Ready to Pitch Your Book? Don’t Sleep on Academic Presses
Contrary to popular belief, university publishing houses are not just for scholars—they also publish poetry, fiction, memoir and more.
I was recently enjoying Timothy C. Baker’s Reading My Mother Back: A Memoir in Childhood Animal Stories, a spellbinding meditation on grief and narrative, when I flipped to the back cover and saw the book had been published by MIT Press in 2022. I was surprised because I had no idea that academic presses like MIT published memoirs.
I first became familiar with university presses when I was a graduate student in English several moons ago. Knowing a “UP” book was necessary for tenure and hoping to one day become a professor, I expected to adapt my dissertation for such a press. It would be a highly specialized work for other literary scholars — a book my parents would proudly display but never read. It wasn’t until reading Baker’s book, having long since left academia for journalism and publishing two nonfiction books of my own, that I realized these presses also publish memoir, essay and short story collections, fiction and poetry.
I became even more curious about this after coming across Deesha Philyaw’s The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and Natasha Trethewey’s The House of Being, the most recent memoir of the Pulitzer Prize-winning former poet laureate. These books were published by West Virginia University Press and Yale University Press, respectively. Wanting to learn more about the kinds of opportunities university publishers might offer non-academic writers, I recently interviewed Jennifer Banks, senior executive editor at Yale University Press, as part of my Narratively Academy class, The Art of Writing a Nonfiction Book That Reads Like a Novel. Her insights were incredibly helpful, so I decided to share our convo here too.
(BTW, the next session of Audrey Clare Farley’s class The Art of Writing a Nonfiction Book That Reads Like a Novel starts this month — if you want to finish your memoir, history or true-crime book and learn how to get it ready for publication, sign up now.)
Audrey: I have recently seen a lot of academic presses publishing trade or public-facing books. I’ve also seen increased coverage of those books, as in this roundup by Electric Literature. Is this a new trend?
Jennifer: I’ve been at Yale Press for 17 years and was at Harvard University Press for a couple of years before that. In that time, we’ve published many books for the public, so I wouldn’t say it’s a new trend. We do a lot of what people call “crossover books.” These books are expected to meet academic standards — they go through peer review [meaning that they’re evaluated by experts in the subject area] — but we develop and publish them for a general interest readership.
Audrey: Are these books shelved at big bookstores like Barnes & Noble? Independent booksellers?
Jennifer: Yes, most of our books are sold through those channels. So much goes through Amazon now, which has really changed the publishing sales landscape for everyone, and there are upsides and downsides to that. But we have a very strong sales track record of getting our books sold through a variety of retailers.
Audrey: So your books are appearing not just online, but in brick and mortar stores?
Jennifer: Oh yes, definitely. We have now actually entered into a publishing, sales, warehousing and distribution arrangement with W. W. Norton. We are working through their sales force, and they are selling our books just as they sell their own.
Audrey: What is the range for the number of copies printed?
Jennifer: It’s huge. A crossover book might end up with a print run of 3,000 to 4,000 copies. One book coming out this fall will have 20,000 copies for the first printing in cloth. We also have books with a first printing of 500 copies or fewer, but there aren’t many in that category because it’s hard to sustain those quantities financially.
First printings are based on preorders. We can assess early sales based on those, although we don’t know what will hit in terms of publicity. You never know exactly how a book is going to take off. We have one book that has sold about 1 million copies in its lifetime, for instance, but it started with a modest first printing and then kept reprinting.
Audrey: Are university press books reviewed in newspapers like The New York Times?
Jennifer: Yes, our publicity department gets books into places like The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, CNN, major broadcast media like NPR, and documentary outlets like The History Channel. But print reviews are not the only way the word gets out these days. A book can spread through the world through social media, podcasts, Substacks or blogs. The publicity landscape is hugely interesting and constantly changing.
Audrey: What is the expectation of authors, in terms of book promotion? What kinds of efforts should authors be expected to undertake?
Jennifer: Personally, I don’t really expect anything. In this way, I think Yale University Press is different from a trade press. We love it when authors are very active in promotion, and it can certainly help a book gain traction. But we want authors to focus on the research and the writing of the work itself. The fall book I mentioned with a large print run — its authors are barely on social media. Other authors do a lot of public speaking or are active in academic communities. More than anything, I just encourage my authors to do what comes naturally to them.
Audrey: I just saw that the publisher Taylor & Francis sold authors’ work to train AI, prompting outcry and a statement of concern from the Society of Authors, but no apparent recourse for the authors. How are you and your colleagues approaching the use of AI? How is academic publishing, more broadly?
Jennifer: I’m not the authority on this, as I haven’t been at the center of Yale Press’ conversations about AI or those of the Association of University Presses. But from what I can see, university presses are treading very carefully. There’s a commitment to human-produced works and protecting that work. I am not aware of any practices at Yale Press where author content is being fed into any kind of AI tool.
I do think that there would be a way that AI could be helpful to the industry. For instance, I would love to have a tool that helps me do quicker and more thorough market research. When I want to acquire a book, I have to do a lot of research (figure out how many related books are out there, how this book might position itself alongside such books, etc.). I can see how an AI tool could really help with that. I can also imagine how AI could be helpful with sales landscaping, media opportunities and publicity. But I’m skeptical that these tools will be available to university press publishers very quickly in the form that they’re needed, partly because in academic publishing — as compared to other industries where AI use is exploding — there’s not a ton of money to be made.
Audrey: Are you actively acquiring? What kinds of book proposals do you find attractive?
Jennifer: Yes, I am always actively acquiring. I aim for 15 books a year. I have a lot of longtime authors, but I try to keep my eyes open for new projects too. My main areas right now are religion and humanities, broadly defined. I’ve published a lot on literature in the past, but now we have an editor who is actively acquiring in that area. I’m always looking for the book I haven’t seen yet. I’m looking to be surprised.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Audrey Clare Farley is a writer, editor and scholar of 20th-century American culture. She earned a Ph.D. in English literature at University of Maryland, College Park. She now teaches U.S. history at Mount St. Mary’s University and creative nonfiction writing for Narratively.