The Future of Academic Book Publishing
Moderator
We're really honored to have a very distinguished panel of people across the academic publishing industry. As some of you may know, in previous years we've have involved mainly university presses in our events. We've always tried to get more commercial ones, but we've never been able to get people in a fairly high level of responsibility in the industry, and we're really honored to have people of that stature here today. In addition, last year, there was a lot of discussion about the role of agents, and we're very lucky to have an outstanding professional literary agent here with us today. So, in terms of a panel to talk about the future of industry, you're not going to get much better than this.
Yesterday, at the workshop, I said the workshop is really about trying to get your book out in the next five years. This is more about after those 5 years and even 10 years from now what the industry might look like and what you might have to do to adapt to that.
We will start with Mahinder Kingra and move along. Please let everyone know who you are and what your views are on academic publishing over the next 5 to 10 years.
Mahinder Kingra
I'm happy to start. My name is Mahinder Kingra. I'm the Editorial Director at Cornell University Press. I also acquire in several fields, including medieval studies, European history, a bit of law and literature and cultural studies as well. It's a pleasure to be here. This is my first time to Japan, and it's been a terrific experience talking with so many scholars about so many interesting projects.
I will start my discussion on the future of publishing by paraphrasing Charles Dickens to say that it is the best of times, and it is the worst of times and it's the best because the kind of work that we all do or are involved with is more necessary than ever. That is a verified knowledge, peer reviewed scholarship, and engaged works of scholarship that are addressing the issues we have in the world today.
As you know, we know these qualities are more in need than ever and harder to find outside of the kind of the environment that we work in. It is the worst of times because all of the pressures, that I think all of us who've been involved in publishing for a while, have been accelerated. These are economic pressures. These are technological pressures and existential pressures as well. In terms of economics, the sort of the economic model of academic publishing has changed dramatically. The decline of library sales, the rise of e-book sales or multiple e-books use for just the same price.
In terms of technology, I feel that we publishers are having to learn more and more quickly, whether it is e-books, were a huge transformation, and now we have AI coming around the corner, so there are these technological changes.
Then, in terms of existential threats, especially for university presses that are affiliated with universities in the North American system, having to justify our reason for existence as the sort of the neoliberalization of the university system increases is more and more challenging. But in terms of the future, so I think all of us as public professionals are sort of up nights worrying about all of this. I think what university presses and academic publishers are really good at doing is innovating.
We've had to innovate from the very beginning. In terms of the current situation, we are innovating in terms of how we are getting the books we publish out. This is sort of different formats, different printing technologies. Print on demand has revolutionized the way that we can publish books affordably. Digital technologies allow for copyediting, sort of much more quick and much cheaper as well and through e-books, e-book platforms, Open Access allows for this knowledge to spread far and wide, whether it is in the social sciences, the humanities, or STEM.
We are also experimenting with formats such as audio books, which allow for a broader dissemination of the work we do. The phenomenon of short books is a new sort of, when you think of Oxford's "Very Short Introductions", that requires convincing scholars that they don't need to write a thousand-page book, but actually 120-page book that really focuses on the topics that citizens around the world need to know about. Moreover, such books can be produced more quickly.They can be produced in subsequent editions as that information is updated.
I think we as academic publishers continue to innovate, continue to face these challenges as to where things are looking. Ten years is a long time to project, and I would not like to do so.
In five years, I think, Open Access is going to become more and more prevalent among publishers of monographs and for monographs, and that is the way that economic models will be found, whether it is institutional funding, whether it's government funding, some combination thereof. I think the reason why Open Access is so important is because it answers a lot of the questions that we as academic publishers have, and it allows us to justify our existence to our parent institutions.
For example, we can go to the Provost of Cornell University and say, "Sure, our books don't sell a lot of copies, but look, if it's Open Access, these books are getting wide distribution in places that we could never actually sell books." We are seeing our books being read or downloaded onto cellphones in Sub-Saharan Africa. We are seeing them downloaded throughout the developing world, throughout Asia, places where it would just be impossible for us to actually sell physical copies of books or even sell e-books. I think that's one trend.
I do think that new technologies will continue to streamline the work we do. I don't think AI will ever replace authors or editors or peer reviewers, but I do think that as these technologies are sort of - as we learn to master them, we can use them to streamline and make our work much more efficient hopefully, and allow us to spend more time on the work that we do really well, which is considering projects, reviewing them, offering feedback, copyediting them, and doing less of the kind of busy work that ends up consuming far more of our - certainly my time than I would like.
I am often pessimistic. In this moment, I'm somewhat hopeful that I think we will continue to innovate and continue to find ways and just continue to find the sort of the connections with scholars, scholar communities, communities of readers to ensure that the work we do continues to be valuable.
Thank you.
Sinead Moloney
Thank you. Hi, I'm Sinead Moloney. I commission in Law and Tax at Hart Publishing. It's an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, and I'm based in Oxford in the UK. A lot of what I'm going to say overlaps with what Mahinder has said which means we must be right. I just picked up a couple of big changes, I think, are coming down the line in the next 10 years.
Number one is Artificial Intelligence (AI). I think that's going to be transformative. I think none of us know yet what's going to happen with it. We have concerns because it really goes to the heart of what we do in some ways, because the way it makes - it generates new knowledge from pre-existing knowledge, which is implications for copyright. It's got implications for authors. It's got implications for publishers. There are practical things we have to do. We have to look at our contracts. We need to look at our licensing arrangements. We need to look at our translation agreements.
Another reason, which I think we're all a little bit worried about is it gets to the core of originality, and that's absolutely central. I think we all pride ourselves in publishing original works, and this does throw a bit of a spanner in the works.
I think we're all slightly dreading like who's going to be the first publisher who publishes an AI generated book without realizing it. There has been some experimentation in the US. I believe some academics in the STEM world have generated articles using AI and submitted them to peer review journals just to see, and some of them have gone through.
This just does mean that we just have to be a bit more mindful of that. But there are definitely benefits, as Mahinder said. Everybody, I certainly thought when I started in publishing, I would spend my day reading. I spend my day looking at spreadsheets and uploading data in bibliographical systems. I think, hopefully, AI will take away a lot of that churn. We're hugely data driven in publishing.
Most of our information is fed out through feeds, so we have to spend a lot of time getting that right. If AI can help with that, that's great. Again, it can help with getting keywords and discoverability, doing some marketing copy. Not all, but some of it, and as Mahinder said, it means we can spend our time doing the more creative side of the job, which is why we all went into it in the first instance.
I think another interesting point in relation to AI is it's going to generate more scholarship. We're going to have to have books telling us how to deal with AI, and that's always good for academia. It means that there are new debates. I think they're going to be more interdisciplinary. But off the top of my head, I was making some notes this afternoon. Law, we're going to need more books on this, and any books we've published to date on AI have flown off the shelves.
Philosophy and ethics, economics, it's going to be opening up new areas of discussion, so things to be nervous about in relation to it, but actually on balance, if it's managed well, it could be a very positive thing for the industry.
The other change I picked out, well, this is an ongoing thing really, but it's the dominance of digital. This has been happening for the last 15, 20 years. It got expedited during Covid when everybody needed to have access to everything online, and that's only going to continue.
When I started in publishing, the print was the master. I think we were even giving away e-books in the beginning because there was a sense of nobody would pay for something that wasn't a physical book. It's completely the other way now. Most people read books online. The revenue comes from the online version. I think audio is going to be really interesting. I think in 10 years, audio is going to be much more established in the academic market. There's a lot of research coming through from students that they're asking for audio versions of the textbooks because this is how they're learning.
If they want them, we will build it. I think in 10 years' time, that could be a new format. It's very established in trade, but I think it's going to be much more established in academic in the next 10 years.
Open Access is without question important. It's essentially mandated now that publicly funded research is available in Open Access on immediate publication. In the UK, we're pretty good at consulting with the industry. We've had a few years to get our ducks in the row, and again, I think in the beginning we all thought, my God, this is going to be existential in terms of the impact on the industry, but it's really just a different business model. Once we got our head around that and we all figured out the business model, I think we were less scared of it. Anything that helps with dissemination is good, and we can still sell books. This is quite interesting. The print book still works with an Open Access model, whether it does longer term, who knows. But that's been quite an interesting development to date.
The final thing, and this might be something that some of my colleagues from North America might talk about more, but I do know some of my colleagues who commission in North America are worried about is approved reading lists and restriction on reading. I was at a meeting last week and one of my colleagues was talking about a law in Florida I think, where they have a list of approved suppliers, and if you publish something on one part of your list that doesn't reach the criteria, your entire list goes off the approved supplier list.
That's just one example of things, new challenges, I think that maybe five years ago we might have thought we'd be dealing with. But as I say, other people might know more about that than me. But it's also important to kind of think about what will stay the same. There is always going to be a need for rigorous peer reviewed scholarship.
It's a forum where academic debates happen. It's where disciplines to develop and move forward. It's a metric by which academics are judged sadly. Actually, the peer review element is only going to become more important, as Mahinder said, with AI, with skepticism around the value of knowledge and expertise. I think that's going to become much more important going forward.
I would say this obviously, but I think there's also going to be a need for publishers, because I think if a subject is supported by an expert list, which is carefully curated, the books are beautifully produced, they're sold and marketed globally, that's just good for the discipline generally. I always finish with the story that I have when I feel I should be pessimistic about the future of publishing.
I started my first job in publishing in September of 2004. On day two, I went to a lecture which my boss of the press I worked with at the time gave where he predicted the death of the book in 10 years. I genuinely thought I need to retrain and that was 20 years ago.I think we're all about innovation and some things we have to figure out as we go along, but again, I think there are reasons to be cheerful.
Alex Pettifer
My name is Alex Pettifer. I'm the Editorial Director of Edward Elgar Publishing. We are an independent family owned and run business based in Cheltenham in the UK. We publish roughly 600 new books a year across law and the social sciences.
Similarly, I'll be reiterating some themes you've already heard, although I thought about actually a lot of these themes are important now as well. I think they're going to get even more important over the next 5 or 10 years. I think if you're thinking about writing a book, particularly in the next few years, you really need to view it as a digital product first and foremost. Print is not going to die, but to give you an idea, when I first joined the business 15 years ago, e-book sales were less than 5% of revenues. This year, they'll be somewhere between 60% and 65%. If you're looking ahead to the next decade, that'll probably be up towards 80% plus of sales. Why that's important, if you think within that 60-odd percent proportion, the majority of those sales are coming from our digital platform.
This has been a huge shift in academic publishing where rather than selling books through middlemen, both print and electronic, now publishers are able to host content on their own platforms and go direct to their own customer, i.e., libraries, and sell typically large bundles of content in one go. We host that content at a chapter level because we think it makes the content more discoverable, more usable, and that brings me on to the next point which is metadata, which is a really, really dry and boring topic.
If you have the misfortune to ever attend a publishing conference, there will be numerous sessions on metadata, but it's something that really drives discoverability, and that's both on the sales side of publishing, but also in terms of how researchers find and use content. I don't know what the figure is, but it's over a hundred thousand, isn't it?
New books published in academic publishing every year, that's probably going to be somewhere near 200,000 in the next decade. Metadata is just so important and that will only ever grow in the coming years. If your publisher asks you to engage with your metadata, view that as a critical part of your job as an author because you know your content best, you know what the best keywords are, really read your blurb as if you are an internet search engine thinking how am I going to discover this content? Don't think, oh, does this make my book sound really exciting? Because it's going to be Google and Amazon crawlers that read your blurb far more often than an individual sadly.
I would also like to reiterate the importance of Open Access. It is not just at the whole book level, but also, I think it's important to emphasize that you can also have your individual chapter, Open Access, with publishers. I think there's two really important benefits of OA for authors.
Firstly, when you look at the user statistics on our digital platform, it's all the OA content that's at the top. There's no doubt that OA content gets used, shared, discovered more than non-OA.
Secondly, it makes commercially viable projects, which are either too niche or too narrow in focus to work as a traditional commercial model for publishing without financial support. That's not to say it's not great research, it's just that most publishers can create that work on a sales model. I think we are very pro-OA. The challenge for authors is it's quite a sort of complicated funding landscape at the moment. But my guess would be that over the next decade, what we're going to see, particularly at large research-intensive universities like University of Tokyo, is more and more central funding will be made available for authors to access. It should, hopefully, become a lot easier for authors to make their book OA even if they don't have a research-funded project which mandates it.
Lastly, technology, it's already been mentioned both on the production side, AI is no doubt going to become more prevalent in publishing. Already there are products in the market, for instance, which allow references to be checked for consistency and accuracy, which you would normally pay a copy editor to do. That's clearly going to be a time and cost saving for publishers just to give one example, but obviously, on the research and writing side as well. I mean, we do have a policy on AI which is on our website which people can read. It's fairly cautious and conservative at the moment in terms of our advice to authors to how they use it. I'm sure that will change in the coming years, but I suspect the change will largely be driven by university ethics, policies, etcetera, which publishers will simply kind of follow suit.
Melissa Flashman
My name is Melissa Flashman. I'm a literary agent at Janklow and Nesbit in New York, and we have an office in London. I'm coming from a completely different part of the publishing landscape, and so I'll tell you a little bit about what I do, what agents do.
Just to start at the beginning, I was a PhD student at Johns Hopkins in literature and quickly decided that given the job market even 25 years ago, and my desire to live in a big northeastern city, I should probably part ways with literature and briefly thought I'd be a journalist and quickly got into publishing on the literary agent side. I've never worked at a publishing house. My job is to represent authors. Many of my authors are academics. There are also journalists, poets and a few novelists, but they come to me for several reasons.
I'll just speak more broadly in terms of academics. I would say there are probably two reasons, related to an increased need over the past couple of decades so have a social or a public impact. This is a metric that a lot of tenure committees have, or the Dean's office for promotions. I would say the other is, especially with the younger academics, there's probably, they're not sure, they might have postdocs, they're not sure if they're going to get tenure. There are nearly zero job openings in many of the humanities, and they're looking for alternate ways to make an impact.
Broadly, I would say all of the academics I have worked with, and they're across disciplines, so economics, history, anthropology, archeology, poetry, literature, etcetera. They are looking to drive or change a conversation.
Whether it's on intellectual history or the deficit or inflation, criminal justice, they're looking to influence the broader public conversation, so they could do that through two routes. One would be generally for an agent, it would be the trade side of a university press, which many of them have and focus on it to different percentage. At some university presses, the more accessible trade books are 80% of the list, at some presses it's more like 10%, but all the books I represent would be on the trade side, almost no monographs, with a few exceptions.
Then, the other place that I would represent them and sell their books would be to trade publishers, like Penguin Random House, or Simon & Schuster, Norton, FSG. Often, I'm approaching both trade divisions of university presses and trade presses at the same time. This has really changed since I started working in publishing in 2001, and just looking even at the younger agents at my agency, who may have started working on poetry and literary fiction. They're doing a lot of their submissions to university presses, to their trade divisions, often alongside trade publishers.
I think there's some pressure on university presses to do more public facing on trade books, probably for economics or to have social impact. I'm not sure where it's coming from. A lot of the authors I work with also address the bigger economic issues as the subjects of their books or someone like a historian of capitalism, like Quinn Slobodian or Vanessa Ogle, or the economist Stephanie Kelton, who I know advises the Japanese Diet as well as the US Congress.
As regards the comments so far on formats, I would say what I've seen is almost the inverse of the end of the book. When I started in publishing, there was the fear of e-books gobbling up print and all the young people that were just going to read on their devices. At least for the books I work on, mostly serious nonfiction, the majority of sales are in print hardcover, and then maybe later paperback. Publishers, at least the ones I work with, often like to keep the books in hardcover as long as possible, just because their margins are higher, and the prices are not $100. These are the books you would buy at a chain bookstore or on Amazon.
Then, audio has been enormous followed by e-book. The balance is different depending on the genre, but e-book sales are usually the lowest of the three categories.
AI is a subject of conversation we have at many agencies, staff meetings about, with our heads of business affairs and legal, and just talking about creativity in general. I work with an English professor named John Warner who teaches us mostly about writing pedagogy. He has published a book with a university press, also with Penguin on teaching writing to entry level undergraduates. I just sold a new book by him on exactly this subject about AI, and it's called Writing with Robots. He has a lot to say. I think he's pretty upbeat about the undergraduates, even though I've talked to some of the professors I work with and the conversations they've been having over the past year with their colleagues in terms of cheating on tests and all of the things you read about in the newspapers are real. Ultimately, however, I'm very optimistic. I don't think any writers, whether they're academics, young adult fiction writers, fantasy fiction, sci-fi are going to be replaced by robots, but it is a real concern that we're all taking very seriously.
Q&A
Question 1
Thank you, everyone.
My question is a very specific one about Open Access and willingness of the presses to send review copies. I've paid for Open Access which cost a lot. Now, I am wondering if we choose to pay for this kind of thing, is the press still very willing to send like a dozen or so review copies across these journals which might be reviewing because you don't have to sell anymore, might you be someone unwilling? I haven't asked yet actually. That's a very specific one, and I'm sorry, I need to kind of rush off at this moment, but it's really nice hearing about various insights.
Thank you so much.
Mahinder Kingra
I would say, at Cornell, we treat Open Access books and paywall books exactly the same in terms of submitting for awards, submitting review copies. We don't really distinguish because we still need to sell the print copies, and so we will still sell to, if it's in paperback, 200, 300, 400 copies of the paperback, but we also want the books to be engaged with by other scholars and the reviews are a large part of that.
We often make print versions. Open Access books are print on demand, but we'll take them to academic conferences and display them there. Although we found that during the pandemic, when journals wanted to review books, they were now accepting electronic books or e-books and that sort of continued. We will often send dozens of e-book review copies out which don't cost us anything. That's not a consideration. We really don't distinguish. Once we've accepted the book, it is a Cornell book, whether it is Open Access or behind a paywall.
Sinead Moloney
Yes, at Hart, we treat them exactly the same. Whatever happens for a non-Open Access book will happen for an Open Access book, because they do sell similarly actually, and as well, the start of the process goes through the exact same peer review process. It's just a different business model to a certain extent, but it is treated the same.
Alex Pettifer
Yes. I mean, just to reiterate, I can think of the only main difference would be in the metadata, to go back to the metadata point. For instance, we will register the book with the database of Open Access books, but otherwise they could be basically treated the same.
Question 2
Thank you for your fascinating presentations. It seems that book publishing is innovating and adapting to the new changing environment, but what does that mean for authors? What kind academic books are more or less welcome as a result of these changes you all have identified?
Alex Pettifer
From our perspective, I would say the biggest change I've seen in my time in the business has been the increased difficulty of finding authors willing to write monographs, and I'd say the biggest factor behind that is disincentives to write books, and secondly, time pressure and more teaching, more administration, etcetera.
And so, how we've adapted as a publisher over that period is basically by coming up with a whole different variety of book series, but product types where we can specifically go out and invite individuals to write those books, edit those books. As a result, our list is a lot more diversified than it was 15 years ago, but also it means that we have a lot more responsibility ourselves internally for driving our commissioning, so that's been a big shift.
Sinead Moloney
It depends, I suppose, in some ways, if it's just a technological difference where it's a format question. Content is the content is the content, so we won't have any changes to that. If there are many subject areas, no question, like I mentioned, emerging because of it. I think it's probably in my area, the law traditionally was very siloed. I think it's helped drive interdisciplinarity because it's opened up subject areas. We were very late to that particular party, but it's beginning to happen now as well.
But I do really think the fundamentals of publishing have stayed pretty much the same, in that it's good scholarship, that's really well peer reviewed, that somebody wants. You think there's enough people who will want to read this, and they're usually the criteria and you work around it. But yes, there definitely have been certainly changes in terms of interdisciplinarity emerging subject areas that we've had to respond to because of it.
Mahinder Kingra
I would say that one of the threats that I didn't discuss because it's such a big topic is in North America, the decline and potential end of the tenure system. A lot of university presses are in some ways credentialing organizations for tenure, and as fewer and fewer faculty are getting tenure, and as there's more and more contingent faculty, the rationale to write books and publish monographs is declining the time for a contingent faculty to actually, and the resources to do research, to travel, to archives and things, is also declining.
I think this is a longer-term issue, but I think in 20 years, especially in the humanities first, then social sciences, I think that is going to create issues for publishers who had traditional strengths in those areas to find authors who have the time, the inclination, or the imperative to publish monographs.
Whether that scholarship then goes more into journal publishing, which is a possibility, whether there are public scholarship opportunities in short books or Substack, so I think that will drive change as well. We don't do STEM publishing. I can't even begin to imagine all the complexities in STEM publishing that these are changes. I think that's probably insulated in some ways, but of course, that's not typically a monograph driven field anyway.
I think those are sort of the big shifts in academia in North America at least, and I don't know if it's the same in the UK and Europe, but I think we are going to see a supply problem down the road. Of course, if there are fewer faculty writing books, that there are going to be fewer faculty reading books, there are going to be fewer students purchasing books too, so I think that these are the sort of 30-year-out issues that I believe have retired by then, and I won't have to worry about them.
Question 3
Thank you for all of your presentations.
Yesterday, I made a pitch about the book I wanted to write, which is more like a popular history, such as The Metaphysical Club or To The Finland Station. I am in the formative, conceptual stage but just thinking about writing it, is a big commitment because you need to, as you need to think about the audience and the interests of the editors. But even then, if I do that kind of trade book, it's still a huge time investment and it is difficult to know if anyone would be interested in the end.
As opposed to, let us say, I just got a contract from an academic publisher where I know that if I write this it's going to get published because it's something that there's already a series of similar monographs. There's already demand for it, but if I'm going to write something popular, I don't even know if I'm going to get it out, and then it's an even bigger investment to write it, like the incentives or the risk is high in terms of time. How do I think through the issues?
Melissa Flashman
That's a very good question. I think the way that agents think about this is, is it a subject that we see there's a broad audience for? The novelist, Philip Roth said at some point, there's the serious, and this is in America, the audience for a serious book, or novel is 200,000 or something. I would say now it's several decades in the future, maybe half a million. That's a lot of books for any publisher. I mean, most books on The New York Times bestseller list are selling nowhere near at that level. But the universe in which a book like The Metaphysical Club is published, Luke Menand had been a senior faculty member at CUNY Grad Center. He was a staff writer at The New Yorker when that book was sold. He had what in trade publishing is called a platform that an agent knew that there was a pre-existing interest for a big book by him on a big subject.
Now, how do you sort of generate that platform?
That is something that has changed a lot in the last couple of decades, so the younger historians, who I work with are, they're probably first publishing one or two academic books with university presses, peer reviewed award-winning generally. Then, they're also writing in public facing publications, The Financial Times, The Guardian, any major national newspaper. I studied in Italy, so there are publications such as the Corriere della Sera, la Repubblica, and of course in the US there is The New York Times and The Washington Post. In fact, The New York Times opinion page publishes academics almost every day.
Part of what I do is sometimes I work with my writers who already have book contracts to place the piece in that opinion section. But a lot of academics are pitching The New York Times. The pieces are between, I think, 800 and 2,000 words, generally around 1500 words. They generally need to be relevant to the various national and international conversations, which I think your work is could engage with. It is sort of establishing yourself, at a sort of public facing person.
My understanding is that, for a university press, generally a good portion of the book is written before you ever contact a university press. At least that is true of the majority of books. You're pitching all of these colleagues with a proposal, but there's often almost a full manuscript written maybe 70%, 90%, 100%. With the books that I represent generally, there's just a book proposal, unless it's an academic who has more or less written most of the book.
But what I'm looking for is a book proposal, which is generally a little bit longer than an academic proposal. It might be 15 pages, but it might be 50. What's making it longer is the sample chapter that demonstrates the writing at an accessible level. It tends to be character, story driven, even if there's deep history, even intellectual history, economic history, and/or a writer like Adam Tooze who I think is in this sort of history of capitalism.
Substack is another - publishers of all sorts love Substack or any email lists where you know who is reading your work. When it comes time to publish your book, whether it's with Cornell or Hart, Stanford or Penguin Random House, when you have a Substack or a newsletter, you have access to an audience, and you have readers who are going to be there, hopefully, for your book.
That kind of baked-in audience is really attractive. Also, social media presence, I would never tell people they need to be on social media, but there are huge academic communities of historians and economists on Twitter, what is now called X. Threads, which is Instagram's new. I'm seeing more academics on Threads. I took a while to sort of takeoff Bluesky.
I was following the elections today in America on Bluesky. That kind of engagement, we can see that, like someone sends me a query letter, I'd like to publish my book. They tell me if they have a newsletter maybe, or Substack, and then I looked, are they on social media? What article have they been publishing in national facing publications?
That means, it doesn't need to be The New York Times. There are a million publications, whether it's more political activists facing publications like The Baffler, Jacobin, these are more on the left; Aeon, which has a sort of social science background. I've seen university presses go after young academics who maybe have never published a book because they're publishing a piece in Aeon, London Review of Books, LA Review of Books, New York Review of Books, The Guardian, The Nation or these kinds of publications. Writing book reviews is also a great way to increase your media presence.
Question 4
Thank you so much for this panel. I'm now a PhD candidate at Brown University, and currently a visiting scholar at the University of Tokyo.
My question is, I haven't finished my dissertation yet, but I do plan to publish it with an academic press in the future. I'm just curious, like whether there are other factors for a press to decide whether to publish a manuscript or not, besides the peer review process. That's my question. Like is there anything that I can prepare beforehand?
Thank you.
Mahinder Kingra
I would say finish your dissertation first. Well, I had an older mentor, a colleague at the press, who wouldn't talk to PhD students unless it was two years after they had their PhD approved because they thought that the scholar needed distance from their project, and they needed roughly two years and I would tell them in conferences, come back in two years. I don't want to talk to you.
I think that's harsh, but I think that's probably true in a lot of ways because I think all of the work that goes into your dissertation is useful for the dissertation and some of it, but not all of it, is useful for a book. Thinking about what those differences are and what you want the book to do is going to be, you want the dissertation to get your PhD. That's really all your dissertation is. But a book is speaking to different readerships, exploring different corners, and so I think that's what you really need. That's a process for a time after your dissertation has been approved and your PhD has been granted.
You need to think about what you want the book to do that the dissertation is not doing. Who you want to read the book instead of the three or four people on your dissertation committee? Because they're not going to buy your book anyway, they're going to get it for free. We've got to find the other 200 people who will buy your book.
Also consider that peer review is really a vetting process and not a determinative process. More important is finding the right press, getting an editor interested in the work, and then convincing them that this is something they should publish. The peer review process simply confirms the quality of the scholarship.
I did want to say, just in case before we run out of time, in the discussion of AI, because we're here at the University of Tokyo and talking in some cases about translation projects, I think the biggest impact that AI is going to have in the next five years is in making scholarship in languages other than English available to Anglophone readers in ways that we can't imagine yet, and also making Anglophone scholarship available around the world.
I'm amazed at how sophisticated Google Translate has gone for over the past three years. I wouldn't rely on having it translate a book at the moment, but when I'm putting together a packet for our faculty board, I will run reviews in foreign languages through Google. It used to often take me then two hours to painfully correct that translation, and now it's almost, I can run it through and there are a few changes that I need to make. I feel bad for professional translators because I do think they are going to be out of a job. Perhaps not for poetry, and maybe not for fine literature, but I do think for academic work in the social sciences and humanities, AI translation is going to make all of this a lot easier.
The question is, will authors of a book in monograph in Japanese, will they want to take it to a US publisher, or will they simply put it out on translation platforms and allow the book to be read that way? I think that that's an interesting and a really exciting challenge because I think that has been a huge barrier to the transfer of knowledge across languages. I do think AI is going to fix that. I think that's the one positive thing I can say about AI.
Sinead Moloney
Yes, I agree with everything, particularly on the time, in terms of waiting to - certainly, the danger is if you start talking to publishers very early, particularly before submission, you may start to write your PhD for your publisher, which means your supervisor will be dissatisfied because a book and PhD are two different things so take your time.
Also, this is slightly counterintuitive for someone who works in book publishing, but really ask yourself, is it a book? I think sometimes there's a sense of it has to be a book and a collection of journal articles is kind of almost a second place, but often that is absolutely not the case. Some research is better in journal articles, so really be honest with yourself, and say, is it really a book? Or is this something that I can produce two or three really strong journal articles out of, because actually, you get it into a very good journal that's disseminated to a huge amount of people. You're reaching more people than possibly with your monograph.
The most important thing absolutely is to take your time. I know it's hard because people want to have book contracts prior to applying for jobs and before job interviews, but if you have time, take it.
Alex Pettifer
All great advice. One quick thing I'd add is, and it was mentioned in the sessions earlier this week, is really try and find a publisher where your project fits really well, and an editor who really believes in it, because ideally that's then the start of a long and happy relationship between an author and publisher.
As an editor, there's nothing more fulfilling than commissioning someone's PhD book, and then having them as an author for many, many years and many projects after that. Rather than having a sort of precondition view of like, oh, I'm always wanting to publish my first book with X publisher, do kind of do your research and look across the industry because there's an awful lot of publishers out there. Look at related titles, look at projects, books that you are familiar with, and also asking advice of your supervisor, etcetera, of good series and things you can try and get your book into.
Question 5
I want to ask for a review related to the market, the academic books market. In Japan, for example, for a book published in the social science, the readers are not only scholars because there is also a general readership so that in Japanese a book of mine with sell about 1000 or more copies, but in English, it's maybe half or less, so I wonder why the English book market is so narrow market for the academic books.
Sinead Moloney
It could be just there're a lot of books being published now. When I started at Hart, we used to do 100 books a year and now we do 180, and you can see that does impact actually on the sales of individual books, and there's more publishers emerging as well.
It's completely anecdotal, but that possibly might be, you're just competing for a piece of the pie with more people possibly.
Mahinder Kingra
I think that the library aggregation services in the United States which bundle e-books for library, so we used to sell routinely 800, 900 copies of our monographs when I started, which is a long time ago now, and that has degraded to 250. In large part, that's because we now sell a single e-book to a library and then every student and scholar on campus can access that immediately. Course adoption books, for example, which were staple of university presses have decreased remarkably because of that.
Also professors don't assign entire books anymore. They assign chapters, and they assign one chapter that's freely available to every student on campus from the start. I think that's part of it as well. But that business model has changed. I think there is a tendency not to read books that are deemed to be scholarly or too serious. I'm surprised that sometimes if our books at Cornell are reviewed in The New York Times. It is very exciting, and then often The New York Times will say that it is an interesting topic, but too scholarly. I think that reinforces the perception of academic books as well.
Alex Pettifer
I'd also add piracy to that as well. You may be familiar with Sci-Hub, but it's a website where effectively any researcher in the world can get any academic publication at few strokes of a keyboard. The scholarly book market relies a lot on faculty recommending titles to librarians in many, many markets but, particularly if you are a younger member of faculty, it may be just a lot easier to access it over Sci-Hub.
I think that there are definitely fewer recommendations going through to libraries and also, it's long been a trend that library budget is increasingly being taken up by serials and journals. The piece of the pie left over for books is smaller, and at the same time, more and more titles are published every year. As an individual book title, you are apparently being squeezed on the library side.
Question 6
Just a quick question. I wanted to bring something up with you Melissa, something you didn't say today, but you said to me in New York, which was that in some fields, such as psychology, trade books are a big thing and there is tendency in such a field to make academic books accessible because people want to read about topics in psychology. I just wonder, do you think that might spread to other fields as well?
Melissa Flashman
Yes, I understand your point. I represent a writer in the Psychology Department at Brown University named Judson Brewer, and he works a lot on habit formation and anxiety. He did this book with Penguin called Unwinding Anxiety, and it's sold a gazillion copies. Today, they asked me will he do a workbook.
He's doing original research and he's running labs and so the academic side is there. He did a university press book first on"habits", but these are books that are also picked up by practitioners, including therapists, clinicians, but also people at home wanting to change a habit. However, it is also happening in other fields - I think there's a ton of interest in topics such as global capitalism, for example.
Interestingly, trade publishers as well as university presses are gobbling up books on what might be called big structural systems. I think if you're sort of answering a question, solving a problem, then writers can come out of fields you wouldn't expect. I mean, the bestselling writers on my list are anthropologists and archeologists in London because the people coming to their books are not just anthropologists and archeologists. It's city planners, it's artists, people in theater, activists, undergraduates, and other people who want to have a sense that the big systems that we live in can be changed. That is, we're not doomed to make the same mistakes again. I don't think there's one field exactly.
It is true that psychology has always been a field that has spoken to a wide audience, but I think popular books can come from anywhere. I was talking to Verso Press, which sort of left academic, with offices in London and New York. I think their bestselling book was by a critic who comes out of New York University. She got her PhD I think, and left the academic world, but wrote a 9,000-word book, drawing on gender studies, and I think it has sold 40,000 copies. Such work could come out of an English department as well. It doesn't have to be psychology.
Moderator
Thank you, Melissa.
That is the end of our symposium. I hope you found it useful. Thank you everyone.
Please give a round of applause for our distinguished panel.
(Applause).
Good night!