The biggest rewards for authors and publishers come from textbooks. A good text will regularly be reprinted and go into revised editions. Once firmly established, a textbook provides a steady income for some years. This is in marked contrast to a symposium volume, which normally will produce almost all of its cash flow in just one year. Publishers want texts in the backlist to offset the short-duty cycle of monograph publishing.
A textbook is the hardest type of book to write well. Conference publishing demands little more than good organizing skills to bring in the papers. In a monograph it is even acceptable for authors to cull material from their research and reviews. And in both of these styles of publishing you are addressing other researchers who speak the same language. With a textbook you have to write down to the level of the average student. You will need to ...
