What You Are Getting Wrong About University Presses

This one is for the academics.

There is much misunderstanding about university presses. I sat down and decided to write an explanatory newsletter and realized it was too large a topic to handle in one post. So I’m going to focus on some misunderstandings some academics have about books they (1) write and (2) assign to students. I need to emphasize this newsletter is more vibes than research (and I really want to learn more myself!)

There are two common complaints I find misguided and self-defeating:

• Complaints about the price of books they assign to students
  

• Complaints about the price of books they write

Let’s take the authors first. Most scholarly books sell very very few copies. Most of the buyers are academic libraries. Ergo, high prices, because the price has to cover the costs of the press to publish those books. Those costs include printing (expensive!), distribution (fees taken), and, of course, labor: your acquisition editor’s salary, the price of copyediting, proofreading, typesetting, designing, cataloging, publicizing, marketing. Say a monograph sells 200 copies (typical if maybe high?) and all the fees above add up to $20,000: the break-even cost would be $100. Charging buyers $100 for that book only ensures the press does not lose money.

Some university press authors are upset that their books are POD, or print on demand. They assume that means the book looks bad, and/or is “less important” than other books in the catalog. Not at all. Sure, maybe 20 years ago POD books looked worse than offset ones, but times change. Here’s a test: go to your bookshelf. Open to the last page of the book—the final page before the back cover/boards. Do you see a bar code and a bunch of numbers on the bottom of the page (something like the image below). That means it was likely printed on demand. Would you have guessed? I doubt it. Given the economy of printing today, POD is the best and more logical way to print in many if not most cases.

Now, you may ask (and I know I did for the longest time): doesn’t the university underwrite the costs to publish scholarly books? Not nearly as much as you might assume. Many university presses have separate budget lines, and must bring in the money they use to pay staff, print books, etc. UP employees are not paid out of the same budget as are faculty, say, or administrators. I’ve been looking for a handy explainer/breakdown to no avail yet (comments are open!) but this 2019 article, when Stanford threatened to pull all funding from its press, states that the press brought in $5 million per year, and the university contributed $1.7 million. Most of the budget from the press comes from sales of books. And this is not aberrant. Some presses need to fully fund their operations through sales, but have a university endowment that helps out. Some presses are under the auspices of their institution’s library.¹

Now let’s take on the question of assigning books to students— requiring them on your syllabus. Many professors refuse to assign books because they think the cost of those books is too high (see above) and don’t want to hurt students’ pockets. But—see above—this can often be an individually self-defeating decision (as in telling one’s potential press, “but my scholarly book will sell 1,000 copies, I know! My colleagues will assign it to their students!”—which the press knows won’t happen, because, after all, you don’t assign your colleagues’ books to your students. You might steal a chapter or two and provide handouts instead though. )

It can all get kinda ridiculous. I have had professors brag to me that they “assigned three chapters” of Belt books to their students. This is, obviously, a copyright violation—not new— this that has been happening for ages. But apart from that, this decision weakens presses that might someday publish them because it siphons off sales.

Over on twitter recently, there was a large thread of professors explaining how they teach their students where to go to pirate academic and other texts for free. How righteous they were! How everyone cheered on their noble and good politics! And sure—(and here is where I have to say again that this is a very partial write-up of this complex situation)—there are usurious presses out there that do overcharge, and this is particularly a problem in STEM and with presses like Elsevier. So sometimes this is a fine move, if the book was published by a for-profit press, say. But sometimes it is, again, self-defeating. The fewer copies UP books sell, the higher UP prices will go, and the weaker UPs will be overall, and it will become only harder for you to get a contract for your monograph, which you need to get or keep your job, because academia still runs on premise that publishing books by a university presses, through peer review (another cost) is a if not the most significant criteria for deciding if they should hire, retain, and/or promote their employees.

It’s madness, and it’s circular, and, often everyone is too dizzy from the spinning to see the ramifications of their decisions (for students) and desires (for themselves).

None of this solves the problems of students having to pay more for textbooks than they can afford, of course. And I haven’t even touched on the mission of UPs, which is baked into everything I’ve written about here. But the solution cannot be increased pirating of UP titles (though it’s often the best workaround). The solution has to be (no one will be surprised here) structural changes to tuition, tenure and promotion, and the funding of universities and their presses.

And, on behalf of my colleagues who work at UPs and are very tired of answering the same questions and batting down the same set of misunderstandings or ignorance: if you want—or need to—publish a book with a UP, do your research (it’s your job, after all), and recognize UPs and the people who work in them are more than the means through which you might get a job or promotion.

Interested in this topic and have more questions?

• Ask UP has great FAQs

• A still very useful 2017 Chronicle package

• On publishing a trade title with a UP, from Jane Friedman

• On universities also not really understanding their presses

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November is within sight and with it my next course on writing book proposals which is, actually, very academic friendly ;)

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1. I’m so curious to learn about more ways UPs are funded, and any info about specific UPs out there.