How to manage book reviewing processes without going insane

Trust me when I tell you this: You need to manage who is going to see your book in progress and what they have to say about it.

If you don’t manage this, you’ll have the same experience as a ping-pong ball. It won’t be fun. It will make you hate everything. And it won’t make the book better.

More reviewers are better and other lies

Opinions are, of course, like assholes. Everyone has one, and some of them stink.

But anyone who reviews your book in process will imagine that you will listen to their opinion and act on it. That means every opinion carries a burden of work along with it. If those opinions contradict each other, you’re going to have to deal with it.

I want you to benefit from the valuable opinions and not suffer too much pain from the rest.

So follow these instructions.

Step 1: List all the reviewers. List them now.

Here’s who may be on your list. (I’m trying to be comprehensive, but you absolutely don’t need to include all of these — include only those that are obligatory or useful.)

• Beta readers
• Your coauthor (if you have one)
• Your boss (if you need their approval)
• Legal or PR at your company (if you need their approval)
• Your developmental editor (one you hire)
• Your editor at the publisher (if you have a publisher)
• Outside academic reviewers, if it is an academic book (I feel your pain)
• People whose opinions you trust (preferably with specific roles, like technical reviewer)
• Sensitivity reviewer (have you written anything unintentionally offensive?)
• A copy editor
• A fact checker
• People whose stories you’ve included, to make sure you’ve described their events accurately

If you happen to be a ghostwriter working with a client, you can add a few people to the list:

• Your client.
• People your client insists have to read the manuscript (limit these)
• People your client happens to think of to read the manuscript (limit these)
• Your client’s spouse (when this got mentioned at a recent ghostwriters’ gathering, the entire audience sighed in sympathy)
• Some rando that your client thinks would be a great reviewer because they wrote a bestselling science fiction book in 1996

The purpose of this part of my post is to make you think, and to talk to your collaborators (for example, coauthors, clients, people in your company, people at your publisher) to make sure you have the complete list.

The first step in managing this list is to know who is on it. It’s better to know than to be surprised when unanticipated people get added later.

Step 2: Classify the reviewers’ scope of control

Put your reviewers into a spreadsheet. In the first column is the name of each reviewer. In the next column mark them as one of the following:

• Obligatory. (These are people who you must satisfy to publish the book, for example, your coauthor, the editor at the publisher, and maybe your company’s PR).
• Optional, but valuable
• Courtesy copy, can be ignored

Step 3: Decide when these reviewers get their say

The rookie mistake here is to fail to schedule reviews, instead letting them take place whenever it occurs to you. You will then get buffeted by a random set of reviews and spend all your time bouncing between people’s opinions.

The ideal situation is to get people’s take in batches, so you can accept all the reviews in each batch together and address them in one additional draft.

So create a third column in your spreadsheet and list when the reviews take place:

• Early/test draft, to get useful feedback
• First draft
• Final manuscript draft
• Draft delivered to publisher
• Page proofs (also known as galleys)

Now reach out to the people on your list and tell them what they will see and when — as well as how long they have to get back to you and whether it is obligatory.

For example, “Hi, Molly. I’ll be sending you my first sample chapter to get your take on my idea. For this to be useful, it would help if you could get back to me by the 23rd.”

Or “Frank, I know we need a full PR review of the book. I’ll get you a complete draft by March 1, and to make our deadlines, I need any required changes by March 16.”

Build a little extra room into these deadlines, because people often need it. (In other words, lie to them about the deadline.)

Obviously, you don’t have to do this for the parts of the process that take place at the publisher, but you and your editor should still be communicating about it.

One more thing. It’s easiest to deliver drafts in Microsoft Word and request markup using the track changes feature. It’s feasible, but often less efficient, to use Google Docs in the same way, but if you let people see each other’s comments, you can get drawn into edit wars, so you may have to share a separate Google Doc with each reviewer. Reviewers who mark things up on pen and paper are a pain to deal with. Reviewers who dictate their comments by voice should burn in hellfire.

The secret to surviving review cycles

You cannot escape the pain of contradictory review suggestions. It comes with the process.

There is one (almost) foolproof technique for making reviews easier to deal with.

Write great prose.

If you create something obviously great, it’s much harder for people to give you terrifyingly contradictory advice. Just awe the reviewers with your book’s greatness and you’ll be fine.

How do you write great prose?

I’m sorry, but that’s a secret that only the best writers know, and in our secret meetings, we have sworn not to reveal it.

When you achieve greatness, send one of us a text. We’ll share the secret handshake and swear you to secrecy as well.

Until then, you’ll just have to do your best to manage your reviewers just like every other author in the world.