Publish Popular Or Perish

The halcyon days of academic publishing, if they ever existed, are now days of serious-minded business.

More than ever, the presses are printing works of general interest and encouraging writers to trim the manuscripts they send to press.

Though most large university presses are unsubsidized and not-for-profit, the presses are churning out unprecedented numbers of trade books--books that have high general interest sales.

In the display room at the Harvard University Press (HUP) in the Holyoke Center Arcade, books range from The Kindness of Children, a new book by a former kindergarten teacher, to Postal Communication in China and its Modernization, 1860-1896, an older monograph tucked in the rear corner of the room.

Paul M. Adams, marketing director at HUP, estimates that the press prints twice the number of trade books today than it did when he started working at HUP in 1984.

Although the bottom line has ruled academic publishing for several decades, the drive to publish smaller, more popular books has accelerated recently due to a more competitive publishing market.

Selling Scholarship

Since 1972, HUP has been appealing to "a wider general readership beyond the academy, and establishing a trend that many other university presses were to follow some years later," the press writes on its Web site.

And academics have long been writing books for larger audiences. Former professor of psychology B.F. Skinner popularized the psychological theory of behaviorism in his Walden II, and most of astrophysicist Carl Sagan's later work was geared for popular appeal.

Adams estimates that about one third of total sales comes from trade books, while textbooks, reference books and scholarly monographs make up the majority of the remainder.

Although the shift towards more lucrative books has shored up the press' once-shaky financial foundations, Adams emphasizes that HUP is still focused on scholarly publishing.

"University is our middle name," Adams says. "The publishing philosophy is to do a certain number of worthy academic books that are saleable to the trade, but our mission is to publish good works of scholarship."

Beyond university presses' focus on trade books, a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the weekly publication of the nation's colleges and universities claims that the size of scholarly work is shrinking.

Starr Professor of Classical, Modern Jewish and Hebrew Literature and of Comparative Literature James L. Kugel has felt the pinch.

Kugel's recent work, The Bible As It Was, is in fact an abridged version of the manuscript he originally submitted to HUP.

After haggling over the length, Kugel and his editors at HUP compromised to publish two versions on the monograph rather than one. Traditions of the Bible, the complete 1,080-page titan, is billed by HUP as a full-scale reference book" and a "sourcebook for Biblical interpretation."

Kugel says he knows other academics from Boston University and the University of Pennsylvania who have also had trouble with HUP editors eager to take the axe to their manuscripts.

Despite the trend towards slim volumes, there are several hefty tomes in HUP's spring line. This season's list includes a 916-page edition of an Indian text, a 880-page Harvard guide to psychiatry, and a 750-page life of Andre Gide.

Furthermore, because non-profit university presses routinely assume deals that might incur losses, they often do the work that commercial publishers "won't even touch," Adams says.

'Glorified Journal Articles'

Although university presses tend to be more lenient with their ventures than commercial presses, conflicts remain between editor and author--in part, as Kugel posits, because of shifts in manner of publishing scholarly work.

"Nowadays, for reasons having to do with general sociology as well as the sociology of learning, the book has come to supplant the journal article as the unit of publication," he says. "This makes for lots and lots of books, many of them really only glorified journal articles or collections thereof."

Gita Manaktala, promotion and publicity manager for MIT Press, says that trade books aren't the only financial lifesaver for university presses.

"There are also other kinds of books that also sell very well for us. Textbooks and reference books also can be quite profitable. They help to subsidize the publication of scholarly monographs," she says.

Even though the MIT Press is not subsidized by the Institute itself, the press publishes a low rate of trade books relative to other large university presses.

Compared to HUP's rate of one third trade books amount to about a quarter of total sales at the MIT Press, according to Manaktala.

Freed says she believes HUP is particularly focused on trade books.

"Harvard University Press publishes far more trade books than most university presses. They're mostly a trade publisher now," she says.

At Yale University Press, also not-for-profit, a body of professors sits on an editorial board that oversees the press to keep academic concerns at the forefront. Nevertheless, economic realities have also forced Yale to be money-conscious.

"I think we've always published trade books, but changes in the marketplace of publishing means that were publishing more [of them] than we ever have," says Pratt.

Pratt says market forces have made Yale University Press lean toward trade books, but not at the cost of academic monographs.

"If we think that someone has a capacity to write to a larger audience, we will encourage them," she says. "We never tell them to water it down."

Writing Beyond the Ivory Tower

For the academic, writing trade books winners requires an ability to relate to a non-specialized audience.

Professor of Anthropology Richard Wrangham, co-author of the popular book Demonic Males, says trade books demand the same rigor as scholarly monographs, but with a touch of color.

"I don't think that one has any lesser demands in terms of the quality of the argument," Wrangham says. "The two areas I see being added are dramatic and aesthetic content."

According to Freed, some junior professors have had difficulty shaping their language to a general audience.

"I think they're a little bit naive about the difficulty that general readers are willing to endure," she says.

Some academics who do succeed in popular writing have worried that this will cause them to lose the intellectual respect of their peers, Freed says, pointing to Carl Sagan as an example.

But Wrangham says there is no stigma attached to writing trade books--the downside is just a matter of opportunity cost.

"The more popular writing you do, then the less academic writing you do," he says. "There's a delicate balance."

Scholars and managers of university presses say they are still seeking that happy equilibrium.