Last year Richard Fisher, a former co-worker, addressed the question “What are academic book publishers for?” in a two-part piece at The Scholarly Kitchen. (Part 1 here; Part 2 here.)
I’m not altogether sure he nails it though. He tells us lots about what academic publishers do and how they do it, but rather slides past the why and wherefore of their mission. (It is of course possible that the title was served up by The Scholarly Kitchen after they got the piece and doesn’t really represent what Richard was writing about.) In thinking about reasons for the existence of academic publishers it would seem fundamental to me, if perhaps simplistic, to assert that academic publishing houses earn their money by making the results of scholarship, research, and academic discussion available to the widest possible audience — obviously the teachers, scholars and students in universities and schools and the libraries they use, but also as many members of the general public as can be induced to care. University Presses as departments of the university are part of the academic community: perhaps rather in the way that a lab assistant is part of the academic community, but nevertheless in a way essential to the smooth functioning of the whole.
Publishers are the ones who decide what it is they’ll publish. It’s not some random process of dealing with the flood of manuscripts coming in over the transom — though all university presses have to cope with a slush pile. They don’t just sit there and wait for Professor Smith to turn up with his dusty manuscript — though of course you know he will. Academic publishers determine which subject areas they will publish in, a choice which may have something to do with what their parent institution is good at, or was good at a few years back. Then they have to pursue the best material they can attract in those fields. Publishers have to select the best manuscripts they can find, whip them into authoritative shape, make them available in the most appropriate format(s), and persuade interested people to buy the books. Editorial selection is the princess of the process, but the boring nuts and bolts of the basics, printer contacts, freelance contacts, marketing routines, sales penetration and distribution, efficient accounting, are what pay for the princess’ gown and tiara.
As Richard says, “It’s also worth stating, quietly, that the fact that most academic book publishers perform the same basic functions doesn’t mean that each performs each of them equally well”. It is perhaps worth stating a little louder that what distinguishes Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press from their confraternity is not just that they are big, or that people love to watch the Boat Race and are used to cheering for light or dark blue. Oxford and Cambridge have been working at getting academic publishing right for upwards of 500 years: it takes time — OK not 500 years, but not a few either. They both publish in many subject areas, but there are areas which they have chosen not to colonize. It needs to be said that they are rather good at what they do.
An aside: Oxford University Press is much bigger than Cambridge. The basic reason for this is that about a hundred years ago the Delegates (the board of academics appointed by the university to manage the press — in Cambridge they are called Syndics) delegated authority to sign up some types of books to their London Manager. This policy, now expanded around the world, was rather successful and such books now outnumber those the Delegates consider at their meetings in Oxford. All the books Cambridge University Press publishes still go through a Syndicate Meeting, though volume has necessitated some selectivity over what books are actually discussed at any length.
Richard reminds us that, in his days anyway, Cambridge’s list in politics was regarded as the yardstick by which others were judged. This is the way it goes in a sort of ever turning cycle. Today it’s politics, tomorrow philosophy or physics or whatever. The reason for one Press’ being perceived as the brand leader in this or that subject results from a combination of things: a good editor, more importantly good advisors (or an editor able to recognize and latch onto good advisors maybe), the effect of one big book acting as a magnet for other good projects, the fact that someone you admire publishes there, and the prominence of the press in your daily reading. A strong department in the university with a tradition of publishing locally helps. I was fortunate as editor for anthropology that Cambridge had a strong department of social anthropology which had been publishing with CUP for aeons. I was also blessed with a strong advisor (who happened to have been my director of studies when I was an undergraduate). The strength of the list while I was running it had nothing to do with me. The best I can claim is to have kept out of the way and done no harm.
The editor’s impact on the strength of the list can effectively be no more active than encouraging the best authors to publish with you. (Judgement about what’s good and bad is here taken as given.) The ability to detect up-and-coming subject areas is an important qualification — I witnessed Cambridge’s early colonization of the new subject of linguistics under the initiative of Michael Black. Occasionally an editor may marry a topic needing coverage with an author ideal to write about it but as yet reluctant or unaware that this is what they’re born to do. Even more rarely an editor may affect the discipline by coming up with an idea nobody’s thought of, and talking someone into writing the missing book. Such insights will be the result of lots of conversations with lots of people with good ideas though. I made a couple of attempts at shifting the way the subject was taught, one in social anthropology, and the other in archaeology. Neither made any ripples in the pool of pedagogy: but you can but try. And every now and then something will take hold.
Of course all your good ideas are subject to authors, academics by and large, and their willingness to put pen to paper. Lots of authors will sign lots of book contracts and never find the time to write the books. Academic books tend not to attract any advance on royalties so the guilting-out power of having taken the money isn’t there. I worked on one manuscript which came in fifty years after the contract had been signed. Some took even longer: Mathematics for Archaeologists was a great idea in the 1970s, and every time I saw George he assured me he was making progress — not enough that any editor ever saw a page of it though. The ability to get the author to do the work should also be listed as one of the qualities of a good editor.
There’a a lot of talk these days about online publishing of academic books. We’ve just lived through an explosion of Open Access publishing of research related to Coronavirus, and many, including many in authority, see free online publishing as “the way forward”. However we aren’t there yet. Academic publishers still find demand from their customers for physical, printed books. Academic publishers aren’t there to set policy for education and research: we do what the academic community wants. Publishers are merely the agents of the authors they publish: if nobody wants to publish in this or that way, then there will cease to be publishers working in this or that way. Of course people crave insight into the future, but in this regard all we can say is that publishers will do what their customers (both providers of manuscripts and buyers of the final product) continue to want them to do. It was ever thus.
Making Book 