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
Academic Self-Publishing--2
Subsidy publishers vary in their approach to the lucrative self-publishing market. Some simply prey upon unwary authors; others straightforwardly explain how to use their services appropriately. Personal, family, church, academic, and organizational records, history, biography, and memoir are appropriate uses, for example, as the goal of distribution usually is non-commercial and the intended market is restricted or small. These self-published works do not even need an ISBN if they are not intended for distribution to the trade.
Some subsidy presses say they screen for quality and may or may not accept manuscripts. These houses may have sales catalogs and use books self-published under their imprint to build a branded reputation for their company, making screening a good idea. However, most vanity publishers, including companies billing themselves as “turn-key publishers,” will publish anything you send them, without comment. They may or may not offer extra paid services of copyediting, ghostwriting, or reviewing. Poor quality of content, among other things, is what has made self-published works unwelcome in the trade.
For academics self-publishing with vanity presses, however, the issue may be lack of professional peer review rather than of trade acceptance. Peer review is essential for vetting or sanctioning scholarly work as authoritative, accurate, etc. Print or online publications that lack any kind of review process tend to be ignored, justly or not, in the academic community. I'll discuss this limitation further in a subsequent post.
Some self-publishing houses say they offer marketing, promotion, and distribution services—which you pay for--and seem to be well connected. They make money at your expense, however, some offering you a royalty as little as 20% on your work in exchange for their efforts. Thus, a house can double-dip without making any capital investment at all. At no expense to itself, it can make money from you and then turn around and make money from your book.
Reputable subsidy publishers are direct and clear about what they can and cannot accomplish for you and your publication. Some claim you can self-publish for free. Disreputable companies claim they can profitably distribute your self-published book nationally or internationally and get you on Oprah.
Labels: self-publishing, subsidy publishing, subvention, vanity press
Academic Self-Publishing
Well, I've been neglecting to post lately. 'Tis a lonely enterprise, given the lack of responses or dialogue. Lately I've even heard blogging referred to (among the youtube and facebook set) as an enterprise for "losers". Perhaps blogging is losing its cachet in the Internet world (aside from celebrity bloggers), or perhaps blogging has been appropriated by commercial enterprises for marketiing purposes. Whatever the case, I would now like to think publicly about another subject that interests me--self-publishing.
I am a self-published author, as well as a publisher of others' works (see www.atlanticpathpublishing.com). In the course of learning how to be in business as a publisher I have acquired much intelligence about publishing models. Aspiring authors, especially academic authors, are vulnerable to grave errors in choosing among publishing models. I'm not talking about open access publishing in this case but about subsidy publishing.
Subsidy publishing, sometimes called subvention in academe, occurs when authors pay publishers to have their work published. A legitimate context for subvention is a manuscript with little or no demand or commercial value--say, on a subject so esoteric that not enough copies can be sold to recover the costs of printing--or a work intended for free distribution. In other contexts, however, many authors naively cross the line into vanity publishing.
Vanity presses include subsidy presses and so-called co-publishers who charge you to self-publish under their aegis. They provide all the services that a traditional publisher normally would supply--including registration of copyright, assignment of an ISBN, and production and manufacturing (e.g., book design and printing)--at your expense. This expense is greater than in traditional publishing—greater in per-unit cost (because only a small number of copies is ever printed) and greater in reduced potential income (because the companies typically also keep more than half of any revenue from sales).
These companies claim that you retain ownership of your book, but copyright law already guarantees that you own your work. By signing a contract with the company, you may be assigning copyright to them inadvertently. And if you use their ISBN, they become the publisher of record, with all the rights that publishers of record have, and their logo may appear on the cover or copyright page of your book. Purchasing a single ISBN from them or some other source does not make you the publisher of record, unless you have set up and registered a company of your own. In any case, people in the book industry recognize and do not trust “scalper” and “proxy” ISBNs.
Thus, you should not use a vanity/subsidy publisher if you want to sell more than 100 copies of your book, recover your costs and then some, or offer your book to the trade, i.e., to bookstores for resale to their customers or to libraries for acquisition to serve their patrons. Booksellers and acquisitions librarians simply will not buy vanity press books. And there's more--in the next post.
Labels: academic authors, authorship, self-publishing, subsidy publishing, subvention, vanity press
Wiki Textbooks 5
The more research on wikis I do online, the more convinced I am about fundamental fallacies in the use of wiki-textbooks for content area learning. There is the question of standards of accuracy and veracity--editors can be anonymous or use fake names; one assistant professor even has his students VOTE on whether or not to accept edited content in their wiki textbook--and there is the question of the professoriate's role--the same assistant professor actually celebrates exchanging his role and status as an expert with that of gatekeeper! He has students write everything from the course syllabus to the exam questions (Heather Havenstein, Computerworld, 8/15/07, Wiki becomes textbook in Boston College classroom; Stan Gibson, 11/20/06, Using a Wiki: A Textbook Case: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2061136,00.asp).
Even experts in IT, possibly the most relevant field for application, debunk wikis as just another form of groupware, prone to fall into disuse as burdens of information management displace knowledge creation (Steven J. Vaughan Nichols, 5/22/06, Wikis Are a Waste of Time: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1965848,00.asp). Not to mention the potential for vandalism, e.g., the pre-calculus wiki-text containing ads for Viagra, Cialis, Levitra, Propecia, Phenteramine, and auto insurance (http://pc40s.jot.com/WikiHome).
But I also see that this is not an all or nothing thing. There IS a place for wikis: providing contexts for skill development. By creating wiki-texts students can develop search skills (how and where to find out all you need to know), thinking skills (how to evaluate what you find and where you find it), judgment skills (how to choose what to include and exclude and what to believe as true), and organizational skills (how to structure and interrelate information from diverse sources). In this use, which is certainly very important, specific content areas are not needed; any topic will do--even, for example, umlauts in the names of heavy metal bands (http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/umlaut.html).
Thus, I think I would have a wiki-text project as a course supplement cum cooperative learning activity rather than as the primary vehicle for transmitting course content. If I were a modern history professor, for example, I might have students write one chapter on "between the wars" to show contributing causes of WWII. In this instance the wiki-text is restricted in scope and integrated around a particular (albeit complex) question and serves a particular instructional goal. I have to wonder, though, if I would have the time to manage the project.
On practicality, a high school history teacher (Clay Burell, 4/12/07 http://beyond-school.org/2007/04/12/update-on-the-broken-world-wiki-history-textbook-project/) had the following to say: "The wiki textbook project has not been difficult to manage at all, so far (but at the same time, it’s not a very student-centered project–the only choice students got was to choose which chapter of WWI to WWII history to turn into a textbook chapter). All students have drafted their re-write of the textbook chapter (paraphrasing skills, reading comprehension, writing), added multimedia (using del.icio.us searches, rss searches, etc–research skills), made a presentation (normally Powerpoint, but that’s fine, and they’re improving impressively at that, possibly because their slideshows are published for real audiences on the wiki), then given, with their partners, lectures to the class using their Powerpoints (speaking skills). I film the lectures, capture them in iMovie immediately after, and upload them to Google Video daily.
To keep the other students learning from these student-taught classes (rather than zoning out), they are quizzed each class on the content from the prior class’ lectures. (And yes, I do some post-mortem teacher lecturing after each student lecture to clarify points and model the “presentation as storytelling” approach I’m pushing them to learn. That is filmed and posted on the wiki too, which has interesting applications for semester exam reviews, next year’s classes, and general uses for world audiences as well.)
Finally, students self-assess their embedded lectures with a rubric my English dept colleagues made, and write goals for improvement for their follow-up lecture. They post these metacognitive skills-reflections on the discussion tab of their wiki page.
They’ll do the whole process again in a “Cold War” wiki textbook, and be graded for their lectures that time as an oral test grade (this first round is just a quiz grade for the lectures).
So the wiki textbook project is really traditional in terms of content, but offers a legacy product for future students with multimedia offerings a paper textbook obviously can’t offer.
Above all, my objectives for this project (like all my projects, really) are about literacy: reading, writing, speaking, listening, researching.
And collaborating."
Collaborating can be forced, however. I recently discovered a wiki tutorial on how to write a textbook. It has glaringly uneven topical development with many unpopulated sections. It was created by an IT prof. in the UK and guess whom he cites extensively on the subject of textbook authorship: ME! Thank you, but now I have to think about editing that wiki to accurately reflect what I actually say in my books and completely cover the topic!!! Maybe I should ask him if he would like to coauthor a book (a real one) with me.
Labels: custom publishing, custom textbooks, online textbooks, wiki-textbooks, Wikis
Wiki Textbooks 4
What Role for Instructors?
Wiki classrooms seem to turn instructors from imparters of knowledge into gatekeepers (and, necessarily, censors) in the global information network. Instructors provide the structure and tools for self-directed knowledge quests, and self-publishing professors and scholars help provide the theory and research that populate the web and constitute that knowledge. Potentially, everyone--and noone--is the expert. This raises an accountability issue.
For decades educators have been calling for nondidactic approaches to instruction, for instructors to be mentors and guides and sounding boards rather than "sage on the stage" lecturers. Now that the classroom is the Internet and the textbook is a class project, this change in job description is really happening for the first time. How does it sit with academics? Is it a relief or an imposition to not be accountable for what one knows or imparts to students? Are measures of teaching effectiveness to be reduced to classroom management skills?
I'm conflicted about this. On the one hand, I know that what I know is not a thing that I possess that I can just hand off to others. What I know is just as constructed from my thought and experience as students' knowledge is for them. The amount and quality of thought and experience is certainly different, however. How would that difference be reflected in a wiki classroom or a wiki textbook? When I try to imagine this, I see myself having to structure and direct investigations without imposing content. I see myself teaching critical thinking skills rather than my subject area. Wouldn't this make me more a technician than an expert or preferred knowledge source in my field? Is this to be the role of college instructors, and, if so, what outcomes might result in higher education?
I wish there would be some comments!
Labels: academic writing, custom textbooks, online textbooks, textbook writing, Wikis
