Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction Jeffrey Williams Publishing strikes me as one of the cloudy institutions, if not ineffable mysteries, of our profession. It frequently finds its way into our conversations and professional considerations (how do I get my dissertation published? ? press is more aggressive, but y is more prestigious , so which press should I go with? Sexuality is a hot topic, and put globalism in the title...), but we rarely analyze it in a critical or concerted way. We recognize that it is tied in very real ways to the hierarchy and internal classing of the academy (what position do you have in the field if you have a Greenwood book as opposed to a Princeton book? if Harvard is on your MLA badge, or Oshkosh State Technical College, will the editor ask you for a proposal?), but at the same time we still usually maintain the prospect of merit, that publishing is just and makes fair evaluations, and anyone has a shot, if they're good enough, if they're smart enough... On the publishers' side, we recognize the power that editorshave (whether they inquire about a project, tell us to send them something, and so on), but on the other hand we frequently see them, in the intellectual hierarchy, as sub-academics, doing necessary jobs, like the people in payroll, but without the intellectual cachet that we trade on. And more intangibly, we accord them a kind of occult power (by fiat they can make or break our career, on the equation of book=tenure), but resent our abjection, that we are dependent on them. "The Academics of Publishing" aims to look at academic publishing , particularly in literary and cultural studies, and its institutional codes, mandates and forms, and how it mediates our intellectual work. It does this in a set of interviews with editors from commercial and a range of academic presses, as well as in essays about the dictates of commercial publishing and the prospects for electronic publishing. The issue aims, first, to examine the intellectually productive role that editors have, very literally as gatekeepers facilitating or disallowing certain work and as catalysts to suggest certain projects and avenues. Presses like Routledge and more recently Duke and NYU have not just reflected but precipitated movements in current academic thought. What roles do editors have in what we write on and what we consider valuable and interesting intellectual work? Second, "The Academics of Publishing" aims to look at the dramatic shifts besetting recent publishing, such as the ensuing pressure forcommercialization and profit even for nonprofit university presses, the resultant decline of the scholarly monograph, and the advent of 6 the minnesota review electronic publishing. This shift is not unrelated to the factors that have generated thejob crisis: it is caused by a decrease in public funding to education, which mandates "downsizing" or proletarianization of teaching faculty and also the underfunding of libraries and other support services; with decreased sales and less university funding , it causes the overpricing of books, thereby creating greater pressure for higher sales and outbounding "modest" sellers; and, with a hyper-competitive job market, it ups the ante on the competition to get published and the symbolic value of publishing. Third, this special issue aims more simply to give some practical, nuts-and-bolts information on academic publishing and how it works, on how publishers decide on a manuscript and on what to send a publisher to get a contract. When I was planning this issue, I tried to solicit a "how-to" essay from editors, and, failing that, thought ofcobbling together one myself. But I realized that the interviews here already do that, albeit in a patchwork way, and more to the point, that there is no single or definitive prescription. However, extrapolating from these interviews, and also from my experience working in publishing (I worked at Routledge for a year between grad school and an academic position while awaiting myjob lottery number to come up), here are a few rules: —know your presses, check their catalogs, look at their books, so that you send your proposal to a press that is appropriate and whose list has affinity with your project. We are trained...