The Travails of Writing and Publishing

I love to write. In fact, I can't help writing. I write everyday and some days have quite an impressive output to show for it. Writing is a way to organize your ideas and express your creativity. It feels good to write. And if I go a day without writing it is like a day without exercising or a day disrupted by an ad hoc event or a power outage. It just knocks me out of my groove.

You would think that writing and publishing go hand in hand. You write a clever piece and a publisher gets it to market for you. But, it is nothing like that. Publishing is a business and publishers care about sales. Even academic publishers have similar concerns. They are less heavy handed to be sure. They care about readership and citations and reputation. But all of that translates, ultimately, into sales. If a publisher cannot get people to pay for reading their publications they cannot survive.

This, in turn, translates into a wide variety of seemingly odd behaviors. Recently, there was a discussion on a listserv that I subscribe to over whether or not it is appropriate for a journal editor to ask authors to cite papers from the target journal. Presumably, the editor did not want the author to miss an important paper on the topic of submitted paper. While that is possible, it is more likely that the editor was concerned about exposure for the journal's offerings or even, cynically, the citation index.

I have sent book proposals to publishers only to have them rejected because they did not match the publishers 'list'. That is, they want books of a particular kind and that is the primary concern. This does not make sense if you believe the publisher's first concern is quality publications. However, if you realize that similar publications will be attractive to their customer base hence making marketing much easier, it does make sense.

I once submitted a proposal to a publisher for a book that I expected to be around 60,000 words. It was  almost finished and that seemed like a nice round number once I had completed the revisions. The publisher said they could not sell a book unless it was 100,000 words. They encouraged me to extend the book in question to that length. I could not do it. I had said what I had to say in 60,000 words and to stretch it to 100,000 words would require a lot of filler. Next time you are wading through a book with a lot of pointless junk in it, remember that you are probably wading through filler that the publisher requested in order to accept the book for publication.

Due to my passion for writing, I have numerous books in various stages of completion. Realizing my innate inability to accept the terms of publishers I have decided to put them on my website and give them away for free. If you would like to see what I have, go to my webpage and click on Books in Progress. This is not as crazy of an idea as it may first seem. As an academic I write to achieve recognition for my ideas. Giving the manuscripts away for free will maximize exposure. Granted, I won't make any money on them, but few academics actually make much money on their books. And if they do make money, it usually involves some sort of compromise - it is a text book really written by a committee or it is a popular press book which is a little thin on academic substance.

The only serious drawback is that of recognition within my own institution. If I can claim to have a book published by an academic press, that carries academic prestige. If I say I put my book on my website for free download, there is substantially less prestige accorded. However, I have never been one to care much about prestige. So, putting my book on my website for free works well for me. Now, if nobody cares enough to download them even for free, well then I do have a problem.