One of the scariest parts of scholarly publishing is waiting for the peer reviewers’ reports to come back. This wait will culminate in that suspenseful moment when your acquisitions editor sends you the reports and you get to see what the experts honestly thought of your work.

Some editors will provide helpful commentary to frame the reports for you, while others will give only cryptically gesture at what they think of the reports, and others will just send a terse “see attached” email, leaving you totally in the dark as to the path forward.

If the reports are so doubtful about the project that the editor isn’t comfortable moving forward with you, I hope they’ll tell you that directly. In all other cases, you can assume that you will be expected to write up a response to the reports. This response will be presented by your editor to the ultimate decision makers at the publisher, likely an internal editorial committee and/or a faculty editorial board.

Don’t assume that negative feedback—even with no softening from the editor—means the press won’t publish your book! If your editor is giving you an opportunity to respond to the reports—even if that opportunity just looks like them sending you the reports and providing no further guidance—that means they do see the potential in your book.

Your response is your chance to make the case that you can rise to that potential. Your editor may even be testing you a little bit to see how you respond to criticism and whether you can put ego aside to produce the best book possible. So what do you need to know in order to craft a compelling response?

Way back in my first blog post about academic publishing, I mentioned that I had no idea what I was doing when it came to responding to the reader reports on the proposal for my first book. This is a problem first-time authors commonly face, because you’re expected to write a document—a response letter—that you may have never seen an example of in your life!

If you have friends who have been through the book publishing process before, see if they’ll share their response letters with you so you can see a model or two that worked out. There’s also an example of a successful response letter in The Book Proposal Book. (If you scroll down in this post, you’ll find a template you can use as a starting point for your own response letter when the time comes.)

Before you write up your own response letter, I want you to know about four misconceptions about reader reports that trip authors up when it comes to writing their responses:

Misconception #1: Peer reviewers decide your book’s fate with the publisher

Peer review is a significant aspect of the scholarly publishing process. It’s what sets university presses and other academic publishers apart from the rest of the publishing world. So the input of experts in your field does matter to the decision of whether or not a press wants to take on the publication of your manuscript.

However, the word of the peer reviewers is not final. For one thing, your editor will be gathering reviews from at least two different scholars, and if their assessments contradict each other or are otherwise ambiguous, the editor will probably get at least one additional reviewer to come on board, maybe more. So the negative opinion of one reviewer is not a death knell for your project.

Even if all the reviewers agree in their criticism of the submitted materials, that doesn’t mean your project is doomed.

Keep in mind that peer reviewers are asked to make recommendations about publication, not decisions. Decisions are made internally at the press. Your editor will take your submission materials, along with the reader reports and your response, to their press’s publications committee (or similar body—different publishers call it different things), and make the case for publication to the people who actually do get to decide.

If your response letter helps your editor demonstrate convincingly that you have the ability to satisfactorily address the concerns voiced by the reviewers, that can go a long way toward keeping your project in play.

Misconception #2: Your response has to show why your peer reviewers’ negative feedback is wrong

Notice in my previous point that I said your editor needs to believe you can address the reviewers’ concerns if they have them. That’s a very different thing than “your editor needs to believe the reviewers are mistaken in their concerns.”

Authors are often tempted to treat the response to reader reports as a rebuttal, but that’s not the right move here. You will be much more effective if you use your response to demonstrate that you can use the reader reports strategically to improve your manuscript. You can overcome even a pretty negative report if you craft your response well!

This is also an opportunity to show your editor and their colleagues that you are a willing collaborator who can make and execute a revision plan. When you write up your response, select a few of the reviewers’ criticisms that you think may actually have been merited and explain, in concrete terms, how you will revise the manuscript to address those criticisms. Say things like, “I will expand the middle section of Chapter 2 to fulfill Reviewer 1’s suggestion that I include more information on X,” to show that you have given real, practical thought to how you will execute the revisions. Include a specific timeline that shows just how doable the revisions will be for you.

If there are big issues brought up by the reviewers that you just don’t agree with, you can respond to those as well. But again, be strategic in your approach. It’s not about belaboring how wrong they are, but rather about acknowledging the reviewer’s position respectfully and showing how your vision for the book will result in something successful even if it doesn’t totally match theirs.

Remember, again, that it’s not the reviewer you need to convince.

Misconception #3: You have to do everything the reviewers tell you to

Hey, remember when I said that reviewers don’t get to make decisions about your book, just recommendations? That doesn’t just apply to the decision whether to publish, it also applies to the specific feedback they give you about the book’s content.

To paraphrase Cher Horowitz, reader reports are just “a jumping off point to start negotiations.” By that I mean that you can usually pick and choose which of the reviewer’s suggestions you will take on board and which you’ll respectfully decline.

Even if you entirely disagree with a reviewer’s understanding of your project, you can probably find something to spin into a constructive direction for revision. Say, for instance, that Reviewer 2 says that your research methods are questionable and the study in its current form is entirely unpublishable. Rather than believing that this means you need to redesign your entire study, you can respond with something like “I appreciate Reviewer 2’s comments about method, and I believe they indicate that I need to clarify the methodological underpinnings of my research and why they are appropriate to the research questions at hand. I will add several paragraphs on this matter in the introduction chapter.”

Remember that you are an expert, and lean on your own expertise when deciding what changes should be made to the manuscript.

Misconception #4: You have to have an answer for everything the reviewers say.

When your editor asks you to write a response to the reader reports, they’re probably not looking for a 10-page itemized breakdown of every little piece of feedback the reviewers gave you. You can ask your editor what they expect, just to be sure, but in all likelihood, they’re looking for you to outline your revision plan in the space of 2–3 pages, max.

You can focus on big picture matters—changes to the chapter order, chunks of content that you plan to insert or remove, broad stylistic revisions—without getting into the minutia of the phrasing Reviewer 3 wants you to change on p. 156.

Above all, it’s crucial to understand the purpose of your response in the context of the publication process.

Essentially, the response letter is your chance to make a final case to the publisher’s decision makers that your book is worth investing in. They will have access to your submission materials and to the actual peer reviews, but the response to the reader reports is where you pull it all together, reminding those decision makers what’s so great about your project and demonstrating how capable you are of bringing the project to its full potential.

A Template for Your Response to Reader Reports

As with all my templates, I need to share my caveat that there is no one right way to write a response to reader reports and that many different kinds of responses can be effective.

Some people go through the reports point by point and address everything. I personally think that’s overkill—and that it’s more effective to address the feedback in terms of big picture categories of revision, as I’ve advised below—but I don’t honestly think it matters much to your chances of success what format you choose.

The important thing is to keep the overall purpose in mind: making the case for your book and your potential to bring the manuscript to fruition successfully. As long as you don’t lose sight of that purpose in your letter, you’ll be good.

Although your editor will likely frame this letter as a response to the reader reports (and that’s what I’m calling it here), I think it’s more helpful to think of it as a “revision plan in light of reader reports.”

Your job here isn’t to rebut the points the reviewers made or prove that your submission materials were perfect all along; your job is to show that you will use the reports to strengthen your project into something that represents a good (i.e. non-risky) investment for the publisher.

Your publisher needs to know that if they offer you a contract for this book, you will submit a sound piece of scholarship that meets all their standards for publication. In other words, the people who decide whether to publish your book should come away from reading your response convinced that you’re a good bet. Providing them with a concrete, reasonable plan for revision—without coming off as defensive or ego-driven—is the way to convince them.

So, here’s how you do that.

The first step, obviously, is to read the reports. Maybe just skim them quickly to get an overall gist. Give yourself a day or two to think things over and get some distance from the comments.

Then, after you’ve sat with the feelings you need to sit with for a few days, return to the reports with an eye to making a revision plan. Print them out if you can, and go through them with a pen in hand. Underline anything that feels significant. When you see something that looks like a suggestion for revision, make a note in the margin recapping the suggestion in a few words. When you see something that looks like a nice summary of what you were trying to achieve with the manuscript, draw a little smiley face (or something less cutesy, it’s up to you, but do mark them because these summaries are one of the most valuable aspects of peer reviews). You can also mark examples of praise that you may want to quote in your response.

Some people make spreadsheets where they keep track of all the comments made by the reviewers and all the revisions they plan to make. If that works for you, go for it. You can also just jump straight from your notes on the reports to a draft of your response and use the writing of the response letter itself to organize all the feedback and your plans for revision.

If you’re not at all sure what the letter should look like, you can use this template as a starting point: 

1. Salutation (“Dear [Editor’s Name] and colleagues,”)

2. An opening statement of gratitude to the editor, publisher, and reviewers for their engagement with your project. Just a couple sentences, tops.

3. A recap of the project and the reviewers’ major positive takeaways. Restate what the reviewers saw as the main contribution(s) of your book; you can quote them directly if you like. (You can refer to the reviewers as Reviewer 1, Reviewer 2, etc.) You’ll also want to recap the book’s overall project to remind everyone of your primary vision for the book. Ideally one of your reviewers will have given a particularly apt summary of the book’s project and you can quote that here as well.

4. A summary statement of the major areas of revision you will undertake in light of the reviewers’ feedback. (You’ll be addressing each of them in more detail as the letter proceeds.) 

5. Several paragraphs, one or two per each major area of revision. For each major area of revision, summarize the recommendations of the reviewers and lay out concretely how you will execute the revisions in light of the recommendations. (More detail on how to do this below.)

6. An optional paragraph to address miscellaneous items from the reader reports if there’s anything else you want to say about them.

7. Another optional paragraph outlining any other major aspects of your planned revision that aren’t in direct response to the reader reports and thus haven’t come up yet in this letter.

8. A timeline for your revisions. You don’t need to get too specific here, but give enough detail to satisfy everyone that your plan is realistic and reasonable. 

9. Closing.

Let’s spend a little more time on how to talk about the major areas of revision.

After you’ve marked up the reader reports and made your margin summaries of the suggestions for revision, you’ll hopefully start to see that the reviewers’ comments can be grouped together into broad categories.

These are some common categories of comments I tend to see in my clients’ reader reports concern the need for: engagement with existing scholarship, refinement/clarification of the argument, additional supporting evidence or analysis, restructuring of the narrative, and stylistic revision.

You may spot different patterns in your feedback, and that’s fine. But do try to spot patterns; if only one reviewer commented on something and it feels like it came out of left field, you don’t necessarily have to address it (either here in your letter or in your revisions at all).

For each major area, write a paragraph that summarizes the main thrust of the reviewers’ comments and then lays out concretely how you plan to incorporate the recommendation into your revision plan. Your revision plan may even include items not called for specifically by the reviewers, but you can go ahead and lay those out here too.

You’ll want a paragraph for each major area of revision you plan to undertake. If you need more than one paragraph to address everything you want to say about each area of revision, that’s ok, but try to be concise. Remember that you want to convince the people who read this letter that you have a clear, executable plan in place, and going too far into minutia here could raise doubts about that.

What if you don’t agree with the reviewers’ advice, or the reviewers contradict each other? You still focus on your own plan for revision, but strategically incorporate the reviewers’ comments in a way that shows that you’ve respectfully considered them as you formulated your plan.

What if a reviewer gives you a huge revision suggestion and you’re not sure you want to take it? For instance, let’s say you’ve written a history that stops at a particular year and the reviewer insists that you must extend the narrative an additional 30 years, necessitating months of additional research and writing.

This is where you have to return to your vision for the book. Would the suggested change advance that vision? Do you have time and access to the necessary research materials to execute the revision? If you’re not sure, you may want to have a frank conversation with your editor about how necessary they think the revision is. If the reviewer says the book is unpublishable without the change, and you ultimately decide it’s not a change you’re willing or able to make, you can still engage with the suggestion respectfully in your response, laying out convincingly how you can achieve a successful manuscript without doing exactly what the reviewer suggested.

Perhaps you can come up with a compromise that allows you to acknowledge and address the spirit of the reviewer’s suggestion without altering your vision for the book. Remember that you need to convince your editor and publisher—not necessarily the reviewer—that your plan is sound.

Some reviewers may give you very minute suggestions, even identifying copyediting errors with specific page numbers. You can certainly take any of these suggestions that feel helpful to you, but you don’t necessarily need to address them in your response. The exception might be if the tiny points could be grouped together and addressed collectively because they represent a pattern across the manuscript. For example, you might say something like, “Reviewer 4 generously identified several points of fact that should be double-checked or clarified; I will carefully attend to these as I revise the manuscript.”

When it comes to laying out the timeline, you might detail the order in which you will tackle the major areas of revision across the manuscript and how long you expect each area to take, or you might lay out a month-by-month/chapter-by-chapter plan. Paint it in broad strokes; a couple sentences should do it. Then give a hard date by which you’ll have the full manuscript complete and ready to submit for further review (this may just be internal review by your editor if the original reader reports were positive enough). This is the date that will probably make it into your contract, so make sure it’s something you can realistically stick to.

And there you have it. If you have any uncertainty about what your editor expects at this stage, you should feel free to ask them questions.

Remember that your editor is on your team and you getting your response right helps them do their job (so they should want to help you help them).

Editors deal with peer reviews and reader reports on a daily basis so they sometimes forget that authors may have little to no experience with these things. It’s ok if you need to nudge them for some guidance. And of course I’m here too, if you need additional support!