Who's getting the million dollar book advances?
A bunch of higher ed links:
- Walter Russell Mead writes about university presses and lots of other problems in academia.
- Big data on campus.
- Unbundling higher education. (Thanks to Jeremy S!)
- UK is going to publish all scientific journals online for free. (Thanks Artemisia)
Why are people attacking lemonade stands?
It's bad when executives at tech firms tell us that we're spending too much time online.
Apt. 11d 
With my husband’s latest book, the university press editorial people have been very slow and often unreachable. Aside from that, the contract was written long enough ago that nobody was thinking much about ebook format at the time. The press’s normal way of doing things is not selling their ebooks via Amazon but through their website!!! My husband is offering to do the ebook production himself, but he is still waiting to hear back from the university press. Ideally, the book should go on Amazon as a reasonably priced ebook (although I understand that the press is not going to want to accidentally undercut their print sales).
He’s worked a long time on this book, and it would be such a waste of effort to botch the book launch.
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Thank you for the link! Long day here and I just saw it.
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Book deals for the 99%:
“Thing is, for most writers (and I include myself here), about 80% of those levels never get used: The vast majority of book publishing deals are ‘nice.’ However, using one adjective to describe both the $1000 book deal someone gets from a teeny university press and the $90,000 book deal from the major New York publisher is obviously ridiculous. A $1K book deal and a $90K book deal are quite clearly not equivalent; one is, oh, 90 times better than the other. If only for sheer honesty’s sake, there needs to be book deal rankings that accurately reflect what deals really get done and the financial quality of those deals for the writer.”
Read the whole thing for the rankings.
Also the follow-up post, “Why a Shitty Deal is a Shitty Deal.”
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What is this “advance” that you speak of?
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“A $1K book deal and a $90K book deal are quite clearly not equivalent; one is, oh, 90 times better than the other.”
As a matter of fact, no. The $1k book deal might get you tenure while the $90k book deal might not, and the $1k book deal may be very important in future salary developments. There’s a lot more in play than the author-publisher transaction.
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Scalzi is writing about trade publishers, the sole home (afaik) of the million-dollar advances Laura mentioned in her post. University presses, with the possible exception of OUP, are a funny little corner of publishing.
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The $1,000 advance is explicitly mentioned as coming from a “teeny university press.”
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Any of you have a good idea of what the typical university monograph print run amounts to? Not the best sellers that fulfill their cross-over potential, but ordinary monographs that appeal to almost no one outside academia? Those numbers have been dropping as the costs of journals and database subscriptions escalated even faster than the books’ price tags.
We’ve killed scholarly publishing in more ways than one and simply attacking high journal subscription costs won’t solve the problem. I’m wary about the UK initiative as it turns around and pours the cost back on the researchers’ shoulders, to wit
Under the new scheme, authors will pay “article processing charges” (APCs) of around £2,000 to have their papers peer reviewed, edited and made freely available online.
So, goodie! Imagine being the poor grad student, adjunct or post-doc who’s stuck with that bill.
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I don’t know how the UK will work things, but NIH funding rules have already caused similar changes for most U.S. journals in medicine. They all have exceptions for need. Basically, is you have a government grant, you can pay because costs of publications are in the grant. If you don’t, you don’t pay.
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