For more than a few years, the masthead of my website has been saying, “With my co-author and spouse Beth Herst, I am completing a book on narrative and politics.” Now I can report that we’ve completed the book and that it will be published. In this post I will provide an academic trailer about the book and some observations on the publication process to this point.

The Book

Our book is titled Public Representations: Screen Stories, Narrative, and the Public Sphere. It explores how popular cultural narratives, specifically film, and broadcast, cable, and streaming series represent politics, governance, and the public sphere. Its focus is equally on how these representations function within cultural discourse, arguing for the role that narratives can play in shaping how citizens experience, respond to, and engage with politics, governance, and the public sphere.

The book analyzes a selection of films, broadcast, cable, and streaming series from the U.S. and the U.K. (and in two instances other European countries) between 2010 and 2020 and Canadian films and series from 1960 to the present. While we did not set out to write a “woke” book, we found that the recent narratives pay much more attention to women, racialized minorities, and indigenous Canadians than earlier narratives (for example those discussed in our 2011 book Governing Fables) when most political actors were white men. Reflecting the size of global cultural markets, we have four chapters about the U.S, one about the U.K. and texts from two other European countries, and one about Canada. We also have a chapter about my experience teaching narrative and management for thirty years.

The Publication Process

Our publisher is the University of Toronto Press (UTP). After receiving a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council to fund the research for the book, I approached UTP and we eventually signed a publication contract. Our editor, Daniel Quinlan, provided helpful comments when we sent him chapters and was sympathetic to our explanations about missing deadlines, the inevitable result of our obligations to our parents and our children.

We submitted the manuscript late last fall, and it was sent to two anonymous reviewers (in the sense that, while they knew who we are, we didn’t know who they are), and they reported several months later. One reviewer recommended publication without changing a word, while the other recommended publication with some revisions. In our response to the publisher, we made the case that the former had better bona fides and a deeper understanding of our manuscript than the latter, and that the former’s recommendation should prevail. UTP’s publication committee accepted our recommendation.

As an aside, I find it surprising that when editors of academic journals have a recommendation to accept an article after some revisions and another to publish only if further revisions are made, they most often side with the latter reviewer. In my view, this makes the reviewing process unwieldy and reduces the coherence of the article that is eventually published.

We are now awaiting the next step, which is copyediting. I know from experience that this can be fraught. Some copyeditors like your style, and this stage moves quickly. Other copyeditors don’t, and the revision process can become tedious.

In the past, copyeditors were in-house, or at least freelancers who were closely aligned with the publisher. I met them face-to-face and had frequent phone calls. They made their suggestions using pencil and sticky notes. Now copyediting is contracted out to offshore production agencies, and the author never meets and rarely speaks to the copyeditor. Pencil and sticky notes have been replaced by track changes. I wonder to what extent the process is now using AI.

We anticipate that our book’s extensive use of online sources will affect the copyediting process. We go to considerable lengths to comment on not only criticism of these texts by scholars and well-known reviewers but also discussions on social media. It can be challenging to note sources with precision and fidelity, which a good copyeditor will check.

We are awaiting the copyeditor’s work sometime in July, and production agencies ask for a quick turnaround. I will likely go on radio silence next month. I will be posting more about the book and publication process in the following months.