I try to establish limits to what I can address. This is because—ideally—you are not usually meant to transform your book into a totally different book in response to reader reports! Your response to those reports is an opportunity to justify choices you’ve made regarding what to include or leave out, or regarding what approach to take to your material.

Sample response to reader reports

Below is a link to the written response I submitted to Manchester University Press in response to the initial reader reports for Practising shame: Female honour in later medieval England. I look forward to writing in more detail about the delicate art of responding to feedback in a future post!