Image courtesy of University Press of Florida
Dr. Catherine Cooper: Do people come to you with a proposal? Do they come to you with a manuscript? Do you approach them?
Mary Puckett: Yeah. It’s a mix of all three. Usually, it’s a proposal or an idea and I can help authors put together a proposal. I can tell authors what kind of materials we need to consider their proposal for a contract and to put that together. Sometimes authors send full manuscripts. That’s not as common because usually authors want some, and understandably so, they want some kind of commitment from a press before they put all the effort into writing a manuscript. And also the feedback that you can get just from a proposal can be really helpful for writing the full manuscript. So, it’s usually a proposal, I often reach out to scholars I think would be good authors for our press, authors who are working on some kind of research that fits in with our list or that sounds really interesting or fascinating and so I’ve reached out to authors to ask if they want to publish a book before.
And so there are three main parts of the publication process. So, the first part is the acquisitions part. So, that’s the proposal part and I’ll review the proposal and talk with the author about it. We’ll decide if we want to do an advanced contract and that means that it’s a publishing contract that’s signed before the peer review process. The other route is called a standard contract, and that’s where the contract is signed after the review process. At UPF, our advanced contract process is pretty straightforward. So, we tend to do a lot of advanced contracts. We’ll talk about those details with the author and then we’ll sign the advanced contract and the author and I will decide on a due date for the manuscript.
And then once the manuscript is in, the next main part of the acquisitions process is the peer review process and that’s what really distinguishes university presses from trade presses is that peer review process. That’s the bulk of my job is shepherding manuscripts through the peer review process. I work with authors on that. I choose the reviewers and communicate the reviews back to the author and talk with them about how to move forward with their revisions or anything else that can improve the manuscript. At UPF, we require two peer reviewers to recommend publication in order to move on to the next step.
So, once the peer reviewers approve the manuscript for publication, we then send the project to our faculty editorial board for final publication approval. And the faculty editorial board reviews the review process, which sounds very confusing, but they’ll just make sure that the review process has been rigorous and that the author has responded to the peer reviews appropriately. And so it’s usually a pretty straightforward process of the board approval so long as I’ve done my job appropriately.
The next main big part is preparing the manuscript for our editorial design and production department. So, that’s when the final manuscript is ready to go. It goes to our editorial design and production, or EDP department, and that’s where the manuscript really becomes a book. It’s typeset and placed, copy edited and all of that.
And then the final step is the marketing phase and that’s where the book gets sent to conferences or to bookshops, where it’s physically published, it’s ready to go to buyers. We have a great marketing department, and we have a pretty good idea of how to sell our archeology books for example, and our other disciplines too, I’m just not acknowledgeable about those. But we really appreciate author engagement with the marketing side of things.
It can really improve sales.If the author is good about promoting their book on social media or if they do book talks. Any opportunity that the author has to incorporate their book into their work just to advertise for it in some way is really appreciated by us. And there can also be those little niche conferences that we may not be aware of that we could advertise the book at. We ask authors for those kinds of events or places that we may not know of that we could use to sell the book and raise the book’s profile. So, we really like it when authors are participatory in that process, it’s helpful for us and we learn from it.
Dr. Catherine Cooper: How similar or different would you say it is, and how, to publish a book as opposed to a scholarly article?
Mary Puckett: The review process actually can maybe sometimes take about the same amount of time, which is interesting. Everyone’s so busy and there are all kinds of timelines with COVID delays and things like that these days. So I think the review process could be comparable, but I think it’s definitely more work to write a book than an article. It’s a really sustained argument. Some of the same steps are involved as far as you have to get permissions to publish images and books the same way you do for a journal and images need to be a certain size and resolution and I think that journals have those same or similar requirements, but definitely the book project it’s a long game. I don’t know if I have any specific guidance on how to determine if something is an article or a book. I think if you can think of three or four solid chapter ideas, it could probably be a book.
