Publish or Perish Archives
June 1, 2009
Posted at 9:30 AM in Publish or Perish
When word got out in early May that Louisiana State University might slash its press's subsidy as a result of the state's budget contraction, Michael V. Martin, chancellor of the Baton Rouge campus, issued a brief written statement. For those who admire the press, it was not very reassuring:
"We hope the governor and our legislature will provide sufficient funding to maintain support of LSU Press, as it is a very valuable asset to this university, the people of the state, and many beyond," Mr. Martin said. "We face, however, extraordinary economic conditions, and we must protect the academic core of LSU first and foremost."
Anyone who cares about university presses should pay close attention to Mr. Martin's choice of words. His statement makes it plain that being a "valuable asset" no longer guarantees a press a secure place in the "academic core" of its parent institution. These days, that can be a fatal degree of separation.
May 7, 2009
Posted at 5:40 PM in Publish or Perish
Got word today that Louisiana's state budget woes could force LSU Press to close. Supporters are rallying people to the cause, asking them to tell the LSU administration and the state legislature how important the press is to the intellectual life of the university and the state. I took some heat from a commenter on the Chronicle's news blog about my choice of the phrase "might get the ax" to describe the danger LSU Press faces. I'd say that if a you cut a press's subsidy with the knowledge that doing so is likely to force it to close, you are de facto giving it the ax. Quibble if you like.
I wish I could say that I didn't expect to be writing more stories like this in the weeks and months ahead. We should know soon about Utah State UP's fate. Maybe LSU Press will pull through. I hope so. It has a long, honorable tradition of publishing high-quality literature and scholarship with a Southern flavor, and it would be sad to see it go.
February 24, 2009
Posted at 3:28 PM in Publish or Perish
Insightful, entertaining, and thought-provoking, Middle Age is fascinating reading and for anyone heading for a 'mid-life crisis,' it is much cheaper than buying a sports car.
February 17, 2009
Posted at 3:34 PM in Publish or Perish
VQR has put its 1973-2005 archives online, including a short story of mine called "Act of Humanity." If I were writing it now, I'd go with a different title, but I am still glad to see it available in something handier than the dreaded PDF format. Thanks, VQR.
January 26, 2009
Posted at 2:14 PM in Publish or Perish
Maybe not the best headline ever, but the funniest one I've seen today. Not that there's a lot of competition out there. ("Major U.S. Companies to Slash 45,000 Jobs" just doesn't cut it in the funny department.)
Posted at 9:44 AM in Publish or Perish
As you might have heard, it's been a little busy here in D.C. the last week or so. I caught some of the peripheral inaugural action--happy crowds, massive litter, bunting all over--in between writing two news stories, three blog items, and a feature for the Chronicle.
It turned out to be a big week not just for the country but for university presses. The Association of American University Presses released a sales survey that confirmed some of the gloomy anecdotes heard in publishing circles lately. Utah State University Press learned that it might get the axe because of cuts to the state budget. Layoffs hit Oxford University Press, the largest UP. (Cambridge UP also cut most of their U.K. printing operation.) And, in a feature I wrote for this week's Chronicle, university-press directors and sales managers share some anecdotes about how they're doing and what might lie ahead. (I heard the phrase "waiting for the other shoe to drop" over and over.)
Bottom line: Much of the news about presses was not good, but it could have been worse. The question now is how much worse it's going to get.
December 26, 2008
Posted at 3:31 PM in Publish or Perish
I got to spend some time recently at Georgetown University's Office of Scholarly and Literary Publications. Informally known as Booklab, it's a "literary boutique" run by Carole Fungaroli Sargent, who combines a deep knowledge of publishing with an intuitive-and-informed sense of how writers work and what they need. An author herself, Carole also has a PhD in 18th-century literature. She gets what it means to be a writer and a scholar. She created Booklab to help Georgetown-based authors cope with the rigors of getting ideas into book form and out into the world. (She'll work with non-Georgetown authors too, time permitting.)
Carole can help with the practical side of things--What should a good proposal contain? What does this contract language mean? How do I find a good indexer?--but she really encourages each author to think about the bigger picture: Why this book now? Why am I the best person to write it? What are its ideal "shelfmates"? How does it fit into my larger career? What does it have to say to the world? How can I build a platform for my ideas?
Booklab's funded through the office of Jim O'Donnell, Georgetown's provost, who summed up the prevailing attitude toward tenure and promotion this way: "We'll drop you from the helicopter naked with a Bowie knife in the middle of the wilderness, and if you come back within seven years wearing animal skins and dragging an elk behind you, you get tenure."
Read more about Booklab here.
FYI, Carole maintains an excellent blog about writing and publishing. Bookmark it now.
November 25, 2008
Posted at 4:34 PM in Publish or Perish
This is a nifty idea. If you know of other universities that are trying out similar ventures, let me know. Tons of scholarly presses have worked blogging into their PR portfolios, but this is the first university-created litblog I've come across.
November 21, 2008
Posted at 3:46 PM in Publish or Perish
Talk to your campus librarian.
September 25, 2008
Posted at 8:26 AM in Publish or Perish
Don't yawn. This is critical stuff for publishers who rely on textbooks as a source of revenue and for the students who are less and less willing to pay big bucks for those textbooks.
A couple of weeks ago, I did a story for the Chronicle about plummeting textbook sales at university presses. It caught the attention of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which has done a follow-up. As they kinda sorta admit, it borrows freely from my reporting (and also from my Chron colleague Jeff Young's coverage of textbook piracy).
Still, I'm glad to see this issue get picked up by mainstream papers, because ithe impact goes far beyond the murkier realms of academe, and it's only going to get more interesting as students and professors figure out more ways to get around the old publishing models. More thoughts on that TK, as we say in the trade.
September 17, 2008
Posted at 2:41 PM in Publish or Perish
Should research conducted with federal dollars be made freely available to the public after it's published? The NIH says yes. Publishers say not so fast.
Last week, Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Calif.) introduced a bill, H.R. 6845 or the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, that would make it a lot harder for federal agencies to require copyright holders to make federally funded research available to the public post-publication. Although the current NIH public-access policy is the bill's obvious target, it could apply to any federal agency funding any kind of research, scientific or otherwise.
I covered a hearing on the bill last week. It got pretty dramatic. Favorite moment: a copyright expert asking whether we really want "the hairy snout of government" poking around in the publishing biz.
Do we? You be the judge. My Chronicle of Higher Ed coverage here, Library Journal coverage here. Peter Suber has been covering the bill and reactions to it on his Open Access News blog, including one post in which he quotes from my story. It looks like not much more will happen with the bill this fall, but this is one to keep an eye on.
September 16, 2008
Posted at 1:28 PM in Publish or Perish
A call for six-word memoirs.
(Via the LA Times's Jacket Copy.)
September 14, 2008
Posted at 9:41 PM in Publish or Perish
I don't have anything useful to say about the suicide of David Foster Wallace, news of which has been widely if sketchily reported in the last 24 hours, except to say that it rattled me more than I'd have expected, and that most of my questions about it will likely never be answered. From my Book World days I have a galley of Infinite Jest signed by Wallace, and it's an odd thing to hold it now and look at a name written in a dead man's hand.
The Howling Fantods website has been collecting blogospheric and MSM reactions, obits, and commentary. It's fascinating, in a somber way, to see how news like this spreads and what kinds of reactions it provokes. Worth reading if Wallace meant something to you, or if you're curious about how the culture tries to take the measure of a writer.
September 4, 2008
Posted at 3:38 PM in Publish or Perish
Not everyone has been hit hard, but the latest numbers have got many people rattled. What's causing the decline, which has picked up speed in the last couple of months? It's not just the economy. Is it textbook piracy? The used-book market? The misuse of course-management software, which profs sometimes use to download chapters to give to their students? I talked to some university-press folks to find out more.
N.B. Before you start blaming high textbook prices, please note that we're not talking about those back-breakers that commercial publishers inflict on students for hundreds of dollars. "Textbooks," in this case, means monographs adopted as course reading--and monographs are the lifeblood of university presses.
August 29, 2008
Posted at 10:39 AM in Publish or Perish
"Ageing chimp's own story on list for Guardian first book prize," sez today's Guardian. (Haven't the Brits learned how to spell "aging" yet? Honestly.)
Me Cheeta: the Autobiography is billed as the true story of Cheeta the Chimp, star of Hollywood blockbusters, told "in his own words". The book documents the life and times of a chimpanzee who has outlived all his co-stars from the 1939 film "Tarzan" to reach the ripe old age of 75. He withdrew from the limelight in 1964 after biting his "Doctor Dolittle" co-star Rex Harrison, and has retired to an old chimps' home in Palm Springs, California.
Well, I'd have been tempted to bite Rex Harrison too.
August 18, 2008
Posted at 3:22 PM in Publish or Perish
I interviewed the manager of a young DC-area singer-songwriter named Chelsea Lee today, and he was telling me how he got her stuff on iTunes via TuneCore. (There's also CD Baby, "a little online record store" that cuts out the middleman.) Artists pay a small fee up front but keep all the royalties and the rights. That got me wondering: Why not TuneCore for writers? We could call it ProseCore, maybe, or FictionWorks. Upload a short story and see your readership grow!
What do you think? Could it work?
August 15, 2008
Posted at 3:32 PM in Publish or Perish
The publisher of the distinguished Arden Shakespeare series has outraged many Shakespearians with its decision to terminate the contract of Patricia Parker, a senior scholar who has been working on a new Arden edition of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" for more than a decade. Why did Cengage, Arden's publisher, pull the plug on Parker's contract? Was she taking too long to finish? Is this the sinister hand of commerce at work, or is a scholars' battle to blame? Read more in the story I did for today's Chronicle (subscription, sorry).
Free links: Parker's supporters have created an online petition demanding her reinstatement, with 215 signatures and counting. On the website reinstatepatparker.com, you can read a copy of the Aug. 2 letter Parker wrote to Arden's publisher, telling her side of the story.
August 14, 2008
Posted at 4:14 PM in Publish or Perish
My kids know that I write articles and that I have an editor. Sometimes they even think it's cool. Lately my son, who's 4, has been scribbling on pieces of paper and saying that he has to finish his article by Christmas. (I like the way he pushes deadlines.) Of course, editing doesn't always go smoothly, especially when your editor is your 6-year-old sister. Here's an exchange my husband IM'd me this afternoon:
Lela just picked up one of Finn's pieces of paper and said, "Finn, I think we need some changes in your article." Finn replied, "No we don't! I don't want you to tell me that, you idiot!" Then Lela hit him.
Note to my editor: I won't call you an idiot. Promise.
August 12, 2008
Posted at 11:27 AM in Publish or Perish
One for the good guys: My friend Jim Hynes has found a publisher for his new novel, Next. Little, Brown is the house that had the good sense to snap up the book. Jim sez:
And Little, Brown, of course, is a legendary American publishing house, which, at one of the scale, published Emily Dickinson, and at the other end of the scale, is now publishing, well, me, Mr. Ghost-Cat-Office-Zombie-Magic-Finger Boy. Probably best not to dwell too long on that dialectic.
Jim's referring to some of the memorable themes of his previous books, which include Publish and Perish, The Lecturer's Tale, and Kings of Infinite Space. Buy! Read! Enjoy!
July 28, 2008
Posted at 10:58 AM in Publish or Perish
I've got two new stories up at the Chronicle. The first is a look at "Literary Geospaces." I write about two very cool digital projects: the Map of Early Modern London, run by Janelle Jenstad, an assitant professor of English at the University of Victoria, and Matthew L. Jockers's Google Earth visualization of the development of Irish-American literature. Jockers is an information technology specialist at Stanford Univeristy--a PhD who helps other academics create nifty new digital ways of presenting scholarship. He's created a movie of his Google Earth visualization, which you can catch here.
The other story up today is a close reading of--wait for it--the latest annual report of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. As I say in the story, annual reports aren't anyone's idea of beach reading. But if you care about scholarly publishing and where it's headed, the essay in the report on "Scholarly Communication Initiatives" is, despite the title, a page-turner.
This also marks the first time I've done something multimedia for the Chronicle. (It's a tie-in to the "Literary Geospaces" story.) You can watch/listen to my narrated tour of Cheapside here.
July 25, 2008
Posted at 2:06 PM in Publish or Perish
As some of you know, I've been looking for an agent to represent a little thing I wrote for my kids. It's called "Henry and the Hungry Hamper," and it's about a boy who does battle with his laundry hamper at bath time. Oh, and it rhymes. It's 600 words long. Reax so far:
Good: My guess is that you will find an agent or editor who will snap this up. Good luck!
Bad: I'm afraid I'm not looking for picture book texts right now as this segment of the market is very flat, and editors are terrible and not buying many these days, alas. Then too, rhymed texts are proving to be challenging as well.
So...onward? Upward? Sideways?
July 2, 2008
Posted at 11:37 PM in Publish or Perish
Maybe I'm just a cockeyed optimist, but I'm less gloomy than some are about the state of university-press publishing. If you have a Chronicle subscription, you can read why here, in my report from the Association of American University Presses conference, held in Montreal last weekend.
Nice town, Montreal. What I did there: Walked around McGill U. and admired the stonework. Got my rusty French working well enough to tell a cashier that I didn't want a bag with my purchase. Had some surprisingly good vegetarian sushi in a town that otherwise serves foie gras with EVERYTHING. Sat in windowless conference rooms. Tried not to overdo the coffee (again, surprisingly good). Talked to university-press editors and directors and other concerned parties. Looked for signs that the End of Days is about to be visited upon UP publishing. Concluded--well, see above.
May 12, 2008
Posted at 3:27 PM in Publish or Perish
A nonprofit "publishing collective," the Open Humanities Press, wants to do for humanists what the open-access movement has done for scientists--or at least make a start in that direction. They're handling 7 journals to start with, and have lined up some impressive names for their editorial board, including Stephen Greenblatt and Alan Badiou. Best of luck, kids.
May 5, 2008
Posted at 12:21 PM in Publish or Perish
Princeton University Press has recalled all 4,000 copies of Peter Moskos's Cop in the Hood after discovering more than 90 errors of spelling and grammar in the 245-page book. They say an inexperienced copy editor is to blame, and promise to have a corrected version of the book back in stores by the end of the month.
It's a first--and a big black eye--for the presitigious press. Princeton UP's director called the matter "terribly embarrassing" and said they're proud of the book, "which makes the embarrassment all the worse."
And the author? He's been writing about the setback with remarkably good cheer over at his blog.
As we say in the journo trade, though, this raises new and troubling questions. What's the state of quality control in scholarly publishing these days? If you have thoughts on that, let me know.
April 1, 2008
Posted at 2:28 PM in Publish or Perish
Heck, yes! This one's a bit different, though; it's hands-on and home-grown.
While the Ithaka group was preparing its big-picture look at "University Publishing in a Digital Age," the University of California system undertook a survey of publishing activities (or scholarly communication, as we must call it now) on its 10 campuses. As the report's authors told me, they found lots of alternative or "entrepreneurial" ventures, including online working-paper series and journals. Now they want to figure out how to support all that activity and keep it in the family rather than having it poached by commercial publishers.
Read my coverage of the report here. Read the report itself here.
March 24, 2008
Posted at 7:48 PM in Publish or Perish
Literary Rejections on Display ("Join the Revolution, Join the Pity Party"): Sanctioned by Entertainment Weekly, and sure to make you smile. Through gritted teeth.
Remember this: Someone out there will always say no.
Can you tell I got a rejection today? One of the better, more thoughtful ones--much to admire, etc. etc.--which only makes it worse.
March 18, 2008
Posted at 2:45 PM in Publish or Perish
And, as the Chronicle reports today (subscription required), the students have won:
The University of Iowa has backtracked on a plan to post all graduate students' theses online and make them freely available to the public. The reversal came in response to vigorous protests last week from students in the university's prestigious graduate program in writing, who said that the plan could threaten the commercial value of their novels, plays, and other creative works.
Reax here and here (see the comments) and here.
March 13, 2008
Posted at 9:39 PM in Publish or Perish
My friend Jim Hynes, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, tipped me off yesterday that students there are up in arms about a new university policy that requires them to make their dissertations available open access--as in free--in order to graduate. We're talking fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction here, not scholarly work. The students, understandably, are worried that this may scotch their chances of getting publishing contracts for their work.
My Chron colleague Andrea Foster had an excellent story today about it (subscription required). Open-access guru Peter Suber responds on his blog here:
I defend OA for electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) and even argue that universities should mandate OA for ETDs. On the other hand, my arguments focus on non-fiction works of scholarship in the sciences and humanities. I've never thought about OA for works of fiction and creative writing submitted for degree requirements in an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) program like the Iowa Writer's Workshop. I suspect that many universities with OA policies for ETDs haven't either.
Barbara Fister of the Association of College & Research Libraries weighs in on what she calls the "Free Culture Clash" here. At Sivacracy, Siva Vaidhyanathan takes it further with a humdinger of a headline: "U. of Iowa Stealing Student Work and Forcing Googlization." For some writers' takes, see Megan Pillow's reaction at the Huffington Post (yes, the HuffPo) and Jim's here and here.
Where does this leave writers who can't even give their stuff away?
