Peer review for books: What to expect

Author: Christabell Ndive

Writing and publishing your first book is a rite of passage for every researcher. If you’ve gotten to this point in your research career, you will already have several journal article publications on your CV, and you’re likely pretty familiar with how that peer review process works. And while peer review for your book and book proposal has some similarities, it also has some key differences.

What to expect from a review of your book proposal

Often, publishing your book starts not with a finished manuscript — as it would with a journal article — but with a book proposal, and possibly a sample chapter. Your book editor may also ask you to suggest possible reviewers (as some journal editors do, as well).

Your book publishing editor will then organize and manage the review process for your book proposal. Both your editor — familiar with current work in your field, including market demand for a book like yours — as well as an external reviewer may review your proposal.

This review will help in a few ways. First, it will help your editor determine if your proposal is ready to be accepted. Secondly, because this review usually happens early on in the book-writing process, reviewer feedback can help you refine and improve your proposal, and the book that comes from it.

And because you need this feedback in a timely fashion, your Springer Nature book editor will diligently work to manage deadlines, and get the review back to you in a timely fashion — with most reviews coming back in two-to-three months.

What reviewers will look for

A book generally has to stand on its own. While books that are part of book series do benefit from being in the series, generally, each book is a single item, unlike a journal article. This means that, in addition to your book’s basic soundness, editors and reviewers will also look at whether your book fits an unmet need, and how it fits in with existing publications.

Your editor will provide your reviewer with some guidelines, asking them to evaluate your proposal on a handful of criteria. The guidance we give to book peer reviewers asks them to look at and comment on things like:

• Will this book offer a useful and/or original contribution to the field?
• Will it adequately engage with recent scholarship? 
• Will it take existing scholarship and research forward?  
• What are this proposal’s strengths and weaknesses?  

These are some of the general questions. Reviews should then look at more specific areas that should help you in refining your plan for your book. These kinds of questions can include:  

• Completeness: Have you adequately covered the topic? Does the reviewer have any feedback on the writing?  
• References: Have you cited the relevant material? 
• Organization: Looks at how you’re planning to organize the material and arrange your table of contents 
• Title: Does your title describe what the book is about?

Another difference with peer review for journal articles is that even if the reviewer report ultimately does not end up bearing on your editor’s decision to accept your book proposal — feedback from the reviewer might not bear on that decision, unlike with journal articles — you should still take reviewer’s comments on board and use them to improve your book as you work on writing it.  

How we use the reviews

Combined with Springer Nature’s book editors’ market knowledge, these reviewer reports help your editor evaluate your proposal. There are three possible outcomes from this process: Your editor would accept your proposal and offer a book contract; ask for revisions to the proposal; or reject the proposal. In all cases, you should expect to see a blinded copy of the review, along with an explanation from the book editor. In some cases, your editor might deem it necessary to review your completed manuscript prior to production.

How you can use the reviews

As mentioned above, you should expect to receive a (blinded) copy of the report, which should have concrete feedback and suggestions that you should incorporate as you’re developing your book and writing the text. This means that you’re not “flying blind” in writing your book, and that you have some perspective on your project from a fellow researcher in your field, along with interpretation from a seasoned Springer Nature book editor.  

This perspective can help your book reach its full potential, and help you make your book the best possible version of itself.

Where to learn more

This review process ultimately should benefit everyone — you as an author, your readers, as well as safeguarding research integrity for Springer Nature. It also helps your reviewers too, by giving them a chance to give authors insight into how they can improve their books. 

To understand what to expect as your proposal gets reviewed, check out the instructions we give to your reviewers here. This page details the same topics we’ve covered in this blog, but from the reviewers' perspective, rather than from yours as an author.