Greg Britton (Editorial Director, Johns Hopkins University Press)

University presses have taken up the charge of disseminating the scholarship of universities far and wide. There are about 157 members of the Association of University Presses. They are as varied as you can imagine with the very largest, Oxford University Press, which is this enormous publishing powerhouse that publishes more books than all other university presses in America combined.

But there are also many other university presses down to very small ones, such as the University of Georgia Press, the University of Illinois Press and the University of Wisconsin Press, all of whom have specific expertise in certain fields. What you'll notice as you look around the university presses, they specialize in certain fields. They specialize in those fields so they can develop editorial expertise but also marketing expertise. University presses exist both in this world of ideas and in this world of market, and so specialize in certain fields.

If you are a scholar of Scandinavian studies, a press like the University of Wisconsin is the best press you could ever publish with. If you want to publish on Native American studies, that is, books on American Indians, you would publish with the University of Oklahoma Press, the finest press in that field.

As you look around for a university press, the temptation is to think of presses such as Harvard, Yale and Princeton because those are the "top brand" names. But in very specific fields, you might find that another press is a better place to be publishing. As you think about publishing in the American market, you need to do your homework.

I will talk a little bit about strategies for how do you identify those presses. Finding a publisher is really about aligning the work you do with the interest of that publisher or the area they publish in. As you think about publishing in the North American market and the university press market in general, I'd encourage you to look for those presses that align with your own research. This requires a little bit of homework. I think the trick is to do a few of things.

One, the age-old thing is to look at recent journals and to see the books that are being reviewed where they have been published. When you scan the book reviews, you'll start to see a pattern of presses emerge.

Next, look at your own bookshelves and look at the books that have been published in the last five years. Where are those coming from? That should give you more presses that you could consider.

Finally, the Association of University Presses, which on their website has a subject area grid which lists all the university presses and all the subject matter that are published and you can triangulate and figure out which presses publish in certain fields. If you are interested in publishing in anthropology, you can see which of the members of that association publish in that field. Now by doing those three things, you have amassed a list of ten publishers.

Now I would do the research of going to their websites and looking at their current offerings in those fields. Now you might see that the anthropology list that you thought you had ten publishers, and you notice that three of them are publishing in fields directly related to your research. Now you have narrowed your search down a little further. You could look at the editors on the websites of the presses. You might send each of them an email and say, here's what I'm writing or have written; and ask if they are interested in pursuing a conversation about this project.

Gita Manaktala (Executive Editor at Large, Massachusetts Institute of Technology [MIT] Press)

University presses, as you probably know, occupy a pretty small but perhaps disproportionately influential corner of a very large publishing universe. It's important to remember that you do have options beyond university presses for publishing your book. There may be good reasons to opt for a university press if that's what will help your career the most. But depending on the type of book that you're writing and your goals for it, commercial publishers might be an option that you would want to consider as well.

Sometimes people say that the difference between university presses and these other types of publishers is that university presses use peer review to evaluate and develop the books that they publish. That's not really the major differentiator because commercial academic presses also use peer review to develop books for publication. I think the real differentiator is that university presses, at least in the United States and I think globally as well, are nonprofits. We're not making decisions based exclusively on sales potential or we don't need to think about shareholders or things like that.

See also: Association of University Presses - Finding a Publisher