Commercial Versus University Presses

In the second episode of Publish My Book, Avi Staiman explores how to determine if your research is best suited for a commercial or university press and why the distinction between the two categories is key to increasing your chances of publication success. Avi shares some important differences between these two publishing types by posing a series of critical questions aspiring authors should be able to answer about their research and publishing aspirations, including: Do I want to see my published book at an airport? By gaining an understanding of important terminology, including ‘trade publishing’, authors can continue to lay down a sturdy foundation for their publishing journey.

Related resources:

• Which publishing option is best for me?
• Learn more about leading commercial and university presses
• Hear from acquisitions editors: The Authors Handbook to Academic Book Publishing
• Identify your current stage within the publishing journey (and navigate the rest of the journey with success!)

Episode transcript

Hello and welcome to Publish My Book, your one-stop podcast for navigating the publishing journey from manuscript draft to published monograph. In each episode, we'll dive into a specific topic on the road to publishing your manuscript to offer you clarity, confidence, and an increased chance of publication success. I'm Avi Staiman, host of the Publish My Book podcast. Over the past 10 years, I've had the privilege of being the CEO of Academic Language Experts, a company dedicated to helping researchers and research institutions publish their high-quality humanities and social sciences research with respected academic publishers. During that time, I've worked with thousands of talented scholars from research universities and colleges to museums, foundations, and scholarly associations around the world, shepherding their research from ideation to publication. Now I've teamed up with the incredible team at the New Books Network to share everything I've learned about the journey with you, to help you streamline your process and transfer your idea into a book published by your dream publisher. Publish My Book, here we go.

In today's episode, we're going to talk about the differences between commercial and university presses. You may be familiar with different kinds of university and commercial presses that are part of the scholarly presses, or scholarly publishers. University presses are generally those presses that have a university name within them. So, for example, that would be Harvard University Press, Yale University Press, and Cambridge University Press. Some commercial presses you may be familiar with include Brill, De Gruyter, Routledge and other big names. Now, the real question is, what's the big difference and is there a massive difference between publishing with a commercial press and a university press?

I'll start of by saying that I wouldn't put too much into this big distinction and I would start by thinking about the particular publisher that you want to publish with and what it is they are known for. What do they have a reputation for? What types of books do they publish? That should be a better gauge for where you want to publish as opposed to whether it's commercial or university. However, there are some important general differences that are important to be familiar with before you go about choosing which publisher is best for you.

I want to start out by saying that just because a press is a commercial press does not make it, in any way, a predatory press or a press that you should avoid. Just the opposite. Sometimes, commercial presses can be some of the most respected presses and publishers of academic scholarly content. However, there are some important differences. One of the things we can say in general about university presses is that they're less pressed or they have less pressure to publish as many manuscripts as possible, which can be a good thing if we're concentrating on high-quality academic content. On the other hand, their timelines to publication tend to be a lot slower than the commercial presses, and therefore, if you're in a rush and you need a few publications out for your promotion or to get a job in a university setting, you may want to consider commercial presses that can turn around your publication faster. The next thing that I would say is that there's been a trend across the spectrum, both among commercial and university presses, towards what's known as ‘trade publishing’. Trade publishing is the idea that books are not just to be consumed or read by as large of an intellectual audience that could potentially be interested in your project. And that's really important when you're thinking about putting together a winning book proposal, which we'll talk about in our next episode, is to think about “how can I prepare my book in a way where it will potentially sell”.

There are differences between different publishers in this realm. In fact, sometimes the university publishers actually are looking at the sales component in a lot closer light than some of the more niche commercial publishers that may have expertise in, let's say, 15th-century religious studies, and may understand and know that they're not going to sell that many books. So what's really important is, again, to go back to your bibliography, go back to your area of expertise and ask yourself, who is publishing in my field? What are the respected commercial publishers? What are the respected university publishers? Now again, in terms of the university publishers, some of them, especially for example, Harvard and Princeton, have really gone in a direction to try to popularize science. You'll see from their book covers that they're quite flashy and exciting and attractive. Sometimes, these books even make it into the mainstream readership. For example, you may be crossing through an airport and actually see a Princeton University Press or Harvard University Press featured there alongside other books from Penguin and other publishers. And that may be something that really excites you or that might be something that you say, no, that is not for me. And that's another good way of distinguishing whether you should be publishing with a commercial press or a university press.

So again, to summarize, there can be good presses that are commercial presses, there can be good presses that are university presses. The most important thing to do is to look at the individual publisher, look at their series and what they're interested in and think about do you want to go more towards the trade route of publishing, where it's going to be a larger audience but maybe less in-depth, versus a more specific niche title that you want to publish that's only going to be relevant to a small handful of researchers but really does a deep dive. That will help you come up with your decision-making criteria for which publishers you want to send to.

Thanks again for joining us on the Publish My Book podcast. Be sure to check out the show notes for links to some of the other resources we mentioned and hit the subscribe button to get notifications every time we publish a new episode. Until next time, keep on forging ahead with your research and moving forward on the road to publication.