Changing
Course?
With Academic
Sales Dwindling, University Presses Target the Trade
Market
FROM PUBLISHING
TRENDS (DECEMBER 2003)
With
“tectonic changes” rocking the university press empyrean
— a withering library market which once scooped up 750
copies of just about every title; steadily shrinking
subventions; plunging public funding; and redlining
revenues that, one director says, “keep going through
lower floors than anyone knew were down there” — it’s
no secret that many university presses have lobbed their
life preserver into the trade book market. Take the
U. of Michigan Press. “When I became Director
two years ago,” explains Phil Pochoda, “Michigan
was doing between 170 and 200 titles per year. Virtually
none of them were trade books. We are shifting that
fairly dramatically. My aim is eventually to have on
the order of 40% trade books.” University presses are
grabbing a “much broader base of trade publishing” than
is frequently professed, Pochoda says. As he summed
up six years ago in a report for The Nation:
“Battered by loss of library sales, disappearance of
NEA and NEH grants, decline of university subsidies,
replacement of course books by course packs and many
other financial woes, university presses are testing,
with more or less trepidation, their own skills on the
treacherous trade terrain.”
Things, since then, haven’t changed much — save the
flood of returns some presses faced after casting their
lot with the good ship Barnes & Noble. Statistically,
things could certainly be better. The 121 Association
of American University Presses members account for
about 2% of total US book sales, or an estimated $444
million in 2002, nearly flat with the prior year. While
revenues stagnate, total university press title output
actually increased 10% last year, with the strongest
gains in the subject areas of business (up 54%) and
sports & recreation (up 38%), according to preliminary
figures from Bowker. Yet amid the deepening red
ink, many in the university press world say, there is
a newly gaping window of opportunity for university
presses to publish titles abandoned perforce by trade
houses and — just maybe — sought out by a public fed
up with what high-minded university press directors
are calling “the huge lacuna that exists in discussions
of important social issues.”
Neither
Fish Nor Fowl
Ask
John Donatich, and the truth lies somewhere in
the muddy middle. Upon his arrival as Director of Yale
U. Press last January, news reports said he was
“moving from an academic-y trade house to a tradey academic
house,” recalls Donatich, who hailed from Basic Books.
“Those ambivalences are pretty interesting, and they’re
pretty fertile as well.” It’s a generous way to describe
the nature of university presses — more typical phrases
are “Janus-headed” and “neither fish nor fowl.” Whatever
you call it, it seems to work. Donatich points to recent
national bestsellers such as Edmund Morgan’s
Benjamin Franklin and Gore Vidal’s Inventing
a Nation. “We had 22 books reviewed in the NYTBR
in the last year,” he says. “We have credibility
in the trade.” Yet Donatich stresses that along with
its mainstream accolades, the press has also garnered
dozens of scholarly awards and keeps a firm grip on
the tiller. “It’s not a mission creep from scholarly
to trade publishing,” he maintains. “It’s more an understanding
of the kinds of businesses we’re in.” Those include
a large art publishing and distribution program, plus
reference, monographs, language, and textbooks. Yale,
which shares a sales and fulfillment operation with
MIT and Harvard — save for in-house national
account reps — also boasts a significant London office
gearing up “not just to distribute globally but to publish
globally.” And the bottom line? “We are actually, amazingly,
far, far ahead of budget right now,” Donatich says,
chalking it up to the trade successes, strong backlist
sales, plus solid institutional support for several
“very expensive research volumes.”
For other large university presses, the whole trade
world is decidedly old hat. “We’ve always published
trade books,” says Peter Ginna, Editorial Director
of the trade division at Oxford University Press,
who adds that while he has bolstered the trade program
during his seven years at the press by “trying to be
better trade publishers,” the number of trade titles
has if anything declined, as the press hones in on “bona
fide trade books” as opposed to academic titles that
are being pushed into a crossover market. Still, crossover
titles do play a role at the press, and are published
as such in an “academic/trade” category. There’s Body
& Soul by French sociologist Loïc Wacquant
about life at a boxing gym on Chicago’s South Side,
which the catalog copy says “marries the analytic rigor
of the sociologist with the stylistic grace of the novelist.”
The title received splashy NYT coverage as a
“sociological-pugilistic Bildungsroman.” Ginna, who
spent six years at Crown prior to joining Oxford,
notes that all titles are reviewed by at least two scholars,
though reviewers apply a different set of standards
to trade titles, putting a greater weight on accessibility
rather than archival research. Even though reviewing
“is a competitive disadvantage for us in acquisitions,”
the process offers an indispensable form of market research
and is frequently the source of “really excellent editorial
suggestions by people who are careful readers.” For
example, he notes that one of his first acquisitions
was a history of Vietnam with an unusual approach to
scholarship. He sent it to Vietnamese history scholars,
who raved about it, telling him they’d order it for
use as textbooks in their own courses. “If you’ve got
a course market,” he explains, “you’re not just living
and dying by a New York Times book review.” Meanwhile,
Oxford is exploring ways to boost its income via a pilot
project with subsidiary rights veteran Amanda Mecke,
now working in association with ClearAgenda,
a firm that specializes in communications and branding
for nonprofits.
Size, of course, does matter in the world of publishing.
“Trade publishing is part of the mission of a university
press, just as is reference publishing and publishing
great works of scholarship,” says James Jordan,
recently named Director of Columbia U. Press,
filling the vacancy left by trade publishing veteran
William Strachan. “For me, it’s a question of
critical size. How big do you have to be to publish
effectively to the trade?” Jordan, who will leave his
post as Director of the Johns Hopkins U. Press,
echoes other executives who point out that the key question
is not necessarily whether or not to tackle the trade,
but whether the machinery to publish trade books is
compatible with the overall structure of a press. “One
of the challenges of university presses,” observes Strachan,
who is now Executive Editor at Hyperion, “is
that they’re asked to reach a greater variety of audiences.
You’re worried about being in bookstores, in academic
bookstores, getting course adoptions, and library marketing.
It’s a wider range of distribution outlets. And how
many resources do you have to reach these different
venues?”
Think
Global, Publish Local
For
smaller presses, alas, the machinery could stand a little
oil of the green variety. “We are a little behind budget
so far this year, but not a whole lot behind budget,”
says Janet Rabinowitch, Director of Indiana
U. Press. “The next months will be very important.”
Rabinowitch was appointed to the post following the
July resignation of Peter-John Leone, who quarreled
with the university over its support of the press. “Unlike
most university presses, IUP has not ever received a
subvention from the university,” says Rabinowitch, who
adds that the press will be searching for a new permanent
director in the near future. “We’ve always made it on
our own.” Moreover, the press pays “a significant” administrative
services fee to the university each year, which is assessed
as a percentage of its budget. Indiana does have a full-time
development officer, whose salary is partly funded by
the mother ship. “But a university press does not have
a natural constituency of donors, as do other departments
that can tap their alums,” Rabinowitch points out.
So like others in its predicament, the press has
turned to regional publishing as a way to broaden its
appeal while remaining true to its mission. Plans are
in the works for a regional trade imprint called Quarry
Books, the idea being that mainstream shops in the area
may turn up their nose at titles that bear the Indiana
colophon, but would embrace regional titles marketed
under the new logo.
It’s the same story seemingly everywhere. “In the past
several years we have made a concerted effort to ensure
that our lists always have a few regional titles,” says
Seetha Srinivasan, Director of the U. Press
of Mississippi and President of the AAUP board.
Such offerings include the 1990 title Juke Joint,
with photographs of Mississippi delta establishments,
and more recently the illustrated history The French
Quarter of New Orleans. Regional trade books, notes
Srinivasan, consistently turn in a higher sell-through
than the press’s national trade titles, and they’re
titles that presses without deep pockets can promote
and advertise within a defined area. “We are more and
more interested in material that would go into these
targeted markets that are not necessarily scholarly,”
adds Donna Shear, Director of Northwestern
U. Press, pointing to a Chicago regional series
and a new imprint called Latino Voices aimed at the
English-speaking Latino market. Regional titles can
also have global appeal, says Richard Abel, Director
of the University Press of New England. New
England Wildlife, for example, taps into specialists
in the biological sciences and wildlife management as
well as general readers all over the nation.
Some smaller publishers, meanwhile, are going for the
trade with gusto. “I do very few scholarly monographs
anymore,” says Raphael Kadushin, Humanities Acquisitions
Editor for the U. of Wisconsin Press, who reports
that as 75% of his own 60-title list is trade-targeted
— and half are agented — he makes monthly visits to
New York, and expects to set up shop in the city for
a few months this coming spring to help launch the new
anthology Wonderlands: Good Gay Travel Writing.
While two other editors at the press handle more scholarly
titles (about 40 per year), even their lists are subtly
changing course. “More and more, we are looking for
accessible scholarly books — titles that might even
jump the tracks into a trade market.” That trend was
kicked off about six years ago with Living Out,
a series of gay and lesbian autobiographies that was
clearly positioned as “original, marketable, commercial
autobiographies” for the trade. “I feel bad that we’re
sort of the last resort,” says Kadushin. “Five years
ago, agents would never consider coming to a university
press. They’d almost rather see the book not published.”
And then there’s, well, the real machinery. Wisconsin’s
fulfillment is handled by the Chicago Distribution
Center at the U. of Chicago Press, which is now
up to 29 clients including Stanford and Michigan,
and is steadily growing as university presses find that
when it comes to dealing with B&N, there’s a modicum
of strength in numbers. “The more mass of content we
have, the better,” says Don Collins, President
of Chicago Distribution Services. He currently handles
about 24,000 active ISBNs and 1,750 new titles per year,
and the center offers trade sales representation to
about five clients as well as the U. of Chicago Press.
Europe is served via a fulfillment arrangement with
John Wiley’s UK warehouse — although Chicago
maintains its own European sales force, shared with
a number of other presses including Harvard and Yale.
Though net sales on the book business have been flat
for about three years, says Collins, new distribution
clients have prompted a recent warehouse expansion,
on top of other initiatives including the two-year-old
BiblioVault, a digital file repository. Similar
fulfillment collaboratives include Hopkins Fulfillment
Services — a sales and distribution backoffice operation
for Hopkins and 10 other presses — and the arrangement
between the California and Princeton presses.
Andrew Tunick, Order Services Manager for California
Princeton Fulfillment Service, explains that both presses
are served from a New Jersey warehouse, but as with
most such arrangements, orders combine for shipping,
but not for discounts.
As for Princeton’s editorial operations? “If anything,
we have reduced the number of straight trade books we
are doing as a percentage,” says Walter Lippincott,
Director of Princeton U. Press, noting that at
most 15% of the list is exclusively trade-focused, with
more energies devoted to professional titles in specific
niches such as economics and finance. “I never thought
that trade publishing was a way to get yourself out
of any financial difficulties,” Lippincott adds. “It
hasn’t been all that successful for the trade publishers.”
©2003
Publishing Trends
