I have been asked this question quite often, both in my current role at Tithebarn Press, and back when I was a commissioning editor at Routledge. At first glance it might seem like an obvious opening to pitch whomever my current employer happens to be, but I’ve always preferred to take the long view. People can usually tell when you’re giving them the party line, and even if they can’t in the moment, it may become apparent to them later that you weren’t straight with them. Conversely, if you’re prepared to tell people why they might want to consider your competition then they’re more likely to trust your advice. Besides, we set ourselves up for trouble down the line if we’re not upfront about what our own strengths and weaknesses are.
All of which is to say that I do my best to be open and honest in answering these kinds of questions. At the same time I am always going to have some bias towards my own organisation, and more importantly I do not have perfect information about my competitors. As so often, caveat emptor.
Terms of Reference
Just to be very clear what we’re going to be talking about here, because it’s easy for me to take context for granted. First, I’m only going to be talking about academic publishing. I do not have good advice for choosing a publisher for your science fiction short stories or your recipe book, and while some of what I’m going to say here might apply anyway, it is not written with non-academic writing in mind. Second, I’m only talking here about book publishers. Hopefully that’s apparent, because if you’re thinking about publishing a journal article you should really be thinking more about the journal itself than its publisher, but just in case.
Establishing your Priorities
These questions are very much not listed in order of importance. In fact, each one of them could have been followed up with “and how much does this matter to you”. What these questions hopefully give you is a way of thinking about what is most important to you when looking for a publisher. In many ways they refer back to the question of what it is publishers actually do (for more on that, see our series on the publishing process, starting here).
1) How prestigious is the publisher ?
The first consideration here is that if you need to publish a book for tenure or career advancement, you want to make sure that the relevant University authorities will “count” a book with your publisher. Some departments have lists or even rankings, others are pretty indifferent. In my experience, many University departments have a preference for University Presses (especially in the US, and countries whose higher education institutions are heavily modelled on the US). Others may be happy enough with an established commercial press, but wary of smaller, less well-recognised presses.
Beyond the simple question of the need for formal recognition, there are other degrees of this you may want to consider. For instance, does a particular press have a well-established series that your book would be a good fit for? Or even more simply, are they well-known for publishing in your field? This may be important not only for the purposes of recognition and reputation, but also because it will affect how easily people will find your book. It’s a common enough scenario that Publisher A is generally recognised as very prestigious, but the less prestigious Publisher B is actually the place to go for books about, say, menswear in the late 1880s. Indeed authors sometimes have to choose between the publisher their University thinks they should publish with, and the publisher that is best known for their particular subject or field.
There are also downsides to trying to publish with a highly prestigious publisher. They likely receive far more submissions than they will publish, and will thus be more likely to reject your proposal. For much the same reason, they may also expect your work to be more polished before they see it, and will be less prepared to see its potential and help you to bring it out. Essentially it’s a question of supply and demand.
Where do we stand on this? I’ll touch on this for each of these questions, but this one probably answers itself. We’re the new kid on the block and while I am confident we will establish ourselves as a publisher of quality books, we are still in the process of building that reputation.
2) What degree of editorial involvement will the publisher have?
There are two main aspects to this — what procedural hoops you will have to pass through, and to what extent the press will support you in doing so. This will tend to be a balance of speed and rigour, and it’s worth being clear at the outset what balance your putative publisher seeks between these two virtues.
As far as procedures go, most university presses will have a lengthy process with reviews at both proposal and manuscript stage. Especially so if their proposal process involves putting projects before an academic quorum of some sort. These are usually less frequent in their congregation than commercial editorial meetings, and attendees are often at liberty to apply their own personal criteria as they see fit. Consequently the process can be idiosyncratic at times.
Most commercial presses (Routledge, Palgrave, Emerald etc) will present fewer obstacles, placing more emphasis on a proposal review process, which can often be quite rapid once a base level of support for the proposal is established. Their publishing committees will meet frequently and for uncontentious projects this will often be a rubber stamp process, provided reviewers have been broadly in favour of a project. Such presses will not normally submit manuscripts for lengthy reviews, although in some series the editor or one of the advisory board may be expected to read manuscripts and give brief feedback over the course of a month or two.
On the support side of things, individual presses will vary, but the distinction is usually more closely correlated with size than with whether a press is strictly commercial or subsidised by a University. A large UP might well provide lots of reviewing, but then will leave it to you implement proposed changes. A large commercial press will likely provide little developmental or line editing support at all unless you’re writing a textbook. A small press is likely to invest more support time in each book they publish, because they can and because they are more likely to see the benefits of doing so.
How do we rate on this? Our procedures are fairly flexible (as I talked about here) and we provide a lot of support for authors throughout the writing process (see more on this here and indeed in most of our updates). We don’t have the smooth efficiency of a big machine, but I think our nimbleness and personalisation more than compensates for this.
3) What publishing model does the press pursue?
Where our previous questions have looked at brand and process, now it’s time to think about economics. It’s well worth making sure you understand, in effect, what “publishing” means to a publisher you are considering working with, on a material level. You don’t want to be disappointed later on by finding out too late that they will be pricing your book for a purely library market, or using a standard cover, when you were expecting something rather different.
To be clear, there is nothing wrong with pricing books to your expects market. In previous roles I have published many books aimed to be sold mainly to libraries, and as long as an author understands that’s what is going to happen then everybody is happy. The point is that there are a range of dimensions to publishing models and it’s worth a little research to understand how a publisher you are considering will think about each of these:
Pricing
By far the most important of these dimensions for most authors and publishers, is price. Publishers will have a sense of who they are expecting to sell books to, how much those prospective customers will be willing to pay, and what forms of discount are likely to be applied to their “recommended retail” prices in the process of making a sale.
It’s a long-established tradition in publishing to use binding to differentiate price-points for different customers. In academic publishing we tend to look expect hardback copies to be aimed at “institutional” purchasers. Most commonly University libraries, where a single copy of the book might be read by many different readers, and consequently also to require a greater degree of physical resilience. Hardbacks don’t really cost all that much more to manufacture than paperbacks, though they are somewhat tougher. Hence we often use a publishing model of having highly-priced hardbacks and rather more affordably-priced paperbacks, the latter aimed more at individual purchasers.
Many academic publishers will understand their principle customers to be libraries and other institutions, and anticipate that many of their books will only attract a very small number of individual purchasers. They take the view that the existence of a less expensive print copy may tend to take more sales away from the hardback than it adds new sales. Therefore they apply a period of a year or more between publishing the hardback and any paperback edition, and when the paperback is published it is to relatively little fanfare.
Cover
I’ve talked a little about covers previously and one thing to really be aware of is that while covers do matter to publishers, often they matter rather less than they do to authors. All publishers are concerned that their book covers should be eye-catching, and help to sell their books. They may also be concerned about the collective visual identity of their books, so that they look of a piece when presented in catalogues, on websites and on tables at conferences. That is to say, our concerns are primarily driven by sales potential and our wider efforts at branding.
For authors, of course, your cover is so much more than just a means to sell your book. It is the visual identity of a piece of work that represents at least months, probably years, of your life. It’s the one aspect of your book that will mean something to the people who matter in your life who aren’t going to read the book. These elements are not inherently in conflict with our priorities, but the mismatch in relative importance can certainly generate tensions.
Unless covers really aren’t of much interest to you (and I’ve certainly worked with authors for whom this is the case), you’ll want to know how your publisher will handle this before committing to them. As with pricing, this may depend on what sort of book your publisher thinks your book is and to whom they expect to sell it. Their research monographs aimed at libraries may only get a standard issue cover, or perhaps one of a range of standard covers — as Routledge, for example, have been doing for about a decade now. Or they may have templates, but allow you to choose a suitable image to use within that frame. Or they may design each cover bespoke for each book.
Ebooks
It would be an unusual publisher these days who did not expect to make some sort of digital version of your book available for sale. Most publishers will produce and ebook and sell it in a range of formats, so that it’s available from a variety of retailers in formats suitable for the most common e-readers. Where they may vary from each other is in their pricing strategies. Some publishers will price their ebooks primarily for an institutional market, others will treat them as equivalent to paperbacks. I’ve known publishers reduce the price of the ebook on the later release of the paperback, although these days it’s more common to just price it that way from the outset. It is comparatively easier for publishers to differentiate pricing for institutions and individuals for ebooks, so there is less concern about lost sales revenue.
A few publishers will engage in some kind of bundle pricing for book and ebook, although this is — perhaps surprisingly — quite uncommon. It’s a logical thing to do on paper (no pun intended), but often actually delivering the two together can be logistically complex.
Where do we stand on these? Our default is to publish in hardback, paperback, and ebook from day one. We price our paperbacks to be affordable discretionary purchases, whereas our hardbacks are intended to be for use in libraries and other institutional environments. Our ebook pricing is pegged to our paperback pricing. We are investigating options to bundle print and ebook, if there is demand for this. All our books will have bespoke covers.
4) What marketing resources will they invest in your book?
Honestly the answer here will often be disappointing no matter who you talk to. Unless your book is a very high priority (a major textbook, for instance) large publishers will do little in the way of bespoke promotion, but you’ll have the benefit of their passive advantages like search engine optimisation and strong existing infrastructure. Smaller publishers are likely to work harder on individual books, but will not have overall scale and visibility. That means your options are likely to be on a sliding scale between big and visible, but relatively indifferent to your particular book, versus small and easily overlooked, but also agile and heavily invested in your book.
I talked a bit last week about the procedural aspects of promoting and selling books and it’s always challenging. Whichever type of publisher you opt for you will need to be engaged with selling your book yourself as well. The question you’re really asking is what kind of support you’re most looking for in doing so.
Where are we on this scale? As you’d probably expect, we’re very much in the small but heavily invested in your book camp. That is, we don’t have the big machine visibility of a major university or commercial press, but because we publish many fewer books, each of them is more significant to us. We don’t have massive financial resources to invest in promotion, but we’re willing to put time and energy into good ideas in a way that larger presses would not have the latitude to do.
So, who to choose?
To go back to where we began, this is very much a question of priorities, of deciding what matters the most to you. What I hope we’ve been able to do here is help you to see the contours of those issues, to make it easier for you to consider how you want to prioritise them. All choices involve trade-offs to some degree, so you want to understand what it is you are trading.
And of course, if after reading this you think we might be the publisher for you, please do drop us a line at proposals@tbarnpress.com.
