How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Crisis in Publishing

I approach the issue of the crisis in publishing from what I hope is an interesting and unique position. I began teaching full-time at a university in 1985. Since then, I have produced books and other forms of scholarship. For three years, though, from 1998 to 2001, I worked as the film, media, and philosophy acquisitions editor at the University of California Press. So, for that period, I was responsible for finding the books that the press would eventually publish in those fields.

From this experience, I believe that, in a certain sense, there really isn't a crisis in publishing. The very word crisis implies that there have been decades of publishing paradise for academics, followed by a recent catastrophic shift. Publishing has never gone smoothly; there are always problems in the industry and problems that affect fields (film was not always the relatively desirable field it is today). However, over the last five or ten years, the publishing industry has undergone some significant structural and economic changes that have placed some serious burdens on authors (don't even get me started on the problems facing philosophers, who would kill for the book publishing opportunities film scholars have).

Let me begin by describing my job as an editor to demystify what it is that editors do and how books get made. Our goal at UC Press, at least when I was there, was to publish about twelve film and media books a year, six each in the spring and fall. We almost never published that many, but that was the goal. To come close to publishing twelve books, I tried to offer at least twice that many contracts, in the neighborhood of two contracts per month. Sometimes I made many more offers, and some months were very dry indeed.

Although I had no set formula, I tried to get books from established scholars, of course, and from junior scholars who had written terrific dissertations. Edited books, although important, were less of a priority, and some books were difficult to classify—screenplays, for instance. Especially toward the end of my stint at the press, there was added pressure to sign "trade" books, by commercial writers, for instance.

It would be impossible to guess how many manuscripts, partial manuscripts, queries, proposals, and book titles written on napkins at SCMS conferences I looked at, but there were plenty. As the numbers indicate, though, at least at UC Press, there was a commitment to publishing a fair number of film and media books, in spite of the various crises in publishing.

Because of these crises, I looked for certain kinds of books within film studies. Books on American subjects tend to sell better than European ones, so a list top heavy on books about French, German, or Italian movies would not go over well with the marketing people. My sense is that most presses want to publish books on African, Central American, South American, and Asian subjects but not too many—presses are looking for the one great book about Indian film, rather than trying to produce four or five over two or three years. Books that had course-adoption potential were an added plus. Books that claimed breadth, about a genre, for instance, or a nation but that dealt with only thirteen or fifteen films had little value. They reflected the author's syllabus and were useful in a classroom only if an instructor wanted to use those films.

Yet scholars still have a great deal of agency, and are producing books that editors want. Over the years, I have seen any number of junior and senior scholars shoot themselves in the foot because they did not understand this and assumed that the myths and legends about publishing were true. I would like to take those myths and legends on directly. Here, then, is my "Top Eight" list of publishing's urban legends.

1. 1. This is the big one, and most others on this list are corollaries. The goal of the editor is to thwart you, to prevent you from being published. Most...