that's the most important thing is taking care of our constituents at home. representatives of columbia university press talk about the value of university presses. this event was held at a culture bookstore in new york city. >> we will take motions from the floor. thank you all for coming this evening. we are hosting this panel and how to publish with the university press. show of hands if this is your

first time at old culture. we are so happy you found us. we have been proud to be a part of morningside intellectual and academic committee and happy to carry one of the widest selections of academic titles in the city. columbia university press is but one of our greatest partners and supporters in our efforts pretty nice conversational be moderated by jennifer crewe who is the associate provost of community press. c-span booktv is here recording the stock said during the q&a portion of tonight's program please wait for a much vaunted come to you otherwise they will be able to record your question. thanks everyone for coming out and i will turn it over to jennifer who will introduce her palace. >> thank you very much and i want to say also we love you too too. book culture is probably one of the most important bookstores for university press.

you wander the aisles you can see a lot of those representative here. i also want to thank the panelists. i will go in order. nicholas dames i know you have a special title. he is the author of two books both published by university press missed out to third getting an british fiction 1810th 1870 and reading and neuroscience and he also writes on contemporary literature and the humanities novel reading etc. for many publications including the atlantic and "new york times" book review, the nation and public books. that leads me into sharon marcus

who is orlando professor of english and dean of humanities still pray she ended her deanship. her first book apartment story city and homes in 19th century london was published by california press enter second look was published by princeton university press. and also i should mention public books again because in 2012 sharon and katelynn at nyu cofounded public's books and on line magazine that features really great accessible writing by scholars but also other people in the community, activists as well as writers on arts and ideas and it's a great publication. and then all the way over there to my left is eric schwartz my

colleague at columbia university press the editorial director and he's the editor of sociology and cognitive science books and runs acquisition department. he's worked at princeton university press in cambridge university press. we have a lot of university presses representative here. i just wanted to start by stating what is university press because some people don't know what makes us different from another publisher either a commercial trade publisher that publishes mostly fiction and general nonfiction you might read but also how would differs from a commercial scholarly publisher. first of all we are not-for-profit organization. that doesn't mean we are --. we are not out to sign up for

books that will earn money for the organization. secondly we are situated within a university. universities are middle name and seller goal, our mission at the university and the mission at the university press are entwined in some way. the university wants to foster research and the generation of scholarship and disseminate that scholarship to curate it and get it out into the world. we also publish important looks that a commercial publisher would not take on because they would not make any money for the company. they may lose money. there are commercial scholarly presses that will publish an increasing number of scholarly autograph -- but they are out of reach for most normal human beings. the university presses to try to reach an audience of educated

general readers with their looks and pricing is usually set to that level. next our method of acquiring books, the editors that eric runs the department is different from other kinds of publishers. our editors often who have a degree in the field or they have had some kind of graduate training and they are given areas of specialization. we have a history editor who also does economics and we have a philosophy and relations editor. they go to conferences and read journals and they develop an expertise and a group of people that they cultivate and learn about. at trade house the editor's main relationship with d with an agent. we do deal with agents sometimes but for the most part trade

publishers the main person they are cultivating is the agent they are doing what they try to get the agent to submit books that they would like to publish. the other thing i wanted to say before we get started university press has published several types of books. we have publish solid monographs that only specialists is rigged and we also publish trade books generally books he would find a barnes & noble and we publish books that we know would be not a book that a mcgraw-hill or harrison ford would publish because it's too small of a market but we are happy to have it year after year. then we do rigorous peer review and this is particularly important in today's atmosphere of fake news and concerns about inaccuracy and information that

gets out there. we publish work that is vetted and verified. finally we have a publication committee and nick happens to sit on that committee now. most university presses have such a committee. they read the pier reviews and they hear what the editor has to say about the book and they read a portion of the manuscript and they are the final okay. if they agree we can offer contract for a book and that's very different from another kind of publisher. so i thought i would ask questions around several topics that are important for university presses and we will limit and get a sense of how we work and how we go about looking at them. i will group my questions were in various topics in the first topic is peer review which i just mentioned. this is briefly essential to our

mission of advancing scholarships and what it represents when considering a manuscript or proposal to a couple of scholars who the author does not know. they don't know who the person is who has read it but it's a very important part of what we do. i guess sharon and nick first of all as an author and is a graduate student adviser and in your case is a former administrator would you think is the value of peer review? maybe sharon can start. >> i think peer review is having your ideas of value-added by experts and it's very important to do that. when you get a book from university press you know it's

been a value-added eye experts writing anonymously without worrying about any of the politics that may affect the academy. it would be interesting if the pier were double-blind and the reviewers didn't know who they were reviewing. what peer review does is it -- the books for how original they are and how accurate they are and also helps them modulate their scope so book that might be narrow if someone might say this is really interesting in your argument and your questions about housing construction and inspection or they might conversely say you are overdoing it a bit with how termites are in understanding of -- so it's great to have other people read your stuff without the dynamics

involved and you get their honest opinion. a peer review is a great preview of your process and also against the internal politics of your department and universities. if outside experts are -- are book it's working properly on its own terms. and a peer review is on this. i recently had an article peer-reviewed and was valuable to know it was double-blind. they didn't know anything about me. they were just reading my article and telling me what works and where they need a little more evidence. it was just a set of responses and feedback. >> nick you can add to that but also add something about your role in our publications. >> the thing that i would add to

what sharon's great summary i would add only one thing to that which is the pier review system ensures an edict to books. the good things that peer reviews are good at weeding out his interpretations. one of the main characters was an impossibly lengthy monograph and determines that they have done that already. it's a shattering moment of the pier review but there's a way that peer review mitigates against repetition. it's a new contribution to knowledge. when i see peer reviews the main thing i tend to look or besides

are their theoretical axes being ground that are unnecessary and want to see the reviewer provide a summary of the book's argument argument. at least there's an attempt to read the manuscript with sympathy. if the pier review or only comes for the details that to me is a sign that the book is not read well and was red with some sub training ax to grind that i'm not aware of. it should be able to suggest the limits of the arguments. that's the first thing i look for when i judge that. i want them to mirror back to me their sense of her readers stepping back and what it would look like. >> there are also times when i have to read between the lines. sometimes somebody will sort if

you will see they don't want to say this isn't groundbreaking original scholarship but they kind of get at it that way. >> you to learn a lexicon of terms that are strongly meant. >> you can tell an eric from your point of view as an editor. >> was often interesting is when there are conflicts in those reviews. if there's a particular reading and a slightly different reading and the author has to engage with one of those readings to determine what is the argument that they want to make. it will make for a better and more engaged book and it lets the public should know the authors committed to this project and that they are going

to defend and stand up for the arguments that they are making. the if peer review from an editorial perspective, think there is always a move to try to review the book was going to be more sensational or book that's going to sell more copies. knowing that our projects are going to be judged by an members of the publication committee and we meet with our publications committee the final thursday of every month. it's a mini-dissertation at times where you were going in there and you have to work that you have spent time in and you are going to have to in some cases defend those projects. sometimes you succeed and infrequently you don't succeed

but i think it's really important to keep it honest. we often think about books that will be considered for publication in what were the perceptions of the committee b. of this project before we get started down the road in the review process. >> as i'm listening to this conversation i realized i should mention for anybody who's particular interest in peer review to aaup now called the aup. the university presses recently put out a best practices booklet on peer reviewing if you are interested in what to expect. it's a handy guide. also something that occurred to me that our committee there are people on it from really nine different fields and crosses humanity social science, science and business.

the way scholars in different fields react to the review is always quite interesting. also the types of reviews you get. in the humanities you might get a person that read every word and is making helpful suggestions on typos and things like that and then you might get something you know and the finance area and science too. might get like a paragraph. >> time is money. >> one person in business school told me that. but anyway it is something that really stands out in one that works well it makes the book a better book and it helps the editor and helps guide the author and it helps us understand as publishers, this kind of publishing some of it is

very specialized and none of us know the field well so these reviews help us situated in the market who would be interested. >> the review process is an opportunity for network building for the author and to add diversity to the reception of the book. i often look for, there's an book that would be interested people across the fields i will try to get a reviewer in one field and tried to get a senior person or a junior person. oftentimes the readings can be very different and it can be really useful for the author especially for junior authors. thinking about readers who would be important revamped for them to know people out in the field who know their work. cervelli great opportunity to build those networks and use our

placements to do that. >> another thing i don't think we mentioned that we often say to authors. review is picking out something in the book and the author doesn't want to deal with it. we often say well this could be a preview of what's going to happen when you have the book published and there's a published review of it. this is the kind of issue that could come up some eyes will catch it now before it's published. i thought maybe we would move on to acquiring the books and eric what are the different ways to look for books to consider for publication and how do the methods differ depending on whether it's a monograph book. >> we have a righty of different ways in which we acquire books. their other projects that come

in by e-mail and such. different fields are different that way. could probably go several years before someone would come in whereas our -- the -- editor gets five projects today. different fields are different in that regard. i would say the number of books that we acquire based on that method is very slim. editors make campuses. we go to different academic campuses and we find out what projects people are working on. each one of our lists has somewhat of a personality to it. broadly speaking i think columbia books are contemporary. we want our books to have a certain flavor and feel across the entirety of the list.

there could be perfectly great projects that simply don't fit that kind of brand identity and not my not provide for us. we get projects from agents on occasion paid we go to the frankfurt book fair. that is an enormous yearly book fair in germany where every publisher in the world attends. there are 300,000 attendees. they opened to the public on saturday and sunday. i've had the good fortune of being in the train station and all of the players were swarming into the train station as i was reading. they were going to frankfurt. also the mission projects by being in a field you often know whether the structure holds in a given field. there's a roux need for an

economics book on a certain aspect of climate change and would it be great if x person wrote that look. you are writing to people that way. somebody writes an op-ed. writing to those authors and saying hey when it beat red ideas be worked on this kind of project. a whole variety of ways that you can get them through the pipeline. >> sharon i'm thinking about public books where you are really trying to reach a little bit. i am curious about what you think and now i think both of you are probably working on a third book. when do you think i want to reach beyond a smaller audience to a bigger audience and how does it play in your mind about what kind of publisher you go to to? >> i suppose every writer looks

at list and often fantasizes about what fits them the best. it's often a process of discovery with an editor. they are good at identifying authors a government identified. you imagine as you are writing up look imagine it's a dialogue that there may be a third party out there that you are talking to and you want to bring into the conversation and you were either too scared to or her you don't know fewer qualified or if everyone revealed she was a possible audience you want them revealed to you. in a way a list is seeing what a possible audience is a given press imagines and it says something i think i want to take on?

>> one of the things you think about ahead of time is choosing between a university press of the upper project that could go either way but am finishing a book right now on the issue of celebrity and i've been working on it for a long time. they say that would make it great trade. so if you have a book that can go either way. in many ways it's great to have all the clamor that up when you publish with the university press of first of all they will let you keep your footnotes and if you are a scholar you like your footnotes. if you've publish for the university press i think you are free to write it look that his

argument driven and these days if you publish with the trade press they are going to ask you to write a book that is narrative driven. and narrative driven book is true written us an idea like why are so many people so obsessed with celebrity. a narrative book is driven by characters and events any probably have to start with something like in november of 1882 sarah bernhardt -- and i personally didn't want to write this book that way but if you're going to write a book that is narrative driven you can see other stories from the start. there are only a few brilliant people and i am not one of them who can make an argument. that is a very tricky thing to do. it's easier to make an argument and that argument can be very

compelling. i chose to put my energy into that and i'm very happy that university press does embrace that. historians often write more narrative driven books. i think that is all i will say. you are in the company of other scholars and you are in dialogue and their books help your book to be more compelling and it reflects on their book as well and that's a very good thing to do. where is in the trade press in your book may not fit in as well you may end up eating the nerd at the party as opposed to being a nerd among nerds. >> and nerd among nerds over a long span of time, nerds all the

way. the nice thing about university press is we really want the book to have lasting staying power. we want their books to contribute to a debate and spark a debate that may last for decades. often it's said the ideal successful university press book is one that sells a thousand copies in its tenth year. in year 10, a thousand copies, not a thousand copies by year 10 10. and the reason being is that then is it book that is meaningful. people are using it for teaching and learning and it's had some kind of an impact on its field. where is the trade publisher really they are wanting to make

money and if the book doesn't sell well in the beginning that may move on to other products and so on and so forth. we make it a little bit more of a commitment. >> it's interesting your comment about the argument of the book because we have that conversation around the table. as the book have an argument and is it really going from beginning to end. sometimes people will submit a book okay a chapter on the senate chapter on that and they hope the conclusion will bring it all together. it really doesn't work. it makes a difference if we can sell it whether we can articulate that argument so that's an important thing and that's what we are looking for. but i am going back a little bit. one other thing i wanted to say in response to you is our sales in any given year, 65% of our revenue comes from backlist

books and those are all books that were developed as course books. a lot of them were monographs and some of the first books they were field changing or something happened and enough people noticed it and thought it was worthwhile and important to further the field to help their students read it. some of these books might only sell 50 to 100 copies a year but they keep selling and they were really published when we thought they would just sell a few hundred and that would be a. it's very hard to predict which one will sell. that's the other thing. actually about the textbooks in the treatment looks books when you were sitting on a publication committee you realize you know this book we think is going to be a trade look and we are going to sell a lot of copies. i'm just wondering what goes

through your head when you think about the different types that we are doing. >> you are obviously aware of the different types and it's funny the answer is always the same and which is imagine this 10 years down the road. is the textbooks still being adopted in courses? is it something that vanished eight years ago without a trace or something that's forward-looking enough that you can imagine a future for it. the genre is being served differently in so many ways but it's a longer futurity that you might have another press situations. >> okay. publishing your book with the university of press. often a first book is a ruse

revised dissertation usually. not always but i'm happy when somebody decides okay that was bad and now i'm moving onto on to my next. that doesn't happen very often. for both of you i'm wondering what were the differences in your experience of publishing between the first and second books? >> i had occasion about five-ish to go to go back and read the introduction to my first book and i was really -- by how much i felt i had to engage with other scholars. so-and-so said this in so-and-so said that in taking issue with this and taking issue with that in building on this. i knew my book would be if they would by people outside my field all of whom would you looking to see what i had to say about their work. because their work was relevant to mine and i don't know who

these people are going to be in advance i felt i had to spend a lot of energy on situating my ideas and foreground that. .. so you have a lot more freedom with your second book and the

topic is the freedom to program your ideas. >> reflect is in opposite ways, so when i think about my first book i had a tremendous time it was like writing a letter to my advisors in installments and i knew they already bought into my ideas. there is a defensiveness about the various things and people i needed to address and that is a

thin topsoil it's much more thoroughly integrated. when you trade for a sense of security is very downbeat or worthwhile. it's harder to target the layer of work and i can see that glaring now. >> by graduate students often say what can i do to turn the dissertation into a book and i

feel the dissertation advising process if done well the actual answer is very little. that isn't what editors ever want to hear a and sometimes you have to demonstrate the book that you publish is different than the dissertation but i think what happens is tha the ae of people spend three to four years in the transformative dissertation only to find there wasn't that much to change chip and they could have sent it out in the first year. i am going to make what is probably a contrary point and junior scholars should send their dissertations out sooner rather than later but as

advisors we need to think about how they can seem more like fox. maybe dissertation is a dirty word and i would be interested as an advisor for a synonym for this unpublishable. >> i hear that a lot and my advisor told me the problem is. they pretend the dissertation looking at the argument through their own lens and what often happens is the dissertation is pretend to demonstrate knowledge for a small grouping of people and it is this kind of argument and work you were describing to be for.

what they need to do is get first-time authors to make it that work rather than a demonstration of knowledge. as a dissertation is to demonstrate you have knowledge and understand the field and are working to gain authority. demonstrate immediately but you don't deserve it and i think that not being able to articulate that argument very quickly and have it be one thing is a great way to lose the authority. the most influential books i've read there's something unique about the first one that when

done well they are utterly unique in a way that subsequent books are not and can be sort of out of nowhere and transformed. i get very excited in my first books because they are a good indicator of where the field is now. there are fewer and fewer people who can tell you what to do. they need to know what every person in the department is doing and have some sort of a knowledge and engagement with that. they are taking in information

from other people and engage with other junior people so so there's a greater body of knowledge. and there is a hunger to be able to say something new and you often see that in the first book's. >> what we usually see is that it's clear that there are exceptions to every rule so it just depends on the level of advising. i will take another set of

questions and then questions from the audience. what is the best way for an author to approach you and then how do you advise people about choosing a publisher? they want to talk with me about the idea.

we have engagement with others around of academic conferences and the sociology editor from the moment the exhibit opens to close and it's usually every hour almost every half-hour talking about new projects and that is when it is the easiest to see people that are harder to get to that you don't often see. using the editor as a resource is some dingbat can be a benefit to the scholarship to talk through ideas. >> what about advising the graduate students that are ready how do you go about saying we might try this?

>> let me know when you are ready to send something out and where you would like to send it. look at the books in your bibliography that are selected from one, two or three presses but even then you are engaged with a set of ideas and anybody that is fortunate enough i guess

that still happens. take a look at how long they stay in print, how are they getting their books reviewed, do they advertise their books. you have the wherewithal and the focus to get your book the biggest audience that they seem pretty small but also targeted and e. to identify for academic books. as hard as it is for the beginning economics to feel this way, do you feel as much as you want them to take your book you want them to explore if this is the right place for you and you want that out as fast as

possible but there are situations that are not right. i'm going to work with you on that for better or worse i'm glad i did that, but it was a hard thing to do given that something was being extended at a vulnerable moment and i very much wanted to see us.

it's important to contact several publishers. have to autho that author relatp and understanding of the work and how could they do the best work bu that still do their wor.

i wouldn't take that kind of thing so personally but being prepared that it fits o but it't because somebody else won't. >> we have finite resources we can only publish a certain books properly. we are not a volume driven operation and want to make sure we get every boo give every boot level of attention. >> i'm sure there are things we missed and we would love to have questioned from the audience.

i am currently writing my dissertation so what i wanted to know what to say the person takes a revisionist approach so you don't have to be diplomatic let's say you follow the political conventions and they agree and think it's great and tell you it's going to be attacked but it's good so then they know you but you are overturning the research. what happens then, coul could be rejected just because you are disproving them?

>> if they revealed they were saying don't publish it because it overturns my work -- >> it wouldn't be that explicit. >> that people can tell when that's going on and there is a thick skin about being refuted and attacked and i don't think anyone in academia has had the experience in the spirit of reputation. when they say i really agree with what you said and they are taking issues and have some questions, people are looking for the engagement and if you are saying something controversial, then they will

trust test whether you set enough to persuade them. i wouldn't assume that a report that is maybe even a little defensive is going to sink a book. i have seen editors make that determination. once they take the project income of their job is to get it shut down. >> this isn't helpful and we will go get a third.

we also ask offers for suggestions. it's not necessarily who i go to but i find it useful who they think is important and should be reading their work and i also ask for food to avoid in the hope of not stepping into this situation. he said something really important i want to underscore because it took me i think a decade if an editor is sending your book out they want it to work out. once you got into that stage you

are past the major triage stage so keep that in mind in terms of how you receive the feedback. and as earlier how you respond to the reports, it's important and the press is looking for you to stand by your ideas but also show your willingness to engage in the criticism. >> any other questions? >> i am curious if any of you have experience to a lot of my favorite poetry books have come from university press and i wonder if you have experience in fact realm or how the process differs it's more just creating

art. >> i do know people who at the university press published poetry and fiction and i believe they still have to get peer reviews but then again they will ask the author will have to explain following this sort of line of style and then they send it out for review but it's much more of a subjective thing not looking for a contribution to a scholarship or something like that. it's more subjective. >> often times there is a series editor and if we have these two

reviews we publish fiction and translation and get people in the field of russian literature and chinese literature, scholars who give their opinion about whether the book would be taught or assigned but it's sort of well it sounds good to me it's not really going to stand in the way of something like that. >> when did you start looking for a publisher?

>> when it was over. i had no sense that this would ever be published. i treated it as a kind of game i was playing that would have a result that might matter to nobody other than me and only after it was done did i start to look around and nobody said anything about where it should go. certainly that is still the case where the question is is this going to be sold in anything or not. it is uncomfortable but also the flip side is a certain freedom you are allowed to explore it on your own and you have a great deal of how you imagine the project to go. i do think it is a bad idea to

think about the presses its the mosit's themost free time you wr have. you will never have a moment can evolve something that's personal so why sacrifice that and in the end it pays off. >> has a slightly different answer although pragmatic that works out the same sort of overlap of fighting for a job and thinking that putting your dissertation out and in my experience what happened was there used to be a lot more jobs to apply for them there are today so i applied for something like 30 shops. as people learned what i was working on there is a continuity

and it's all about being finished enough and that there was something to talk to editors about. >> i wouldn't do it until you feel confident and comfortable enough that you wouldn't mind it being sent out for peer review and you might want to proceed. in american history, editors are throwing themselves at the graduate students working on something interesting because

there's so many publishers in that area. they were not able to get a job, they leave the academic community to have to work that t is orphaned in a way because you have no network in the world with which to promote it to. writing the dissertation is a job in and of itself and to have the conflict in projects with the content going on at the same time your advisers want you to do this, but the peer reviewers

want you to do that. it is a complex i don't need to deal with. >> anyone else >> thank you very much and everybody else on the panel. [applause] [inaudible conversations]

>> encouraging people to take their seat. good evening, everyone. i am the new executive director celebrating its tenth year now

and i want to advertise the alliance with the bio. courtesy of the president bio we are going to be cosponsoring their conference will also be happening here. for the new indigo fellowship there fellowships given out every single year