Meredith Benjamin
Communications Coordinator, AAUP
The buzz for the 2010 AAUP Annual Meeting began long before the meeting touched down in Salt Lake City, as the diverse and varied program made its way online and the Program Committee’s Facebook page developed an active following. The meeting itself more than lived up to the anticipation, with almost 530 individuals in attendance for a packed agenda of panels, speakers, workshops, and real life social networking.
Three pre-meeting workshops got the meeting off to a bustling start, with close to 150 attendees in total. “E-Book Publishing in a Nutshell,” organized by Alan Harvey (Stanford University Press), addressed issues in e-book publishing from manuscript to customer access and featured presenters who outlined processes in action at their presses. Presenters at “Not Your Father’s Marketing: New Strategies in the Digital Age,” organized by Colleen Lanick (MIT Press), shared how they have adapted their current marketing strategies to keep up with today’s readers, wherever they may be. The Financial Officers Meeting found success in coordinating its schedule with the Annual Meeting this year, with 34 participants discussing the issues they are facing at their home presses.
On Thursday, attendees also had the opportunity to take a trip to the J. Willard Marriot Library at the University of Utah, where they were treated to a tour which spanned book history: beginning with clay tablets and rare books and concluding with a demonstration of a book printed in five minutes on the Espresso Book Machine. In between, attendees also received a tour of the Book Arts Studio, made their own “zine” on the history of book printing, created a letterpress bookmark, and viewed the American Institute of Graphic Artists 50 Books/50 Covers exhibit.
Attendees gathered that night for the Opening Banquet, where they were welcomed by Executive Director Peter Givler. The 2010 AAUP Constituency Award was presented in memoriam to Will Powers, who served for 11 years as the design and production manager at the Minnesota Historical Society Press. Presented by Betsy Litz, the award was accepted by Pamela McClanahan, director of the Minnesota Historical Society Press, on behalf of his wife, Cheryl Miller.
The Opening Banquet also featured a memorable keynote speech by William Germano, Dean and Professor of English Literature at The Cooper Union, and scholarly publishing veteran. Exploring the theme, “What Are Books Good For?” he took his listeners through the history of books, beginning with “scholarly work before the term was invented,” and traced four stages, characterized by the relationship between data and narrative. In conclusion he said, “We are the case for books.”
At the Friday luncheon, Kathleen Keane, 2009-2010 AAUP President gave her farewell address to the membership in which she acknowledged the challenges presses have faced in the past year, while looking optimistically to the future. The following afternoon, Richard Brown assumed the presidency, leaving the audience with a message of “not naïve optimism, but hope,” in his inaugural address.
If you were not able to attend the meeting, missed a session because of another held simultaneously, or simply want to have a second look at the presentations, many are available via the Annual Meeting Wiki and the online program.
The 2011 AAUP Annual Meeting will be held June 2-5 in Baltimore at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront. There is already a new buzz building for the 2011 meeting, and AAUP Annual Meeting Program Committee Chair Gita Manaktala (Editorial Director, MIT Press) is collecting ideas for session topics and speakers. We hope to see you there!
The Whiting Diversity Grants, Whiting Newcomer Grants, AAUP/WiSP Professional Development Grants, and Early Career Grants (funded by CrossRef and BookMobile) were awarded to staff at AAUP member presses to facilitate their attendance at the 2010 Annual Meeting. Upon returning to their home presses, the grant recipients prepared reports describing their experiences and what they took away from attending the meeting.
Darrin Pratt
Director, University Press of Colorado
During my first year working in university press publishing (1991), I attended a Midwest Presses meeting hosted by my employer, Indiana University Press. Little did I know that this opportunity would not be repeated as often as I would have liked. I did not show my face at another AAUP meeting until Western Presses in 1998 in Berkeley, and I have had only infrequent opportunities to network with and learn from my colleagues at other presses since then.
Nevertheless, every AAUP conference I have attended has been extremely valuable, because of the lessons learned, the connections made, and the reminder that the difficult issues we face we do not face alone. Because I’ve always garnered much from these gatherings, I would like to send someone from my staff every year. Unfortunately, I have only been able to do so twice since 2000, both times sending our marketing manager. Justifying the cost of this fantastic resource is difficult for a press with limited resources.
So I was excited to hear that the annual meeting was going to be held in Salt Lake City, only an eight-hour drive from the Denver area. That may sound like a long trip to you folks from the East Coast, Midwest, or South, but when you live in a big Western state, any other major conference-hosting city is often at least that far away. Here was an opportunity to take my entire staff at a reasonable cost (because who knows when we might next afford the trip for just one), if, of course, I could convince everyone to spend hours together in a car and to share hotel rooms. Fortunately, the five of us get along well, so the prospect was only moderately horrifying and my staff was amenable to the plan.
Happily, the trip was well worth our time and efforts. My hat is off to the program committee for concocting one of the most energized and practical programs for dealing with the changing landscape of publishing, one that focused on moving us forward instead of looking back at what we (think we) have lost. For those of us at Colorado, this was the perfect opportunity to contextualize our efforts to adjust to the changes wrought by our increasingly digital world—and to get some great ideas from our many peers creatively addressing the same issues.
One big problem with working in publishing out West is that, as noted above, you’re a long way from anywhere most of the time. Presses like Colorado don’t get many opportunities to talk shop with other like-minded scholarly publishers in a face to face setting. You can start to feel isolated and unsure of the path you are taking, particularly in the turbulent publishing climate we all face today. So hearing what others were doing with respect to e-book sales and delivery, XML workflow and conversion, and the like was both reassuring (none of us have all the answers just yet) and stimulating (there’s more than one way to skin a digital cat).
As it turns out, the trip was not without incident—one of our cars broke down on the drive westward. Even so, we all are glad to have had the opportunity to attend this meeting and hope to have many more opportunities to do so again. Speaking on behalf of everyone at Colorado, we’re ready for our next road trip!
AAUP posthumously awarded the 2010 AAUP Constituency Award to Will Powers, for 11 years the design and production manager at the Minnesota Historical Society Press (MHSP). The award was established in 1991 to honor staff at member presses who have demonstrated active leadership and service to the association and the university press community.
The award was announced on June 17 at the 2010 AAUP Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City. Betsy Litz, Production Manager at Princeton University Press, introduced the award, describing Powers as “embody[ing] everything that is so wonderful about the AAUP.” The award was accepted by Pamela McClanahan, director of the MHSP, on behalf of his wife, Cheryl Miller.
Among Powers’ numerous accomplishments while at the MHS Press, five of the projects he worked on were honored by the annual AAUP Book, Jacket, and Journal Show. He began his career in publishing as a typesetter at Stinehour Press in Vermont. He went on to establish his own fine press, Amaranth Press, in San Francisco, while also doing editorial work for the University of California Press and North Point Press. Moving to Minneapolis in 1988, he worked briefly for an advertising agency, and returned to book design with Stanton Publishing Services (BookMobile) before assuming his role at MHSP.
Over the years, Powers served the AAUP community in a variety of ways, with a remarkable generosity of spirit. Colleagues remember his willingness to share advice and information with others on the AAUP email lists, and to mentor students, interns, and young colleagues. He moderated and participated in numerous panels at the production managers and annual meetings. At the 2004 Annual Meeting, he distributed a chapbook he had developed, New Types for New Books: What We Have; What We Need, which subsequently went into three printings. He was a member of the Design & Production Committee in 2007, and served as its chair in 2008.
Powers passed away on August 25, 2009. Together, the Minnesota Historical Society Press and his wife Cheryl Miller compiled a chapbook celebrating his life and work, A Tribute to Will Powers, where colleagues, family, and friends shared memories and photographs.
Meredith Benjamin
Communications Coordinator, AAUP
In May 2007, when the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation announced its plan to fund collaborations among university presses, excitement about the possibilities of the program abounded. Just over two years later, fourteen grants have been awarded, and some have reached the stage of having published works to show for their progress. Four directors from presses that are part of collaborative grants convened at AAUP’s 2009 Annual Meeting for a panel entitled “The Mellon Collaborative Publishing Grants: Reports from the Presses,” and some spoke with the Exchange later to fill out their comments.
All four of the projects represented have the aim to publish in underserved areas of the humanities, often prioritizing scholars’ first books. The Modern Languages Initiative (MLI), for example, arose when the presses involved noticed that while program enrollment in Modern Languages was up, publication was down. Junior scholars in the field were thus having difficulty getting tenure books published, explained Fred Nachbaur, Director of Fordham University Press. Fordham is collaborating with California, Penn, Virginia, and Washington on this new program.
The Ethnomusicology collaboration, led by Indiana University Press in conjunction with Kent State and Temple, focuses on the way in which field of ethnomusicology is underserved by traditional monograph publication. The group received a one-year planning grant to research the feasibility of developing an online platform for the multimedia content (audio/video) that is frequently an essential component of scholarly works in ethnomusicology. Janet Rabinowitch, Indiana Director, explained that the presses also worked with the Society of Ethnomusicology on the project, to ensure that the proposed platform would best serve the needs of scholars in the field.
A few common themes can be found amongst the collaborations: their work with the Mellon Foundation helped the publishers to clarify and focus their aims, the grants raised press profiles at their parent universities, and working with other presses proved both challenging and extremely rewarding.
Moderator Steve Maikowski, director of NYU Press, provided a perspective from a collaboration entering its second year, the American Literatures Initiative (ALI). NYU works with Fordham, Rutgers, Temple and Virgnia on the initiative. Maikowski acknowledged the various challenges that the presses dealt with in their first year working together, but said, “the good news is, we have good books published now” – a sign of successful collaboration by any standards.
Press groups dealt with the practical aspects of collaboration in a variety of ways, but all agreed that communication among group members was paramount, despite its challenges. J. Alex Schwartz, Director of Northern Illinois University Press, member of the Early American Places Initiative with the University of Georgia Press and NYU Press, suggested that it “has to be somewhat official,” if presses with their own standards and customs, working hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles apart, are to successfully collaborate. Maikowski echoed this idea, emphasizing the necessity of having someone who is clearly directing the program, as “an enormous amount of work [must go into] management.”
While receiving a Mellon grant is certainly a major boon for a press, it does come with its own set of obstacles. The distribution of grant funds was a practical concern that occupied an unforeseen amount of staff time. Some directors noted the difficulty of re-opening acquisitions pipelines in subject areas that the press may have not published in recently.
However, all the directors seem to agree that the benefits far outweighed the challenges. Beyond the obvious advantage in cost savings that comes from pooling resources, Schwartz described the “creative dynamic” that resulted from working with other presses, and the “different mindset” which was necessary to approach the collaborative project.
Nachbaur counted among the advantages for smaller and mid-sized presses the opportunity to benefit from staff at partner presses who occupy positions that may not exist at others. The MLI initiative for example, has one person at each of the five presses handling a different aspect of marketing for the project’s titles.
The cooperative process has also served to motivate staff members. Schwartz explained that his staff has felt more like a part of a larger community as they work on this “serious inroad in scholarly communications.” This sense of community extends beyond the publishing side of the process. Nachbaur believes the initiatives have created an “intellectual community for the [subject] area.”
At the panel, Maikowski expressed a hope that the collaborations might result in the development of efficiencies from shared resources, which could potentially have an effect greater than a one-time cost savings. His hope is that “reducing the cost of publishing monographs [will] mean we can keep publishing them.”
The integration of e-publishing into the grant projects varies. Initiatives like the one in ethnomusicology have focused on formats beyond the traditional monograph, and the most recent grant was awarded to presses who will study the viability of a collaborative university press distribution system for e-books. For the grants focused on first books, however, Maikowski explained that Mellon did not want a digital-only outcome. The grant did provide funds for the conversion of print-ready PDF files through XML to make books available in digital format, an option that NYU Press, among others, has taken advantage of.
Many of the valuable lessons learned during collaboration have resulted from staff at different presses being forced to re-think the way they do things and re-evaluate certain aspects of their own press culture. The standardization of work-flow inherent in collaboration has led presses to try reduced print runs for books outside the initiatives, and experiment with new printing models, such as paperback originals versus dual editions or lower-priced hardcovers.
Maikowski gave an example of how his initial impulse was to attempt to lower costs by hiring more junior copyeditors with lower hourly rates. Convinced by his partners to go with more experienced copyeditors, he was pleasantly surprised to find out that their overall cost was lower, as hourly rates were higher but efficiency led to fewer hours per manuscript and a lower per page cost.
Within the grant-funded collaborations, press groups have already learned from each other. The ALI initiative developed an outside managing editor model in which all participating presses send their copyedited manuscripts to the project editor hired by the presses and receive back print-ready PDFs. The model ensures uniformity, and keeps costs predictable, as the group pays per manuscript. Maikowski described this model as “scalable,” and it has already been adopted by the Early American Places and Modern Languages Initiative groups.
As scholarly presses continue to search for new and innovative ways to continue their work of publishing high quality scholarship, these new projects provide a model that could be valuable even outside of grant-funded programs. Maikowski envisions this as a possibility, particularly for presses who are not able to increase their staff, but are looking to grow their list.
In addition to the four initiatives represented at the panel, six other grants have been awarded to press collaborations. Four additional grants from the Mellon Foundation have been awarded to presses partnering with their universities and other institutions on publishing projects. AAUP has recently compiled a listing of the collaborative Mellon grants received by university press collaborations to date.
Despite tough economic times and tightened travel budgets, nearly 500 members of the scholarly publishing community turned out in Philadelphia for the 2009 AAUP Annual Meeting. As always, the sense of collegiality and community that is a hallmark of AAUP pervaded the meeting from the first plenary sessions through till the late night receptions.
Two pre-meeting workshops got AAUP’s time in Philadelphia off to a great start, as the nearly 35 registrants for each had the chance to devote a day or more to hear from their colleagues on how they have faced some of the most pressing challenges publishers face in the digital era. “Rights and Permissions in a Digital Marketplace” attracted staff from all areas of university press publishing, and provided valuable information on how some presses are dealing with the challenge of digital rights and content. “Electronic Marketing” was also well received and featured lively discussions on topics from effectively utilizing social networking media to the relative benefits of “giving away” content.
Attendees came together on the first night of the meeting for the Opening Banquet, where they were welcomed by Executive Director Peter Givler. Historian Michael Zuckerman delivered the keynote speech, in which he took the unusual tack of describing the histories of “horses, and watches, and perhaps a bit about radio and newspapers,” in order to demonstrate that “many reports of many technological deaths have been greatly exaggerated.” He closed memorably by exhorting the audience: “when we go— if we go—let’s go gloriously, honorably, and, above all, joyously. There’s no crying in publishing.”
The Opening Banquet also saw the presentation of the 2009 AAUP Constituency Award to Tony Crouch.
Panel and roundtable sessions covered a wide variety of issues facing university presses today from formatting books for e-readers, to connecting the press with the parent university to the always popular “best practices” sessions in which colleagues share both what has worked well for them and what they wish they had not done.
The annual meeting is always a time of transition in AAUP leadership, as the current president becomes the past-president, and the president-elect assumes the reins. Alex Holzman, 2008-2009 AAUP President, gave his farewell address to the membership on June 19, in which he advocated for finding a new model for e-book production and distribution, despite the many challenges that will need to be worked out along the way.
The next afternoon, Kathleen Keane assumed leadership of the AAUP as she gave her inaugural address.
One of the most memorable talks of the meeting, and surely the most controversial, was Michael Jensen’s “Scholarly Publishing in the New Era of Scarcity,” part of Plenary 4 on Directions in Open Access Publishing. Now available on YouTube, the recording of his talk has now received over 1,000 views – not bad for a video on scholarly publishing! In his talk Jensen advocated that presses move towards a digital publishing model with a focus on open access, as a means of saving not only university press publishing, but civilization as a whole. Detailing frightening signs of environmental collapse, he implored the audience: “Please don’t think of me as a doomer – but I hope I’ve scared the hell out of you.” Judge for yourself at: http://www.nap.edu/staff/mjensen/scarcity.html
If you were not able to attend the meeting, missed a session because of another held simultaneously, or simply want to have a second look at the presentations, many are available via the Annual Meeting Wiki and the online program.
Recordings of the entire meeting, individual sessions, and the Electronic Marketing Workshop are all available from Conference Media.
The 2010 AAUP Annual Meeting will be held June 17-20 in Salt Lake City at the Salt Lake Marriott Downtown. The 2010 Annual Meeting Program Committee, chaired by Greg Britton (Publisher, Getty Publications), will meet in September to discuss ideas for the program. If you have ideas for sessions or wish to participate, please e-mail Greg Britton at gbritton@getty.edu. We hope to see you there!
The Carol Franz Memorial Grants, Whiting Diversity Grants, and Whiting Newcomer Grants were awarded to staff at AAUP member presses to facilitate their attendance at the 2009 Annual Meeting. Upon returning to their home presses, the grant recipients prepared reports describing their experiences and what they took away from attending the meeting.
Read more about the grants.
On June 20, 2009, John Hopkins University Press Director Kathleen Keane assumed leadership of AAUP. Keane will serve a one-year term, and succeeds Alex Holzman, director of Temple University Press.
Keane began her career in university press publishing in 2002, when she joined the Johns Hopkins University Press as director of finance and operations. She was appointed director of the press in 2004, assuming oversight of an extensive publishing program which includes 200 books and 70 scholarly periodicals per year, in addition to the online collection Project MUSE and customer services operation and fulfillment for 16 client presses.
Keane has been a member of the AAUP Board of Directors since 2007, serving for the past year as president-elect, and was a member of the Task Force on Committees from 2008-2009.
Before moving to the world of university press publishing, Keane worked in commercial medical publishing, holding positions at Harcourt Health Services and J.B. Lippincott & Company. Keane earned her bachelor’s degree in English from Connecticut College and a master’s degree in English from Catholic University of America. She received her M.B.A. from the Colgate Darden Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia.
In her inaugural address at the AAUP Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, Keane discussed the various challenges facing university presses today, and some of the innovative ways in which presses have approached them:
The 2009 AAUP Constituency Award was presented to Tony Crouch, Design and Production Director at the University of California Press, on June 18, 2009, at the AAUP Annual Meeting in Philadelphia. The award was established in 1991 to honor staff at member presses who have demonstrated active leadership and service to the association and the university press community.
In introducing the honoree, Martha Farlow, production manager at the University of Virginia Press, described him as “one of the most knowledgeable, generous, and green individuals in our community.” Crouch’s nomination was supported by many in the AAUP community who have benefited from the wisdom and insight he has shared over the years. The nomination letters all noted his generosity in sharing his time and experience with all levels of staff.
Crouch has served in his current role at the University of California Press for 21 years, and announced in his acceptance of the award that he would be retiring at the end of June. He received his initial training for the world of print and publishing in the UK before emigrating to Canada. He was the design and production manager at McGill-Queen’s University Press for seven years before assuming the role of Director of Publishing for the Province of Nova Scotia.
While at California, Crouch became involved with BookBuilders West, eventually serving as director, and receiving their Distinguished Service Award in 2002. In 2005, he was inducted into the PrintMedia Hall of Fame, marking the first time a member of the university press community had been selected for the honor.
Crouch’s commitment to sustainable publishing has been notable over the years. Calling him the university press community’s “Green Superhero,” Farlow recalled how he began investigating chlorine-free and recyclable papers in the early 1990s, and helped establish a corporate sustainability program at California in 1995. In 2009, California received the Sustain Print Award for Longtime Leadership presented by Book Business magazine.
Over the years, Crouch has served AAUP in a variety of capacities. He served on the Program Committee in 2003-2004 and 2007-2008, on the Eco Task Force from its inception in 2004 through 2007, then the Eco Subcommittee of the Design and Production Committee from 2007-2009, served as a Whiting Week-in-Residence host, and spoken on many panels at various AAUP meetings. In the wider publishing community, he has managed a book show for the Publishers Association of the West, and taught courses at the Stanford Publishing Institute. Crouch has been a valued member of the scholarly publishing community throughout his years of service, and the impact of his contributions will continue to be felt long after his retirement.
By Colleen Lanick, Publicity Manager, MIT Press
The news that the Los Angeles Times Book Review, after more than thirty years, would cease publication in its freestanding format and merge with the opinion section of the newspaper made headlines from Galley Cat to an interview with former book review editor, Steve Wasserman, on the NewsHour. This is not shocking news to anyone who has been following trends with book review sections lately. It just seems like the latest in a growing list of newspapers shrinking coverage for books. In recent years, the Boston Globe’s book section was cut in half and folded into the “Ideas” section; the San Francisco Chronicle’s book section was cut, but after public outcry from their readers, restored, though in a slight four-page edition; and the Chicago Tribune’s book section was moved from Sunday to Saturday, the day of the week with the lowest circulation.
Now just a year after the highly publicized and protested news that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution had eliminated its book review editor, Theresa Weaver, the Hartford Courant has laid off its book editor, Carole Goldberg, and major cuts were made at both the Raleigh News & Oberver and Newark Star-Ledger. Chris Watson was abruptly let go from the Santa Cruz Sentinel (but was then given the opportunity to continue writing two weekly columns on books, with less column space and only on a contract basis). And Marie Arana, long-time book editor at the Washington Post Book World, one of the last freestanding book sections in the country, will take a buy-out at the end of the year. The future of that section also seems unstable.
It’s clear that this recent list of cuts and restructuring is not going to end soon. Because space is so limited, it’s become more difficult for publicists to count on securing coverage for university press titles in many of the traditional venues we counted on for so many years. Reporters I talk to and the editors I meet with who still have book sections remain very interested in MIT’s titles and are always looking for interesting and timely books and authors to feature on their pages. But vying for space on these pages has become very competitive and editors simply cannot cover all of the titles they would like to cover given their space restrictions. We now have the challenge of looking for alternative places for getting attention for our titles. “While it is true the review sections in many print media have either evaporated or shrunk, the internet provides a vast wealth of opportunity to publicize our authors’ ideas,” Christian Purdy, Publicity Director at Oxford University Press, commented on the situation. “Also, many traditional print publications are becoming much savvier with their online presence and with a growing readership for many loyal readers. This too can be new fertile ground for review attention.” The Boston Globe has a wonderful blog (Brainiac), as do the New York Times Book Review (Paper Cuts) and the Los Angeles Times Book Review (Jacket Copy)—just to name a few. All of these blogs seem to be thriving and even growing with interesting content and large readerships.
To make up for the decreasing review coverage, more and more publicists and authors are looking to online sources and broadening the focus of pitches to newspapers and magazines beyond just contacting the book review editor. Ranjit Arab, Publicity Manager at the University Press of Kansas, says they’ve seen the writing on the wall for some time now. “We’ve really made a concerted effort over the last few years to find ways of offsetting dwindling review space,” he said. “That has meant getting more coverage off the book pages, encouraging authors to contribute op-ed pieces, and targeting any number of high-profile blogs and Web sites—all of which can impact a book’s success just as much as a review in a mid-major newspaper.” At Princeton, this dip in both major and second-tier newspaper coverage has also sent their publicists and authors to the internet as well and is allowing them to be even more creative on with their pitches, according to Andrew DeSio, Princeton’s Publicity Director. “Places such as TruthDig and Bookslut are great for general book coverage, but also more targeted blogs such as Marginal Revolution, Brad DeLong, Dani Rodrik, and Econlog are great for our economics books and Kaus Files, Bloggingheads.tv, Daily Kos, and Instapundit” for political authors, DeSio said. “Finding targeted, renowned, and influential blogs/websites is indeed the way of the future. Also, we’ve been pitching for more off-the-book page coverage at the newspapers, as book reviews aren’t the only places that feature books. Op-eds have also been very effective at creating awareness of an author or book.”
One could argue that it is the newspapers themselves that are in such peril and it’s not the death of the book business. It is also important to notice that some book sections are actually expanding their sections. The Wall Street Journal has expanded its daily book coverage and given it more prominent placement in the paper, and the Austin American Statesman has a new-ish regular feature dedicated to university press books. Online, NPR has also just launched a regular book review feature on its website. Cleary this is not the norm, but it’s important to note that there are still some thriving book sections—both online and off.
Some still view a review in the print version of a newspaper as more authoritative than a blog post or online only review, but I think this perception is slowly changing as websites are becoming more relevant and exciting content is being posted online. I doubt that the thrill of a call confirming a pending review in the New York Times Book Review will cause publicists to simply shrug rather than do run down the hall screaming with delight, but it’s time to stop complaining and to look in a new direction, while continuing to engage with the reporters and editors we’ve been working with in the past. “Personally, I find this media proliferation exciting,” says Arab. “It is shaking up the old model, taking away influence from a few traditional sources and putting it in the hands of some new players, so it’s not a matter of publicity outlets disappearing—they’re simply reemerging in other forms. As long as we continue to publish timely and interesting books, we shouldn’t have any trouble attracting the outlets that reach our intended audiences.”
by Brenna McLaughlin
In 2006, the planners of the electronic publishing workshop decided to create an AAUPWiki to house the knowledge that would be shared and created at the event. The moderators edited the wiki on the fly, demonstrating the power of the tool to attendees as session notes became wiki articles.
After the workshop and the 2006 Annual Meeting were completed, additional meeting session notes and presentations became the backbone of what is intended to be a long-standing and dynamic resource for all AAUP members. As the AAUPWiki founders wrote on its main page, “The goal of this wiki is to be a living encyclopedia of best practices in scholarly publishing.”
Since its launch, the conference knowledge of two more annual meetings has been added to the AAUPWiki. In addition to the contributions of the wiki’s original developers and meeting attendees, the AAUP Business Handbook editors recently decided to post the Handbook articles on the wiki site, and the Marketing Committee is now considering posting the Marketing Handbook.
The AAUP community has a rich tradition of sharing advice, experience, and ideas. Not-for-profit publishing is for the most part a collaborative and supportive, rather than competitive, endeavor. The wiki platform allows for community editing and content creation, and it is the association’s hope that members and committees will continue to take advantage of this great tool.
I encourage you to go explore, learn from, and add to the resources now available at http://aaupwiki.princeton.edu. While the AAUPWiki is publicly accessible to search and read, AAUP members must register at the site in order to edit content. (This is a light layer of security to balance both access for the AAUP community with protection from spammers.) If you presented at a session at the Montreal meeting and would like to post PDFs or slide presentations for the wiki, please contact me at bmclaughlin@aaupnet.org to have that posted and linked. Thanks must go to Chuck Creesy and Princeton University Press for hosting and administering the AAUPWiki.
AAUPWiki: http://aaupwiki.princeton.edu
2008 Annual Meeting Knowledge: http://aaupwiki.princeton.edu/index.php/AAUP_2008_Annual_Meeting
The AAUP Annual Meeting was held June 26-29 in Montréal, Quebec. Resources from the meeting, including speeches and Power Point presentations, will be posted to the Annual Meeting web site over the next few weeks: http://aaupnet.org/programs/annualmeeting/2008/
Look for articles the 2008 Annual Meeting in the next Exchange!
Information on registration, programming, grants, and pre-meeting workshops are now available at the Annual Meeting website: http://aaupnet.org/programs/annualmeeting/
Several grants are available to offset costs of attending the Annual Meeting. Questia is sponsoring a grant for individuals from small to mid-size presses, and the Whiting Annual Newcomer Grant will be offered to eight individuals from member presses that have not previously attended the meeting. The Whiting Diversity Grant is available to minority staff with at least one year of experience at a member press, and the Richard Eckersley Memorial Grant will be awarded to one emerging university press designer. All grants carry a deadline of April 10. Information and applications are available on the website: http://aaupnet.org/programs/annualmeeting/2008/grants.html
By Ann Wendland
Marketing and Sales Manager, University Press of Colorado
Why I chose not to go to AAUP 2007 (and got to go anyway)
Chances are, if you’re in sales and marketing, no-one from your department went to the AAUP meeting in 2007—less than half of the presses represented sent sales and marketing staff. Perhaps you felt that you just couldn’t allocate the time and money. That’s why I chose not to go.
Like yours, my schedule is maxed. A department of one, I’m responsible for every aspect of sales and marketing for the University Press of Colorado. A hundred good causes vie for every minute, and, worse, they tear apart every dollar. AAUP 2007 appeared in my draft budgets, but in the end I felt that I had to reallocate the money.
Questia, which awards three full-ride fellowships to the meeting for employees of small to midsize presses, gave me a grant, so I went after all.
To my surprise, I found that attendance would have paid for itself in directly related net sales within a month. The meeting also helped me free up time and will have long-term sales benefits. Colleagues offered information that contextualized my decisions and lent experience that helped me shape efforts in quickly changing parts of the field and areas in which I’m less knowledgeable.
Free time
Just before the meeting, I’d made a time-dictated change to advertising and exhibit planning that I wasn’t certain would benefit sales. I had been planning ads and exhibits on a book-by-book basis that required extensive research and laborious scheduling. This year, I dedicated 90% of ad and exhibit budgets to recurring venues—journals in which we would advertise regularly and exhibits in our niche subjects. Long-term agreements with ad reps, recurring deadlines, and templates for journal and program ads saved a lot of time, but I felt concerned about narrowing our focus.
]At AAUP 2007, speakers emphasized that in the current climate for university presses, publishing in niches and regularly touching base with target audiences in those niches is the best route to strong sales. The venues I’d chosen for ads and exhibits matched the lists that the director would highlight in the next strategic plan, so I set my concerns aside. Had I not attended, I might have continued to doubt my choice. Now, I can spin it as a shrewd marketing decision to brand the press through repetitive exposure and visual consistency. Really!
Other panelists also freed up time. I cheered (internally) when publicity panelists mentioned that we should just tuck materials into books because press kits get tossed. When colleagues shared their runs of review copies and galleys, which I’d assumed were higher than mine, it turned out that I could stand to trim. Time and money saved.
Free money
Ideas and information from AAUP 2007 gave a quick boost to our sales through bookstores and online vendors, helped me market the press back to member institutions (Colorado is a consortial press), and gave me key information that will support long-term projects.
The quickest boost came from conversations emphasizing the importance of promoting backlist. On returning home, I reviewed our sales with Barnes & Noble, alerting buyers to perennial sellers that B&N had dropped or sold an abnormally low percentage of. They immediately bought hundreds of books for a net sales boost of several thousand dollars. (It’s not much, but it would cover a conference and it took one day.) I worked with sales representatives to develop a backlist promotion offer for independent booksellers.
Several sessions reinforced the value of robust book pages online, especially at Amazon.com. At home, I confirmed that Amazon.com sales have grown since we improved our pages recently. I stepped up efforts, incorporating uploads of reviews and blurbs into regular routines and initiating participation in Amazon’s “Search Inside the Book.” I gave Dial-a-Book the OK to post excerpts on prominent sales sites and ensured that our books turn up in Google BookSearch. These projects might have languished if AAUP 2007 sessions hadn’t reinforced their importance.
For an easy basket, I adopted a speaker’s suggestion to include names of supporting institutions in ads, promoting our member universities to thousands of people. Board members can use that information when they advocate for increased subsidies. Time required: three minutes.
Two long-term priorities for the press—increasing foreign sales and gaining course adoptions through direct mail—require me to build certain knowledge and skills. Related sessions offered the expertise of some of the most successful presses in each area, allowing me to take advantage of what they’d learned over years.
Profitable Conversations
Sales results of serendipitous conversations at AAUP 2007 would be hard to quantify, except to say that the meeting crowds were studded with the very wholesalers and review editors that we allocate significant time and money to meet.
Writers from six book reviews attended. I enjoyed broader conversations with a couple of them than typically occur in publicity meetings. The sessions helped me make more of their reviews, too. Now, I’m quickly posting them online and using them in e-marketing. As suggested by Blackwell’s AAUP delegate, I emailed new Choice and Library Journal reviews to Blackwell and received an immediate response.
A spirit of collaboration drove the meeting: people shared detailed, useful information both in and out of sessions. At every turn, I found a happy chance to meet or reconnect with colleagues from other presses, wholesaler honchos, industry associates, AAUP staff, sales representatives, and consultants with coveted expertise.
In the hotel bar, consultant and former Oxford University Press U.S.A. director Laura Brown sat beside me and we chatted about library sales (a conversation with the co-author of the Ithaka Report on university presses and libraries that I certainly couldn’t have budgeted). Here’s my favorite of her suggestions: take a librarian out to lunch. She had lamented how few publishers talk one-on-one with librarians. The head acquisitions librarians of our public and university libraries were delighted to meet with me and each offered valuable information about recent and upcoming changes in buying methods.
See you next year?
Quick corrections and opportunities that came up at AAUP 2007 saved our press enough and earned enough to pay for the meeting. Long-term benefits of streamlined work and increases in sales will come from key information that people shared in sessions and casual conversations. If, like me, you chose not to go to the 2007 meeting (and if no-one handed you a free pass that made it impossible to resist), I hope I’ll see you in Montréal this June.
Up-to-date information on the 2008 AAUP Meeting can be found at http://aaupnet.org/programs/annualmeeting/
Minneapolis, MN
The 2007 AAUP Annual Meeting was a great success, bringing approximately 600 scholarly communications professionals together in the Twin Cities. While the cocktail parties are long over, the knowledge-sharing that the annual meeting is known for continues.
* Talks, session notes, and presentations are available through the AAUPWiki: http://aaupwiki.princeton.edu/
* The inaugural presidential address by Sanford Thatcher, Director of the Penn State University Press and 2007-08 AAUP President is online: http://www.aaupnet.org/programs/annualmeeting/2007/pres.html
* A list of volunteer mentoring contacts was compiled by Laura Westlund (Managing Editor, University of Minnesota Press) and distributed at the Newcomers’ Reception. The list can be accessed by members: http://www.aaupnet.org/members/mentor07.html
NOTE: this is a members-only resource. A member ID and password is needed to access this. Members may request login information here: http://aaupnet.org/pwrequest.html
* MP3 recordings of almost all sessions are also available for purchase: http://www.conferencemedia.net/
At the 2006 Annual Meeting
by Brenna McLaughlin
Communications Manager, AAUP
The French Quarter looks almost untouched. Bars, restaurants, galleries, and shops are open; there are none of the tell-tale high-water marks that scar much of the rest of New Orleans. Some shops are shuttered, there are some signs promising that this or that local favorite will re-open soon. There is one major difference, though, in the French Quarter since Katrina—the people. There just aren’t that many of them. Certainly, there were tourists, residents, and workers about in mid-June, but by numerous degrees fewer than years past. The Quarter seems oddly quiet (excepting the almost desperate boisterousness of Bourbon Street)—more like a shore town in the off season than the bustling year-round convention city that New Orleans had become. The city, home to close to half a million people before Katrina, is now estimated at a population of around 200,000.
The business-as-usual veneer on New Orleans’ tourism center is almost enough to fool some first-time visitors who haven’t yet gotten a glimpse of the city beyond the Quarter into thinking that NOLA residents and officials are exaggerating the extent of the damage, underselling the extent of the recovery. As I waited for a table at Café Du Monde, for the de rigueur café au lait and beignets, two of these visitors stood behind me. Unhappy at the unexpected delay, one groused, “And they say New Orleans is still struggling.” “Doesn’t look that way to me,” the other agreed. To give them the benefit of the doubt, they may have arrived seconds too late to see why we were queuing. A large party, maybe 30 or more, had crowded in just before me. Not tourists—they wore t-shirts indicating a Presbyterian volunteer group and looked to be taking a deserved break from helping New Orleans in its, yes, continuing struggle to recover from the natural and man-made disasters of 2005.
Location is always an important part of the experience of an AAUP Annual Meeting, and it was, plainly, an extraordinary factor in 2006. When the meeting was originally scheduled to be held in New Orleans, reactions varied from chagrin over the summer bayou heat to reminisces of freewheeling New Orleans conventions past. After Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, and destroyed the New Orleans that we had known and expected to visit, the board and program committee’s reaction was unanimous: if the hotel was in a condition to host AAUP 2006, we would be there.
Attendance numbers at the meeting were surprisingly unaffected by the decision to stay in New Orleans, although on an individual level it was often a major factor. Some, worried about the city’s strained services, decided to stay home this year; others made coming an unusual priority. And for those who came, the meeting’s mood was uncharacteristically subdued—despite reported excitement about the program and appreciation of the good food and good service that the city is still proud to provide. New Orleans’ reality was inescapable.
At the opening banquet, Jim Amoss, editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, shared his truly gripping story of the daily newspaper’s experience in reporting their city’s disaster. In addition to the recognition its breaking news reporting received, the Times-Picayune rightfully won a Pulitzer service award for its efforts to get news to city residents stranded without access to basic information about what was happening. A tiny detail, mentioned in passing as Amoss concluded his presentation, threw the massive scale of this civic disaster into sharp relief. His home phone service had been restored only the week before—more than nine months after the hurricane.
A small group of AAUP attendees were able to gain a more immediate sense of the disaster’s scope and the significant human and cultural loss. Generously organized and led by Michael Mizell-Nelson, Assistant Professor of History at the University of New Orleans and content coordinator for the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, and Greta Gladney, a graduate student in the UNO history department, 4th-generation New Orleans resident, and post-Katrina activist, a small tour was driven through some of the most devastated neighborhoods in the city, including the Lower Ninth Ward. Scott McLemee, a writer for Inside Higher Ed who took part, later reported in his column, “It was overwhelming—too much to take in.” Another participant posted a shaky video from the trip on YouTube, and even at this distant remove, McLemee’s words ring true.
I was able to take a bus trip run by one of New Orleans’ commercial tour companies; these are not yet permitted through the Lower Ninth Ward. Other areas of the city were equally, if differently, shocking. Neighborhoods such as Gentilly (which experienced the second highest death rate) and Lakeview show at first glance not the utter ruin of the Ninth Ward, but an eerie ghost-town appearance of normality. I found myself looking out to miles of still-standing densely-built low-rise residential blocks. They look, at a glance, just like the city neighborhoods a conference-goer such as myself would have no reason to ever visit, the neighborhoods where many of us live in cities across the country—where people live, work, pack their bags for travel, and expect to come home to.
Focusing my eyes on these streets, though, and looking closely at the houses, I saw the high-water marks, the evidence of rot, the empty windows, and, most frighteningly, the spray-paint markers of search-and-rescue teams. Few people are yet living in these homes, few working from them, and there are too many reminders of those who found they’d packed their bags for good in August 2005.
The tour bus driver, who was also the guide (the company no longer had enough staff to cover absences even with the minimal tour schedule presently running), quietly personalized the trip, pointing out along the way the home which he is slowly rebuilding, the house where he had grown up, the neighborhoods where family and friends no longer live. It was a shocked and sobered assortment of strangers—from California and Tennessee, from Florida and New York—whom he then asked to write a letter to our senators and representatives, to turn a trip of mourning into a kind of mission for recovery.
It is, in the end, a small gesture: to support, with what financial might we can muster, the city’s brutalized tourism and convention economy, and to bear witness back to our own home regions of the conditions our fellow citizens are still living under. But the small gesture of one individual or organization can have real effect when multiplied by all of us—by 600 scholarly publishing representatives, by the 17,000 librarians who came to New Orleans the following week, by 30 Presbyterian volunteers, and even by two impatient, perhaps just not-yet-caffeinated, café patrons.