By Daniel Penrice
Northeastern University Press doesn't publish diet books, fitness books,
pop-psychology and -spirituality books, or ghostwritten exercises in celebrity
self-promotion. Its books are not conceived or marketed for their "synergy"
with the television programs, cable channels, movies, videos, or CDs of
giant media conglomerates. Compared with commercial publishing today, this
is life in the ivory tower.
On the other hand, say the editors at N.U. Press, academics with warmed-over
doctoral dissertations or jargon-ridden monographs should save themselves
the postage. And if you wandered into your local Barnes & Noble this
fall, you might have been surprised to discover-there amid the stacks of
I Am Jackie Chan and Sugarbusters! ("Cut Sugar to Trim Fat")-a
display featuring a plump, copiously illustrated collection of interviews
with female opera stars, published by Northeastern.
As a university-based publisher with a mission of advancing knowledge,
N.U. Press-along with more than 100 other nonprofit academic presses in
America today-occupies an increasingly significant niche in an industry
that has changed ominously in recent years. The media conglomerates, with
their relentless demand for maximum profits, have swallowed up all but
a remnant of "trade" publishers (the term for for-profit companies
issuing titles sold in conventional bookstores). At the same time, commercial
bookselling has fallen to the dominance of chains such as Barnes &
Noble and Borders. As the corporate giants tighten their grip, both the
caliber of commercially published books and the financial health of the
publishing industry have suffered. In these circumstances, university presses
offer a beacon of hope for readers worried about the future of quality
publishing.
Yet to begin to meet such hopes-and indeed to ensure its own survival-university-press
publishing has had to venture out of the cloister. Today, 120 years after
America's oldest continuously operating university press was founded at
Johns Hopkins University for the purpose of disseminating scholarship,
academic publishing is a different kind of enterprise than it was even
two decades ago, when what would become the Northeastern University Press
was established.
All of which suits Bill Frohlich, N.U. Press's director and editor in
chief, just fine. Since 1977, the year of the Press's founding, he and
his colleagues have transformed it from a shoestring operation whose second
title (a volume of physics-conference proceedings called Experimental Meson
Spectroscopy) sold all of 500 copies into a publisher with sales of well
over $1 million on thirty-plus new books annually, regular reviews in the
New York Times, and, yes, coveted shelf space at Barnes & Noble. In
the process, N.U. Press has had to learn an increasingly demanding discipline:
publishing good books and getting more than a handful of customers to buy
them.
"In the early days," Frohlich recalls, "we were purists
in terms of the kinds of books we did. We thought that selling 600 copies
was doing fine. Now I get very upset when I think of being able to sell
only 600 copies of a particular book. So the times have changed dramatically."
How N.U. Press has weathered the changes so far, and what it must do to
stay around for a while, could be the subject of a book titled "The
Art of Survival."
Bill Frohlich came to Northeastern in 1976, after sixteen years in commercial
textbook-publishing. His job at first was to lead the university's now-defunct
Publishing Group, which offered printing and related services to other
departments. When Frohlich approached former president Kenneth Ryder with
the idea of launching a genuine university press, he found Ryder enthusiastic.
Yet others were less receptive. "When I went around asking for reactions
from the deans," Frohlich recalls, "one of them was very honest
and said, 'Who needs you? If I want to publish, I go to McGraw-Hill.' "
Frohlich nonetheless got approval for his proposal, along with an initial
budget of $10,000. Within three years of its founding, the new Northeastern
University Press had published all of five books. Three originated as projects
within N.U.: a collection of essays on American fiction; the physics-conference
proceedings; and a book of essays on the American Revolution. The other
two books, reissues of seminal but out-of-print works of New England history,
launched a series of American history reprints known as "Northeastern
Classics."
In an effort to encourage scholarly publishing at N.U. while at the
same time benefiting from homegrown talent, Frohlich began looking into
areas where the university had particular strengths, hoping to find something
besides "textbooks and dusty dissertations," he says. The College
of Criminal Justice initially proved to be the only place with promising
projects, so N.U. Press set out to make a name for itself in criminology,
publishing books by Northeastern faculty such as Judge, Lawyer, Victim,
Thief (coedited by Nicole Hahn Rafter); Criminology in the Making (by John
Laub); and Legal Homicide (a revised edition of William Bowers's influential
Executions in America).
Building on its slender academic and economic base, N.U. Press began
reaching into other fields and beyond Northeastern in the early 1980s.
Having ventured into literary criticism with its very first book, the Press
continued to publish titles in that area. The initial focus on both literature
and American history, combined with the interests of the editors, soon
led to the new academic field of women's studies. By the mid-'80s, the
Press had expanded its overall list to include American literary reprints,
a growing line of books distributed for New England cultural institutions
such as the Massachusetts Historical Society and Boston's Museum of Fine
Arts, and (in an experiment not obviously related to the rest of its offerings)
two biographies of classical musicians.
In the meantime, what was still in many ways a start-up operation had
achieved impressive revenue growth. Annual net sales had jumped from an
estimated $9,000 in 197778 to nearly $355,000 in 198687, N.U.
Press's tenth year. Although one reason for this growth was the success
of Frohlich and his staff in finding promising niches in which to publish,
another key factor was the openhanded support of Northeastern. Virtually
all university presses are subsidized by their parent institutions; the
economics of publishing generally, combined with the circumscribed market
for scholarly books, has traditionally meant that only a few very large
academic presses (such as Harvard's and Chicago's) can turn a profit. As
N.U. Press enjoyed spectacular growth throughout its first decade, the
university continued to provide operating budgets and to cover losses so
as to enable it to maintain its momentum.
In the late 1980s, however, scholarly publishers found themselves facing
a shrinking market. Academic libraries had long provided the principal
clientele for university presses. But budget cuts at colleges and universities,
coupled with steep price increases by commercial publishers of scholarly
journals, forced academic libraries to rein in their purchasing. Suddenly,
selling even 500 or 600 copies of a book-an outcome that now covered a
decreasing portion of the cost of publishing it-represented no mean achievement.
For editors used to a world in which a book called Money, Sex, and Power
could be about "feminist historical materialism" (to take an
actual example from one of N.U. Press's catalogs of the mid-'80s), this
transformation in the marketplace presented-and still presents today-a
fundamental challenge. No longer able to survive by producing titles destined
only for a quiet burial in college libraries, academic presses have had
to find new customers. University-press publishing will never be a business
in the usual sense, as long as its mission remains the diffusion of scholarship.
Yet when you ask Bill Frohlich today what it will take for N.U. Press to
survive and perhaps even prosper, he cites as one of his maxims: "Think
like a commercial publisher."
"As long as academic libraries were buying at least a thousand
copies of most scholarly titles," Frohlich says, "you could justify
doing a wide variety of scholarly monographs. That's changed-now you're
only selling 350 copies to libraries, on average. So you've got to be more
selective. Now you've got to figure out how to get the scholarly monographs
that are more likely to turn into paperbacks that have supplementary potential
in classrooms. You also have to figure out how to convince academics to
broaden the topics on which they write, and to write in a style that is
accessible to more than their peers."
But finding essentially academic books that will appeal to more than
specialists is tricky, says senior editor John Weingartner. "Many
of the monographs we consider are written by junior faculty members,"
he explains, "and publication of their manuscript is critical for
getting tenure. So it's a matter of achieving some sort of balance between
fulfilling the scholarly requirements and making the language more accessible."
For N.U. Press, achieving that balance with scholarly titles has meant
consolidating subject areas. Today, the Press continues to publish titles
aimed mainly at faculty and students in the disciplines where it enjoys
its strongest academic reputation and a strong market position-criminal
justice, American history, and women's studies-while having withdrawn from
fields such as literary criticism and theory and dropped the "Northeastern
Classics" history reprints.
At the same time, N.U. Press has also entered some new niches. In 1989,
for example-having just published reprints of Richard Wright's Lawd Today!
and Claude McKay's classic Home to Harlem-the Press launched what is now
a successful series called the Northeastern Library of Black Literature.
According to associate director Jill Bahcall, these titles have tapped
the growing classroom popularity of African-American literature while also
opening a whole new sales channel. "We established a very good reputation
with that series," Bahcall says, "and not only for course-adoption
[books assigned for class reading]. It also helped us get into African-American
bookstores, which are now a quite strong niche market."
While such toeholds outside the academic world represent important victories,
Frohlich's dictum "Think like a commercial publisher" has required
broader assaults on a market traditionally commanded by the trade houses.
University presses have always published a certain number of "trade"
books, taking advantage of their rich intellectual resources to appeal
to serious and discriminating general readers. Today, with such readers
increasingly being abandoned by the Time Warners of this world, academic
publishers are sensing opportunities. The problem, of course, is guessing
what will sell-and in N.U. Press's experience, it has always been a guessing
game.
After the unexpected popularity, in 1989, of Hemingway in Love and War
(on the writer's World War I romance with Agnes von Kurowsky), the Press
made its first intentionally successful foray into the trade market with
In Spite of Innocence: Erroneous Convictions in Capital Cases (1992). Frohlich
notes, "One of the reasons that I went into criminal justice initially
was because I thought that certain topics related to that field might have
broader appeal." When In Spite of Innocence-two of whose three coauthors
were academics-sold even better than the Hemingway title, N.U. Press had
discovered a vibrant commercial market in an area where it has enviable
academic credentials.
The Press's next winning bid for commercial success came with a criminal-justice
title by a pair of nonacademic authors. Mockery of Justice: The True Story
of the Sheppard Murder Case (coauthored by the son of the accused killer
and victim in this notorious event of 1954) attracted so much national
media attention that N.U. Press had to hire outside publicists. That same
year, however, the Press took on a seemingly more parochial topic in a
book that would quietly become its all-time biggest seller. As of today,
the hardcover edition of The Boston Irish, by Boston College historian
Thomas O'Connor, has sold an impressive (by university-press standards)
total of 11,000 copies. N.U. Press has reaped additional revenues from
this title by selling the paperback rights to the trade publisher Little,
Brown.
An author such as O'Connor, who has written five books for Northeastern,
is every contemporary university press's dream: a first-rate scholar who
can write engagingly for the general reader. While doing his share for
N.U. Press's bottom line ("I hope he lives a long time," Frohlich
says appreciatively), O'Connor also vouches for the Press's increasing
stature among scholars of American history. "A number of my colleagues
now are aware of Northeastern University Press," he says. "I
don't think that they were ten years ago." A recent addition to the
Press's roster of women's-studies authors, University of Kansas historian
Ann Schofield, adds her own scholarly endorsement: "One of the classic
women's-studies titles [Rosalind Pollack Petchesky's Abortion and Woman's
Choice] was published by Northeastern and has been kept in print. That
in itself testifies to its profile in the field."
In the quest for ever greater sales, however, N.U. Press has moved into
territory where its identity as an academic publisher becomes quite blurry.
While the Press, ever since a successful gamble on a Robert Schumann biography
in 1985, has become an academically respectable publisher of books on music,
a few of its titles in this field look surprising in a university press's
catalog. Boston Globe music critic Richard Dyer says of this segment of
N.U. Press's list, "They have a weakness for singer biographies brought
over from Europe, some of which aren't very good."
Frohlich concedes the truth of this criticism when he speaks of his
offerings of "somewhat light, self-serving interviews with great living
divas." Yet such books-including the just-published Diva: The New
Generation-have the merit of being salable at Barnes & Noble. "We're
taking advantage of the trade market," Frohlich says, "of having
a niche and being able to count on-hopefully-sales."
But along with the move into trade-publishing territory have come trade-publishing
problems. After nineteen straight years of continuous growth, peaking at
$1.47 million in net sales in 199596-N.U. Press has stumbled the last
two years. Sales have dropped and returns of books from retailers have
skyrocketed. Part of the decline in sales can be attributed to a drop-off
after one phenomenal year, 199596, when net sales rose a whopping
forty-one percent. But the high level of returns is an industry-wide affliction,
one that N.U. Press now shares. Twenty-six percent of the Press's books
are being returned now, a rate that has doubled over the last decade. A
large share of those returns come from the megastores, Barnes & Nobles
and Borders, whose doors the Press worked so hard to break down.
Bookstores aren't solely to blame, however. Last year N.U. Press suffered
from a problem as old as bookselling: people simply didn't buy as many
books as the Press had hoped. Some of the new releases on which N.U. Press
had banked heavily-such as Public Heroes, Private Felons (by Jeff Benedict,
a former research director at N.U.'s Center for the Study of Sport in Society)-sold
poorly, while the backlist didn't generate as much revenue as in prior
years. "There is no scientific way of figuring out what will sell
well," Frohlich says. "You have to have a certain degree of luck."
If luck was lacking last year, then perhaps the Press is due. It kicked
off the current academic year with several appealing new releases, including
Thomas O'Connor's latest effort, Boston Catholics. [Editor's note: see
Books, page forty-eight.] Frohlich is optimistic about many of the Press's
books to be published later this year, including a commemoration of the
centennial of Duke Ellington's birth and (in a foray for N.U. Press into
what might be termed ancient history) a recounting of the Boston Red Sox's
last World Series victory in 1918.
But if N.U. Press is betting on the perpetually hapless Red Sox to be
winners, wouldn't it be better off getting out of the trade-book market
altogether? "We can't look to the past and to scholarly monographs,"
replies Frohlich. Although the challenges of bookselling seem to be growing
harder, he says, "I've got to be cautiously optimistic because of
our long track record. I have to believe that what we have to do is simply
find and publish a few more good books."
The recent woes have set back N.U. Press's plans for turning a profit
in the near future. Frohlich had originally calculated that the Press would
become profitable in the 19992000 academic year on net sales of roughly
$2 million, but with last year's revenues dropping to $1.23 million, he
concedes that the target for profitability has become more distant. Yet
given that the overall trick for university presses today is to generate
sales while reflecting intellectual credit on the parent institution, it
is difficult to judge N.U. Press as anything but a success. Looking at
the twenty-one-year record, Peter Givler, executive director of the Association
of American University Presses, says, "It's a very solid, very impressive
achievement."
Where the Press will be ten, or even five, years from now is anybody's
guess, as the environment for university presses, and for book publishing
generally, looks increasingly unpredictable. So it seems promising that,
while reflecting on the Press's achievement to date, Frohlich sounds more
inclined to talk about the future. "We have to try even harder than
we're trying now," he says, "be smarter at everything we do,
and publish better books with better potential." If his divas can
hold the line against the sugarbusters, then perhaps Northeastern University
Press can help prevent a lean future for discriminating readers.
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