Confessions of an Electronic Book Review Editor (Jan. 1999)

[My efforts to promote online interactive book reviewing on H-SHEAR stirred up some controversy among representatives of more established print journals. I think they saw it as potentially threatening. I don’t remember any effort to stop us from doing them because they were quite popular, certainly among young historians but also among well-established historians. Some tried to dismiss our efforts as amateurish because we didn’t have the controls and standards in place that print journals had. But I think we did a good enough job that the amateurish charges didn’t carry much weight. Because there was such interest and concern in what we were doing at H-SHEAR, I was invited to give a paper at the Annual Business Meeting of the Conference of Historical Journals at the American Historical Association convention in Washington, D. C. in January 1999. I remember my actual presentation was a fairly brief, informal presentation of what we had been doing at H-SHEAR but the full paper was later published as “Confessions of an Electronic Book Review Editor” in Editing History: Newsletter of the Conference of Historical Journals, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Spring/Summer 1999), pp. 1, 4, 7-9. I continued to serve diligently as the Book Review Editor for H-SHEAR up until the day I left academia in June 2000.]

Editor’s Note: This paper was delivered in a special presentation to the participants in the CHJ Annual Business Meeting at the AHA gathering in Washington, DC in January. The author’s experiences may be of benefit to anyone who has the responsibility of managing journal reviews.

I have been serving since February 1997 as the Book Review Editor for H-SHEAR, an electronic forum for scholars interested in the history of the United States from approximately the 1780s to the 1840s. It is affiliated with SHEAR (the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic) but more directly falls under the institutional umbrella of H-Net.

H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences OnLine began back in December 1992 as an effort by a handful of scholars to tap into the potential of the Internet for the express purpose of advancing humanities and social science teaching and research. They did this at first basically by providing the computer hardware and software and know-how to set up edited electronic discussion lists like H-SHEAR so that scholars interested in a particular subject could come together over the Internet in an organized fashion. H-Net has grown astronomically over the past six years, but its electronic discussion lists are still the heart of the operation. Today there are about 100 lists serving over 90,000 subscribers in 90+ countries, and the numbers keep going up and up each year. ¹

Back in the summer of 1994, H-Net decided to launch an electronic book review project that could combine the energy of the lists with the institutional power of a central office that would be housed at Michigan State University. I will go into more detail in what everybody does later, but basically each of the list editors would use their knowledge of their field to pick the books to be reviewed, find the reviewers, and then edit the reviews for content. The central office would deal with the publishers, handle any costs, copyedit the review, and archive the finished review on H-Net’s web site where the reviews would be permanently saved and could be easily searched, retrieved, and printed out. At present the MSU central office has a budget  of about $75,000 per year to pay for staffing and expenditures.

The book review project, to put it mildly, has been a big success. “By the end of 1998, H-Net will have published over 2,500 reviews, with more than 500 reviews published by 1996, 800 in 1997 alone, and more than 1,000 since January 1998.” ² Quite a considerable number for a project that is less than five years old! Of the 100 H-Net lists, about 75 have posted at least one book review and I would say that 30 of the lists are quite active in book reviewing. A lot of people must find these reviews useful because in 1997 the H-Net review website averaged over 5,000 hits per week, and 10,000 plus hits in a week was not unusual.

My bailiwick, H-SHEAR book reviews, did not really get going until I came on board in February 1997 and then it took a while to get started up. We posted our first review in September 1997 and at first averaged about a review every two weeks. Now we are a quite active list, averaging about a review a week. Altogether we have posted a little over 50 reviews in the year and a half we have been in business.

Personal Background

Before launching into the concrete details of our operation, I would like to share a bit of personal background. I will not say my case is typical of H-Net book review editors, but I think my story in many ways captures the spirit of the way that H-Net has grown and developed. My career as an electronic book review editor began two years ago when I sauntered up to the H-Net booth at the AHA in New York City and started talking casually to Richard Jensen, the then-Executive Director of H-Net. Peter Knupfer happened to overhear that my field was early American history, and asked me out of the blue if I would like to be Book Review Editor for H-SHEAR. Peter, who along with being the Associate Director of H-Net was also the lead editor on H-SHEAR, had been looking for a book re­view editor with few results.

I was rather taken aback by the offer. Al­though I had written plenty of book reviews as a grad student, I had never actually had any book reviews published, let alone edited anything except student papers. My area of specialty was actually colonial America, al­though I had a thorough grounding in the history of the early republic in grad school. Yet, I was strongly tempted by the offer. My initial reaction was that as a newly minted Ph.D. still searching for that elusive tenure-track job this gift horse might somehow be my ticket to professional acceptance.

But what really clinched it for me was meeting a lot of other H-Net people at an in­formal gathering later that evening. When I started talking to all these H-Net people, their enthusiasm was infectious. It was clear to me this was a wonderful chance to be in on the ground floor of something new and exciting with revolutionary potential. It appealed to the idealistic and maverick side of my person­ality. So I readily accepted the offer.

I did not at first have any strong ideas about what I wanted to do as a book review editor, but I quickly hit on the idea that the list should specialize in fully interactive books reviews in which reviewers, authors, and audience could come together in a col­legial forum. I had seen a couple of these in­teractive reviews on another list, H-Rural, and was very impressed by them. Interactivity was also the ideal espoused by H-Net itself. As Pat Denault, the then Asso­ciate Editor of the H-Net Book Review Project, put it back in 1995:

This type of interaction, at least in its formulation as a virtue, is a true inno­vation in the humanities. Responding to book reviews has long been consid­ered ill-advised and likely to exacerbate tensions. Yet, scholars routinely discuss each other’s work at confer­ences, often in a very engaging and friendly manner, and not always in the course of formal presentations. One of the most important goals of the Review Project is to capture those conversations, gently remove the chaff, and make them available as dia­logues for their colleagues. ³

We have been doing these interactive re­views now for a year and a half and from what I have heard from everybody, both formally and informally, they have truly enhanced the list. Indeed, many people on several different lists have told me that ours is the most useful list out there, and attribute a lot of this to the tone set by the interactive reviews. People have told me over and over that they are far more likely to read one of our reviews than a print review and that they read them reli­giously all the way through.

Now for some concrete details of our op­eration.

How do I select titles to review?

You will probably laugh at my “system” for selecting titles, but this is one of those areas where I have cut corners. What I have done in the past is simply look at the adver­tisements in the back of the AMA and OAH programs and try to pick out books whose titles suggest they might have something to do with U.S. history from the 1780s to the 1840s. Sometimes I occasionally get sugges­tions for titles from list members. H-Net also sometimes gets review copies of unsolic­ited books directly from publishers and they will contact the list they think most appro­priate.

How do I acquire review copies?

After picking the books, I simply e-mail the author, title, and publication informa­tion to H-Net and they actually order the books for me. Once the book arrives at their office, they contact me. After I find a re­viewer, they send the book directly to the re­viewer, paying the postage so there is little cost to me except my time.

How do I match up reviewers to titles?

This was actually my biggest problem at first. Luckily, as part of our H-SHEAR appli­cation procedure, we have subscribers fill out a form which asks among other things whether they would be interested in reviewing for us and on what particular topics. When I started I had a backlog of about 50 willing re­viewers (mostly grad students and junior faculty) and that was all I had for quite a while. Almost everyone else I approached in the ear­liest days turned me down. With 50 review­ers, we were pretty much reviewer-limited.

I can proudly say that those days of being reviewer-limited are over. Now that we have developed a good reputation and an H-SHEAR review is something actually desir­able to do for grad student and senior scholar alike, I no longer have any problem finding a good reviewer for almost any book that comes in.

I find my reviewers today from several sources. I still get most of my reviewers from our subscription forms. As the numbers on our list have grown from 400 when I started to over 700 today, so has our pool of willing reviewers. In addition, even people who when they signed on to our list had no in­terest in reviewing, after seeing the kind of things we are doing are usually quite willing to do a review if I ask them. I also now regularly rope in people not on H-SHEAR as reviewers through recommendations from specialists in a certain field and referrals from people who were unable to do the re­view themselves.

Overall we have ended up with quite an interesting range of reviewers from emeritus professors to grad students, although when picking grad students I try to stick with ABDs whose research interest closely matches the subject matter of the book. The many senior scholars we have give the re­views a certain level of legitimacy, while jun­ior scholars still provide a lot of the energy and enthusiasm that H-Net thrives on.

There are still a few problems that I face when matching up reviewers that print jour­nals do not face. For example, the way the system works I do not actually get to see the book myself. Sometimes I have little idea what the book is about unless the title is quite explicit. Also I cannot check to see who is acknowledged in the book to avoid assigning a review to someone too closely as- sociated with the author. H-Net has tried to get around this problem by Xeroxing the ac­knowledgment pages and jacket blurbs of the books and sending them to us, but this might take a couple of months and I have usually found a reviewer by then. If we make a mistake in choosing books or re­viewers, in the end I rely heavily on my re­viewers to inform me.

After getting a reviewer, I then have H-Net mail the book to him or her along with a stylesheet that describes how to write a re­view for H-Net. Officially we give the re­viewer six weeks to submit the review, but in practice I have found that it usually takes longer than that. It is a pleasant surprise when I get a review in six weeks. The aver­age I estimate is about 10 weeks. The earli­est was four weeks and the longest—well, I am still waiting for some of them! I usually have to cajole the reviewer one or two times via e-mail.

When finished, the reviewer sends the re­view to me, usually as an e-mail message or an attached file to an e-mail message. But I have had a few reviewers uncomfortable with sending reviews over e-mail, and I have asked them to just send a floppy disk.

How much checking and copy editing do I do once I receive the review?

Luckily for me, I think most of my re­viewers have done a good job right off so I have not had to edit too heavily for content, although I sometimes make suggestions for improvements to clarify certain points. I feel very lucky because a lot of editing creates bad vibes between reviewer and editor and a lot more work for me, neither of which I need. Admittedly, the list members may not think all the reviews are to their taste. There are some stark differences of opinion about what makes a good electronic review, or a good interactive review.

I note in particular some sharp divisions in the H-Net enterprise between those who would wield a heavy editorial hand to main­tain scholarly standards and those who have faith in a free market of ideas. I tend to be more a free-market person (don’t worry; try it and see what happens; it’s an experiment!), but I believe that a healthy tension between the two ideals probably works best overall.

I have also heard much disagreement over short versus long reviews. Some like to read reviews on screen and so like for them to be short and get right to the punch like a print review. Others prefer longer reviews and do not try to read the reviews on screen; they simply make a hard copy which they can look at in their leisure and save to refer back to later. I myself tend to prefer longer reviews although I do not force my opinion on reviewers. I have suggested at times to various reviewers that they either shorten or lengthen reviews when I thought the book warranted it. Overall I am sure there must be some middle ground and I prefer to let it evolve over time as the list gravitates to what list members think works best. But I do not want to nip anything in the bud.

After getting a review I can live with, I then send it on to H-Net for copyediting. Usually in checking over content, I weed out all the spelling and grammatical errors, so H-Net usually does little more than to put everything in a standardized form and make sure all the publication information is correct. They are usually able to get the copyedited review back to me within a week, sometimes a day.

What about interactive reviews?

After receiving the review, the next step for an interactive review is to locate and get in touch with the author, usually via e-mail, but sometimes via phone. Almost always they agree to participate. Some of them are not quite sure what to say, so I tell them they can do whatever they want, the time and space is theirs. I suggest they can take up points where they beg to differ, bring up what led them to write the book, what was left out of the book, where the field is going, where their own research is going, make suggestions for possible discussion, etc., etc.

Because this is still so new I do not have any fixed amount of time I give authors but I do try to get them to commit to getting the response back to me by a certain date. There is a lot more variability in how long authors will take to respond. The average is about two to four weeks. The shortest amount of time has been a couple of hours. Some authors can take three to four months. As with reviewers, generally I have to engage in a bit of cajoling.

As I said, authors are usually quite happy to reply, and indeed grateful for the forum. However, I have had a handful of reviews • where authors opted out of responding for various reasons. This usually only happens with highly critical reviews, or at least cases where the author sees the review as highly critical. Some of these authors have what I would call a traditional aversion to respond­ing to a review, believing that authors should simply take their lumps. Others sim­ply do not see what good could come out of responding. But again this has happened only a handful of times. If the author opts out of responding, I simply post the review as a non-interactive review.

Once I have the author’s response, I then forward it to the original reviewer for a fol­low-up reply. Most reviewers pass on the op­portunity for a rejoinder, having said all they had to say in the review. But some of the more interesting review sessions, though, do have a rejoinder, either taking up differences with the author, clarifying points, or raising issues that might be good for discussion on the list.

Although H-Net copyedits the original review, I take care of copyediting follow-up responses from author and reviewer.

How do the review sessions themselves work?

At this point we are now ready to post the interactive review to the H-SHEAR list. I decided early on that it was best to post re­views on a regularly scheduled basis so I have pretty much stuck to the following pat­tern. The week before posting I announce the upcoming review to give list members a chance to take a look at the book over the weekend if they or their library already has a copy. (And with the length of time to set up an interactive review, most major universi­ties libraries have copies of the books by the time we post.) I also use the announcement as a way to give my reviewers a bit of free publicity, mentioning their affiliation, dis­sertation or book title, any recent articles, etc. Then the following Tuesday I post the original review. On Wednesday I post the author’s response and any follow-up reply from the reviewer. Then I open up discus­sion to the entire H-SHEAR audience, usu­ally with some suggestion of possible discus­sion topics. Finally, I send the original re­view, author’s response, and any follow-up replies to H-Net for permanent archiving on the H-Net website. H-Net also sends a copy of the review to the publisher.

Do you have any trouble getting responses from H-SHEAR subscribers?

This is one area I have little control over. One of the major goals for doing interactive reviews is to stimulate higher-level discussion on our list. The H-SHEAR audience has al­ways been notoriously a pretty passive bunch, but they have started to open up a bit since we have launched our review project. Most re­views get little follow-up comments from list members, but there have been a few occasions where long “threads” have been launched by reviews. I find it hard to predict which reviews or topics will generate discussion and which will not.

One thing I have noted is that list mem­bers can be a little slow on the uptake. Even after opening up discussion on Wednesday, it might not actually get started until the weekend when people have a chance to sit down and pull their thoughts together. The slowness with which discussions develop is one reason why we have restricted ourselves to doing no more than one review session every two weeks. When I first started doing interactive reviews in the fall of 1997, I only had enough reviews to post them biweekly, but over time I have decided that this neces­sity was a virtue. If I tried to do a session a week it would simply get too hectic and would kill discussion. Yet as our coverage of the field has gotten more and more com­plete, we are running into the problem of what to do with all the reviews we have got­ten. I have started moving to running tan­dem review sessions, posting two interactive reviews on related subjects at the same time.

We have also done other things to try to stimulate discussion, like simultaneously posting interactive reviews on our list and one or two other lists to tap into a wider au­dience.

But personally I do not let it bother me if there is no audience discussion. Generating discussion is not the sole criteria for judging the success of what we are doing. Too many people who never post anything to the list have told me how much they enjoy the in­teractive reviews and encourage me to keep doing them.

Interestingly, with such positive feelings about interactive reviews and H-Net policy encouraging them, you might think a lot of other lists would follow suit. But that is not the case. Out of the 100 lists on H-Net, H-SHEAR and occasionally H-Rural are the only lists that do interactive reviews. Most of the lists with dynamic review programs have opted for speed and numbers, taking great pride in getting as many reviews to you as fast as they can. And going the inter­active route is certainly not conducive to speed and numbers.

If we just did non-interactive reviews, we could literally post them within a day of re­ceipt from the reviewer. As it now stands there is a substantial delay between receipt of review and posting, anywhere from two to six months. Some of this delay is due to the time needed to get the author’s response and reviewer’s rejoinder, but additional de­lays enter through the need to put together tandem sessions and schedule several months down the road to ensure we have enough sessions to fill our calendar. By the time we are finished, we are really not any quicker than print journals. We ran mostly 1997 books in 1998 and we will be running mostly 1998 books in 1999. But again we have turned necessity into a virtue because people have told me they are a lot more likely to comment on a book if it has been out long enough for people to have actually seen and/or read the book.

Another reason why other lists do not do interactive reviews is because interactive re­views demand a lot more of the poor review editor. I would say I have to spend three to five hours altogether putting together an in­teractive review while a non-interactive re­view would probably take an hour or so.

What kind of working relationship do I as H­SHEAR’s book review editor have with Mitch Snay, the book review editor of our print sis­ter, the Journal of the Early Republic?

I would characterize the relationship as “pleasantly independent.” We know each
other and have talked a few times at conferences but usually not about book reviewing.

You might think that since we both cover the same historical field and H-SHEAR is affiliated with SHEAR, that we either must have a closer or more strained relationship that we have. Actually we have totally inde­pendent enterprises. I have very little knowl­edge of how the JER works and rarely look at JER reviews except occasionally to see who they are getting for reviewers and whether they are reviewing books ahead of or behind us. As for Mitch, he is not even on our list (although he has asked me about checking out the reviews on the website).

At one point we did engage in some dis­cussion about H-SHEAR reviewing books that the JER decided not to review. But the kind of books they did not want to review, we did not either.

Overall I could imagine a much closer re­lationship with the JER for the benefit of both organizations, but I can also see ^.a lot of downside potential in the loss of our in­dependence.

I know a lot of print journals are very concerned about the idea of going on-line or even having competition from electronic lists. SHEAR itself is very worried about H-SHEAR taking away potential members. At the SHEAR conference last summer, I was invited to sit in on the SHEAR Advisory Council and Editorial Committee meetings because H-SHEAR was high on their agenda. But they had nothing but very posi­tive things to say about our book reviews and list overall. Their basic concern was how they could use this great thing we have got going at H-SHEAR to increase the member­ship of the parent organization which has become quite stagnant in the past few years.

Any horror stories?

So far everything has gone pretty smoothly, but then if anything goes wrong I am in the fortunate position that this is all so new that no one is quite sure what we were supposed to be doing so I can simply write off any mistakes as an experiment. And I have certainly had my share of experiments!