Quick Guide: Working with Contributors – Page 3

Author Responsibilities

As the lead author/editor of your textbook, you will interact with your contributors and help ensure that they deliver their materials in a timely manner. Cognella will not send or receive anything directly to or from a contributor, nor will we send them reminders as deadlines approach, as their primary and most important relationship is with you. We will ask that you are very mindful of deadlines and regularly communicate with your contributors so that they do not fall behind schedule.

We will provide you with various tips and resources along the way—everything from webinars to Quick Guides and other tools. You can then freely share these resources with your contributors so that they have everything they need to complete their contributions.

You will also be the one to review the quality of the work of all contributors.

As you assume the role of lead author/editor, here are some questions to consider:

• How consistent would you like the voice to be across chapters, given that they are being written by a variety of people with a variety of backgrounds?

• If you are, for whatever reason, unable to fulfill your responsibilities as lead author, is there a co-author or contributor you would recommend to take over lead duties?

• If you have a co-author sharing lead responsibilities, have you decided who will communicate with all your contributors? Do you have a clear plan for reviewing responsibilities?

Contributor Responsibilities

There are several things that are important to clarify with your contributors based on your preferences:

• Will your contributors be expected to format their contributions according to Cognella standards, or will you do that for them?

• Will contributors select all the images and create other elements (tables, text boxes, etc.), or will you do that for them?

• Have you told your contributors which style guide to follow (CMS, APA, MLA, etc.)?

You can also remind them that they won’t have to spend huge amounts of time worrying about:

• Layout and design considerations

• Typos and grammatical errors

• The book cover