COMMITMENT AND CARE
Publishing With a University Press
I N1878, Johns Hopkins University’s first president, Daniel Coit Gilman, founded the Johns Hopkins Publication Agency to publish important material for scholars and the public outside of the academy. “It is one of the noblest duties of a university to advance knowledge and to diffuse it not merely among those who can attend the daily lectures,” said Gilman, “but far and wide.” Gilman was onto something: Nearly one hundred fifty years later, Johns Hopkins University Press—the oldest continuously operating university press in the United States—is just one of over 120 American university presses striving to enlighten readers everywhere. But the conglomeration of the publishing industry and evolving reader habits have significantly changed the U.S. commercial book economy over the past few decades, and university presses now serve even broader roles than what Gilman envisioned—and arguably more indispensable ones. Besides offering regional expertise and deep dives into academic and niche subjects, university presses provide readers with the kind of innovative voices and literary forms that commercial operations can’t always justify publishing because of their bottom line. They also help authors build lifelong careers in a field fraught with financial and professional challenges. That mission serves writers, readers, and the wider world.
Despite their name, university presses don’t just publish class textbooks or arcane scholarship in stuffy tones. They are book publishers like any other, though a larger vision or mission drives them in place of the pressures of living and dying by profit margins. Some university presses specialize in local history and Indigenous culture. Some focus on the American West, others on the American South. For instance, the University of Texas Press publishes some of the best music books in the country. University of Arizona Press provides crucial literary and scholarly coverage of the U.S.-Mexico border. Niche is where university presses excel. So, too, is longevity and the capacity to mark a writer’s place in a larger historical literary tradition. Book series like the Pitt Poetry Series from the University of Pittsburgh Press, the Yale Series of Younger Poets at Yale University Press, and the Iowa Short Fiction Award from the University of Iowa Press connect their authors to their forebears—and are themselves a testament to the durability and consistency of university presses. Many university presses also publish memoirs, essay collections, poetry, and short stories whose forms may be too experimental or unconventional for commercial publishers to touch, like the graphic essays in Dustin Parsons’s collection Exploded View: Essays on Fatherhood, With Diagrams (University of Georgia Press, 2018) or Sorayya Khan’s sweeping memoir We Take Our Cities With Us, published in 2022 by Mad Creek Books, an imprint of the Ohio State University Press.
Many run unique series that focus specifically on a style, genre, or approach. The Machete book series at the Ohio State University Press, for instance, aims to “break new aesthetic ground in nonfiction… from authors whose writing has historically been marginalized, ignored, and passed over.” The University of Georgia Press’s Cave Canem Poetry Prize series is “dedicated to the discovery of exceptional manuscripts by African American poets who have not been professionally published.” The variety of books that university presses publish each year—and keep in print—helps make this a beautiful and opportune time to be a reader and an aspiring author.
If your ultimate goal as an author is to get your book read by people who will appreciate it and to have it produced and distributed by an organization filled with individuals who value your hard work, then consider these many reasons to submit your manuscript to a university press.
The basics
The average reader doesn’t bother worrying about types of book publishers— trade, academic, vanity. Readers just want a good book. But when writers think of book publishers, they often think of the large, well-known commercial book publishers that have historically been based in New York City, like Random House and HarperCollins. The country’s biggest have consolidated over the years into five publishing houses that industry
insiders call the Big Five.
Yes, New York book publishing looms large in the literary culture. Even authors who have never stepped foot in Manhattan know its mystique: literary roundtables at the White Horse Tavern, the sense of achievement from meeting your editor in a tall building in the ultimate big city. The Big Five can offer writers larger advances than university presses can—sometimes by whole orders of magnitude. There’s also a myth that they will necessarily provide better publicity and marketing support. But in that quest for the greatest visibility and remuneration, authors can miss the unique strengths of a university press.
A personalized experience
Marisa Siegel, senior acquisitions editor for trade at Northwestern University Press, sees university presses offering many significant benefits, including a stable, long-term home for the book; a prioritization of quality above profit; the ability to position the author’s work for adoption for school courses, as well as selling to trade audiences; and a more personalized experience, from acquisition to publication.
“Yes, my title is acquisitions editor,” Siegel says, “but I also do developmental edits on the book with the author, and I remain the author’s primary point of contact as the book goes to our production department, goes into copy edits, and gets to cover design and sales and marketing. I’m shepherding it through, so in that way, the author has my personal attention from start to finish. That’s often true at small independent presses, but in the bigger publishing houses, I don’t think there’s one person authors can go to when something isn’t feeling good and they need to talk to make it right.”
Many editors will tell you that university presses also help build careers, rather than just publish salable books.
“We want to build lasting, careerlong relationships at Northwestern,” says Siegel, who also notes that university presses sometimes serve as springboards to commercial publishers. “We can be a first home for an author who might not break out in a big publisher but whose next books after their university press experience may go to bigger publishers.” They can help launch careers this way partly because they can take creative risks when signing books.
Sharing university resources, or having nonprofit status, means university presses are more insulated from fiscal pressures than the Big Five. That means editors can often make decisions that are less driven by the bottom line and more about contributing to a larger body of literature, or elevating a particular voice whose work may be too challenging to sell huge numbers of books, despite its merits, literary and otherwise. Sure, some of the most influential books in the literary canon came out on big commercial presses, and many of the books that sell well are also highly creative, challenging works. But being mission-driven, nonprofit, or partially subsidized by a university affords an editorial openness to challenging, unconventional, formally inventive work.
“On the trade side, I like hybrid work that’s harder to classify and maybe more difficult to put on a bookshelf,” says Siegel. “But because we are doing a lot of work on our scholarly side, it means that I can take a risk on something that might be weirder, and therefore make a little less money, or might be doing something that a Big Five publisher wouldn’t be comfortable putting out. I can’t do this with every project; we need to make money so that we can keep making books, but profit is not the first thing I think about by any means—ever. And for me, that’s how I want to be thinking as an editor.”
Breadth of material
For authors looking to publish their books, university presses offer a multitude of opportunities. “What I love about working with university presses, both as a writer and an editor, is how expansive the idea of good writing is,” says Nicole Walker, series editor at Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction at the University of Georgia Press. “Books can be genrebending, sentence-wilding, subject-dancing, deeply researched, and deeply felt. This broad field is a democratizing force. Writers whose work might not fit a commercial press because it’s not ‘commercial’ enough can find audiences who are looking for books that embrace distinctiveness.”
University presses publish some of the most formally inventive memoirs that come out each year—even as memoir itself is no longer the viable, commercially popular genre it once was, according to some agents. Few commercial presses publish that
many essay collections, which is a form creative writers often study in graduate programs but that some literary agents shy away from representing because essay collections aren’t considered commercial. University presses by and large do not share this aversion. This commitment to all kinds of work hearkens to many university presses’ mission, which is tied to art, knowledge, public service, civil discourse, and the specialties of the institution they are affiliated with.
Crux publishes literary nonfiction written by diverse writers working in what Walker describes as “a variety of modes.” In editing the series for the past two years, Walker has enjoyed the freedom she has to curate a particular aesthetic, publishing work that is “sometimes wild, often imagistic.” She sees this as evidence that the university values the series’ unique literary personality, what it brings readers, and what it reflects about the press itself.
When you’re a writer working in a genre or a style that is not considered “commercial,” university presses provide support, a platform, and recognition. “Having your book published in a series like Crux is an important step in that [career-making] process,” says Walker. “For one it is critical validation for your work by your peers. Additionally, because of the editorial structure of a series like Crux—one that includes a series editor and an advisory board in addition to press staff—an important by-product of having your book selected is the expanded network and community that comes with it.” That’s built into the process.
Jason Bennett, the publicity and social media manager at the University of Georgia Press, points to that community of writers affiliated with a press as part of its career-making powers: not in terms of landing new jobs, but in a broader sense. Crux’s advisory board includes authors Steve Fellner, Kiese Laymon, Lia Purpura, Paisley Rekdal, Wendy S. Walters, and Elissa Washuta—all accomplished writers, respected by their peers. “To have a book chosen by them puts you in great company, and it validates your hard work and talent as a writer,” says Bennett. “Now, none of these people are obligated to raise a finger to help promote these books, but they often do it anyway because they are genuinely enthusiastic about them—and often in ways I can’t even see or won’t know about. This aspect of our work doesn’t necessarily fit neatly in a bulleted list of ‘what’s great about university presses.’ But this is where the community aspect of what we do differs significantly from a large trade press.” To him, facilitating conversations around the press’s books is an essential part of marketing
and promotion. “So, in this context, a series is not just a series; it’s also the people who are a part of it.”
While the Big Five aim for revenuegenerating hits, university presses’ mixture of risk-taking and community support sometimes produces a commercial hit too, like West Virginia University Press had with Deesha Philyaw’s debut story collection, The Secret Life of Church Ladies (2020). Declined by the Big Five, this university press book sold around 30,000 copies in six months, was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction, and won the PEN/ Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction, and the $20,000 Story Prize. Then it got optioned by HBO. So art and commerce can coexist. But it takes the proverbial village.
Staying in print
Although university presses aren’t protected from the vagaries of commerce and individual books’ sales—many still have to fund part of their operation from book sales—their operating model means they are more insulated. That, and the evergreen subjects their books cover, means many university press books stay in print so they can remain available to scholars and educators and be part of an ongoing cultural dialogue. Whereas the Big Five often let their older books fall out of print based on sales histories, some university publishers, like Northwestern University Press, think like a library, aiming to be an archive for authors’ books that exist in perpetuity. That’s another manifestation of a more personalized experience.
Ready to submit?
If you have a manuscript you want published, take a look at a few books that you loved, or that share certain qualities with your book, and find out which university press published them. Your book might fit their wheelhouse and aesthetic too.
Before a writer can sell a book to a commercial publisher, they need a literary agent to represent it, helping with everything from shaping an initial nonfiction proposal to navigating the contract for the sale of a novel. Literary agents are advocates and important guides in the legal world of contracts, rights, and payments. But landing an agent can be difficult and time-consuming, and many agents simply cannot represent the kind of book you want to write—or already wrote. What to do with your poetry or essay collection in a commercial world that publishes few of them? Or what if you’re a prose writer whose agent won’t represent your poetry? Submit it yourself to a university press. No agent, no problem. Follow the press’s submission guidelines and contact the press directly.
Submitting to a university press puts a certain responsibility on the writer to think more holistically about the process, do the research, and make sure the potential publisher is the right one for them. If the legal stuff intimidates you or makes you feel vulnerable, university presses often will have your back there. “I try really hard to go slowly through the contracting process with my authors,” says Siegel. “Editorial transparency and financial equity have become pillars of the work I see myself doing, so for me, with or without an agent, the conversations are the same. I’m making you the same deal whether or not your agent is in the room, I’m not going to lowball you, and I’m going to answer every single contract question that many authors have.” While not all editors have the bandwidth for this level of thoroughness and advocacy, university press staffers are generally there to help unagented authors with contracts and questions.
So what makes a book a good fit for a particular university press? Besides being well written and fitting the publisher’s lists, editors look for a variety of elements in potential books to sign. “Is the author saying something important or unique to the subject?” says Bennett. “Representation is important: Are we publishing books by and for the community we serve? If it’s a scholarly book, is the scholarship solid and does it make a significant contribution to the field? If it’s a trade book, does it fit with our strengths? On the other hand, if a book is outside our established areas of expertise, does it help us grow in areas we’d like to grow?”
And remember, if an editor finds your manuscript promising enough to share with colleagues and outside readers for deeper consideration, that publisher may be asking a similar question: How can the press help you grow as a writer in certain areas while you help it grow? With the right publisher, it works both ways. At a university press, you’ll flourish together.
AARON GILBREATH has written for Harper’s, the Atlantic, Adventure Journal, High Country News, the Dublin Review, the New York Times, Red Canary Magazine, and Columbia Insight and is the author of The Heart of California: Exploring the San Joaquin Valley (Bison Books, 2020), which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award.