Pulling an essay from an edited volume

Advice manuals for people in graduate programs often say, "Avoid edited collections like the plague!"* Submit articles only to peer-reviewed journals, they continue, and don't let some editor get your dissertation chapter for some forgettable new collection. This is good advice, and I know it, but I broke it anyway some four years ago. Saw a CfP for a peer-reviewed collection of essays, and wrote a dissertation chapter with that volume specifically in mind.

At the time, the decision made sense. After all, I was currently writing the dissertation, the terrors of the academic job market were looming, and publications are a good line on the CV (or at least better than no line on the CV). Nor did I plan for this dissertation/book chapter combo to survive into my eventual monograph. Hence, I wasn't really "wasting" my research on an inferior publication venue.

Alas, 3 1/2 years after submitting the original manuscript, I've finally pulled that book chapter.

There'd been warning signs for a while. The editor seemed extremely disorganized, for one -- I had another friend whose abstract had been approved, but she bowed out after several e-mails to the editor went simply unanswered. The peer review process was a joke, too -- between my two received peer reviews, one was superficial and the other incompetent. Worst of all, the editor seemed perfectly willing to blindly accept/publish anything  . . . as I realized a few months ago when I took another look at my contribution and realized, horrified, what a piece of garbage it was.

Don't get me wrong -- the argument held up brilliantly, but the writing itself put a blush to my cheeks. After taking four days off to re-write, I ended up cutting 15% of pointless verbiage and significantly professionalized the tone. To be fair to myself, I was only a doctoral student when I wrote it, and my writing has clearly improved since then. Still, no serious academic editor should ever have accepted that original book chapter without substantial revisions.**

Anyway, the only reason pulling the essay took me so long was guilt. If I pulled the chapter, that might scupper the entire volume, which I knew had some length issues. Nonetheless, it finally just reached the point where (a) I had given the editor every chance, and (b) now, unlike four years ago, publishing an essay in McFarland won't do anything to help my career.***

So, that's that. Have to say, re-submitting the article to a real academic journal is coming as quite a relief.

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* That particular quote, if memory serves right, comes courtesy of Surviving your Academic Job Hunt: Advice for Humanities PhDs, a book by which I live. It's by Kathryn Hume who, incidentally, also did Fantasy and Mimesis back in the early 1980s.
** There were several other warning signs as well, but they must go unnamed for the sake of anonymity.
***Although McFarland will occasionally publish good books (and they're really trying to be the Routledge or Palgrave Macmillan of popular culture studies), I've also received several job-market warnings from serious academics about the relative worth of a publication in McFarland.

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