With Academic Sales Dwindling, University Presses Target the Trade Market
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.”
