Choosing a publisher for a monograph

In academia, publication is about perception. I prefer to view it as being about communication to present and future readers, about exploring and synthesizing knowledge, about the love of teaching in another form. But the reality is that most academic authors publish because hiring decisions and tenure decisions consider publication records as a significant factor.

The scholarly monograph is key in that publication record. Textbooks and teaching materials don’t count, even at most teaching colleges, even though writing a good textbook demonstrates more mastery of a subject area than any esoteric exploration of the margins. Editing a journal rarely counts for much, and a reasonable rejection rate for the journal means that the editor is necessarily alienating many of the contacts he is making. Tenure requirements may be rigid (one monograph and four journal articles) or flexible (one monograph and three to five journal articles), but the monograph remains the bane of the young scholar’s life.

For publishers, monographs have become difficult to justify publishing. Sales of monographs have plummeted over the past two decades, and the only reason that most publishers still consider monographs is because they are afraid of losing their position of importance in academia. If we don’t publish monographs, then we won’t be considered a serious publisher, and young scholars won’t continue looking to us for salvation, and established scholars won’t be as contented in their relationships with us. Academic publishing relies on an intricate web of relationships between publishers and professors, because publishers depend on professors being willing to serve on editorial boards, edit journals, act as peer reviewers, review books, write back cover blurbs, and make connections between publishers and authors or prospective authors. In return, the professoriate asks that publishers continue to publish monographs, and publishers feel obliged to oblige.

As academic publishing has grown, the chances that any particular scholar has read any particular book has dropped, so it is unusual for the actual merits of a book as a work of scholarship to become widely known. New printing technologies have made the size of the initial print run unimportant, so books are rarely still ranked based on that number. The professoriate no longer demands that publishers edit those monographs, or proofread them, or typeset them, or even market them (though some publishers still do). What publishers must continue to do is put covers on books and put logos on the spines. This vastly reduced set of expectations has made the reputation of the publisher take on an overriding importance, even when the criteria for evaluating a publisher are highly impressionistic and idiosyncratic. A young scholar seeking to publish a monograph must choose a publisher with a good reputation, and must avoid a publisher with a bad reputation, and must somehow divine which publishers are which.

Note that this is unrelated to deciding which publisher may do the best job of editing the book or marketing the book, or which publisher may help the book reach the most readers, or what the contract terms might be. Even the opinion of the author herself about the reputation of the publisher is unimportant. What matters is the opinion of the professors who will be on the tenure review committee or hiring committee. For an author given the choice between a publisher with a good reputation who in fact is little more than a glorified copy shop and a publisher with a bad reputation who in fact carefully reviews and edits the books they publish, the decision should always be the publisher with the good reputation.