The university of North Carolina, press hell be our guest unc press is celebrating. Its 100th anniversary. But first some news from the publishing world. Well the publisher simon and schuster is currently in the midst of an unusual free book giveaway. Its an effort to help bridge the growing divides facing america today. The book publisher is giving away the digital audiobook and ebook editions of amanda. Ripleys book high conflict why we get trapped and how we get out and anna sales. Lets talk about the hard things the lifechanging conversations that connect us. In discussing this giveaway simon and schuster ceo. Jonathan karp said quote perhaps if we all get a little bit better at having those Difficult Conversations will begin to find more common ground. He added that the Supreme Court decision on roe versus wade along with debates on guns the 2020 election, january 6th Climate Change and immigration were on his mind as well in coming up with the idea of the giveaway. And speaking of simon and schuster. The company is nearing a key trial date in its proposed merger with publishing giant Penguin Random house. It was in 2020 that the paramount global company, which is the parent of Simon Schuster agreed to sell it to Penguin Random house two billion dollars was the sale price and now that sale was challenged by the Justice Department who sought the block the deal over antitrust concerns. Now the trial starts august 1st in the Us District Court for the district of columbia. And now were going to turn our attention to a very specialized kind of press and this is the University Presses. John sharer is the director of unc press mr. Chair. What does a University Press do or an academic . Press do well, theres probably a hundred and fifty hundred and sixty different members of the association of University Presses and they all do slightly different things, but in general the things that we have in common is we are we are based usually at a university or an institution of higher learning. Were doing a type of publication that the commercial marketplace just doesnt support usually an academically focused issue or topic we call these monographs these specialized humanities volumes, and then we do peer review which is a rigorous external review of every manuscript and every journal that we publish and having worked in both trade and University Press publishing. I will say theres not a return on investment in peer review, which is one of the reasons that the commercial marketplace doesnt support it, but it enhances books it helps keeps us out of trouble. It helps stop publishing people who just want to pump their fist and make points and actually focus on the research and the argument at hand. Well you spent several years with basic books, which is part of the shet group. Very large publisher. Why did you transition to presses, you know, its it basic is where a lot of University Press authors went when they wanted to move the decimal point sometimes on the financial arrangement that they had with a publisher. And so it was not a a big jump to go from from basic to to unc. Im a unc grad so i had actually worked briefly at the press after i graduated in the late 80s. So i was familiar with it and it was just a unique opportunity to kind of go back to my own roots, but all so to focus on trade publishing i was described as a kind of a conveyor belt. Theres just always a new big important book they have to focus on and some of the things that were looking at unc press are thinking about doing publishing in different ways and trying to change the way publishing happens and think about publishing in the 21st century as opposed to kind of legacy process of publishing. So its an exciting place to be actually mr. Scheer. Whats the connection of unc press to the university of North Carolina . Yeah. Its a good question. So we reside on the unc chapel hill campus, which is kind of the Flagship Institution of the unc but actually an affiliate of the unc the statewide system, which has 17 campuses going all the way from western carolina, which is almost in tennessee to Elizabeth City state, which is almost in norfolk virginia. And so we actually have an affiliation throughout the unc system, which we are really proud of and is part of the areas of innovation because we want to have an understanding for what the various campuses throughout unc one and they want everything from open textbooks to humanitys readers to new journals. And so its really expanding their horizons of what were doing as a publisher, but youre an arm of the university. Yeah. Well, we are separate 501c3 nonprofit, but we report structurally into it. Were odd. We are unusual. We were founded a hundred years ago by faculty members of unc chapel hill, but always as a separate institution and i think the idea there was to make sure there wasnt too much pressure from the campus to publish what they wanted us to publish. So theres always been friction is probably too strong a word but deliberate intent to make sure that we werent disorder this reflexive publication arm of the campus. Can readers find unc published books in their local bookstores or on amazon . Yeah. Well they can find everything on amazon, which is one of the great things about amazon. I would say we published about 110 books a year and about 20 of those we expect to be in bookstores. Theyre meant for a general audience. Especially we post a lot of books about the state of North Carolina and about the south rate large and so we want all those books to all be there. We actually have some stores in North Carolina that are great. They actually have unc press sections, which is funny because nobody walks into a bookstore, you know, looking for something new by simon and schuster right . They what they want books by individual authors, but i think a lot of our stores have that sense of community that we do as well that they want to support the publisher. So, how are you different than say Harvard Press or yale, press yeah. In some ways. Were very similar. In fact the functions that we do are just like we did at basics so we acquire books we edit them. We design them we manufacture them. We market them and then but i think its its kind of the type of book that were looking. That so even though were using the same sets of tools and processes. The books themselves are are a little bit more. Im comfortable saying esoteric because again, thats what the marketplace doesnt support. Well, i would also say a lot of the iv presses many of them look more like trade presses and a little bit less maybe like unc unc were deliberately, you know, 3 4 of our list is is academic monographs. These are books that are going to sell anywhere between 400 and 800 copies. So that is a deliberate choice that we are making because we think that is the part of the humanities kind of scholarly fields that needs the most support and so we have the resources and thats where we apply them and the the definition of monograph you can kind of take the word apart it is a book about a single topic and so it is more narrow in focused deliberately. So in fact during the period youve process sometimes some of our authors who are writing monographs are make these kind of extrapolations and sometimes the peer review processes. No, you actually need to focus on argument and it sounds delimiting, but its actually part of the the academic process that that scholars go through as part of their tenure process in particular if youre a if you want to be tenured in a humanities field you frequently have to publish in one or two monographs with the University Press as part of your tenure package, but that said i dont want them to sound more narrow than they need to we had a revised dissertation published as a monograph. That was a finalist for the National Book of ward and on the long list for the pulitzer prize, so theyre not inherently narrow, but they just they tend to be mr. Chair. Do you exclusively publish unc professors their dissertations . Yeah. Thats thats a question. I get asked a lot and and actually not at all is the funny answer and it takes a little explaining and i guess the way i equate it is theres an art museum on campus as well, but the art isnt of students and unc faculty. Its its world class art. Theres a performing arts program and the performing arts program doesnt have performances by unc students and unc faculty. It has a worldclass art program. And so i think the idea with a University Press on campus. Not so much to i mean we work a lot with local faculty and do workshops and things like that. But one of the things that a flagship campus is once is a worldclass publisher in their midst, thats what were doing. Lets go through the numbers again. How many books do you publish a year . Its about 110. Were in a growth mode. So were probably gonna be about 140150 within a couple years and then we published about about 18 journals as well. How many employees at unc press . So we kind of run two businesses at the press. We have the press itself, which is about 45 employees. And then we have a Publishing Services division that we created about 15 years ago called longleaf services. Its doing sort of the back end of publishing the fulfillment sales accounts receivable and all that. So weve got another 2530 people working there revenues. So revenues at unc, press weve actually its better to say this now because weve had a couple of outstanding years. So when i got to the press in 2012, we were constantly between 4. 5 and 5 Million Dollars last year. We were at almost 7 Million Dollars that was kind of the big pandemic year and then the year that we just completed. We were a little bit closer to six Million Dollars. So were doing quite well, but still a pretty modest basic was a 30 Million Dollar publisher when i was there so that and so that money are you making are you making a profit . No. No, are you breaking even no so i can give you the heres the math on an average scholarly monograph so it costs us between 25 and 35,000 to get that book. Peerreviewed acquired copy edited manufactured distributed put into the marketplace. Were going to generate between 15 and 25,000 dollars in revenue. So when i signed a contract for a new scholarly monograph, im digging a ten thousand dollar debt knowingly, like we exist to do that now we get support from we get some support from the state. We have an endowment. We published some regional trade books that generate a little bit more income that helps support the scholarly list, but the way i like to think about it is the scholarly list is at the tip of the pyramid in terms of mission. That is why we exist and these other things that were doing are in support of that. So you are a nonprofit youve done fundraising as well. Correct . Yeah, we we do a lot of fundraising. Do you do that . One person at a time. Its im lucky because i have inherited a program there were people with a vision in the 70s that started a Fundraising Program at unc press. So its an endowment essentially is the the key tool that we use. Most presses dont have this. Its a really hard thing to do. Independence from the University Also gives us a little bit of leverage sometimes if youre totally embedded in the university the fundraising priorities may not be for the University Press there may be other things that want to do it. So weve been kind of in this narrow slot thats given us a chance to do it, you know really well and we just talked to people who care about publishing they care about North Carolina they care about the south because our our origin story is founded in 1922 there is in 1922. There is no publishing in the south except religious publishing people are printing bibles and hymnals and missiles, but theres no secular publishing in the south. So when the press was founded it was an affirmative act to say the south was a region that is worthiest study. So we continue to embrace that notion and theres people who love the south and care about that and thats the thats the kind of the coach dream that we pull on. So, where do you have your books printed theyre printed usually one of three places. Most of our books are printed at a printer in michigan. We have a we do some illustrated books and theyre done that kind of various places depending on who has the right paper and and pricing and then we have a print on demand facility in with our warehouse in la verne, tennessee where we do a lot of printing john chair. You mentioned that your revenues went up during the pandemic. What happened . Yeah. Its a good question. I mean, i personally bought more books and Jigsaw Puzzles during the pandemic than i had throughout my whole life. So i think i think two things happened one is people reading the book was a fairly safe thing to do during a pandem. And then the press also has a long history of publishing books about race and social justice. And so when the country was kind of on fire a little bit in the summer of 2020 a lot of the books that we had published that used to sell just a couple hundred copies a year started selling a couple of thousand copies a year. So we were its funny because a lot of those books that we had published we had done at a loss and then suddenly you had this, you know, almost a windfall and it was it was a strange thing because we knew this was there was a very troubling external environment. Theres a lot of precarity and yet we were having this kind of like economic success and it was almost difficult to navigate how to do that and how to make sure that people were being rewarded and compensated, but also, i think there was a sense that we were doing our Mission Better than we ever had before during the pandemic. What about dropping the paywall . Yeah, so that was an interesting thing. So what happened was we used these intermediaries to get our ebooks into academic libraries and when you know when everything kind of broke down in march of 2020, i remember i had to drive up to unc asheville to retrieve my daughter. It felt like a scene of a dystopian novel these aggregators. They came to us and they said people are disconnected from their books. They either left their physical books on shelves or the ip address that they used to access the digital collection all went, you know all broke down and they basically said to us, hey people have already bought these books and you need to give them access to it. Well this, you know i said we had a good year but in march and april our sales hit a brick wall like we thought we were just gonna get locked up for a long time and so on the one hand we were confronted with this shortterm economic challenge now the other hand weve got these people coming to us saying hey, you should open up all your books. And i came to the conclusion that you know in a time of crisis is when you really have to kind of show your stripes who you are as a Mission Oriented organization. So we said lets do it. Well open up the paywalls. Let make everything accessible all of our scholarly books accessible and then a really fascinating thing happened, which is first of all the usage went through the roof, so they had to you know, the people who aggregate these additions had to redraw their charts to make a bigger y access so that they could show the you know, the exponential increase in youth in use which is great because there is this kind of declension narrative about monographs being less and less relevant and turns out that it might be that business model. That is the problem and not the monographs themselves. So we saw the usage and then at the same time print sales went up and theres an argument that were trying to test which is if you actually let people read Digital Editions particularly if scholarly books that theyre likely to engage digitally, but they may pivot to print and so we look a little bit different than a lot of other Media Industries where digital is kind of both the discovery device and the us what were seeing, is that for or specialized texts people discover digitally, but they frequently want print and doesnt seem to be a generational thing. Theres a lot of evidence that thats that school kids want print textbooks as long as theyre affordable. So it was it was an experiment that we never could have constructed ourselves in normal times, but we i think we learned a valuable lesson that that we can afford to disseminate our scholarship more broadly than ever by making by reducing the friction and the paywalls and the Digital Editions. Well having a stable business on top of it and and now we can show usage in a way we can show global usage in a way that was inconceivable in a printbased marketplace where we really struggle to ship books and to you know areas of the world where weve historically not not disseminated scholarship particularly. Well now as the country is opening up, is that paywall still down . So we we put the paintballs back because we were quite ready to go there but we are we are we are using that what we learn from that and were actually were participating in a study that the nehs funded to systematically. Look at what happens to print sales of monographs where the Digital Edition is free because we want to understand what happens to sales go down. Are they the same or do they potentially go up because people have discovered them and found them in a way that they wouldnt in the first place once we have a better understanding of that then we will we will look at trying to do a little bit more systematically. The way i like to think about it is we need to kind of get off this Cost Recovery model of publishin