University presses

Ah well, second hand the book is $27,- on Alibris, but new I saw it for $ 66,45! One of the partners in my office had his own solution: he edited and released his book himself, shouldn’t be that difficult nowadays.

Wonderful insight for the unwashed, er, unpublished.

Philosophically one might consider that when I was in college a millenium ago, it took three work hours to pay for a book. I make substantially more money now; but it still takes three work hours to pay for a book. I detect a Mcnamarian, beancounters conspiracy at work here….

Hi Eric, I’ve been a lurker since you started the site, but this topic has forced me out of the woods. One thing we’ve discovered in my department is that thanks to dwindling budgets, university presses actually are more profit motivated than ever before, to the point that some of us have started to question our tenure requirements because of it. On the one hand, publishers now shy away from topics they consider hard to sell. On the other, they increasingly accept almost anything having to do with the Civil War, which is becoming something of a “cash cow.” The end results are harder times for scholars examining less than “hot” fields, the publication of books on the Civil War that ten years would not have seen the light of day, and a devaluation of what you and I and the rest of us do in the Civil War field as a direct result. Given the state of the economy and current views toward the role of government, I don’t see it getting any better.

As for a lack of marketing, my first book died on the vine because of it, but Tennessee and Kentucky did a marvelous job with later works. I have to give them “props.”

Eric,

Interesting comments on your experiences publishing through university presses. I’ve worked for commercial publishers, and for a university press (9 years), and offer a couple of observations in response. It sounds to me like you were expecting something from university presses that they have never been organized to deliver. Like all presses, they are struggling to adapt their business models to keep up with changes in publishing (the advent of true print-on-demand, and so forth), but they will never fully adopt the practices of commercial or trade publishers because that’s not what they do.

First, as you know, most or all academic presses have a mission to disseminate scholarship. This is why they publish obscure, esoteric, and often inscrutable monographs. There is no commercial market for these works, but they satisfy a professor’s tenure-track need to publish, and add to the pool of scholarship in a particular field. You mention this freedom to publish otherwise unpublishable material as one of the advantages, but this advantage/mission is inseparable from the other issues about which you complain. It necessarily impacts the pricing, the lack of marketing, etc.

With respect to pricing, at least in my experience, university presses are not seeking to gouge buyers so much as they are seeking to avoid asking the provost for a bigger subsidy. They usually price according to a formula that would allow them to recoup their costs on a low print run for a hard cover book. Rather than print 1000s of a book that might sit in the warehouse for years, they typically will print 1,500, 1,000 or – more often – less than 1,000 copies in cloth (with some exceptions, like ongoing classroom adoptions). To some extent, they depend on regular sales to libraries to reach the break-even point, but in recent years even libraries have severely restricted their purchasing.

It may be true, as you say, that university presses don’t necessarily need to make a profit, but that’s not why they have such high list prices on their books. They have those prices because they have low print runs (higher unit costs) and are under pressure from their university administrations not to lose money.

Regarding cutting corners, here I would beg to differ (at least with respect to university presses as a whole). All presses produce budgets for certain titles, with allowances for artwork and maps, but selling a book short on art is not something endemic to academic publishing. Individual presses, and individual acquiring editors, would address that question on a project-by-project basis (Oxford University Press, for example, recently published a Civil War title with over 700 images and two dozen 4-color maps).

Generally, in my experience at least, university presses have been the last publishers to cut corners in the art of bookmaking – the last ones to forego traditional book designers, and full-fledged copy editing, the last ones to abandon high-grade cloth and papers in favor of cheaper materials, the last to opt for adhesive case binding over smyth sewn. Of course all of this, along with small print runs, also contributes to higher unit costs. All of this is changing now, as more and more presses utilize standard designs and less expensive material, and relegate paperbacks to digital print-on-demand services.

Regarding the long turn-around time, this is a legitimate complaint and a real problem for university presses. Partly this is due to small staffs, partly to institutional paralysis, partly to what they’re able to budget for a given season. Still, it’s inexcusable.

Lastly, your comments on the weak marketing among university presses is right on the mark (though more presses than you named do have significant marketing campaigns, notably Nebraska and Oklahoma, who also publish what are effectively trade paperbacks). This is one of the most frustrating things for authors, and others. For some reason, after the initial burst of publicity (catalog listings, review copies sent out, some print ads and displays at some book shows), a university press book is left to its own devices (which often means the author promoting it himself). Internal marketing departments concentrate on the press catalog, and on exhibits, but are not funded as at commercial publishers. Nor are they set up to keep pushing backlist titles that might still have a market. If library sales and the initial push are enough to recoup costs, then they aren’t terribly concerned about how long it takes to move the remaining 100s in inventory.

Your comment about the maps notwithstanding, a university press is generally a good way to go to ensure a well edited, well made book. But you won’t get rich (many won’t pay royalties on the first print run, or the first 1,000 books, e.g.). It usually means a greater presence in libraries, however, if that is important to you (when was the last time you saw a White Mane title in a library)?

All of this is to say, some of the university press shortcomings you mentioned are less outrageous when viewed in light of their mission, and the models they’ve developed to fulfill that mission.

Eric,

Yeah, that’s me. I saw the university press commentary, and had to jump in. One of your other correspondents, Ken, mentioned that university presses are becoming more profit-minded all the time, and that’s true. That will necessarily prompt more changes in the marketing arena. They need one or two relatively big sellers every cycle to pay for all the dogs they publish.

But they have some leeway on the pricing, when they’re willing to take a chance. When Stanford published David Eicher’s “Civil War High Commands,” they wanted to price it at $125, but I implored them to bring it out as close to 50 as possible. It started at $65, and went up to $70 at some point. Still pricey for the average book buyer, but reasonable for a massive, 1000-page reference work.

Ted Savas won’t skimp on your maps. We had such a map fetish when we began publishing CWR quarterly and various collections of essays, we started drafting them ourselves, since we could tailor them closely to the narrative (and because they’re fun to work on). That was one of the motivations behind our getting into Civil War publishing in the first place — maps were too few and/or useless. Other motivations included the paucity of detailed treatments of anything outside the major (mostly Eastern) campaigns, the lack of end- or footnotes (masking an epidemic of sloppy research), and the near-absence of any outlets for long articles on lesser-known subjects.

But from the beginning maps were integral parts of everything we did. The more the better. Publishing 36 or so of Mark Moore’s precise maps in Bradley’s Bentonville book was just a natural treatment for that subject matter. That’s not to say the quantity of maps is important in and of itself — it helps if they are readable (I’m thinking of Priest’s South Mountain book, which I hope was repaired in subsequent printings).

I know Ted still values those same attributes in his military histories. So if your hangup with Kent State was maps, you definitely went to the right place with Savas Beattie.

— Dave Woodbury

While most University Presses may suffer from the problems you indicate here, I think one of the more successful presses is Texas A&M. Granted, they do operate largely in niche markets – military history and Texas/Southwest history, but the work they publish is almost always well received.

I’m not privy to their pricing decisions, but as a Texas History collector, I haven’t noticed their price being out of line with the other publishers in the field. Also, they publish many more-popular works than bland (to most) history which may give them a leg up on some presses.

Some of the books they publish are amazingly beautiful. I have a copy of “Lure of the Land” by Frantz et al which is basically a history of settlement across Texas based on historical Texas maps. It is a stunning example of the very good works coming out of there.