Feature Articles

Two Days in Knoxville in the Year of the University Press
by Bob Nardini, Senior Vice President & Head Bibliographer, YBP Library Services

"Why would anybody get into this crazy business?" asked Peter Givler, Executive Director of the Association of American University Presses (AAUP). Givler was a principal speaker at "The Book & The Scholar," a conference put on by the University of Tennessee Press and the University of Tennessee Libraries to celebrate "The Year of the University Press," as AAUP and the Association of Research Libraries have designated 2004.

The only answer to Givler's rhetorical question was that a disparate group of scholars, university administrators, graduate students, librarians, book vendors, and university press representatives were willing to speak, listen, and raise questions of their own for two September days in Knoxville as they examined university press publishing from every angle. Is university press publishing a business at all? Or a better question, how much a business and how much a scholarly and cultural enterprise? For every speaker that was the central question, one framed at the outset by University of Tennessee Chancellor Loren Crabtree. "University presses are in trouble," said Crabtree, in case anyone needed a reminder of what today's economic picture looks like.

University presses have become commercial publishers, offered Bruce Wheeler, professor of history at the University of Tennessee and author of books published by both types, "they're just not as good at it as, say, Houghton Mifflin." The clubby, genteel university press of a generation ago when a disdainful attitude toward marketing prevailed is dead, said Wheeler, and it certainly sounded that way when Steve Wrinn, Director of the University Press of Kentucky, offered his advice to graduate students. "Don't send me your dissertation and tell me you've written it as a book," advised Wrinn. "Just don't." Readability, to Wrinn, is as important or more so to a university press today than the research that goes into a book. Most dissertations should never become books. They are a completely different exercise. "Yours," Wrinn told the graduate students in the audience, "is probably not as important as you think it is."

Wrinn would know, since Kentucky receives some 2,000 to 3,000 book proposals annually, many dissertations among them. There's barely time and staff to properly acknowledge them. Proposals or manuscripts carrying a Kentucky postmark will generate at minimum a little personal advice via return mail, but most submissions will get a form letter rejection and nothing more. In a year Kentucky can publish just 50 or 60 new books. For young scholars, not a good ratio.

University presses, continued Wrinn, are not passively waiting in the mailroom for the right manuscripts to reach them. "We operate in the disciplines," he says. At professional conferences and in other ways, "we try to get books jump-started at the proposal stage." Wrinn said that "high-level professional gossip" is a good description of what an acquisitions editor does. "Who's doing the best work?" an editor might ask. "What books need to be written? Who's the best person to write them?"

A "refugee from commercial publishing," having worked at Brassey's, Lexington Books, and Rowman & Littlefield before coming to Kentucky, Wrinn finds himself in a much different world. University presses may claim a higher purpose, he says, but even so are bound by new fiscal realities. Over the past three years at Kentucky, the press has seen a 25 percent cut in university funding and yet must invest $30,000 to $50,000 in overhead and direct costs for every book published. The vocabulary has changed for university presses, noted Wrinn. They once relied upon a "subsidy," but now must report, instead, that "we are running a deficit."

Givler offered more new vocabulary. A year ago university presses reported an average operating loss of 5 percent-or, as Givler put it, "involuntary support from the university." That was common in the period immediately after 9/11, when "things were looking kind of grim." Over the past year, though, most AAUP members are reporting strong sales. University presses are editorially-driven institutions, Givler notes, and while he agrees that money has always been a sticky problem, he argues that their overall financial record has been a good one. Among the 60 to 65 largest members of AAUP (excluding Oxford and Cambridge), sales accounts for 85 percent of net revenue. About half of the remaining 15 percent comes from outside subventions such as endowments. The remaining 7 to 8 percent is direct university support, a total for these AAUP members of some $24 million, which "hardly qualifies as spare change" in higher education.

For their money, Givler reports, universities support an institution that can help to cement a campus to its surrounding community. He recounted that the University of Arkansas announced the closing of its press several years ago. Members of the public took to the newspapers and used other means to pressure the Chancellor, pointing to the role the University of Arkansas Press had played in sustaining a sense of regional identity, through books about the state's literature, folklore, and history. The press stayed-although a $1 million Perdue contribution made the decision much easier.

Beyond this role in regional trade publishing, Givler said that university presses, unlike commercial publishers, are free to publish "before there is a market." After 9/11, AAUP members combed their lists and mounted a special website featuring 640 titles about Islam, the Middle East, terrorism, and other topics illuminating the events of that day. In the months immediately afterward, the three top national best-selling books all were from university presses, Yale's Taliban, Northeastern's The New Jackals, and Rutgers's Twin Towers.

The Rutgers book, by Angus Gillespie, had sold about 1,500 copies since its 1999 publication. Suddenly Rutgers had a problem, 88,000 orders to fill. Later, worse: 50,000 copies came back as bookstore returns, illustrating in a most painful way what dangers a university press courts when entering the world of big-time trade publishing. Givler knows this story at first hand. He was director of Ohio State University Press in 1983 when Helen Hooven Santmyer's And Ladies of the Club was a surprise success. OSU had arranged an initial print run of 1,500 copies. Rights were sold to Putnam's, who brought out a trade edition in 1984 and soon was selling 30,000 to 40,000 copies a week. It would have been a disaster for OSU to have kept the book, says Givler. "We didn't even have a loading dock."

Of course to any university press the opposite end of the scale is more familiar territory. Jennifer Siler, Director of the University of Tennessee Press, described recent progress in short-run printing systems. The economics of print-on-demand technologies began to make sense for university presses in the late 1990s. As an experiment Tennessee placed 25 backlist titles with Lightning Source in 2001, and now has 65 titles with the University of Chicago Digital Distribution Center's BiblioVault. This new venture, supported by a Mellon grant, is working with over 30 university presses and other scholarly publishers. Siler, with plans to add about 50 more titles to the repository, reports that most titles placed with BiblioVault have reprinted at least once.

That's among the aims of BiblioVault, to provide an economical way to keep slower-selling backlist titles alive while bringing certain older titles back into print. Titles are reprinted in minimum runs of 24 copies as stock runs out. In all, BiblioVault has reprinted about 3,000 copies to date for Tennessee. The press has enjoyed these continued sales without the overprinting risks of traditional paperback publishing. The economics and the technology for initial print runs, however, as well as for any cloth edition, for oversized books, heavily illustrated books, and books over 300 pages in length remain problematic. But all university presses by now, Siler reports, are using short-run printing techniques to extend the lives of at least some of their books.

That pleases authors. For a book to have enduring impact, according to Michael Lofaro, Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, "the only game in town" is a university press. Lofaro's first book, published in 1978 by the University Press of Kentucky, was a biography of Daniel Boone still in print. That commitment to longevity-keeping books available and printing them on acid-free paper in the first place-is a powerful draw for academic authors, who might forego the larger advance and longer initial print run that trade publishers can offer.

Lofaro finds the "commercialization of university presses by fiat" a worrisome trend. Wrinn answered by noting that the bestselling Wildflowers and Ferns of Kentucky, which sold 10,000 copies, enabled his press to work with seven young scholars to turn their dissertations into books, books that would not have paid their own way. While most of Kentucky's books are scholarly, the bills are often paid by ones that are not, many of them regional titles like this one. Such commercial successes don't narrow the range of scholarly topics being published, argued Wrinn. Instead, they make it possible to publish scholarly works at all today.

The reward for junior scholars who publish with a university press, everyone agreed, is promotion and tenure, not wealth. For a first-time author, Givler explained, a contract will likely exclude royalties on the first 500 copies sold and may allow 7 to 10 percent net royalties beyond that. While writing is a solitary and lonely activity, he pointed out, publicity and marketing are highly social. An author's own efforts in exploiting personal networks and working in other ways with a university press marketing department are important. Direct mail is the most effective way to promote a scholarly book, according to Tom Post, Publicity and Promotions Manager for the University of Tennessee Press, which puts some 10,000 catalogs into the mail each year. Tennessee will also send out close to 30 review copies for a new book. While the press will buy advertising for some books, authors who ask "What about the New York Times ad?"-a common enough question, Post says-are far off the mark in gauging their book's sales potential, as a half-page ad in the New York Times Book Review goes for $17,635.

If authors often are unaware of publishing economics, librarians are not. Sandra Yee, Dean of Libraries at Wayne State University, called for "radical change" in business models for university presses. She pointed to collaborative online projects between libraries and publishers such as Columbia University's CIAO, Johns Hopkins's Project Muse, and the History eBook project of the American Council of Learned Societies. At the same time, she believes university presses need to improve the marketing of their books. The university presses at Michigan and Michigan State, for example, have begun to work together on marketing. Her own library is working with Wayne State University Press to create and market regional books.

Several librarians from the University of Tennessee remarked on how difficult it has become for young scholars to publish the books required of them for tenure. Molly Royse, the library's Humanities Coordinator, noted that books remained the "coin of the realm" in the areas she oversees. Yet she described a "book publishing crisis" for young scholars, who face high standards for tenure while universities cut support for the libraries, a principal market for scholarly books. The libraries at Tennessee are doing better than most peers in sustaining the book budget, reported Linda Phillips, Head of Collection Development & Management, with 20 percent of this year's materials budget allocated for books. At Tennessee, the library has made protecting and growing the book budget a priority. "I can assure you," said Barbara Dewey, Tennessee's Dean of Libraries, "that we're buying more books today than we were four or five years ago."

If buying books, funding books, printing books, editing books, publishing books, marketing books, and selling books all received due attention at the conference, at the end of day two one topic remained unaddressed until an audience member asked, "How does someone learn to write a book?"

"I have no idea," answered Wrinn, who was otherwise seldom at a loss for words. He turned to Givler. "Do you want to take that Peter?"

"No."