Introduction

First Things First

You need to publish.

The first edition of Getting It Published began with that sentence. So let's start with that assumption. Is it still true that you need to publish? There's a lot of discussion on this point, and an endless supply of stories about authors who put their work online and find immediate feedback, or writers who blog and reach more people immediately than they might had they disseminated their work through a more traditional format.

So why is traditional publishing still around? The question has never been more urgent, but perhaps never quite so misunderstood. The enthusiasm for what sounds like bypassing traditional scholarly publication venues is grounded on two conditions within contemporary intellectual life.

First, the sheer potential of digital communication and the extraordinary acceleration in computing power (and simplified design and layout apps) make it appealing for any writer to try his or hand at writing, designing, and manufacturing his or her own book. Beautiful physical objects can be made without the intervention of a professional publishing house. The technology, in other words, has caught up with one facet of authorial desire.

Second, academia is as subject to the currents of economic and professional unrest as any other segment of contemporary society. From Occupy to the growing crisis in adjunct academic labor, this moment is marked by a frustration and resistance to prevailing systems of authority and organization. Some of that frustration has touched the world of scholarly publishing. Why don't I just post my beautifully designed book on my website and make it free to anyone who wants to see it?

For some projects, that's exactly the right decision. But there are two points to be made, one technical and the other political in the broadest sense. Designing something that looks wonderful isn't a cakewalk. Maybe you can teach yourself how to do it, but you may need to pay a designer ahefty sum to to help you achieve your vision. The more important point, however, is that everything you really need from a publisher — a tough reading, suggestions for cutting and strengthening, the approval that puts your work among the select titles on that publisher's list, the money to get your book to people who don't otherwise wander eagerly to your own website — is out of reach.

Self-publishing was once quirky or simply quaint. Now the term no longer seems quite right. Anyone can post anything — a blog, an essay, a booklength study — and, as is often the case, now repost something that has already had traditional, validated publication. Author A publishes an essay in a collection from a major university press and shortly thereafter posts the essay on the author's own website. The boundaries between self and professional, between unsupported and externally validated, are increasingly slippery. They will become only more so.

These confessions of ambiguity may not seem to help the beginning scholarly author, but they're included here to provide a quick but hardnosed look at the conditions within which an academic writer will ponder publication options. So here's the fundamental reality: publishing in traditional forms from traditional venues is, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, still the critical way in which academic achievement and contribution are determined.

In short, writers have never had more opportunities to send their words out into the world, or at least out into the world of the Internet. That's good news for many kinds of writing and for many kinds of writers. But scholarly writers aren't ordinary wordsmiths. They write with a particular purpose and under a particular set of rules. Write at home and post to your website, and you can make accessible to your readers your views on politics or literature or biotechnology. Some scholarly writers do just that.

What motivates scholarly writers isn't the opportunity to blog about Henry James or quarks or Coptic portraiture. Scholars write with more precision and with more precise intent: their work is rigorous and rigorously reviewed and then produced to the highest standards of scholarly publishing. Only then does the work of scholarship really enter the big academic conversation. That's not to say that independently posted writing can't be valuable, but there's no mechanism to help the serious reader separate online wheat from online chaff.

Scholars need publishers to do a lot of things — to help shape the structure that the ideas will take, and sometimes to help clarify the ideas themselves, to proclaim work loud and clear and to do it to the best and most interested audience possible, and to authenticate the scholars' writing within the academic world. Blogs and websites are increasingly important augments to a published book, but the book remains the central means of connecting scholarly ideas to academic minds and scholars to the academy. Some of those books are physical, some are both digital and physical. Even where the digital edition is the primary text, a publisher will supply POD — print on demand — for those readers and collections who want the physical thing itself. Perhaps unreasonably, the academy looks differently at physical books than at digital books. And so for most of the narrative-driven scholarly fields — from literature to sociology, from anthropology to art history, and on through the Dewey classifications — it's the physical book that still shines out as the proof of academic achievement.

The Internet provides many forms of dissemination and access, and they can all look like forms of publishing. Do you blog? Is your blog simply your own site or do you blog for an organization or a publication that also has a print version? Many blogs are gorgeous things — sometimes more handsomely designed than many printed books. Blogs have the further advantage of offering images and links to video and audio and all the wonders the digital world can offer. For some writers (and anyone who blogs is a writer), a blog can feel like a digital homestead, a place to set up camp and declare it to be a space where your word rules.

There are a lot of blogs. A lot. Somewhere in the nine figures, but no one is sure and the number is growing daily. How many academics blog? There aren't reliable figures on this question either, but you can trawl the Internet and come across blogs on almost any conceivable subject, including topics that you might have thought appeal only to a handful of specialists. That's the beauty of the Internet and of blogging. For some scholars, the blog is a short form...