Changing Times

The publishers that published my first book have been acquired by a larger conglomerate, one that has been buying up several smaller presses recently. I'm sad about this development -- it's likely to be a real loss for the field. Among other things, the publisher was known for putting out high-quality scholarly books, even if they would not be extremely profitable. As a result, some of the more important collections in the discipline have been published there. The press was founded by a very smart person who wasn't afraid to take chances and go his own way. (I had the fortune to be introduced to him at a conference after my first year of graduate school; I imagine he wouldn't remember me, but I remember the story he told about negotiating something or other with Germans. They thought he couldn't speak the language, but underestimated how much he was able to pick up with a week or two of immersion -- to their detriment!) Alas, he's retiring now, and that seems to be part of the reason behind the sale.

Now, the emphasis throughout the (academic) publishing industry seems to be shifted toward books that can be marketed as textbooks. If it doesn't have that kind of broad market, a potential book is likely to have a much harder time being published. It's much more about the bottom line. That makes sense to a point, but some important ideas benefit from book-length treatments, and not all useful books are going to be accessible enough for use even as advanced-level textbooks.

Self-publishing can work for some niches, but I don't see it taking off in the short term for academic books, mainly because a self-published book not only would not count toward tenure and promotion, but it might even be a negative. ("Your ideas are so crazy that you can only get them out there on a vanity press" or "you wasted your time on this when you should have been doing legitimate publishing.")