oh there's more
[Music]
all right so um
thanks everyone for
[Music]
coming to this book workshop
um delighted to have everyone here it's
kind of interesting to do this in a
virtual environment emily and i did
um something like this very similar
about a year ago up at the
u.s holocaust museum we're talking to
the um
fellows some of the fellows there and we
had a really good time although i lost
my voice at the time so
emily had to fill in a lot for me
but um let me share
my screen what i would tell everyone is
um
feel free to um use the chat
um you could ask you can
jump in if you want or you can use the
chat
um we will have questions and answers at
the end
but um it's always good to have um
questions as we go along so if something
doesn't
make sense
feel free to let us know let me put this
into present mode
great so um
welcome to our uh book publishing
workshop um
my name is peter potter i'm publishing
director here at virginia tech
um vindicated here let's see if i can
get rid of
there we go um some um i
you i have information here about me so
the kinds of things that i am
working on um here at the university
um emily and i overlapped very
did we overlap actually at cornell i'm
not sure if we actually did but it was
very close
and emily why don't you introduce
yourself
and we'll get started hi i'm emily
andrew i
am a senior editor at cornell university
press where i've been
sort of lost track of time between four
and five years um
and i have been in scholarly publishing
more generally for over two decades
so um really looking forward to
finding out more about what you're
curious about actually
great so um here's here
very quickly is our um plan for the
uh for the morning um we're going to
talk a bit about we have some slides so
we'll talk a bit about
um kind of the current state of
publishing
um then talk about uh finding a
publisher
what to do when your book is published
some financial considerations
we'll talk a bit about open access and
we'll have a q a session
and again you can
add uh questions as we go along to the
chat i'm trying to figure out now how to
do that with my
screen sharing on
do you all see um now the
um faces on the side yes yes
you do okay so how do i
um um
you know what if um emily can you see
the chat
i can do you want me to just send a
hello and we'll see if people can see
that
great and then you can let me know if if
um people raise questions in the chat
all right so um one of the things i like
to
to tell folks about um the state of
scholarly publishing
is that um a lot has uh
changed clearly over the course of even
my career i started in the
late 1980s um before
there were even word processors in um
publishing
and now it's of course uh
very very different but in many ways
a lot of publishing a lot of what
happens in publishing
is very similar to what it was when
perhaps if your graduate students what
your advisors were
um familiar with back uh in the day
so um much of what
the kind of traditional stuff of the
submission process
peer review and board approval contract
the contracts have changed but it's
still pretty much the same
manuscript adding editing and the
printed book
all of this is still going on as it was
and i doubt it'll change
anytime soon what has changed of course
is
now we have ebooks we have print on
demand
the quality of print on demand is now
incredibly uh higher than it
was in the past and it gets better all
the time
libraries of course you all have heard
about the
shrinking budgets for libraries buying
books and now they buy
ebook collections mainly and the amount
of money that goes to the presses from
the sale of these ebook collections is
much less
than what they were
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the kind of revenue they were able to
accrue
in the past so that has really cut into
university press sales amazon of course
now is
is the behemoth um
really dominating the publishing uh
landscape
i just saw today that simon schuster one
of the
big five publishers is up for sale and
it's there's likely going to be further
consolidation
of the kind of the big publishing uh
landscape and
and amazon is one of the reasons why
that
um they've driven the margins down so
much that
um it's very difficult for anybody but
the big publishers to make a go of it
and within scholarly publishing now we
have a move towards open access
publishing and we'll
talk a bit about that we have one more
person
okay um so just in terms of the
um the kind of the way things have
changed in terms of
sales um you know less than a third of
books today are sold in bookstores
most much of it is sold online and
amazon alone counts for 70 of those
online resales
and these figures are from a few years
ago and i
i haven't checked to update them
recently but i my guess is that they're
even
more um accentuated than they were
so those of you who are thinking about
approaching a publisher
you have several options
and they range from the university press
to
you know a big publisher like paul grave
or
sage or taylor and francis um
the university presses are of course
non-nonprofit and there are about a
hundred or so of them
uh in the u.s and and canada
um we also have of course societies like
the american chemical society
apsa which is the political science
association
all of these publish not necessarily
monographs but um there are there are
societies that do
and then we have non-profit
organizations like like brookings
um excuse me
from back what's that
i think we didn't hear peter if other
people are like me i think we didn't
hear the past minute you just froze
oh okay oh sorry about that um
so um what i was saying was uh
in terms of finding a publisher your
options are
uh non-profit publishers university
presses societies
and commercial presses and for those of
you
for instance publishing your first book
you want to make sure if you
uh are thinking of going with a
commercial publisher make sure that your
department and your college that they're
okay with that
because sometimes
say a university press having university
press is
considered the gold standard
so in terms of finding a publisher and
and emily will
uh join me here in a second um some
some early some tips basically on uh
finding a publisher
so um some of this is
seems intuitive but i find when i talk
to
to assistant particularly assistant
professors
they often don't want to submit a
manuscript until they have a perfect
but you really want to start early in
the process
start looking at publisher websites when
you go to conferences even if your
manuscript is not complete
you want to begin reaching out to
editors
at university presses or whatever
presses you're approaching so when you
go to your
your main academic meetings um
you want to start establishing
relationships with
with editors and begin kind of making
those contacts
even if the manuscript is not uh ready
to go
um now uh emily will talk a bit about
the the proposal the
uh how to prepare proposal yeah i was
just looking
um nostalgically and longingly at that
last slide of the aha meeting in
2017 boy uh the world of conference
going already seems so foreign but i
hope it won't be always
um so in terms of submitting a proposal
everybody
is welcome to be in touch with me
afterward and just ask i've formalized
um a one-page proposal guideline
sheet i am happy to circulate to anybody
who wants it
um and i'll just keep it general right
now
to say that um really the most important
thing
is to remember to engage your editor
so you engage your editor in a different
way than you would engage
let's say a grant committee then you
would
engage let's say a promotion or tenure
committee
you engage an editor in this very same
way you would engage
an educated relative which is just to
assume that that person is generally
interested
in what you're doing but not
specifically or particularly
interested in what you're doing and so
you need to
really explain what is interesting
about your project and to do it in a way
that doesn't reference
constantly your discipline or the
disciplinary jargon
that circulates widely within your field
so um first thing you do is you find the
name of the correct editor um i we see
very few dear sir madams
anymore um that was a thing of
yesteryear but
make sure it goes to the right editor or
else it simply won't be considered we
just have too many
proposals arriving daily not to
um if if an author has clearly spent a
lot of time
preparing their proposal i will give a
lot of
uh my time in receiving the proposal
but um yeah anyway that that's all i
will say there
um so what you need to do is
keep the proposal six to eight pages
maximum i would say though i read
scholarly manuscripts for a living
my bandwidth like the rest of societies
is getting shorter and shorter so
you need to capture my attention fairly
quickly
if i see something with half inch
margins on
all side and right and left regulated
and just dense with text i think oh
okay i can't get to this now i'll get to
this when i have a moment
and that moment never comes so make it
easy
and enjoyable for me to do this task and
how you do
it is you describe at first your
research
in a page or two just issuing academic
jargon
and presenting the main thrust clearly
and simply
explaining why it's important you
engage your work in the work of the
press
so you set the two in conversation with
each other
i thought to submit to your press
because you've recently published x and
y
and here's how not just because you've
recently published x and y
period here's how my book exists in
conversation with that book here's how
it disagrees
here how here's how it stretches the
limit of that
um it's always flattering to a publisher
as in
any relationship to notice the thing the
publisher does well
i see you have a remarkable list in
french history
um i see that you have
an award-winning list in slavic history
i'm just picking these things out of the
air say
um and i would like to join it um
and then what you should do is identify
your audience
if you think there will be course use
don't just assert it
but list a handful of courses across the
country and provide their enrollment
figures where possible
also provide a rationale why you think
it would be used in those courses
if it will be an important scholarly
monograph explain its contribution to
the discipline
and i'll just put a little star there
beside funding
which will
since cornell university press just
published a book about the musical
hamilton
and its intersections with america's
most
potential contentious legal issues um
clearly that's a book to occupy the
attention of general audiences
and um but she also needed to make that
case to
us okay then you give
a word count for the manuscript indicate
whether there's other ancillary material
photos maps tables and
a justification for all of that um
if part of the manuscript consists of
previously published material
in article form or other anthologies
identify how much this is
and what major changes you intend to
make
um to this material
then other kind of practical things when
you anticipate sending the manuscript to
the press
um oh sometimes
actually in in regular non-zoom sessions
people often ask me so i'm just going to
ask this preemptively
how long is an ideal book and um
that i used to smile and say there is no
length and no ideal book but now i have
actually a precise figure
funny that how budgets create precise
figures like this
so um at cornell university press most
of our books are in the
90 to 110 000 word
inclusive range that's inclusive of
notes and bibliography
and they have up to 10 images by images
i mean
everything we can go
up to 120 000 words inclusive
um i need to create a justification for
this
with my colleagues and we can go up to
20 images inclusive again a
justification is needed for that
anything above that demands an extra
level of funding
again asterix beside that we'll get to
that a bit later
and then to complete your fantastic
proposal you are going to need an
annotated table of contents and by that
i mean not a page per chapter i mean you
can fit three or four chapters to a
single page
so here's what the chapter explores
one sentence um here are the sources on
which i draw
one sentence here are the questions it
addresses
one sentence so you can fit three or
four chapters on a page
um and then some publishers like a cv
i guess at cornell up we say we like a
cv
personally i don't find it that useful
but it is a convention i think of
publishing so that's a proposal
in its broad outlines and i can give you
more specifics
if you would like to write to me i just
want to conclude by saying this
one of my former colleagues whom i
respect a great deal
um near the end of his career used to
say
uh you know don't even send me a
proposal i'm bored of proposals
just send me a you know who this is
right peter
just send me a paragraph or a few
paragraphs by email
telling me why i should publish your
book that's all he wanted
and i say that just to say that we all
get kind of hung up
on the formalities uh and and
um the prescriptiveness of how to
prepare a book proposal
but really you just need to start a
conversation that's what a proposal is
um and so
peter there's a question from tom i'll
just say what it is and then you can
tell me whether you would prefer to
address it later or now here are a
couple questions about pitching a book
what are guidelines on the amount that
can be published previously in journals
two are authors in a better position if
they publish
in general audience formats and three
what is the role of series editors
advisory board should they be included
in the proposal process
thanks those are great questions
do you want to tackle the first one
emily
oh sure um so um
so the ideal from a publisher's
perspective or from my perspective i
guess i would say would be
um you know
one or two articles at most
from your book that are then
reconstituted for the purposes
of the manuscript if there's more than
one or two articles all of a sudden
we're getting into territory
where um chapters can be you know
freely slash illegally downloaded um
by professors for course packs and it
undermines
um your book as a thing we need to sell
so
that's what i would say please bear in
mind that it is incumbent upon you
as an author to secure permission
from the originating publisher to
include this material
in your book um the next question peter
for you
are authors in a better position if they
publish
in general audience formats
sure so i would say to this
um it it may
help if for instance if you are
writing for a general audience if the
book you're submitting is
a book that you think is going to have a
more than just a narrow disciplinary
audience
um the fact that you've published in
general um say maybe in a
you know uh um new york review
books or that that wouldn't be the case
but um you know some kind of or if
you've done
editorials in the washington post that
sort of thing it helps because it shows
that you
um know how to reach a the kind of
audience that you say you're going to
reach in the manuscript
i'm not sure it i don't think it hurts
in any case
um but if it's you know your
first book um
it and it's a scholarly book it it may
not make that much of a difference does
that
sound about right emily yeah i would say
i would say um at my press
now to engage the uh attention of our
marketing department
you need to have what they call a
platform it's a bit
amorphous but what it seems to mean
is that you are willing to hustle you
are willing to help them get the word
out
how do you do that you write op-ed
pieces no matter how arcane and
scholarly the topic
you can connect i noticed one of our
authors for instance had an op-ed in the
washington post today
or sorry on sunday about um
whether we can you know there's been
lots of talk about
um the election being
a coup in terms of like
a coup for democracy or uh hijacking
democracy
and one of our authors who actually
works
on um coup d'etat in various
uh fragile states i mean it's
it's a it's a book in our security
studies series really quite monographic
but she reached out to the washington
post and pitched
an op-ed piece um and then that gets
attached to your
book so yes absolutely peter i would say
that
the more you're willing to show you can
do that kind of outreach
the more marketing will actually be
interested in working with you on your
book
and the last question is the role of
series editors peter
yeah i think you um you added you now
oversee
the is it the cornell studies and money
you can talk a bit about
that yeah so um
i would say it it it really varies press
depress
tom sorry i can't see you but i'm using
your name um
it varies press to press um i think with
some european presses correct me if i'm
wrong peter that you send the book
proposal directly to the series editors
who are kind of the guardians at the
gate if they like it then they send it
on to the press
so just look on the website each series
will have a web page and it will talk
about
um how you should submit the proposal
so in the case i um oversee
yeah cornell studies money proposals
generally
come to the series editors first who act
as the guardians
and then pass along to me they are very
active interventionist involved
wonderful series editors
um sometimes i prefer for various
reasons to have the proposals come
directly to me
but it will in short answer to your
question tom it will say
on the series website how they like
submissions to go
great um the other thing about um
the proposal that i would say is i say
here before
uh below ask me for examples i do keep
examples of some um
good proposals that i've received over
the years i've sort of blocked out the
the names and the identifying
information but i'm happy to share those
with anyone
who would like to to see them at least
gives you uh
uh somewhat of an idea of what a what a
good proposal looks like
i also have one and the author actually
i'm very pleased he just won
um an aha award this year and when i
send his proposal
along with my proposal guidelines it is
just such an example of cognitive
dissonance for authors because they
cannot match
what i think with a good a good proposal
would be with the guidelines i've
written
they just bear no similarity to each
other which is part of the point i guess
right that is a good point sometimes
sometimes
just following the proposal guidelines
isn't
isn't necessarily the best way to
describe a project yeah um
and here talk a bit i know we have some
uh uh graduate students here
and um the the topic of revising your
thesis
is is of course a perennial one and
um emily if you want to start now
i'll um jump in as as i see
sure that sounds great um i will try to
be brief
um so my first and best
rule is take a break from the
dissertation there is
no other way to let the sediment settle
even for myself when i need to write an
important email
i write it i keep it in my drafts and
then i send it a few days later
it's just such a good practice and so
i know when i get a proposal i know
before i get to the line i defended this
um november 15th 2020
i know that's the case before i even get
to that line because it appears to
rush to peremptory so do take some time
away from the project i know that's
easier said than done
in this age of publish or perish but i
really
think in the long run it pays off um
my next big piece of advice which is
probably the easy
way to start revising is to
shore up the the achilles heel of your
discipline
so the achilles heel i would say for
people in the humanities are there notes
far too many long explanatory
interesting digressive
sidebars that hit me like that phil
spector
was at the wall of sound where you just
cannot distinguish what the beatles are
actually playing because there's so much
kind of orchestral music in the
background
um for those in the social sciences
tables and figures happen to be
your achilles heel so using tables and
figures
to illustrate something that the text is
already doing
um and then i would say what is
called in publishing sign posting
but my partner who is in construction
i prefer the term from his field which
is
scaffolding when you are repairing a
building you need to put up scaffolds
around the building
and then when that building's repaired
you got to take those scaffolds down
otherwise i can't see the building
and these are the scaffolds in this
chapter i will discuss
first i will do a then i will do b then
i will do
c um i will draw on these thinkers
and that is all scaffolding that is
meant to keep your building in place
but it prevents actually seeing the
subject matter
um for your readers and then my last
best piece of advice is save rewriting
the introduction and conclusion until
the end
or create kind of um a preliminary or
provisional or even a point form
introduction for yourself
sketch it out here are the main things i
want to argue
um or here are the central animating
questions
but what you'll need to do at the end of
this very tiring project of thesis
revisions
is you will have to revisit the intro
with renewed gusto
you will need to bring to it all the
questions
and wonders and speculations you had
entering the project you will need to
if i may sound spacey for a moment fuse
your
writer brain with my reader brain what
does that mean
it means that you are somebody who's
already written the conclusion so you
know the voyage you're going to take i
as a reader have not yet
read the conclusion so what i need you
to do as an author
is give voice to all the questions i
never even knew i had
in sort of a platonic way the drawing
forth i wondered about this
i read this but it seemed to me
curiously incomplete because
um i went searching here expecting to
find answers but i
actually didn't they troubled a whole
series of new questions
um and so on so um
those are the big ones again i have
a whole sheet i'm happy to supply
actually maybe i will send this stuff to
peter afterward and
then you can ask peter and he can just
distribute it and
um on thesis revisions i break it down
into five main steps
um but peter has got the spines of some
really good books
listed there um do you have beth louie's
thesis
beth louie's book there i like her book
but she's got beth louie um had a book
published by cambridge called the
handbook for academic authors
and there's one excellent chapter on
revising thesis revision
i say it's excellent because it really
artificially
quantifies the process first you must do
this
then you must do this and it's so
helpful to have those kind of
guidelines when you're going about
something that is big and wobbly
i particularly excuse me i particularly
like bill germano's work
of getting it published there the and
from dissertation to book
bill used to be at routledge
um and was really important for
routledge in developing their cultural
studies
uh list and he's very good on the
subject really gets you to think about
who you're writing for
um how your audience is different than
it is for the dissertation and
how to think about what what is the
the message of the book as opposed to
the message of the dissertation and
they're
they're often very different
so a former um a
director at a former university press
where i used to work
said the dissertation is to the book
as your rough notes are to your thesis
so it's that transformative it's not
just a slightly
warmed over version um it really is
transformative and um yeah
i just should underline that tom has
another
great question which is for faculty
publishing a first book
based on the dissertation what is the
likely timeline between making a first
pitch
and having a book published by
university press
so i think we get to that here in this
next um
yeah this let's uh uh cover that as part
of the
submission process here okay
um so um mail or email i think
everyone's email now right peter
yeah yeah that's um
no need for the hard copy anymore yeah
um yes so um email us
a proposal do you know what i like that
actually seems quite sophisticated to me
because it saves us both
time if you can um
send me just a brief paragraph
hi emily i'm working on a book called x
it argues
why would you be interested in a formal
proposal
that's that and then you will get a
response much quicker and you can help
winnow down your list
i would say you don't want to put all
your eggs in one basket so you don't
want to send a proposal
in my opinion were i an author just to
one press
i would pick the top three or four
presses with whom i would like to
publish
and send a proposal to all of them
i would put in the cover letter
accompanying my proposal
um at the very end please note you know
something to this fact
please note i've sent this proposal to
select few other presses
however i'm most interested in
publishing with
and then please do highlight that
sentence
and change it um you know peter and i
are both smiling because
so many times we get i'm most interested
emily in publishing with cambridge
because
and uh so i have fun with authors when i
write back
to them about that but um and then you
autofill that sentence i'm most
interested in publishing
with uh cambridge because um
and that will kind of alert the editor
who is reviewing the proposal that other
people are
also looking at this um so that is what
um that is what i would advise how often
do i follow up
i would say right now because of
pandemic
conditions and because everybody has
about double the work that they did
eight months ago um to me i love gentle
prompts
i love them if an author can send me
um an email if let's say you've sent me
a proposal you haven't heard anything
which shouldn't be the case you should
at least get an acknowledgement of
receipt
um within about a week um if you haven't
got an acknowledgement of receipt
in about a week then give it three weeks
from the time you first submit and say
just curious if you've received my
proposal which i sent on next date
um do you have any idea when i might
expect to hear a reply
um and then if you don't hear about that
give it another week or two
follow up and then if you don't hear
after two follow-ups write that press
off
because that's an indication i think
of and i include myself in that you know
um if you're not able to get back to an
author
um after two follow-ups then perhaps you
don't want to work
with that press so that's what i would
say um
multiple submissions as i say at
proposal stage are absolutely to be
welcomed and expected
in fact even with my return authors i
suggest
that they send their uh proposal to
other presses as well
because i want them to feel really
confident that they've chosen my press
for good reasons
um and um yeah we can talk a bit later
about what those reasons might be
what differentiates publishers but uh
that's how you would do it you i would
say for most
publishers and peter will have more
information about this
i would say most of us do not want
multiple submissions
of the manuscript that is to say
we don't want to send a manuscript into
peer review that is being sent into
review elsewhere
though um i i used to say that as though
it was general fact
and then every single person with whom i
have co-hosted a publishing workshop
says oh it's not the case for us so
so i don't know i do know the big
multinationals will entertain multiple
submissions
for us i will just say that when we
start
investing in your project i don't just
mean financially investing
though my time is also a financial
investment on the part of the presses
um it is a relationship that has to have
oh oh good okay i thought that was me um
it is a relationship that has to have
some mutual transparency so
um if an author
said to me can i also send this into
review
with another press after i had indicated
that i was interested in pursuing the
project post proposal
i would feel a little deflated
personally um
so you might want to ask that earlier in
the process
i'm not being very clear here peter i
realize can you jump in
sure i know i i agree completely with
that um
that multiple submissions do happen but
um
it's it you have to be transparent with
the publishers
um and you know an editor is well within
his or her right to then say if you
if you write and say ask can i submit
this to another press
um you know if i if if
if as as an editor myself and
when i was at cornell if i was in a
publishing in an area where i knew i had
the pick of
of the the best manuscripts in a
particular field i would just say no to
that
um but sometimes um
editors make exceptions and at some
presses
there's that competition between presses
is more
more pronounced so you just want to be
clear and upfront with
the editor and establish
what exactly you're going to do i've had
authors over the years i've had
a few cases where someone did not tell
me that it was submitted
to another press and then they accepted
a contract from that other press
and there's nothing more galling than
than that
okay um this will i'm concluding
my my time um up front so in terms of
peer review
you know that uh the signature of all
university press publishing
is that your manuscript goes through a
blind peer review process
that means you do not know who the
readers are they are anonymous readers
um i think most university presses do
single blind peer review
which means that the reviewers know your
identity
um i have long hoped for a double
peer review but i have not made that
revolution uh
happen yet um so
you are able to recommend readers
to your editor i ask authors for five to
ten potential readers
um it used to be that i would approach
about four people
a pre-pandemic i would approach about
four people to get
two readers lined up and now i need to
approach
10 to 12 to get too lined up um
we're just all you know reeling with
multiple responsibilities and peer
reviewers
are no different so um include
a bountiful list you may divide up your
list into different
categories so you may say emily were
wishes horses
i would like to have one reader with
this uh
cluster of um interests and one with
this cluster of interest
um so i edit a series of military
history for instance i
often find one reader with the national
background
and one reader who's sort of a broad
military historian so you can
divide it up that way these should be
people with whom you have not
co-authored
in the past five years um and
uh who've not already read the
manuscript in whole or in part
i will also ask you for a list of people
to whom i should not send the manuscript
if it's a first book i ask you to remind
me in that do not list
of the names of people on your committee
in case i approach one of them
by mistake um and if you feel that there
is a reader who just wouldn't be open to
what you're forwarding in the manuscript
you can let me know that too
um and so those are the two lists i try
to draw one reader from your list
and one from my own though often those
lists will
intersect um it takes me
again please allow flexibility just for
pandemic conditions because
everything really is changing daily but
it takes me generally about
three weeks to line up two readers and
i used to give them six weeks to report
that's no longer possible now i have to
give two to three months to
report so within
three to four months of submitting your
manuscript you will have two reports
if you were a military historian you can
cut that time in half
as you can with so many things because
they are an efficient group of scholars
but for most of us it is three to four
months
i will let you know and your editor
should let you know
um we're expecting reports about this
time
okay and um i give readers
one calendar week to be late before i
start hounding them
mercilessly um
reports can go one of three main ways
we're hoping for
two solid thumbs up this is an excellent
contribution to scholarship
um it will add luster to the presses
list
here are some suggestions for the author
to take into account
while they are revising their final
manuscript so that's what we're hoping
for
um and then the second two categories
are sort of tied for frequency
um the revise and resubmit clear what
that entails
and the hung jury which may be one
person saying it's ready to go
and one person saying revisions are
required
um in the case of
in the case of revise and resubmit i
will send you a way to do a revision
i will ask you for an informal email to
me
indicating what broad stroke changes you
intend to make
just so i can ensure that you have
picked out the a level comments that you
have separated the wheat from the chaff
often authors think the chaff is the
wheat and so
i can help with that um if
we have two positive reports
recommending publication then it goes
before
some uh internal evaluation committees
um and if we've got a hung jury
then i will ask you for response to
reports
which acts as a discretionary tool on my
part i think
is this now a strong enough package that
i can expect
a positive reception from the various
adjudication committees or
oh you know what reader one who is quite
negative actually has
a lot of social capital with the
committees so i'm going to ask the
author to revise
and we'll send a revised version back to
that reader for final checkout
after i feel the dossier is ready to
bring forward it goes
and i think this is generally true of
all presses there are two
committees one is internal that is press
wide
and the other is a faculty board a
hallmark of publishing with the
university press
is that it has a faculty board these are
scholars appointed by the university in
the press's various areas of publication
and they give the final approval to
publish
the in-house committee which comes
before that looks at things like
market looks at things like the
financial status of the book
looks at things like it's fit for our
list and the peer reviews and how the
author has responded to that so
they're generally two evaluative
committees
um and then you're home free and
at that point we have jumped through all
the hoops
oh i was going to say tom has asked
another excellent question but indeed
it's trevor this time
should one include these recommended
readers in the book proposal
or later i would say trevor don't
include them in the book proposal
because that seems a bit
from my in my opinion that seems a bit
like you're presuming the press is going
to go ahead with peer review
um and so to me it seems a little
presumptuous um so
wait until you hear back yes there's
something we'd like to pursue
pursue and then you say great would you
like a list of my readers would you
concur peter
i would i would agree with that um
i i find sometimes though it's
it doesn't hurt to drop some names in
the
in in the letter you know saying
um you know i'm familiar with
so-and-so's work
and um my work is like this person and
so in so ways
that the kinds of people that you would
want to be readers
if you mention them
to to show that you are aware of their
work that's always helpful and editors
tend to know
who are the uh the best scholars in
those fields
yeah i answered everything here
i think so and um i i guess the the
question about the how long it takes
from sort of beginning to
end um you've covered that as far as
you know submitting the manuscript and
um getting reviews
that there's the additional question of
so when you get say you get the reader's
reports in
three months four months then there's
some time before it can go to the board
and uh
edit the editorial boards of most
presses meets
um periodically they're not meeting um
you know necessarily every month
so there may be some additional time
between
receiving those reports and actually
getting a board approval
i would say as a rule of thumb assuming
an incredibly smooth process assuming
all the stars align assuming readers
your editor can find readers they report
positively they report on time
uh the editorial committees meet when
they're supposed to and all that stuff
um it can be um 15 to 18 months
from submission of the original
manuscript to publication of
of the print book if that's the way it's
going
um yeah so
for me i would say generally it's
between
a year and a half to two years uh if
revision
is required yeah i think that's a that's
fair and
i want to emphasize the point you made
about
um finding how difficult it is now to
find readers and having to go to
10 or 12 in order to find two
that was something i noticed that it was
getting over the course of my time at
university presses that
it was getting harder and harder to find
at reviewers and
it was part of why um you know a move to
a different
setting was was i certainly didn't miss
that process of having to go and find um
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um fine readers and being turned down
again and again and again
i see a question there oh you see them
now i didn't know
sorry yes i can see them now um
rachel's asking me if you have
previously done reading for a press is
that worth mentioning
um i mean that would be something
typically in a cv
um and i sometimes notice that but i
don't know that it makes that much of a
difference
would you agree just say um sometimes
people use that to establish
relationship in the cover email
so you might say dear emily i so enjoyed
reading this manuscript for you
or when i read this manuscript for your
colleague roger
i thought that my own work might be a
good compliment
so it's just opening a door in the cover
email but
it's not um it won't make me look
more favorably at your proposal if i
wouldn't want to take it on anyway
um okay ariel's got a question so i just
need to read it quickly
yeah it's a good it's a good question
and this this came up
um with it comes up particularly with
open access books because they're
readily available online and and through
jstor and project muse they're
downloadable by chapters
um i'm curious to know what emily thinks
of this but i would say that
it it shouldn't i don't think it should
really change
the fundamental way that a book works
but you do
it does help to be aware of the fact
that increasingly books
are available in chunks
and just understand that um
that that may have some effect on the
way you prepare the manuscript in terms
of just thinking about
um like if somebody's coming in at
chapter three
do they need any preparation for
instance
um for to get to that material if
they're just reading that chapter
it's a tough call though because you
don't want to get into the
um having to to just
summarize re-summarize things it it
slows down the book
i'd say the only thing i've heard from
marketing colleagues
um ariel is that in terms of chapter
titles
what they call discoverability is really
important so
um you know those metaphorical
poetical chapter titles that may have a
quote
um or a metaphor and then there's a
colon
and something explanatory and long
with the date range following that is
not
good for discoverability what you need
are
the key terms so if you think about it
if i wanted to use chapter three from
your book
and i am just typing and i'm doing a
search
how would i best find chapter three
you've got to make sure some of those
key terms
are in your chapter titles yeah and
another point i would make with respect
to this is that
um you know it as
more and more books are downloaded in
chunks like this
i i don't know if taylor and francis and
oub do this
but um increasingly um
there are you need to have like a little
um
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abstract essentially of the chapter i
don't know if publishers are typically
asking for this but
often uh or i think this will be
something that will happen more in the
future i guess as
as books become more um
more dividable into chapter chunks that
get downloaded separately
having a little having uh and airing the
metadata where they can provide a
summary
so you don't you don't need to do that
unless you're asked but
i find any way that thinking about the
chapter in that way like how would i
summarize this chapter if i had to in
two or three sentences
is a good way to think about whether
you're
achieving what you need to achieve in
that chapter
so a little bit about we'll quickly go
through these last points is
publisher contracts are really not that
much different than they used to be and
i would say
um you know there are tricks to reading
them
and i've read a lot of them over the
years and i always tell
folks that if they want to send me their
contract or if they want to send me
questions
about the contract um i'm happy to
answer them because i know the
kinds of the um tricks of the trade i
guess
so but i would encourage you to review
them i i can't tell you how many times
over the years
um i talked to authors and they
just signed the agreement they never
looked at it never read it they don't
even know where it is
so it's um it's important
particularly nowadays with digital
publications
so when your book is published
a few things i will say here that
i think it's important to bear in mind
is that um
you know the average monograph if it's a
monograph
uh these days it's it's fewer than 300
copies this doesn't mean that every book
is just going to sell
200 copies but
don't be surprised if that's the case
um some books will sell many many more
but that's
the average monograph these days is is
under 300 as opposed to when i started
in the business it was
1500 1200 something like that
you're probably not going to find your
book in your favorite bookstore
we have just um the barnes and noble um
their local author section is very
limited
um so it's it's very often
not gonna be uh the kind of book that
makes it onto bookstore shelves
and in terms of libraries very often now
as i said
earlier libraries are buying ebooks as
part of packages
rather than print books so
you can look in like oclc and find out
where what libraries have the book as an
e-book
but very often they may not have a print
copy
um one big thing that's changed over the
years is the
used to be you would see a lot of ads
in particularly disciplinary journals so
the american historical review the
apsr
that was where the publishers took
ads and a big part of their budget was
spent on that
the they would take out occasionally
ads in places like the new york review
of books
or times literary supplement probably
not the new york times
book review because that's really
expensive
but i would say these days on a
publisher's list
very few of the books are those that get
advertised
in in the new york review books or
um the times literary supplement and
because
journals have gone digital um ads are
much less
part of it uh part of the
process these days so advertising i
think in terms of
marketing budgets has gone down pretty
dramatically
would you agree with that emily so we're
not doing any advertising
um except for in
when there were conferences we would
advertise
in the conference program but
apparently data shows that there is no
correlation between
advertising and sales so
so that's a big yeah that's a big
difference and and as
um emily mentioned earlier this idea of
uh
publishers want authors to have uh their
platform
um that's the the sort of a jargony word
of choice these days but
very often what what marketing
departments are doing is
helping they're basically providing
guidance to you
yeah and developing your own social
media presence
social media really makes a difference
these days
and we found increasingly with the open
access books
there's a definite correlation between
um
social media and the
how a book gets downloaded or how it
sells
that it does make a difference and one
of the
interesting things that i i learned
recently that
when you look at say alt metrics
if you're if you're tweeting out your
book
um don't just put the cover there
put make sure you include the title and
say the isbn or the doi
something that that can be picked up by
the searches otherwise if you just
say here my new book is published and
you have the book jacket
there it's it's not traceable
so that's uh one important thing and
we're actually working on coming up with
a set of tips now for authors in terms
of how to
how to do social media more effectively
that's something that's going to be
coming out of the um
tome initiative oh peter i cannot wait
to see that
yeah it's um and it's based on we've
we've definitely have
stats that that show what makes a
difference
um and here this is a
again something that um many of you will
you may face is um you a publisher may
require a subvention
i'll let um emily talk about um outside
of
uh virginia tech and i'll talk about
some of the virginia tech options
oh so yeah they're um associational um
grants that you can get um so
um i get grants for various
uh parts of asian studies uh
china japan korea
a lot of the grants are coming from
universities so the university of
michigan has a grant i guess
also virginia does too
and you know honestly
i would say most of my book projects
come
i try to get at least five thousand
dollars um
invention for each book why because
books are really
expensive to produce even taking out the
human labor costs
which are actually the most significant
cost there are
but even taking those out you know it
costs
the same amount for a university press
to produce your monograph as it does
stephen king's next book
and yet your monograph will sell three
to four hundred copies and stephen kings
will sell
who knows how many um and so we
just in order to keep the enterprise
going in order to keep the lights on all
these other cliches that have emerged
um we i just feel
it's the duty to the book and to the
publisher
to ensure that there is a subvention
making sure
the book sits on solid foundations
so if there's no money at the university
are we not going to publish your book
absolutely not no way um your book will
be published
based on the strength of the peer review
and your editor's enthusiasm for it
um but if there is money there
absolutely we will apply for it
post pandemic these grants seem to have
gone down at least 50 percent
where they exist um so
um yeah i'm seeing craigslist rachel's
point there that the
institute of turkish studies is um yeah
a lot of times that
some of the grants come from uh cultural
ministries of different countries and
yeah um this is clearly out of date so
i will change that yeah there are a
bunch of different ones and now
um peter when you and i met last year in
dc
one of the things i'm starting to do is
when i sign on a new series
we are trying to get open access funding
for the series
from the four so these are
the series of books that i'm developing
it's a wonderful series called the
environments of east asia
it's a multi-disciplinary series
combining
geography and history and politics and
sociology
and it looks at kind of a confluence of
two really important things on our list
environmental studies
and east asia but given that so much of
the potential market is not
in north america um we just thought
in so many ways it responds to issues
both of equity and um
democratic scholarship i guess as well
as
the financial crunches facing um
university presses and the need for
subventions that we are actually trying
to build this in
um as the sciences have done for very
many years we're trying to build this in
from the inception that's that's
um helpful to know that that's that's a
change since
um since my time uh at the press
so um for those of you and that's
everyone uh here at virginia tech um we
do have a faculty book publishing
subvention fund that
is funded by the provost's office so
uh particularly if you look at um jack
vinnie's
page there's a book publishing page
where it'll give you the information
on on the funding you can receive so
there are two options here
the faculty book publishing subvention
fund and i'm an ex-officio
member of the board that
reviews those requests
and it is not available
this uh subvention fund is not available
to non uh vt faculty
it's just for virginia tech faculty so
um the faculty book
uh subvention fund here is what you
would learn on the website which is that
grants
are typically in the 500
in the 500 to 2000 range
there are four extra costs
for publishing such as you have a it's a
longer than normal book you have many
illustrations you have color art
that kind of thing it's to help support
the publication of a book that's already
been accepted for publication and the
committee is chaired by
ignacio moore and um
i think peter graham is still on it and
rachel scott and we've added actually
another person this year so
um i encourage you uh if you
do have a book published or have a book
contract
and the publisher um asks you for a
subvention this is your
your first option um and
um to we have uh leora here
um i see uh tenure track that was
to clarify to non-tenure track faculty
post docs
um that's a good question i i
i don't think it makes a difference
um if you are um here at virginia tech
it is open
um to you it doesn't specify tenure
track faculty tom might uh
might actually know the answer to that
better than i do
but i don't think it it is just for
um tenure track faculty postdocs i'm not
sure about
all right um
the other option is um this initiative
called tome which
um some of you may have heard we've
heard about um it is a
joint initiative that's nationally
sponsored by
the association of american universities
association of research libraries
and the university press association um
the website is openmonographs.org
and there are 66
participating university presses and
those you can find them on the website
and there's a on that website there's a
place specifically for authors so if you
are considering this you can go there
and find out further information
and as you can see we are one of the
currently 18 funding
institutions and how it works
is that the participating institutions
agree to provide a baseline grant of
fifteen thousand dollars
um grants are paid directly to the
publisher
and in in return publishers agree to
release a digital
openly licensed edition online
uh it does not prevent them from
publishing a print edition
and in most cases or all cases i haven't
seen one yet where there hasn't been a
print edition
but um the idea again here
is um if you have a contract
and you want to have your book
considered as a possible open access
book
um you can contact me and i can
give you information about that we've
helped now something like nine or ten
faculty publish their books open access
with presses like cornell
duke um
let me see michigan penn state so
um it's a it's definitely a
sign of where things are going in the
future
um so far as part of the tome initiative
68 books
have been published um and over a
million
dollars in grants given out so for us we
do three a year we fund three a year
at fifteen thousand that's forty five
thousand a year we've done that for
um three years and we're um
we've lined up books for this coming
year but there are still slots available
for um the following year um
i wanted to just give you a sense of
what this means for a book so
some of you might uh you might know
donna agmon
in the history department and her book
of colonial affair is a cornell
university press book published in
uh 2018 so the print edition
as i was saying before here 237
lifetime sales and the average
is 200 and around 280 so that's under
uh that 300 copies as i was saying so
that book is sold you know kind of
around a little below average but
not significantly so but so that's
280 copies are out there
however as released as an open access
edition
it has had over 2 000 um downloads
either as chapters or books
cornell made it available as a free
kindle book
it's available through our did our
institutional repository v-tech works
cornell has its own open website
we have a site through through tome that
we
um post the books to and jstor and muse
also um allow downloads by chapters
so that's over 2000 downloads
of that book now we don't know
always what downloads mean but
in many cases like with jstor and muse
they do keep track
of these and we know that the book has
been accessed from
38 countries and 78 institutions
throughout the world
so those are those coming from
institutional addresses
are a clear sign that they are being
accessed and
in the case of a book like donna's where
it's about french colonial
the french colonial presence in india um
she really wanted to have that book
available in
india and the book has been then
downloaded in serious numbers
uh there in india so it has really
helped um
the accessibility of that book and it's
now the open access edition has been
used in some classes
so that is really helpful to um
the kind of getting the book out there
in red
there are a number of other experiments
with oa books going on
um this first one knowledge unlatched is
a post
publication um
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initiative so it it basically is it's
not something you would
probably need to worry about but it's
after a book is published knowledge
unlatched
works with libraries that subscribe and
those books
if they get enough funding the books are
released open access
after publication and we we are
a contributor to knowledge unlatched um
there's a sustainable history monograph
pilot which is at uh unc press
um that's a also a pilot project that's
i think in its third year now
um and i think um emily mentioned that
cornell has a
has some books in that um series as well
and um at the university california
press they have the luminos series which
has itself published i think 80 some
monographs is open access books so there
are other options
out there and if you're approaching say
the university of california press or
unc
press you want to keep that in mind
and that's it for the
uh presentation so uh let's
open it up for further questions
feel free to
jump in if you'd like if you want to ask
in the chat we can do that
any questions we didn't answer
i have a big question
if i may um and i'm thinking
particularly about humanities and social
science fields where
uh publishing a single author monograph
has been the
academic standard for at least 40 years
um do you anticipate that changing going
forward given all of the
changes that you see in in publishing
now and in the future
and if so what
what what can it should take place so
that faculty are not
caught between academic expectations
and a changing publishing world
asking for a friend
emily do you have thoughts on that
i was just gonna say when you find out
the answer please let me know so i can
establish an exit plan
i really i don't mean to make a quip
it's something i think about
every single day because all of our
careers ride on it
and i have absolutely no idea of the
answer what
what do you think peter well i think you
know there are
i think the open access uh
monograph movement is important
because we we all recognize that the
the publishing system
for academic books is broken um
it just you know i i don't know how
presses without a huge endowment
are making it through covid but um
and i know that sales were were down
at university presses across the board
the last i saw
so it is it is tough times and part of
what the tome initiative is about is
trying to change the the business model
to
to shift it so that um
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so that everyone um
so that that we continue to support
university presses
um so that they continue to can continue
to do their work
i thought that your question tom correct
me if i'm wrong i thought it was
and this why i could didn't kill
equipped answer will
scholarly monographs will the scholarly
monograph in whatever form it takes
whether away or print
still be the bedrock of an academic
career
no yeah kind of
you know i mean i guess the question is
um it has been
and my question from your perspective in
academic publishing is you know can it
still be
the kind of foundation for an academic
career
but i guess the larger question is um
you know in in a kind of tenure track
progression
um universities have in some ways ceded
a lot of control to publishers
that sounds bad but you know in effect
saying get your book published
and this is why i asked the question
earlier in terms of the timeline
um you know and and would it make sense
for universities instead
to say you know here's a here's a
combination of things we expect for
tenure in a humanities social science
field
which may not be a single author
monograph and which would give
faculty some some options and not be
quite so dependent on
this book publishing process that as
peter said
is is broken um then the question
becomes what's
what's the alternative um you know and
in one alternative unfortunately is to
say
you know well you have to do more of
lots of different things um
you know and again that was part of my
question earlier in terms of publishing
articles
but also publishing general interest and
and so on
is the response to say well you should
you know get your research
out in lots of different venues but
maybe not just
in a in a book not make the book the
primary outcome
yeah i i mean i definitely think
universities more and more
provosts and deans have to understand
how the environment is changing and they
have to open up
i think um the tenure process to be more
inclusive of other kinds of publications
that said
that book doesn't seem to be going away
and
there was a report recently it was a
melon-funded report
came out of emory university as michael
elliott
uh you can look that up and it's a it's
a
he reviewed kind of uh or checked with
the faculty
at emory and they talked about
um does the book still matter and and
it's a it's a really interesting
defense of the long-form argument and
why it still matters
and um it was it was important for us in
thinking about the tome initiative
because
um uh it's
if we're just trying to save books for
the sake of saving them
uh for the 10-year process then
it's it's not going to last but if we're
saying
that the the long-form argument still
matters
and it's it's a it's a unique feature of
the humanities and
and humanistic social sciences then it's
something worth saving
and we have to do everything we can to
to save it
um i do think it's becoming increasingly
problematic to say that everyone
coming out of graduate school should
revise their dissertation and publish it
as a book
i would love to see that go away but at
least they're that having that be the
kind of the standard that everybody has
to do
um there are a couple of questions here
we had someone um this was uh james
right um i'm at the beginning stages of
an edited volume project
involving an array of contributors as
the editor at what stage in the process
should i contact acquisitions editors at
various presses
um yeah i
um i would i i'll defer to
emily on that one that where you think
in the process
you would want to see something right
so just getting uh backing up a bit just
to the nature of edited volumes
themselves
um at my previous publisher um i would
say
30 of the projects in which i worked
were edited volumes
um and now i would say less than five
percent
so at cornell university press as a rule
we don't publish edited volumes and then
we make exceptions to that rule
um but i think
in the four or five years i've been at
the press i've published maybe two
just to say to set up to to approach
publishers
who seem more active in publishing
edited volumes
than others or to be prepared to make
an extra special pitch or
provide a really interesting rationale
for why this book
needs to be published as is as uh
as an edited volume okay so i would like
that said because for me
so much is required to cross the edited
volume threshold
in part because our market research
shows
sales while already slim for
monographs are slimmer still for
for edited books um so because the
threshold is that much
higher it's not so useful for me to be
involved
at an early stage hey emily i'm thinking
about a book and
a collection on this topic um
not so helpful i need to see more
about contributors topics if you just
have an idea and don't have contributors
and topics ready i would say for all
presses
here's what's helpful to propose
a provisional um or aspirational table
of contents
here are the topics we intend to cover
we'd like to cover
here are uh two or three people whom we
intend to approach to cover each topic
or here's whom we've already secured
and then here are the ways um in which
we are going to ensure
this is um a conversation between
chapters that it is thematically unified
that it is not repetitive um
that there is a sense of dialogue and
cross-referencing throughout
that the whole is greater than the sum
of the parts so
that's what i would do in terms of
preparing a proposal
uh for a volume and sending it to an
editor
um one thing i would add is that
when we consider we've considered edited
volumes for the faculty book
publishing subvention fund and
we don't typically fund
um edited volumes unless
the editor and usually both editors are
from
virginia tech and there's a a good
representation of virginia tech faculty
as the authors so i think matt wisnowski
and
sts we funded
a book that he published with mit press
so that was a case where we thought
there was significant
enough virginia tech presence uh to
support that but uh others we've we've
turned down
um because we have limited funding
and we really want it to go mainly to um
um single author books
um could you go over again
um how much of a manuscript should not
have appeared in journals ahead of time
what we said there i think was you know
one to two
chapters could be published as articles
probably
you don't want to go over that
and those you want them to be
significantly revised for the book
um you don't want to just have
you know a book an article just paste it
in as chapter 2.
um will we receive access to the video
yes um
you definitely will um
great um other other final questions
again
i would just remind everyone and emily
will send me some information afterwards
and you can contact me if you have
questions um so she's
available i know to um to talk with you
and
i'm available to help out with
um if you have a book proposal and you
want some advice on it
um i love to talk with with authors
about it i've i've since i've done at
virginia tech i've probably met with 20
30
faculty members and um talk with them
about their proposal i'll just
usually sit down with you um nowadays i
guess it would be six feet apart
but i love to i love to do that actually
to to look at proposals and just talk
about it with you and
push you on um are you do you really
know what you want to say here
um i learned from some very good
editors over the years that taught me
you know how to
how to bring out the best in a book
manuscript so
um and yes somebody asked for the
contact information again
let me provide that um
while you're looking i will address
leora's question
um in terms of sequencing um
so for me i like to get a proposal
and one sample chapter only what do i
read the sample chapter for
not really for content if that that
sounds like an
odd distinction i read it for
communication
are you clear are you interesting does
your pros have energy
that is what so um there's no need
really to get more
chapters than that accompanying a
proposal the proposal tells me what your
book will cover
the sample chapter tells me how
i can't see the comments any longer oh
thank you says the europas
yeah um we've
what only a couple of minutes left and i
know that kevin
uh concannon asked a question about his
yoko ono
project and we both looked at that um
[Music]
emily what was what that this was a
a question about permissions
for material and permissions is a really
thorny
thorny problem particularly with
artistic work kevin do you want to
mention again
what the what the specific question was
uh i'm trying to remember what the
question was i have actually permissions
i mean most of the material that i will
need i will get from
her own archive um
so that isn't really a big question the
question is
other things that come from uh
not from her archive that she doesn't
own in getting those those photographs
i'm sorry i it's been a while i wasn't
prepared to um
pursue the question here well
you are it's it you will be as the
author
the most publishers will not do that for
you so you
have to do that and a publisher will
want to know
that you either have secured permission
or you have a pretty good chance of
securing permission before
um they will consider the manuscript
but again i that's something that uh
kevin i'm happy to to talk with you
specifically about so
um i do a lot of um illustration
research and try to find
um um both
openly licensed material but then um try
to negotiate
um rights for um
um not openly licensed works and i can
help you with that
well thanks yeah no i've done it before
i've licensed images from newspapers
and so on and i'm just curious what the
landscape is but it's probably not for
this
uh moment right now because in the past
if it was under a thousand copies
you got a deal but if we're talking 300
copies
maybe that's changed yeah and the and
the other problem with it now is that
um books are made available as ebooks
and so a print run
doesn't matter as much as it did in the
past and that um
i know galleries and um
licensing organizations like um
arts and it's not art store but um
i can't remember the name of it now but
um
i don't know how they've changed to
reflect
um the fact that books end up online
and print runs don't matter as much
anymore but it's definitely
uh has changed the landscape i find it
astonishing
that these uh permission holders or
copyright holders are still asking for
print runs
um i think the majority of our books at
cornell university press or publish
print on demand
which means we don't have a print run
when we start out publishing the book
uh and so what we are asking for now
and in fact kevin you said it used to be
um
under a thousand copies over a thousand
copies my experience lately
has been um it's over 3
000 is one price and under 3 000
is another price which accounts
for sort of the over 3000 are now trade
publishers
um and the under 3 000 are the rest of
us
and um frankly i have no idea
how any of them monitor this right
they don't they don't but the 3000 the
other thing i would say is that 3000 is
meant to
comprise um ebooks as well usually
but um some some agencies are more
careful at policing this but i think
most of them are not these days
um so we've reached our time
so um thank you emily very much
for joining us this morning and thanks
all for
uh listening and
please follow up with us at any time if
you'd like
see you all bye
you