Notes on Academic Publishing

[orichalcum]

Yesterday, I attended a workshop with a former publishing director for Cambridge University Press. Some of her advice was the standard stuff you can get from books like "From Dissertation to Book," but there were some particular insights I hadn't thought about previously which it seemed like others reading this might find interesting:

1. Academic publishing market for monographs is lousy right now, largely because the portion of university librarians' budgets devoted to monographs is way down, because the journal subscription prices have risen 17% in the last four years, on average. So now only 30% of most univ. library new-resource budgets goes to books. This means less demand, which means that most academic books have print runs of under 500 copies. However, ironically, some presses are reacting to this by trying to commission more books total, since they can't get very many copies out of any one book anyhow, and some book might strike a gold mine.

2. In most cases, you need to pitch your book for an international (if Anglophone) audience, since most major presses sell to libraries in 150-160 countries and will get at least one U.K. reader and one U.S.A. reader (U.S. libraries being half the world market). This means you need to think about issues of parochialism - do you reference "Birmingham" without making either "Alabama" or "England" clear - and take into consideration major international theoretical divisions in your field. In general, U.S. readers tend to be more concerned about issues of methodology, theory, and being up on the latest secondary criticism, since their libraries are larger and have that criticism available, whereas U.K. readers expect more attention and focus on primary sources/archives and drawing larger conclusions from those sources. I realized that I've been modeling my book on a bunch of British books - which may explain why U.S. reviewers criticize me for being less up on theory/criticism.

3. A frequent trap is to think that "interdisciplinary" means "trendy and can sell twice or thrice as many books to people in both fields." In fact, there are two pitfalls here: A. The publisher will send your book out to one reader in each discipline, each of whom may guard their discipline's boundaries assiduously and harshly. The historian, say, will slam down on you if you aren't up on all the latest historical theory, whereas the gender studies person will expect a comprehensive knowledge of feminist theory. Then there's the marketing problem - both publishers and librarians are still tightly divided by departments, and so the history librarian may think, "oh, this is a book which should come out of the women's studies book budget" while her colleague thinks, "oh, this book should be part of the history budget" and then 0 rather than 2 copies get bought. So it may be wiser to pitch to a main field and mention "influences" by other fields, so you can wind up neatly in a box.

4. Very few people read academic books cover-to-cover anymore. Usually, esp. with the advent of digital books, they will read a chapter or even a few pages. This suggests that it is useful to write a granular book - one that is helpful in sections and bits and pieces. However, if you present a wholly granular book idea, the publisher will say "why not publish that as a series of journal articles?" So you also need a strong argument which connects and ties together all the individual quilty bits.

5. Some comments on titles, which are apparently important:  Many library search engines cut off the title after the colon, so your "search term" words need to be in the first part, not after the colon if used. Publishers hate quotes and puns and odd punctuation in the title. Short is good, from an aesthetic perspective. Big picture - though not too general - is good. Names are better than dates - i.e., not "1795 - 1945" but "Napoleon to Hitler" or "Austen to Hemingway."

6. Common mistakes in the cover letter: The phrase "filling a much-needed gap" - both silly, but also suggests that you are not doing important work, but just "grouting" - filling up the unimportant spaces between other people's big tiles. Similarly, "previously overlooked" or "ignored" suggest that there might be a reason no one bothered with your topic before. Positive, constructive words and strong verbs in the title or blurb help sales - "The Making of the Modern World" or "The Rise of the Novel" rather than "The Novel in Victorian England."

7. When referencing others' works, don't be a passenger in their train. "Drawing on" sounds like you're just hitching a ride on their ideas, whereas "building on" or "challenging Smith's theory" sounds like you're establishing new, game-changing thoughts. At the same time, you don't want to pitch your tent in the middle of nowhere, because people don't buy books there; you want it connected to the existing scholarly discussion. What makes an academic book valuable to you is that it fundamentally changed or developed your ideas about a particular topic - that's what you want to suggest your book will be. Also, avoid talking about "goals and objectives;" what your book does should be in the present, not a possible future. Not "I hope to change" but "changes."

Hope this was helpful for relevant folks! Discussion welcome in comments.