The editor emailed to ask for new contracts for the two chapters that had been accepted to a forthcoming text. New contracts? I doubled-back to check the text, and it all looked kosher. The proper titles had been used. I wasn’t sure what the concerns were. So I went and worked on the formatting and left the contract issue for later. Well, a short while later, another email came. It turns out that the title change was on their side.

One of my bad habits when receiving a form email is to just glance over it quickly and try to weed out any part that is not necessary. I had sent various emails with the images and such attached. I truly thought I was done and that I had been caught up in a last-minute email-everyone sort of scenario (which has happened before).

A Midstream Title Change

Well, there it was. The book was changing its name. The brilliance of the earlier conceptualization (in my humble opinion) was diluted, and the book now again was about some case studies in e-learning…nothing too sparkly, nothing too unique, and nothing too eye-catching. That was it. I duly went through the motions and made two other contracts. I am lying low hoping that the changes I’ve made are sufficient.

I’ve had other challenges occur in publishing. I’ve had one book scheduled for publication with a giant mainline press fall through because their marketing department sensed a shift in the economic situation. Oh, and one book did morph into two, with my chapter being accepted in the latter follow-on work with a new title. Still, I never had a book title wholly change direction with this particular press or this particular set of editors.

Making Inferences

Anything, I thought about what might be going on on the back end. The corresponding editor was clearly grumpy. I realized that their former topic—while wholly brilliant in my opinion—probably had a hard time getting sufficient contributors. Their new title was a generic, and while the new reconceptualization might mean a new market and that the book would actually go to press, I am guessing that this was a disappointment. Any niche topic will be a tough slog. People do not adjust or reframe their topics so easily. And their areas of expertise are fairly fixed.

As I thought a little more about this state of affairs, I thought that it would be quite useless to feel too lonely or even alone in our challenges. After all, others who would strive to do the same thing—innovating at the edges—would have a difficult time of it.

Anyway, I updated the contracts with my digital signature…updated the CV and was on to the next thing. Maybe there is something to be said about lining up potential contributors before the start of a project to make sure that it’s a can’t-fail…but that is really playing something a little too safely. I’m of the school of “fail like you mean it”—if you’re going to take a risk, go for broke (but in a smart way by mitigating risks). Anything that is going to be a pure innovation has to involve risks. And if the cost is that something goes in under different wrappings, that’s the smallest of concerns.

A Revised Inference

Then, I noticed that the two book titles for the two chapters were different. Rather, this was an issue of an abundance of riches. Rather, the two editors had way more content than could be fit into one text, so they had divided the text into two and used new titles on both. This abundance is great—and it takes so much work to really work with so many authors from around the world. They’re doing something very right.