“What Am I Gonna Write About? What?”: Some Thoughts on the Future of Academic Publishing

I’ve taken the title of these comments from Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett’s Lost Weekend (1945), and from Don Burnham, as played by Ray Milland, agonizing about his future as a novelist. The film, of course, is a melodrama about alcoholism, but many of us can relate to Don’s more mundane fears about writing, and we know what he means, even if we no longer use typewriters, when he says, just a few moments before, “I’ll be sitting there, staring at those white sheets, scared!” Gazing at blankness might also work as a metaphor for thinking about the future of academic publishing, because so much of the field seems so mysterious and unknowable to so many. With this in mind, I intend my own comments on the present and future of academic publishing as a way of giving some modest advice about writing books and working with editors.

Of course things have changed in academic publishing over the years, and I’m coming at this as someone who has been working at universities for the past thirty years and also spent three years, pretty much in the middle of that span, as an acquisitions editor at the University of California Press. New technologies have made it easier to print (and reprint) books and to reproduce illustrations. Fields have changed or merged or gone away. And the ongoing corporatization of the university has affected the place, status, and budget of the academic press and also produced a permanent adjunct class of instructors with little time or support for their scholarship. I would propose, though, that some very important things have stayed the same, and you can use them strategically and to your advantage in trying to publish your monographs.

Marketing, Writing, and Sales, Oh, My!

All of the stages in writing a book, and then seeing it published, can seem a little daunting. So let’s break things down a bit. The most important part of writing a book is the conception of the project, and here, I can’t stress enough the same advice that I would have given fifteen years ago: talk to editors at the very beginning. Good editors have a great sense of how a book ought to be shaped, about what even constitutes a book, and about topics that might be more or less marketable.

I would guess that most of us appreciate the benefits of collaborative work. But we probably tend to think about collaboration in terms of joint authorship, in the actual writing process, or perhaps working with someone to put together a collection of commissioned essays. I would suggest another kind of collaboration—making your editor a collaborator in the conception of your project. Editors never object to queries from authors about book projects, although these usually come when a book is well under way. Instead, start talking to editors as soon as you start thinking about your book. Get them involved early, and listen to them when they tell you how the ideas you have can coalesce into a monograph. Some editors might be overextended and might put you off, or might have too many books already in the fields you’re writing about. In that case, you might want to get creative in thinking about presses, and consider talking to an editor who doesn’t yet have a fully established list in your scholarly area but who might be interested in building one.

I would give much the same advice to anyone who has finished a dissertation and hopes to get it published. I’ve spoken with so many recent PhDs who understand what comes next as an intensely isolating project. They plan to work on their own, redrafting their dissertations until they’re ready to be etched in stone, and only then contacting editors. Instead, I’d urge anyone in this position to do the exact opposite. Start talking to editors right away, and get their ideas about the direction your dissertation might take and about precisely what makes it possible as a book. There...