University Presses - Advice welcome!

Hi tom. I can't specifically address your questions but I think the answers just might lie within their websites. I expect they'd have a list of titles and you could determine from that if what you have in mind might be a fit.

Hello,

When I first started querying, I was also advised to try a couple of university presses (with a regional tie-in to my subject) along with agents. I got better responses from agents, so that's the direction I kept going.

You can research university presses in much the same way you look at agents: the various writing guides, websites. While many of them are supposed to be moving towards appealing to the "serious general reader" I've found that many of those University Press books (despite eye-catching titles and covers) till read very much like scholarly works.

Does the subject of your book lend itself to a particular region or university's area research?

Good luck!

Susan

Keep in mind that university presses are generally on a non-profit model for small run books (c.f. textbooks).

Both University of Nebraska and University of Oklahoma are very strong in the Western History (read - Frontier America) market, and have paperback outlets as well (Bison Books comes under the University of Nebraska). That said, they can afford to be pretty selective about what they take in.

You'll find that the UP needs vary greatly depending on the focus of your book. If it's self-help or home improvement, I'd say you'd be better off looking elsewhere.

I shopped my first book to a few university presses and received rejections.

Then later I found the perfect publisher for the book and it's done well ever since.

I've spoken to an author who has written for university presses, and his experience has not been that great. His criticisms included poor communication between author and publisher, poor promotion, and poor distribution. Now, I don't know if these are universal among all university presses, but that was what he told me. He told me I was way better off for going with the publisher who published my book.

Many university press books are too scholarly for my tastes. I've picked up a few and I see looooong sentences and big words. IOW, by the time I got to the end of the sentence, I had forgotten what happened at the beginning of the sentence.

On the other hand, I own a university press book that I was quite satisfied with, and that was this one about WKRP.

It's a good, well-written and well-researched book about the show. Now if you look at amazon's listing, you can see a few negative customer comments, but those are beside my point. My complaints about it are awful cover and bad title, and that's what you might get with a university press.

And the reason Bowling Green University Press published it is because I believe the author was a professor there. It is my humble opinion that the book could have found a larger publisher.

allen

tombookpub said:

. . . what types of non-scholarly books do these book companies publish? . . .

Click to expand...

Allow me to recommend careful study of their catalogs and examination of their submission guidelines. Most catalogs should be on the Web these days, and guidelines available on request if not on the Web.

--Ken

Hi Tom,
One of the nice things about university presses (especially state-funded unis) is that they usually have some kind of mandate to publish books of regional interest, and while they'd like to make money, it's not their main goal. Most editors at university presses I know publish texts of interest to their particular university, scholarly works by professors, and books of regional interest or by regional authors. It can be a good match. One thing to remember about Uni presses, though, is that because they don't necessarily publish to make a ton of money, they also can have very haphazard distribution.