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Should you publish with an academic press or try to go bigger?

Nathan Rupert CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

An author recently asked me this question:

I now have an accepted and confirmed publishing deal based on my detailed proposal from a leading academic publisher.

However, it has been suggested to me that I not take the academic deal and push to find a trade publisher with a much larger audience. Those who have read my proposal feel the book has a potentially large reader base. This will mean turning away the academic press and going back to the market for a different publisher.

What should I do?

Your author platform makes the difference

I sympathize with the author. Academic publishers have limits: they focus on ideas over sales, move slowly (typically at least two years to publish), have less influence with bookstores for distribution, and make it hard to break out into the mainstream. You’ll also generally have to deal with academic peer reviews, which can significantly slow your project down.

Buy contrast, trade publishers have more pull with distribution, more potent marketing groups, and are faster to market (although it still often takes at least 15 months). They also pay bigger advances. All other things being equal, an author seeking a broad audience, like my contact, will be better off with the traditional publisher.

But walking away from a publishing deal is always a risk. Do you really want to give up the bird in the hand?

My advice to the author was this: take a close and honest look at your author platform. If you can drive sales of 10,000 to 20,000 books with your own channels, such as social media, a podcast, a blog, newsletters, Substack, speaking gigs, columns in media, and the like, then you can beef up your proposal to appeal to a traditional publisher.

If not, you’re unlikely to get a deal — and you’ll have given up your best chance to get published.

My contact’s book idea was excellent. I think his book will be successful. But despite my enthusiasm for his book idea, I couldn’t be sure he’d get a traditional publishing deal, given the limited size of his platform. So I advised him not to take the risk.

In theory, he could go out to the trade and come back to the academic publisher if his pitches didn’t connect. But publishers don’t like to be treated that way, especially once the author has accepted the deal. (If you haven’t signed a contract, you can probably get out of it legally, but your reputation will suffer. Publishers respect handshake deals; they expect the same from authors.)

It’s entirely possible that his academic deal would evaporate if he came back in three or four months. In fact, there’s no guarantee that the editor who greenlighted the deal would still be there to okay it a second time.

Bottom line: don’t go back after accepting an offer to publish, it will tarnish your reputation. And if you pursue traditional publishers without a powerful author platform, even with a great idea, your chances of getting a deal are hit-or-miss.

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