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[00:00:00] Andrew Hibel: Welcome to the HigherEdJobs Podcast. I'm Andy Hibel, the chief operating officer and one of the co-founders of HigherEdJobs.

[00:00:06] Kelly Cherwin: And I'm Kelly Cherwin, the director of editorial strategy. Today we'll be talking about getting your book published with a press. Our guest is Greg Britton, who is the editorial director of Johns Hopkins University Press, where he manages the selection of 150 new books annually. He also acquires the press’s award-winning list in higher education studies. Prior to his appointment at Hopkins Britain directed Getty Publications at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Greg is a friend of HigherEdJobs who's been connecting us with some great books over the years. So, Greg it's so nice to have you here today.

[00:00:36] Greg Britton: Kelly, it's great to be here. Andy.

Andrew Hibel: Great to see you, Greg.

Greg Britton: Nice to see you.

[00:00:41] Kelly Cherwin: Before we dive into the questions of publishing, for those people who aren't quite familiar with the university press, can you tell us what a press is and what your role is at the university press?

[00:00:50] Greg Britton: Sure, the word press is sort of a misnomer. Really we are a publisher, we're a university press publisher, which means we're based at a university and we [00:01:00] publish books that are scholarly and general interest books. But really there are books written by academics, by professors, and scholars. Everything we publish is peer reviewed. So what a publisher really does is to select manuscripts to vet them through peer review.

And to improve them through developmental editing and copy editing and proofreading. And then to design and package them, have those books manufactured and then turn around and market and promote them and sell them to a global audience. So really the publisher is connecting authors with readers.

[00:01:38] Andrew Hibel: And how would a university press/publisher be different from a non-university publish?

[00:01:45] Greg Britton: That's a, a really terrific question because we are often compared to trade publishers now, a trade publisher is like a, maybe a New York House that might publish a wide range of popular books [00:02:00] for general audience. The big names that publish bestsellers, university presses, try as they might don't publish bestsellers.

They're publishing books with a dual mission. One is to promote scholarship and scholarly work and the other is well, let me put it this way, a trade house is driven by a profit motive. Okay. And a university press as a nonprofit publisher is driven by a sort of dual mission of promoting scholarship and being able to do it in a sustainable way. So we sell books, but we sell books. So we make enough money to be able to do it again.

[00:02:42] Kelly Cherwin: So, you've referenced books. Can you just give us a little background on the difference between publishing in a journal versus a book.

[00:02:48] Greg Britton: Sure, like a university press, like Johns Hopkins has a really well established and enormous journals publishing program. We publish about 110 scholarly [00:03:00] journals annually. Now, in addition to having a journals division, we also have a books division. Think of the difference between those two containers. They both publish scholarly content, but they do different things. I like to think of them as just different tools. A journal reaches a specific scholarly audience.

It comes out periodically. Maybe it's monthly or maybe it's quarterly. There's a faster turnaround, and articles are often in digestible size so that a reader could quickly pick up the latest scholarship in a certain field. Now a book has a really different trajectory. A book tends to be longer, but it has a much longer shelf life.

Books tend to last over time. I think of them as being like nodes in a conversation so that the books are the main drivers of that [00:04:00] scholarship, but so much is happening in journals. There's a faster turnaround. Those aren't the only ways that scholars connect. Scholars are also communicating these days on the web, on podcasts, on blog entries.

They're writing articles in the popular press. I'm always looking for scholars who are engaged with their own community, but also engaged with a broader public.

[00:04:25] Andrew Hibel: Thank you. That's really fascinating. If you're someone who's inclined to actually go out and consider publishing a book, what's the number one step they should take trying to get a book published?

[00:04:37] Greg Britton: I think before you contact a publisher, there are a couple of things you should ask yourself. The first thing I think an author should or potential author should ask themselves is, what do you wanna say? And the second thing is, who do you wanna say it to? This question of audience is really key to the work of authorship [00:05:00] is knowing who that person is or who that group is and what do they need to hear.

We are, as anyone knows, flooded with information. There are so many demands on our attention that readers are impatient with information that doesn't give them something they need immediately. And that's true for books too. And so what I love for authors to do before they contact a publisher is really work out in their minds.

Who are they writing it for, and what do those people really need right now? Now if you can answer those two questions, the third thing you should do is to do a little homework on who the best publisher is for that work. Publishers like many different media focus in certain key areas. At Johns Hopkins, for instance, we publish in eight core areas, and one of them is in higher education.

We also publish in the life sciences, we publish in [00:06:00] public health. We publish in health and wellness in some other key fields, and then in some humanities and social science fields. But really for an author, you should, rather than trying to publish. You might broadcast your book proposal around to hundreds of publishers.

It would be far more effective to do a little homework and find the five key publishers who publish in your area. Now, how do you do that? One way you can do it is by turning around and looking at the bookshelf behind you, and those are probably the books that are most top of your mind, and those are books that are published in your field.

Look at the spines of those books and you'll start to see a pattern of the publishers who are publishing in your key field. Another way is to look at the journals that are published in your field. In the back of those journals are going to be ads for publishers. Those are publishers who are active in your field, or go to [00:07:00] your annual conference, your annual meeting, and walk around the book exhibit, and you'll start to see a pattern here of publishers who are really active in your field. Those are the ones you should be targeting with your book idea.

[00:07:13] Kelly Cherwin: That's great advice. So I have a question. So you're doing your homework and you find the presses that you wanna reach out to and you answer those questions and say your proposal is accepted. Can you kind of give a little bit of insight into like what the timeline is? What does that look like for a new author? What, what can they expect, what the process is going to be?

[00:07:31] Greg Britton: I wanna back up a little bit and you said after your project has been accepted and, and really there's this middle step that I think is the shaping of that idea. Some authors will approach a publisher with a book proposal. Editors at different presses all have sort of different ways of wanting that information. I usually like for an author to begin earlier than the book proposal with a conversation [00:08:00] with me about what their idea is and how they hope to turn it into a book and that conversation could start with an email, you know, just to, here's my idea.

What do you think of it? Is this a good fit for you? And if it is, then I might ask for a book proposal and a sample chapter. There are a couple of really good resources for authors wanting to do this. Probably one of my favorites is William Germano's book, Getting it Published, which is published by the University of Chicago Press, and that is a great overview of scholarly publishing in that whole process.

The same author William Germano, also wrote this really terrific book called From Dissertation to Book for someone specifically wanting to turn their dissertation into a book. This is a great guide, and it's thankfully under about 150 pages, so it's not a big time commitment. There's a third book that I wanna tell you about [00:09:00] and that is, do you mind if I'm doing a commercial for other publishers books?

[00:09:04] Kelly Cherwin: I'm sure they love it.

[00:09:07] Greg Britton: No. This is Laura Portwood Stacer’s book, The Book Proposal Book, A Guide for Scholarly Authors published by Princeton University Press. And this is a terrific resource for authors wanting to navigate, you know, how do I start a book proposal?

What does that look like? A typical book proposal does a couple of things. It's, it convinces me as an editor that I want to publish this book. Second, it gives me a tool that I can take to the team I work with and convince them that it's worth publishing. An acquisitions editor is the champion of a project, but I don't, ultimately, I'm not the decider of what we publish.

I pick projects that I then present to a team of people and convince them this is worth [00:10:00] publishing. And that team is made up, well, first of all, I, I get the proposal or a manuscript peer reviewed, which means I send this out to other scholars and they write me back reviews saying, this is really worth publishing, or you shouldn't bother with this.

Or usually the, the reviews come back and they're somewhere in between saying, this is worth publishing and here are the ways you can make it better. Okay, well with those reviews in hand, I take this to first an internal committee that's made up of our head of marketing, our head of sales, our head of finance, the person who does design and production, and my fellow editors at the press and that group discusses the project and decides whether it's a good fit for the press, whether it builds on our program in higher education, for example, whether it competes with something else we publish.

Or whether it competes with something that a, that another press has [00:11:00] just published. Those are the conversations that happen. And then there is a third step after peer review and then this internal discussion at a university press. And that is, I present it to, um, our faculty editorial board. For a final conversation, and this is a board made up of faculty from the university here, from Johns Hopkins, and they read these proposals and they read those peer reviews and they give us advice on, you know, this is worth putting our name on.

And once a book has gone through that process, then we would offer the author a contract to publish the book. All of that happens before we get to the sort of production stage of publishing.

[00:11:43] Andrew Hibel: Greg, what would be some of the common questions you'd receive from perspective authors in that early stage of the process?

[00:11:50] Greg Britton: You know, publishing is unnecessarily opaque. A lot of more junior and even senior scholars don't necessarily understand what a [00:12:00] publishing house does, and they ask all sorts of questions not knowing what the process is. And so I'm happy to have an author ask anything. And the most common questions are about explaining the process.

How long does this take? What will you do next? What will my involvement be? There's a lot of anxiety because it appears mysterious, it appears to happen behind closed doors, the decision making. So I like to be as communicative as possible with those new authors. I think the hardest thing is this turn that happens, which is writing is a difficult task, and it happens independently.

It's a solo activity. It's a, it's a solo sport. And then you approach a publisher who says yes, and it all of a sudden becomes a team sport. Every author uses this metaphor, this is my baby and I feel so uncomfortable [00:13:00] with, this is my baby, cause it feels like someone is handing you a child. And what's going to happen is we're going to raise that child.

I think by the time a book is published at Hopkins, there are 40 people who have touched that book in some way, and that might be a copy editor, it might be a proofreader. It might be someone who built the website for that book or wrote the jacket copy that goes on it, or the person who calculated and tracked the royalties that that author will earn.

Um, there are lots of people in that team who are doing different things, and authors are in many ways reluctant to turn their baby over to this group. Now this is a group of professionals who know exactly what they're doing, so sometimes it's talking the author through that entire process.

[00:13:54] Andrew Hibel: Do you find once somebody has been through that, a repeat author is after having their [00:14:00] baby raised by a clan of 40 folks, are they desensitized to it the next go around? Or is it, it takes a few rounds of this before people start understanding this is just the process?

[00:14:12] Greg Britton: No, I, I, I think the best authors are the ones who understand that just as they are expert in their field. That they are working with a group of experts in their own fields. So the person who is doing book design knows book design better than that author does, and those authors learn to trust the expertise of those other people.

Where we run into trouble is when the author thinks, this sometimes happens, that they know book design better than the professional. So those lead to different conversations.

[00:14:47] Kelly Cherwin: I have a question regarding how a potential author gets to go from being an individual to being part of the team. So I'm assuming you are a pretty popular guy.

And you're getting a lot of emails and phone calls and [00:15:00] proposals. So how do you decide, how do you sort through all of these, I'm sure great ideas?

[00:15:05] Greg Britton: A publisher once described this to me. He said, Greg, you're like standing on the edge of this beautiful stream and this beautiful babbling brook, and all you have to do is dip your cup into it and you will find wonderful things, except the stream keeps running and you're going to miss other things.

I'm not sure it's that easy. I probably get eight to 10 book proposals. There are times I'll get eight to 10 a day, depending on the time of the semester. The first decision I make when I open an email is to ask that question of fit. Is this something that fits what we publish? If it's something that doesn't align with what we do, it's an easy no.

For example, if someone proposes a memoir to us, which people do remarkably frequently, I think that's an easy no. And had they done a little bit of homework, they would know. We don't [00:16:00] publish in that field. And when I see those, I think this author is broadcasting their proposal to everybody, including my competitors and my colleagues at other university presses.

If it is something that that aligns with the areas we publish in, then I take a step back and think, is this a book about a topic that is important? Is this a book that says something unique about that topic? You know, is this book timely or is this rehashing something that we probably already knew?

Those are hard questions, but I'm asking these ruthless questions in a very short amount of time with very little information. I wanna know that this is saying something new, that I think people will want this information, and then I want to know that this author understands who they're writing for. So, another question I'm asking very quickly is, who's the [00:17:00] audience for this?

And then finally, I want to know, is this author the right person to tell this story? Do they have the standing to do what they say they want to do? And that's super important.

[00:17:15] Kelly Cherwin: And I'm guessing a part of your job is probably pretty difficult because you kind of have to look into a crystal ball and predict the future. Like, is this book, is this topic going to be relevant in a certain amount of time?

[00:17:26] Greg Britton: Yeah. You, you asked earlier about how long a book takes and manufacturing a book, actually printing a book takes a very short amount of time, but because of current schedules and the demands of online bookselling, we actually have to deliver metadata to the big online bookseller about eight to 12 months in advance.

So we're scheduling out about a year. That means I always coach authors, you know you're writing for an audience that exists a [00:18:00] year from now, and so you both have to write in a way that is evergreen and you have to project forward into the mind of where those people will be. Now, I earlier talked about the affordances of books.

This is a real problem with books. There are slow moving tools or slow-moving vehicles. Maybe if, if something is faster breaking, maybe a journal is a better place to publish, or maybe it's an op-ed in another form of media.

[00:18:31] Kelly Cherwin: For example, HigherEdJobs

[00:18:33] Greg Britton: For, for example, and all of these exist in this sort of media landscape that books have this permanence that maybe HigherEdJobs doesn't. You know, you are putting out a new piece every couple of days, and although we're publishing at a pretty fast rate, we publish a new book in higher education every two weeks. That book has been planned for about a year out. [00:19:00]

[00:19:00] Andrew Hibel: Greg, thank you so much for all this inform. I've learned a lot. Uh, do wanna let folks know out there if you have questions or, or thoughts or anything you wanna share with us, please feel free to email us at podcast@higheredjobs.com or send us a tweet at higheredjobs.

We'd love to hear what, what your thoughts might be about getting your book published or working with university presses. I think it's a, it is such an interesting part of the academic community. Listening to your bio as we started, how did your path get you to an academic press? And it seems like it's been a fulfilling career for you, why have you enjoyed it so much?

[00:19:39] Greg Britton: You know, I have the best job in the world because I get to talk to scholars and researchers about what they're working on right now, and I hear ideas, I hear their ideas sometimes before anyone else has ever heard them, and that makes it a really exciting job. [00:20:00] I sometimes think that editors, you know, we're, we are not academics, but we exist in this middle space between scholars and academics and readers, and we are translating, I sometimes think we're like embedded journalists along with troops. We're not doing the fighting, but we're there in the trenches doing the reporting of the fighting that happens. Um, that's probably two militaristic metaphor for this, but I think of publishers or editors is being as attuned to what's happening in scholarly fields as anyone, and that makes it really.

[00:20:41] Andrew Hibel: Thank you. As you say that it, it very much resonates with me personally because as a career website, we're really kind of similar to that. We are not here to interview candidates or go to employers and give feedback from candidate interviews. We're here to try to have that [00:21:00] conversation happen between the parties and often get to have the privilege of watching the match be made.

And there, there is something about that, that there's magic in that moment and being a part of it. Very, very personally taking some pleasure from that, but not taking away anybody else's pleasure from them in the process. And that is kind of a great place to sit.

[00:21:22] Greg Britton: Um, yeah, it really is.

[00:21:25] Andrew Hibel: Thank you so much, Greg for joining us today. We really enjoyed the conversation and uh, hope we can get you back some other time.

[00:21:31] Greg Britton: Andy Kelly, thanks so much.

Kelly Cherwin: Thanks Greg.

[00:21:34] Andrew Hibel: And thank you for listening and we look forward to having you join us again on the HigherEdJobs podcast.