Two random observations about academic publishing, written between batches of grading

1) John Scalzi offers a none-too-gentle reminder that professional writers like himself do, in fact, work for money, and not for free.  Academics like myself, meanwhile, have the opposite problem: we spend a lot of time shamefacedly correcting people convinced that academic authorship is the yellow-brick road to riches, when, in fact, we tend to work for either pennies (relatively speaking) or books.  I've reached that phase in my career when--gulp--I occasionally get asked to write things, and I'm delighted, even though any payment is likely to be in books, not cash.   There are ways to make money off academic writing: books that appeal to the general public (Oxford, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale all turn those out from time to time); textbooks (usually not valued from a professional POV if you're at an R1, but potentially a source of $$$, especially in STEM fields); and anthologies (especially if the anthology has "Norton" somewhere on the cover).  That being said, the debates over soaring textbook prices have brought the ethics of #2 starkly into question--along with the rise of open-source and in-house textbooks, such as my own college is now calling for--and the spread of e-texts may eventually cut sharply into #3*.  Most of us, though, see little or no money for our deathless (or deadly) prose--I think Book One earned me about $250-$300 in royalties while it was in print, and the final check, issued in pounds sterling, was so small that the fee to cash it would probably have been more than the check's value.  I'm still toting it around in my wallet. 

2) I've written before about academics defecting to edited collections instead of journals, which was already A Thing when I was working for Modern Philology in the late 1990s.  Edited collections have at least one major upside: usually, the editor has vetted your abstract and pre-approved your chapter, so you know that the final product has somewhere to go.  Unfortunately, they also have at least one major downside: editors who can't place the collection anywhere.  (Editors! Please find a publisher first!)  Alas, one article I wrote back in 2011 has suffered death by cancelled collection, which means that I now have to find somewhere else to put it.  Now suitably revised, of course. (Um, anyone out there want an article about monarchy films?)  Of course, having a publisher doesn't always guarantee publication.  The very first article I wrote after arriving in my current position experienced a moment of crisis when the publisher that commissioned the collection decided that, eh, it really didn't want to print another book in 19th-c. studies at that particular moment.  Editor: Unprintable! Us: Unprintable! (The article, on Grace Aguilar, did get published eventually.)   

*--Although many free e-texts still aren't ready for prime time: there remain significant issues with typos, copytexts, non-existent annotations, and the like.  Still, I do use them regularly when the alternative is making the students spend even more $$$. 

Comments

[Flavia]

Well, we academics do make money off our writing--but it's all indirect: it gets us a tenure-track job, or tenure, or a new job, or a raise.

And wouldn't most of us take a position equivalent to Scalzi's--that we're not writing something for someone else for free unless it adds a line to our vita (or serves some other professional end)?

The nature of the compensation is different, but the attitude is, I think, analogous.

[Miriam]

True, although I think that once you get outside the R1s, many academics are publishing for reasons that don't easily link up to any sort of money (e.g., some scholars I'm familiar with who teach at community colleges). Or publish out of proportion to any possible compensation (as at colleges like ours). There's professional recognition, but given the decreased job mobility for senior faculty, even that doesn't translate well into $$$...

[Justin O'Hearn]

Is there a balance an academic can strike between writing for an academic audience and a more popular audience? We all like to think our topics are fascinating to the world (or should be) but they are usually inaccessible to that broader audience. I, for one, would love to share my work with all possible audiences. Would this mean writing two versions of things or selectively choosing publishers?

[Miriam]

Big, sweeping books (even if they're big, sweeping books on a single thing) have more of a popular audience than a monograph. There are also questions of jargon, style, even footnotes...