Download Academic Books

[Berk Boyraz]

Theacademics I have met who write books seem to assume one of two things. The first assumption is that publishers are doing authors a favour by publishing their books. The second is that the royalties offered are a set figure. Both of these assumptions are wrong.

Publishers often belong to parent companies that are very, very rich. For example, the company Informa plc has four operating divisions: business intelligence, academic publishing, knowledge, and events. Its academic publishing division covers the humanities, social sciences, and STEM subjects, and includes publishers such as Taylor & Francis, Psychology Press, Cogent OA, and Routledge. In 2016, the latest year for which figures are available, this division made an adjusted operating profit of 187.2million. Informa as a whole made an adjusted operating profit of 416.1million.

Bear in mind that the person you are negotiating with, usually your commissioning editor, will not have the power to make the final decision. Keep your relationship with them as cordial and professional as possible, and make your case as clearly and concisely as you can, because you need them to advocate for you within their organisation.

In many ways this is the simple part of the negotiations. Once you agree the royalty figures, the publisher will issue a draft contract. It is a really good idea to get independent professional advice on the contract, because it will be hard to understand its implications unless you have specific legal expertise. In the UK, you can join the Society of Authors as soon as you have a draft contract, and specialist vetting of that and any other contract you receive is included in your membership fee. They will tell you which points to negotiate on, and how.

Does all this negotiation sound icky to you? Get over it. You are going to work really hard on writing your books. It makes sense to do all you can to make your books work as hard as possible for you.

Thanks Helen, this is hugely helpful. A rookie question: do any publishers tend to rescind the contract offer altogether instead of presenting a counter-offer? I guess academic authors are hesitant about negotiation because a draft contract is already a hard-earned victory after several months of blind review etc. Is it possible to risk losing the offer if we negotiate harder than usual? Thank you so much!

I have two questions:

1) How can I find a publisher who is indexed in Pubmed (the US federal repository of scientifc publications in the Life Sciences), so that a copy of the online version can be deposited there ? (my previous publications were deposited there).

Apart from that first question for you, I have another question that came to my mind as a resutl of reading your post:

2) I would like my book to come in both online version and print version. Is that impossible?

Hi Helen,

I have recently been offered a contract for me to publish my Phd Thesis as a book. It is with a German publisher. I have no experience of this type of thing. I have not been offered any royalties on the first 100 books, and only 5% on e-print books. To me this sounds really unfair. However, my supervisor has told me this is standard practice, especially for German publishers. But I feel I should try and negotiate abit. Have you any thoughts? Thank you for your time

It is worth looking at it in slightly different terms. Most of my fellow academics are working on fixed budgets for book purchases, usually related to their institutional book allowance. Libraries, too, have fixed budgets. This means that, if a publisher increases the price of their book, they are unlikely to increase their share of that fixed amount that is being spent on books. In fact, their total income might well reduce; if a book is expensive, I might consider it only if it is right in the centre of my research interests. If it is in a related area, then I will be tempted to buy it if it is affordable.

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And why not sell it digitally for a very affordable price? Im sure many academics now happily read on their ebooks or tablet devices. This takes out the huge cost of a print run.

Having worked in educational publishing i know that very little of the cost of producing books goes into the edit and paying authors compared to printing it!

Bloomsbury/T&T Clark have been publishing much less expensive paperback versions of some of their books a year or two after the hardbacks were released. I assume the more durable hardbacks go to professional libraries, the paperbacks to readers. I have three LNTS volumes on my desk at the moment, two are hardbacks for review, the other I bought at SBL for a quarter the price of the hardback.

However, some of the commentators here do not seem to realize that a lot more expenditure goes into producing a book than printing costs. True, PoD has made it cheap to produce printed books, which is reflected in the rise of self-publishing. However, it is nave to think that if only we all embraced digital technology books would be practically free.

The sad thing is that some (not all!) of the publishers with the highest book prices cut corners exactly on these items, by making the author doing them or not paying much attention to quality. This pretty much defeats the argument that publishing with a prestigious publisher will result in a better book than, for example, self-publishing.

Ian Paul: theologian, author, speaker, academic consultant. Adjunct Professor, Fuller Theological Seminary; Associate Minister, St Nic's, Nottingham; Managing Editor, Grove Books; member of General Synod. Mac user; chocoholic. Tweets at @psephizo

The target audience is presumably other researchers. Researchers normally buy books from grant money or university money, not out of their own pocket, so they are not terribly concerned about the price.

No book is or goes useless when it comes to readership. There are so many libraries (public or school/universities) that buy the latest editions of every types of books. I am from the STEM background, where every new book on technical subjects costs more than USD100. You can find readers of the books from every genre possible otherwise it would not exist. Paying or not paying for the book is a separate topic. I can talk about myself at least. Even though I am not educated in the field of interior design and architecture, yet they fascinate me a lot. And not only that I like to read such publications (books, magazines, etc). I don't like to spend money on things that have shorter lifespan and books are one of them as you read them once and they spend rest of their lives in a nicely decorated bookshelves. I find it unfair. So, I either head to library or ask in my local book circle if someone has or can borrow me or even sell at a cheaper price tag.

Exactly: the target audience is not the average reader. The target audience is the scholar, professional (or advanced amateur) community. How the scholar community pays the books, it is another topic.

To add to the other answers, it may help to understand that these fees are often not paid by real working academics, but are passed on either to university libraries, or to grant funds, or to students (if the book is a textbook). Many universities also have programs where academics can order the book directly through the university library. So the researchers actually working in a field do not experience the cost directly. Unfortunately, that means the publisher can basically set the price to be whatever they want, without any major repercussions.

First, $60 is not really that much for such a book. These days, $20 (which you mention) is the price for a relatively small paperback book. For example, my most recent purchase is Reality is not what it Seems by Carlo Rovelli. This is a short book (c. 250 relatively pages) and it's in paperback and the price was $18 in a regular bookstore. Another is The Investigator by John Sandford. That one is a mystery and truly mass market. It's a very small paperback and about 400 pages. Price was $11.00.

Second, the economics of the book business are such that the author will get a relatively small portion of the cover price. I don't know the exact numbers (which will vary by book, author, and publisher) but I would guess that an author is lucky to get 20% of the cover price and 10% might be more likely. So, that's (say) $10 per copy of that book. And books in niche areas are unlikely to sell many copies. And they take many, many hours to write.

Third, others have mentioned some of the audiences for the book. But, for sure, they are not the "average reader". But I'd like to make another point. I also like to read philosophy. If you look at "price per book" they are indeed expensive. But if we look at "price per hour" they are not. The Sandford book I mentioned took me about 6 hours to read. That's $2.00 per hour. I haven't read the Rovelli yet, but I'm guessing it will take me about 5 hours, that's $4.00 per hour. An academic philosophy book? That will take many hours. They are typically quite long and often fairly dense. 20 hours would be $3.00 hour, and some such books take me longer than that!

This book is not intended for individuals at all. A very narrow range of organizations and specialized libraries are going to buy those books. When I was looking for a copy of the book for academic work, the only copy available through the library search system of my country was located in a library in the capital that is specialized on the general topic (defence) and was only available to read on-premise (unless you were an employee of certain government agencies).

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