By publishing reviews of scholarly books, journal editors can amplify and extend intellectual conversations within their fields. This essay offers suggestions for journal editors who wish either to consider publishing book reviews or to improve the value of the book reviews they publish. The advice-focusing on enabling, encouraging, and acknowledging influential, transformative scholarly book reviews-is intended to help scholarly book reviews come closer to achieving their potential as intellectual contributions of their own.

Online submission portals for scholarly journal manuscripts regularly include space for a covering letter or its equivalent. But why should that opportunity mark the first contact between author and editor? This article reimagines the submission-accompanying covering letter by exploring the value of earlier outreach and correspondence between authors and editors. For authors planning submissions to journals in the humanities and humanities-adjacent social sciences, especially, this article explains the purpose and practice of initiating contact via query letter after manuscript conceptualization but before manuscript composition. Following a positively received query letter, a covering letter becomes a straightforward letter of transmittal accompanying an anticipated submission that an editor should be predisposed to welcome.

© University of Toronto Press, 2023 doi: 10.3138/jsp-2022-0053 notes 1. Abbie Griffin and Gloria Barczak, ‘Effective Reviewing for Conceptual Journal Submissions,’ AMS Review 10, no. 1–2 (June 2020): 36–48, https://doi .org/10.1007/s13162-020-00162-z. 2. I have previously bemoaned the use of in-line citations in books such as this one, where strict adherence to disciplinary convention sacrifices the reader’s experience. (Such citations can be perfectly at home in journal articles.) Here, citational paraphernalia occlude the arguments in the earlier and concluding chapters. 3. Brian Paltridge, The Discourse of Peer Review: Reviewing Submissions to Academic Journals (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Brian Paltridge and Sue Starfield, Getting Published in Academic Journals: Navigating the Publication Process (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016). 4. The moral? Publishing is a relational enterprise, and important ideas cross delivery platforms. The 2019 presentation in Boston was one of several workshops on the topic that Barczak and Griffin had delivered. The success of those workshops spurred both their 2020 AMS Review article and this book.

3. Germano notes, astutely, that ‘when writers on writing say something about what makes a book work, the first thing they emphasize is often the writer’s voice’ (157). Germano’s is a voice of someone I would delight in inviting to dinner. 4. With respect to copy-editing, readers can consult the grammar, spelling, and style guides of their choice. Or, perhaps closer to Haag’s method, see Claire Kehrwald Cook, Line by Line: How to Improve Your Own Writing (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985); or Virginia Tufte, Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 2006). 5. I love what Haag offers about titles: All authors should aim to ‘distill in one elegant title the premise’ of the book (89). Given the misleading nature of perfection vis-à-vis revising, though, I was more predisposed to appreciate Germano’s masterfully subtitled book. 6. A book that falls midway between Germano’s and Haag’s approaches is Scott Norton’s Developmental Editing: A Handbook for Freelancers, Authors, and Publishers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Norton successfully presents lengthier examples while engaging with macro-level issues; his book consequently requires more of a commitment from its readers. 7. Examples of Haag’s ‘trickster clichés’ include in their infinite wisdom, rear its ugly head, and fraught with peril (269). 8. Sixty-five considerations make for a lot of passes through a text! But similar issues can be addressed simultaneously, since the aim is to learn how to become a good self-editor. To that end, both Germano and Haag wisely recommend reading one’s text aloud. 9. But, indeed, as Haag points out, ‘Shortening a manuscript is challenging work’ (200).

You might think that two books on the same rather niche topic, published the same year by two major university presses, would have a lot in common. In the case of this pair on revising scholarly book manuscripts in the humanities and social sciences, you would be wrong. The reason? Revising is writing.1 Approaches to writing are as varied as the writers who embody them, making approaches to revising no different. Expansively, revising can entail a re-visioning of what a text could become—that is, a re-imagining of its promise or potential. More narrowly, revising can involve re-seeing what a text says—that is, improving its clarity and precision. Approaches all along the macro–micro spectrum are valid and necessary. What you and your working manuscripts may need at any given time may differ, so let us welcome both of these engaging works. William Germano, author of On Revision: The Only Writing That Counts, clearly aligns with the re-visioning camp. A professor of English at the Cooper Union, Germano is a former editorial director of Columbia

© University of Toronto Press, 2023 doi: 10.3138/jsp-2023-0017 attention it pays to potential solutions beyond a few brief remarks about the need to better educate researchers on how to identify predatory practices and how one university’s appointment letters state that research fndings ‘should be published only in well-established and credible scientifc journals that employ rigorous peer review’ (102). Instead, the concluding chapter simply recaps in two-and-a-half pages what we have already read in the previous 112 pages. It would have been more valuable to use the conclusion to look ahead rather than back with a thoughtful discussion of how legitimate scholarly publishers, government higher education overseers, university administrators, law enforcement agencies, research funders, and faculty members individually and collectively, could better defend and protect academic integrity.

If you write for a living—or if your living involves writing, as is often the case for scholars—you know that writing does not always come easily. Through experience you learn what works: when you can be most productive; how to schedule and structure your writing time; how to set realistic goals (and who can support these goals); which rituals and routines suit your personality and the ever-evolving exigencies of your life. For those who are newer to scholarly writing for publication, though, the challenges to writing enjoyably and with a sense of purpose can easily overwhelm. Do not despair. By identifying and emphasizing what you can control with respect to writing, this pair of books offers tools and strategies for self-reflection and for understanding—and ultimately for improving the quality, efficiency, and effectiveness of your writing practice. Christian Wymann of Bern, Switzerland, presents serious, straightforward, and sensible perspectives and advice in Mind Your Writing: How to Be a Professional Academic Writer. With content gleaned from six years spent as a writing coach and framed as responses to ten fundamental questions about writing, the brief chapters (averaging just seven 10.3138/jsp.53.2.03 53 2