Re: Off-topic on publishing

[Eric Van Tassel 101233.342@xxxxxxxx]

On 23-11-98 George Scithers wrote (in part)

>... potential readers ... depend on the publishers' self interest in
> maintaining their reputations for not publishing drek ...
> ... what goes on with non-fiction publishing is completely outside
> my experience ...

Well, I've spent quite a few years in university-press publishing, the
narrow end of non-fiction publishing, and I would just add that along with
maintaining a reputation the university press has another incentive to
favor a high rate of rejections (I guess I turned down about 90% of
proposals when I was an acquiring editor at an eminent American university
press; I have no reason to think the rejection rate is lower for the
non-fiction list at a reputable "trade" publishing house). That incentive
is that non-fiction publishers, in English-speaking countries at least,
provide the academic world with a career-validating service. A career in
university teaching is a dead end unless the teacher builds a record of
published research, which (at least in the humanities) means articles and
eventually one or more books. Younger academics have found that hiring and
tenure committees regard self-published work with undisguised contempt; and
if a doctoral thesis has been turned into a "real" book, they still want to
know which publisher put it through their evaluation procedure. As an
acquiring editor I couldn't get a book accepted by my university press
Editorial Board without written assessments from established scholars in
the the author's field; and scholars were, in their turn, willing to write
such reports -- often requiring as much work as a short scholarly paper --
for derisory fees, because they understood that the process was an embedded
feature of the career structure in the universities.

Cheers
Eric Van Tassel

PS: In another posting, Scithers added that in a book from a reputable
publisher "the content will be of professional quality". To the extent that
this refers to the assessment process I've mentioned, I agree; but that
assessment is (as it were) on the macro level, and on the micro level I
have to say that copy-editing -- which, when I first went into non-fiction
publishing, went far beyond checking spelling and counting the footnotes
and embraced such things as querying internal inconsistencies and (indeed)
fact-checking -- is on the way to becoming a lost art. (I still do some
freelance copy-editing, mostly on musicology books; on some of the books I
worked on in the 1980s, which eventually became important scholarly
contributions to their discipline, I would obtain a score of the concerto
being analyzed or a copy of the opera libretto being discussed, and would
verify for myself every one of the author's references to bar (measure)
so-and-so or confirm every one of the author's translations from German or
French. Nowadays no university press -- still less any trade publisher --
would pay me enough to allow me to expend anything like that amount of time
and energy.)