Former journal editor Gerald Stone said an article isn’t dead until you as an author decides to bury it. Some authors, he said, don’t know that the letter they receive is an acceptance letter — the editor only wants the author to make revisions and resubmit. Instead, strangely, they take it as rejection.
For this reason, Stone said, when you get a letter from a journal that will tell you whether your article has been accepted or not, follow this procedure:
Most books come out of experience. Authors find a need in the field. They discover the existing texts have weaknesses, miss important topics, or simply do not excite their students. It may very well be there is no book on the particular topic they are teaching, or that the author is on the developing edge of an emerging area in a discipline.
Betty Azar, author of Understanding and Using English Grammar, said: “Experience tells me that first an author should see a need in the field. If the book you want to write fills a need you have in your own teaching, you can be fairly sure it will do the same for other teachers. Some of the best books have come from teachers like myself who develop their own materials for their classes because there was nothing available in the marketplace to meet their teaching needs, and then turned these materials into texts.”
Here are some ways to get started in textbook publishing:
