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
Academic Authors Can't Write! --Part 2
Tests of student writing performance often show that students need more help in developing topics—using detail and citing examples (Newkirk, 1999). As a publisher (and former academic and textbook editor), I often find precisely the same problems in the writings of students’ instructors--manuscripts with page after page of unrelentingly abstract prose, excessive jargon, paragraph after paragraph on constructs with no hint that they have empirical analogs in the real world. This kind of writing does not raise or maintain intellectual standards; it prevents or impedes learning!
When asked to provide topical development with expository details and concrete examples, many academic authors are offended. They call it dumbing down. My beef is with academics who attribute dumbing down to textbook publishers as an excuse for their bad writing.
Revising expository writing to make it accessible to learners is not and should not involve dumbing down in either form or intent. Offering concrete examples is not dumbing down, for example. Concrete elaborations let readers imagine, visualize, or identify with representations or exemplars of an abstraction. This vicarious experience, in turn, engenders self-confidence in learners, who more readily rise to the challenge of grasping the difficult or complex idea in aid of which the concrete example was advanced.
A challenge with professors as authors is that many tend to regard their works as sacrosanct products of their intellect and standing, both hard-won. Frequently, then, they interpret requests for revision or development of their manuscript as the publisher’s nefarious effort either to abridge academic freedom or to dumb down a scholarly work. These are misconceptions. There are legitimate reasons, such as the following, that editors might ask textbook authors to change their organization or content.
• The book will be too long for its intended market or predetermined level of investment and has to be cut.
• Concepts lack adequate elaboration through concrete examples.
• Sources are not cited.
• Undocumented opinions are presented as facts.
• Undocumented facts seem inaccurate or misleading.
• Information seems outdated or lacks currency.
• Topical coverage seems unbalanced, biased, or unexpected for the course.
• Material is judged to be strongly offensive to some or all readers.
• Examples, language, or expression are inappropriate to the intended reader, course, or subject.
• Vocabulary level is inappropriate for the course level.
• The writing is ungrammatical, wordy, or full of “pomo-babble.”
• Digressions or redundancy compromise meaning or coherence.
• Material is too similar to that in competing textbooks.
• Material invites claims of plagiarism or copyright infringement.
• Chapters lack appropriate apparatus and pedagogy.
• The manuscript departs significantly from the previously agreed-upon book plan.
None of these reasons involves a request to dumb down. Thus, academic authors should not make this claim to excuse writing that is bad or inappropriate to their audience, course, or mission. Nor should they take it upon themselves to adulterate the knowledge they are attempting to convey. Students—whatever their state of knowledge—can detect gratuitously dumbed-down prose in an instant and are justifiably insulted. Dumbed-down prose is, in Orwell’s beloved cuttlefish ink analogy, insincere (Orwell, 1946).
In truth, textbooks need to be clear, coherent, and concise—the three C’s championed by William Strunk so long ago (1918). In addition, textbooks need to address their true readers—the actual students whose learning is at stake, not the professor’s dissertation committee, journal review board, or tenure committee, not colleagues, critics, or prize panels. On the other hand, meeting learners “where they are” in their intellectual development does not require leaving out either big words or big ideas, especially when glossaries or pronunciation guides are provided in textbooks. Rather, meeting learners “where they are” requires clarity, coherence, and concision of exposition. Knowledge about learning also is important, for in the end analysis, textbook writing is teaching.
The solution? I think institutions of higher learning, academic departments, professional degree programs, and scholarly publications should provide more opportunities (and more rewards) for academics to learn to write sound expository prose. We also can hope for a more balanced attitude toward textbook publishing as both a vital form of teaching and a valid form of scholarship.
Labels: academic authors, academic writing, textbook writing
Academic Authors Can't Write! --Part 1
Of course, it's an exaggeration to say that academic authors can't write. I say it in the the same sense that "white boys can't jump." But still, among the many academic authors I've worked with, only two or three of them would I say were good writers. Most are wordy and imprecise, inconsistent in style, unclear in exposition, inflated in jargon and ego, pedagogically unsound, and, worst, they lack an authentic and attractive authorial voice (the one true source of a textbook's success).
Many other observers have noticed problems with academic writing, such as the Journal of Philosophy and Literature’s famous Bad Writing Contests (Dutton, 1996; see www.denisdutton.com/bad_writing.htm). Canadian journalist Robert Fulford referred to academic writing as "pomo-babble"—“the tortured polysyllabic prose common in academic writing” (National Post, 7/15/03):
“Scholars in the humanities spend much of their time writing, and are forced constantly to read the work of superb writers. Yet they pour out streams of gnarled and barbarous sentences and don’t even know they are doing it…. Crimes against language are not victimless, of course. Academic life has become a publish and perish world: Professors publish, literacy perishes. Students perish too.”
I find it ironic that so few professors write well, especially for students, and that even fewer recognize this fact. Why is this? What are they doing wrong? And what can be done to improve the quality of writing for both scholars and college students? If you have thoughts on these questions, I hope you will comment.
Labels: academic authors, academic writing, writing
The Academic Ego, Part 4: Pricing Outfalls
This is the 4th installment of a previously unpublished article I wrote for academic editors to help them gain a perspective on the authors they work with. Author perceptions about academic freedom and the transformations of the publishing industry brought about through digitization challenge academic editors in new ways. (Copyright Mary Ellen Lepionka 2007: All Rights Reserved.)
Pricing Outfalls
Publishers began addressing the issue of pricing only when the great success of the used textbook industry became known, and again following price revolts early in the 21st century. Students now can buy used, foreign, and pirated English-language copies of textbooks online, and some universities opt to rent textbooks to deliver by the chapter to students via their intranet servers. The publishing industry also has responded with streamlined low-cost or coverless editions and e-textbooks, uncoupled from their supplement packages. Nevertheless, textbooks that don’t do well—or that compete directly with the publisher’s more successful new acquisition—often are retired, and the academic ego is bruised again. "I got dumped for a bigger gun," one angsty author put it.
In academic and scholarly publishing, in contrast to textbook publishing, complaints about prices usually refer to the high premiums that libraries must pay for print and electronic journals that publishers monopolize. Library consortia have fought back to great effect, aided by online networking. In some well-publicized cases libraries have cancelled their subscriptions for the most expensive scientific, technical, and medical journals from companies such as Elsevier, Wiley, Academic Press, Blackwell, and Kluwer.
In addition, many scholars and researchers increasingly publish their work online, often using electronic clearinghouses for peer review. They make their articles available on a noncommercial basis, self-publish, and also generate increasingly popular blogs for academic discourse. These trends further challenge the publishing industry at the same time as they help stimulate the growing open-access movement in academe (Suber, 2002), such as the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), Free Online Scholarship (FOS), and MIT’s Dspace.
Editors must be sensitive to the fact that authors have more options now than ever before. The road to successful projects must be paved carefully with information about the textbook publishing industry.
Freedom to Publish
Many academics champion the open access movement in the belief that it safeguards freedom of thought and expression. Academics take academic freedom very seriously and tend to believe that the publishing industry (and mass media) determine what gets published (or aired, etc.). They seem not to realize that publishers, like television networks, base their decisions on 1) market data, rather than on conspiracies sealed in closed executive meetings, and 2) shareholder expectations, rather than on megalomaniacal quests for world domination. In contrast with the realities, scholarly outrage over perceived threats of censorship or abridgement of academic freedom may be grossly oversimplified and thus tough for editors to deal with.
This outrage may stem in part from appocraphal imagery concerning mind control, perhaps from literature about cults or classic works such as 1984 or Manchurian Candidate. In textbook publishing, it also comes from the application of ideas about political correctness, in which, in Diane Ravitch’s words, publishers and editors become the “language police” in response to public pressure (2003). Editors requesting changes to a textbook manuscript may be thus accused. The authors of an introduction to psychology textbook who refuse to mention Sigmund Freud, because they do not approve of Freud’s ideas, for example, may fault the publisher for caving in to the demands of the prospective customers who teach the course! In this manifestation, the academic ego rests firm in the notion that people should know enough to want what the author is providing (and if they don’t, the hell with them).
Unlike editors of trade nonfiction, textbook editors routinely must ameliorate conservative, liberal, fundamentalist, Marxist, deist, feminist, existentialist, and other ideological “expository” prose to protect naive audiences and to avoid alienating the instructors who order the textbooks. Ufortunately, crusades in defense of Intellectual freedom may extend to moral claims about human rights to knowledge. A creator of prying and crippling computer viruses famously defended himself by claiming, "I don't publish viruses to cause a panic. I only publish to spread knowledge. I don’t think knowledge should be punished" (Zeller, 2005). Where knowledge is sacrosanct, then, so is the expression of it, and by extension the one who does the expressing. This is heady stuff, especially for people who live for what they know and what they think they know--the academic authors with whom academic editors must travel (like so many Sancho Panzas).
Labels: academic authors, Academic editors, Academic ego, author-editor relations
