From call for chapters to edited volume: managing a book with fifty authors

The edited volume — also called an edited collection — is scholarly publishing’s most social genre: one or more editors pick a theme, a call goes out, and authors from different institutions join with their chapters. The result is a single book carrying fifteen, twenty, sometimes fifty names.

It is also the hardest genre to manage. With a single-author book you have one counterpart; with an edited volume you have as many counterparts as chapters, as many deadlines as chapters, as many review processes as chapters. Most editors carry this load with an Excel sheet and an overflowing email folder. In this post we will sketch a healthy skeleton for the process — and note, here and there, how that skeleton comes ready-built in Nasirus.

The call: the book’s birth announcement

A good call for chapters states three things clearly: the book’s scope and thematic boundaries, the expected chapter format (word range, citation style, abstract language), and the calendar — abstract deadline, notification of acceptance, full-text deadline, target publication date.

A call also has a life cycle, and it usually gets forgotten: the call is announced, opens, and closes on its deadline. Where closing is manual, two classic accidents happen: either the call page looks “open” for months and submissions keep trickling in weeks past the deadline, or the editor closes it early and a justified complaint lands in the inbox. In a systematic flow, the call closes itself when the deadline arrives — but the editor’s “I’m waiting on one more valuable name, let’s extend a week” always overrides the system. Automation runs the calendar; humans manage the exception.

The topic pool: the antidote to duplicate chapters

An under-discussed problem in edited volumes: three different authors claiming the same subtopic. If the call merely says “send us your chapter proposal,” the editor ends up on submission day with three texts that look suspiciously alike.

The fix is to open the call with a topic pool: the book’s planned chapter titles are listed, and authors claim an open topic or propose a new one. Once a topic is bound to an author, it is no longer available to anyone else. In Nasirus this pool is a natural part of the call: when a topic finds its owner, the list knows it too, and nobody sets their sights on an already-claimed title unawares.

Two-phase review: abstract first, then full text

Reviewing fifty full manuscripts at once drowns editor and reviewers alike. The established good practice is two phases:

1. Abstract/proposal phase. The author sends a 300-500-word proposal. The editor (with section editors if needed) assesses fit with the book’s scope. This phase is fast, and it establishes the book’s coherence from the start.
2. Full-text phase. Authors of accepted proposals submit the full chapter. The text goes through editorial review — and out to peer reviewers if institutional policy requires it.

The two phases should have separate forms, separate dates, and separate decision records. “My abstract was accepted — why was my full text rejected?” can only be answered with documentation if the two phases keep separate records.

Editor permissions: whose word counts

In multi-editor books, an invisible source of friction is ambiguity of authority. Who is the lead editor, which editor can decide on which chapters, who can only read?

The answers to these questions should live in the system, not in a verbal understanding. In Nasirus, whose word counts where is defined together with the call, and when a decision is recorded, who recorded it lives in the record. Far from eroding trust between editors, this structure protects it: nobody ends up in a “that wasn’t my decision” argument.

Assembly: from chapters to a book

When all the chapters are accepted and finalized, there is still no book — there is a collection of chapters. In the assembly stage, chapters are ordered, the preface and introduction are added, a consistency pass is run (citation style, heading levels, terminology), and the file set is handed over to typesetting.

This handover point is, from a process-management standpoint, the genre’s most critical moment: the collection process ends and the standard book-production process begins. Nasirus’s assembly wizard takes on this passage: the chapters fall into place, the work moves onto the ordinary book production pipeline, and the accumulated substance of fifty chapters — their authors, decisions, and files — does not get lost along the way; nothing is left to email archaeology.

A short checklist for editors

Before you open your next call, have a clear answer to these five questions:

• On what date, and by what rule, will the call close?
• How are you preventing duplicate topics?
• Are the abstract and full-text phases kept as separate records?
• Is decision authority among the editors set down in writing?
• Once chapters are accepted, how does the handover to production happen?

If you can answer “our system handles that” to all five, the edited volume is genuinely a joy of a genre. If you can’t, and this load sounds familiar, write to us to talk through the call-for-chapters module using your own call as the example.