Love this question!!

I found working with our team very stimulating. Historians so rarely collaborate on a collective enterprise that it was fun (and intellectually challenging) to hash out a common approach in our meetings. One of the things that made the original People & a Nation team work so well was that most of us knew at least one other person on the team before we started to sketch our a plan and draft our chapters (only one was unknown to the rest of us, and he left the team first), and we knew we shared a common approach to US history. But even so in the beginning I had to push my colleagues to get them to include what I regarded as adequate coverage of women & gender.

As you indicate, there is a rhythm to textbooks. I learned to live with the revision cycle and to plan ahead for the months & years I would have to devote to revisions. My monographs would have appeared more quickly had I not had to put that research and writing aside regularly for the textbook, because when revision time came I had no time for anything else. On the other hand, I have reached more students/readers through the textbook than through anything else I have written. It is humbling to think that tens of thousands of students have read my version of Early American history. I have always enjoyed hearing from students who have used the book in college or in HS AP courses.

I have now decided not to write chapters any longer–after 9 editions, and thus 18 times through my prose, I hit a wall. I am still affiliated with the book for the forthcoming 10th edition in the capacity of ‘consulting editor,’ which basically means that I am helping out with a variety of different tasks.