NYU Press Helps Establish American Literatures Initiative
Five university presses recently joined together to launch a collaborative project to expand the publication of first books by scholars in the humanities. The five presses—NYU, Fordham, Rutgers, Temple, and Virginia—have established the American Literatures Initiative, designed to create new opportunities for publication in underserved and emerging areas of humanistic scholarship. The venture was formally introduced at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, held in December in Chicago.
The presses will receive $1.37 million over five years from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the initiative. With the assistance of the Mellon grant, which will be administered by NYU Press, the five presses will confront the publishing crisis in literature and literary studies, an area in which the annual number of university press books has declined steeply in recent years, even as the number of new Ph.D.s being awarded has remained relatively stable.
NYU Press Director Steve Maikowski, author of the original grant proposal, said that the initiative will be an innovative, entrepreneurial, cooperative effort to expand the number of books published in literary studies by reducing costs and increasing the audience of readers. Each press will continue to acquire and develop titles according to its own needs and editorial criteria, looking for high-quality first books by promising scholars and seeking out the best scholarly work about English-language literatures of Central and North America and the Caribbean.
The most innovative aspect of the program will be the establishment of a shared, centralized, external editorial service dedicated solely to managing the production of books in the initiative. This service will handle all copyediting, design, layout, and typesetting costs, and manage each title through to the point where it is ready for printing.
“Sixty percent or more of the unit cost of a typical monograph is in these developmental costs,” said Maikowski. “Under our new model, we’ll see significant savings, and each member press can receive electronic files for its books ready for printing and publishing, with most costs already covered.”
Mellon funds will also be used to pay authors modest royalty advances and develop robust, collaborative marketing efforts among the five presses—which will reduce costs for advertising and electronic marketing, publicity, academic conference exhibits, and other efforts.
Another goal of the initiative is the creation of a sustainable model of scholarly publishing in this area of the humanities. Each press will increase its output yearly—up to five books each year—so that after five years, as many as 125 new books will be published that might not previously have been viable.
