Film and Media Studies and the State of Academic Publishing: Introduction

In the winter of 2013, editors from five university presses provided their insights regarding the changing nature of scholarly publishing for Cinema Journal’s In Focus. Topics included intellectual property, fair use, and detailed assessments of how digital technologies and pipelines (namely e-books) were already transforming their work. While acknowledging these and other changes in the publishing business, each editor confirmed that the mission of an academic press had remained fundamental: to publish rich and varied scholarship that generates intellectual debate, critical engagement, increased readership, and, yes, library and retail sales.¹ A few months later, Columbia University Press published Thomas Doherty’s Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–1939 (2013) and Harvard University Press published Ben Urwand’s The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler (2013).² While Columbia University Press backed Hollywood and Hitler with a strong, traditional marketing campaign, Harvard University Press employed an outside publicity firm for The Collaboration to garner press attention, in part by critiquing Doherty’s competing book. “Perhaps I’m naïve about academic publishing,” David Denby wrote in the New Yorker, “but I’m surprised that Harvard University Press could have published anything as poorly argued as Urwand’s book; and I’m surprised still more that Harvard or Urwand (or both) hired a commercial book publicist, Goldberg McDuffie, which, in its press release for Urwand’s book, attacked Doherty’s work on the subject. . . . In the past, disputes between scholars were hashed out in academic journals and conferences, not by hired guns.”³

With the ensuing controversy over The Collaboration (and its public relations campaign) in mind, we (along with Anne Helen Petersen, originally a coeditor who now writes for BuzzFeed) were inspired to ponder the many ways in which film and media studies scholars navigate a complex set of questions for writing, publishing, and promoting their work, especially in an increasingly digital landscape where much of the controversy over The Collaboration played out. This led us to a series of questions: What are our roles as authors? What kind of promotion is appropriate for us to commit to for our books? How can we best work with editors to ensure that we are meeting their expectations for both rigorous scholarship and strong promotion at a time when academic presses are increasingly under financial constraints and adapting to new business models? This engagement between academic press and author is indeed a collaboration, and of a very different kind. Thus, we asked fellow scholars and scholars who are also editors to discuss the current state of academic publishing from this side of the fence with particular attention to how marketing academic books has changed in the era of social media and how the pressures of publishing fit into the demands of an ever-changing academic landscape.

This In Focus, therefore, is centered on academic books in film and media studies and the changing ways in which scholars work with editors, marketers, social media, journalists, and their colleagues to expand their research and audience in the twenty-first century. The articles in this section also consider how the work of contemporary film and media studies scholars has changed over the past decade as academic presses, search committee expectations, tenure requirements, contingent labor duress, university cultures, and the field itself continue to transform in challenging, exciting, and unexpected ways. Video essays, academic blogs, social media, popular writing, and spatial and data visualizations are just some of the many ways in which new models of scholarship are joining more traditional avenues like academic journals, edited collections, and—of principal interest here—books. Yet many of these digital publishing options are not counted as highly as the staple outputs of academic research: the peer-reviewed article, chapter, or—again—the book. Still, the changes brought about by the digital transition, the influence of digital humanities, and the move to both closed and open-access digital publishing have created a new set of opportunities for and challenges to traditional academic presses and to traditional scholarship. There is also a significant upheaval in academic journals amid...