Academic Self-Publishing--3
If you are looking to self-publish without being in business as a publisher, here is a working list of subsidy presses: ArborBooks, AuthorHouse, BookLocker, DogEar, Falcon Books, Infinity, iuniverse, Lulu, Outskirts, Publish America, Trafford, Vantage, Vision Books International (VBI), Writers Collective, XLibris, and Xulon. You would need to investigate further to see which publisher would be right for what you want to publish and which would have the right terms and conditions for you.There are in addition small commercial subsidy presses that focus specifically on academic authors looking to self-publish scholarly works or custom textbooks for classroom use. See, for example, senatehall.com, cjp.com, and brownwalker.com. Open access publishing is another whole subject, and I'd like to talk about that next, quoting from the second edition of my book, Writing and Developing Your College Textbook (Atlantic Path Publishing, 2008).
Labels: self-publishing, subsidy publishing, subvention, vanity press
posted by Mary Ellen Lepionka @ 10:56 AM
2 Comments:
Good sound advice. I have written a book on a niche in architectural history. I found your article while searching subvention.
A Midwestern university press liked my book but has told me that it was impossible to publish without subvention. Is that the case with most university presses these days?
Thanks,
Greg
Hi, Greg,
Thanks for responding. Congratulations on your architectural history text!
Yes, most university presses use subvention, especially in niches such as yours that lack a large ready audience. In a niche market the cost of producing a book, especially one with many illustrations and high permissions costs, can easily exceed expected revenues, or break even at best, making them unprofitable to publish. For example, a former client of mine is having a heavily illustrated book on a New York landmark (a dissertation conversion) published with a high-end university press for their skyscraper series, using subvention. In all, the contribution was around $8,000 (which I think was a little high).
I suggest you show your contract or offer to an intellectual property rights attorney to ensure that the price is right, that you retain subsidiary rights as desired, and that the press has an active marketing plan for your book. You can reduce your costs by identifying the audience for your book, its size, and exactly where it most likely will find your book for sale, and by having your own marketing and promotion plan for selling your book. Your own marketing efforts would likely be more effective than theirs regardless.
Suggest also consider how you might make your book attractive to college instructors in courses that cover your niche. The textbook market may be large enough to permit publishing without subvention, and many university presses are turning to textbook publishing, especially for second-tier courses, because textbooks are more profitable (though that may be changing with digitization and online dellivery).
If your goal in publishing is recognition and respectability for your work by association with a university press, that's one thing. If your goal is the widest possible dissemination of your work to the educated public or to students, that's another. And if your goal is to recover your costs by selling enough copies, and possibly to profit after that, then that is another factor to consider in choosing the best publishing model for you and your book.
You probably should also investigate a commercial publisher--an academic or scholarly press that publishes in your field, a model that does not require subvention (instead, you might be offered an advance). BTW, I have an annotated list of academic publishers by subject area in my book, Writing and Developing Your College Textbook. I discuss publishing models in the first three chapters, including open access, which is potentially lower cost to both you and your readers, though you still would have the problem of clearing permissions.
I wish you the best of luck and hope you will post to my blog again on any relevant subject.
Sincerely,
Mary Ellen Lepionka
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