Transcripts For CSPAN2 Discussion On University Presses 2018

CSPAN2 Discussion On University Presses January 16, 2018

The floor. Thank you for coming this evening, a special panel on how to publish with the University Press by columbia University Press, University Press 2014. We really like it. This is your first time here. Welcome. We are so happy you found us. For over 20 years we have been in new york citys intellectual Academic Community, happy to carry one of the largest selections of academic titles in the city and columbia University Press has been with the greatest partners and supporters. Tonights conversation is moderated by jennifer crewe, director of associate press. Procedural note, cspan booktv is here recording this talk so during the q and a portion, wait for a microphone to come to you so they can record your question. I will turn it over to jennifer. Thank you very much. I do want to say, we love you too. This is one of the most important bookstores for University Press to wander the aisle and feel a lot of us represented here. I want to thank panelists, james, you have a special title. The department of english and comparative literature at Columbia University, Nicholas Dames is the author of two books both published by University Press, 18101870, and reading neural science and fiction. He also writes on contemporary literature and humanities, the novel reading etc. For many publications including the atlantic New York Times book review, the nation and public books and that leads me into sharon marcus, literature at Columbia University and dean of the humanities, ending her deanship. Her first book, city and home in 19thcentury by the university profess and her second book, marriage, desire and friendship was published by princeton, and also i should mention public books again because 2012, sharon and caitlin at nyu cofounded public books, an online magazine that features really great accessible writing by scholars and other people in the community, activists and writers it is a great publication. All the way over there to my left is eric schwartz, my colleague, editor and director, editor of sociology and cognitive science and basically run the Acquisition Department and worked at princeton University Press and cambridge University Press and a lot of University Presses represented here. I just wanted to start by stating the University Press, some people dont know what makes the difference from another publisher. Either a commercial trade publisher that publishes most of the fiction in general nonfiction you might read, also how the difference between commercial scholar publisher, first of all we are a notforprofit organization. All University Presses are, that doesnt mean we try not to incur too much of a loss but we are notforprofit and we are not out to just sign up books that will earn money for the organization. Secondly, we are situated with the university. University is our middle name so our goals, our missions at the University Admission at University Press are entwined in some ways and university wants to Foster Research in a generation of scholarship to disseminate that scholarship, to be deteriorated and get out into the world. We also publish important books that a commercial publisher would not take on because they would not make any money for the company. They might lose money. There are commercial scholarly publishing, an increasing number, but they price them out of reach for most normal human beings so the University Presses to try to reach an audience of educated general readers with their books and pricing is usually set to that level. Next our method of acquiring books, eric runs the department differs from other kinds of publishers so our editors often do have a degree in the field or had some kind of graduate training and are given areas of specialization to acquire them. We have a history editor who also does economics and philosophy and religion editor so they become specialists in those areas, they go to the conferencees, they develop expertise in a group of people they cultivate and learn about the new trends in the field. The main relationship would be with an agent. We do deal with agents sometimes, the trade publishers, the main person they are cultivating are the agents they are dealing with and try to get the agents for books they would like to publish. And the other thing University Presses publish several types of books that only specialists would read but we also publish trade books that you would find at barnes noble and we publish course adoption books we know would be not a kind of course adoption that pearson would publish because it is two small markets but we are happy to have it because the books sell year after year. And we do rigorous peer review for every book we consider and this is particularly important in todays atmosphere of fake news and concerns about inaccuracy in the information that gets out there. We publish work that is vetted and verified. And finally we have a Publication Committee and nick happens to sit on that committee now, most University Presses have such a committee. They read the peer reviews and they hear what the editor has to say about the book and a portion of the manuscript and they are the final okay. If they agree we can all have a contract for a book and that is different for the publisher. And i thought i would talk about University Press and in the end a sense of how we work and go about looking at books and accepting. I will group my questions around various topics and the first is peer review which i just mentioned. This was briefly essential to our mission of advancing scholarship and what it means is something we are considering, manuscript or proposal who the author does not know we are sending, they dont know who it is, and sharon and nick, first of all, as an author and graduate student advisors and in your case may be as former administrator, what do you think of the value of peer review . I think peerreviewed, having your ideas evaluated by experts and it is important to do that and when you get a book from University Press it is evaluated by two experts writing anonymously without worrying about the politics that affect the academy. It would be interesting if peer review were doubleblind and didnt know who they are reviewing. And tests the books that are published for how original they are or how accurate they are and help them modulate their scope so book that may come across as very narrow in the peer review process might be very interesting and you might expand your argument to include questions about Housing Construction and inspection or might conversely say you are overreaching with this argument, the key to understanding cosmology, ratcheted down a bit so it is great to have other people read your stuff and without the dynamics involved, get their honest opinion but for Young Scholars it is a great preview of the tenure process and protection against the internal politics of your department and university, outside experts ratifying your book, mostly if it is working properly on its own terms and peer review helps us honest. I recently had an article peerreviewed and it was very valuable to know the person writing it didnt know anything about me, just reading my arguments and telling me what works and where they wanted more evidence and it was extremely helpful to get those responses and feedback. You could add to that but also add something about your role in our publication because nick will read the peer reviews of these books in all sorts of fields and how you judge those. Sharon gave a great summary of that is i would only add one thing and the peer review system ensures a sort of meaning to books. One thing peer review is good at weeding out our repetitions or reiterations, and a great parable about this, some of you will know what i am getting at. One of the main characters working on a lengthy monograph and confirmed by a young man, the germans have done all that. There is a way of doing that with peer review but theres a way peer review does mitigate repetition in a field so if something is Peer Reviewed there is a stronger claim of a new contribution to knowledge and without that and when i see peer reviews what i look for besides theoretical actions, i want to see the reviewer provide a summary of the book, that shows there was an attempt to read the manuscript with sympathy. If a peer reviewer only fixes on details that to me is often the sign that it was not read well and was red with a subterranean ax to grind that im not aware of. Should be able to suggest the limits of that argument as well as newness of it. The first thing i look for when i judge that. It is more informative than that. I wanted to mirror back to me there since as a reader was it would look like him. There are times we have to read behind the lines, sometimes somebody will damn with faint praise. If they dont want to say this isnt a groundbreaking original scholarship, you can get at it that way. You read a lexicon of terms that are faint praise and strong praise. From your point of view as an editor. Often interesting when there is conflict in your views so reader a has particular reading or slightly different reading and the author has to engage with one of those readings to determine what is the argument they actually want to make. And it would make for a better, more engaged book and lets us as a publisher know the author is committed to this project and they will defend and stand up for the argument they are making. Peer review from an editorial perspective keeps them going. There is always a move to try to do the book that is more sensational or will sell more copies and knowing our projects are going to be judged by scholars in the field, members of the Publication Committee and members of the Publication Committee, we meet with the Publication Committee the final thursday of every month. At times where you are going in there and you have work you have invested time in and you have 2 in some cases defend those projects, sometimes you succeed and infrequently you dont succeed but it is important to keeping us honest and we often think about books we consider for publication, what with the perception of the Publication Committee be of this project before we even get started down the road of the peer review process. As im concerning to this conversation i realize i should mention for anyone who is particularly interested in peer review that the aau p, association of University Presses recently put out a kind of best practices book on peer review if youre interested in it or what to expect if your book is Peer Reviewed it is a handy guide. I also wanted something that occurs to me about our committee there are people on it from nine different fields across humanities, social sciences and science and business and the way scholars in different fields react to review is quite interesting and the types of reviews you get, humanities might get 7 pages singlespaced with lots of the person really read every word and is making helpful suggestions and typos and things like that and you might get something in the finance area science too, you might get a paragraph. They understand time is money. One person from Business School once told me that, time is money. It is something that stands out and when it works well it makes the book a better book and the editor helps guide the author and helps us understand as publishers publishing this kind of publishing, some of it very specialized and none of us knows the field well so these reviews help situate the market. Also use the review process as an opportunity for Network Building for the author and to add diversity to the reception of the book so i will often look if there is a book across fields i will select a reviewer and try to get a reviewer in one field and another and another and the senior person and a junior person, often times readings can be very different and it can be useful for the author especially junior authors, thinking about those that would be important for them to know those people out in the field to know their work, really great opportunity to build networks and use placements to do that. Something i dont think we mentioned, we often say to others if peer review is picking up something in that book, the author doesnt want to deal with it we often say this could be a preview of what could happen when you have the book published and there is a published review of it, this is the kind of issue that could come up so might as well catch it now before it is published. I thought we would move on to acquiring these books, what are the different ways editors look for books to consider for publication and how do their methods differ depending whether it is a monograph or trade book or test book. We have a variety of ways that require books, there are projects, different fields are different that way. Our science editor could go several years before someone comes over the transom for him but the philosophy editor there are different fields that are different in that regard. The number of books we will acquire based on that method is very small. We also make editors make visits to campuses come we go to academic conferences and use those as Networking Opportunities to find out what projects people are working on and each one of our lists has a personality to its. Broadly speaking columbia books are global. We want our books to have a certain feel on the entirety of the list. They could be perfectly good project that simply dont fit that brand identity and might not be right for us. We get projects from agents on occasion. We go to the Frankfurt Book Fair and that is an enormous yearly book fair in germany where every publisher in the world attends, there are 300,000 attendees at this years, they open it to the public saturday and sunday and i had the good fortune of being in the train station is all the players were swarming into the train station as i was leaving, they were going to frankfurt and also Commission Project so by being in a field you often know the structural holds in a given field, there is a real need for an economics book on a certain aspect of Climate Change and wouldnt it be great if x person wrote that book and so you are writing to people that way, seeing somebody write an oped, writing to those authors saying wouldnt it be a great idea if you wrote this . A whole variety can get books into the pipeline. Thinking about public books where you are trying to reach beyond the academy a little bit. I am curious about what you think, you are on your third book. When do you think i want to reach beyond a smaller audience to a bigger audience and how does it play in your mind about what kind of publisher you would go to . I suppose every writer looks at lists and often fantasizes about the list that fits them best, but it is often a process of discovery with an editor and peer reviewer and Publication Committee often very good at identifying what was identified or sometimes out of reticence or ignorance. As you are writing a book you imagine a dialogue but there may be a thirdparty out there you are talking to or want to bring into the conversation but i too scared to or dont know if you are qualified or simply ignorant of his. In a way, scanning a list is a way of seeing what possible audiences are given press and is that something i want to take on . One of the things you ask ahead of time is choosing between trade press and University Press if you have a project that could go either way and i am finishing the book right now on celebrity, working on it for a long time and i tell academics about it they say a great trade book but im publishing it with University Press, very happily because for several reasons. If you have a book that could swing either way why would you go with University Press . It creates glamour. But if you publish with University Press they will let you keep your footnotes and if you are a scholar you are attached to footnotes. They will try to argue you out of them and put them in a crazy format where you cant say anything properly. If you publish with University Press you are free to write a book that is argument driven and these days if you publish with the trade press they are going to ask you to write a book that is narrative driven. Argument driven books are driven by ideas like why are so many people so obsessed with celebrity. A narrative driven book is driven by characters and events and would start with Something Like on november 2, 1882, Sarah Bernhardt woke up to find out and i personally didnt want to write this book that way and if youre going to write a book that is narrative driven you can see the story from the start and there are only a few people and im not one of them who can make an argument through narrative. That is a very tricky thing to do and it is easier to make an argument as an argument and the argument can be compelling and have their own suspended i chose to put my energy into that and i am happy to be in a press the embraces and Universi

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