YOU ARE UNPUBLISHED, unknown, and have just finished a dissertation on urban politics in the Midwest. Or you made tenure in the 1960s but haven't yet made it into print, although your friends assure you that your manuscript on the structure of metaphor in Jane Austen will be gobbled up by a university press. Or you are a veteran of the lecture hall and want to recast your course on "Byzantium Between East and West" as a book. What do you do? You
certaintly face difficulties, because hard times in higher education and in publishing have made it harder than ever for academic authors to get their work accepted by university presses.
I can appreciate the degree of difficulty, because I recently completed a four-year term on the editorial board of the Princeton University Press. Having cleaned out my files" not "files" actually, but seven cardboard cartons crammed with readers' reports and minutes of board meetings—I can offer an account of the publishing-process to the person it affects most deeply but who knows least about it—namely, the academic author. Princeton follows some procedures that do not exist in other houses, but its experience is fairly typical of the better university presses. So a report on how manuscripts are accepted at Princeton should be of some help to authors dealing with presses everywhere in the world of scholarly publishing.
First, dear author, you should know that the odds are stacked against you. I figure them at nine to one or ten to one, calculating the number of manuscripts submitted against the number accepted. Despite the hard times that have hit academic life—or because of them—the submissions increase almost every year. In fiscal 1972, the first year for which we have figures, the Princeton University Press received 740 manuscripts. In 1981, it received 1,129—an increase of 52 percent. In 1971 it accepted 83 manuscripts. In 1981 it accepted 118—an increase of 42 percent. In retrospect, the pattern seems clear: the pressure from submissions rose steadily throughout the 1970s, shot up in 1976 and 1977, and broke the 1,000 mark in 1980. The press responded to the flood of manuscripts by increasing the How of books, so that it IIOW plans to accept about too manuscripts a year, financial conditions permitting.
That is a huge job both for the editorial board, which faces tougher decisions at every meeting, and for the editors, who must cope with wave after wave of manuscripts and pass on an increasing number of "nos" to an increasing population of disappointed authors. Seen from the author's point of view, the process looks still tougher. In a given year, your manuscript will be one of about 1,100 considered by the press, and you hope that it will be one of 120 accepted for publication.
To do so, it roust clear a series of hurdles. It must catch the eye of an editor, win the favor of two or sometimes three readers, make a preliminary cut at a pre-editorial board meeting, and survive the final selection at a monthly meeting of the editorial board, when four professors will choose a dozen manuscripts from a field of fifteen to nineteen. There is no ironclad quota, but there are always losers—and more of them each year as the competition gets stiffer. So how to win? After going through my cardboard cartons, I have come up with the answer: a surefire survival strategy for authors, using six easy strategems.
I. Don't submit a book. Submit a series. We at Princeton turn down books by the hundreds, but as far as I know we have never turned down a series, and we took on a half dozen during my four years on the board. Other presses do the same, especially in the natural sciences, where the craze for series is strongest. If you arc merely a humanist, you could propose a series on the human condition and then slip in as its first volume your monograph on Jane Austen or urban politics in the Midwest.
II. If you must propose a book, make it a book about birds. We never turn down field guides, and we have accepted books about birds from every corner of the earth—Colombia, West Africa, Russia, China, Australia.... You can't lose, at least not with Princeton. Other presses find other subjects irresistible. You might try country houses with Yale and cookery with Harvard.
III. If you can't come up with a field guide to birds, choose one of the following subjects: William Blake; Samuel Beckett;: the nobility of almost any French province between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries; a new theory of justice; a translation of anything Japanese, but preferably poetry, which should be "linked" and located at some point in the period between 2000 B.C. and 1960, although any other period will do.
IV. Tactics. It is not enough to select the right subject. You have to tackle it in the right manner, and the tactics vary according to field. For example:
Politics. The press reader must be able to say in his report, "This study combines hard digging in empirical data with a significant contribution to theory." I especially recommend the mining industry in Peru and dependency theory, or Bolivian copper and modernization, in a suitably revisionist version.
English. You must prove that you know all about the latest lit-crit theory from Paris and New Haven and that you don't believe in it.
Art History. Keep it esoteric. Thirteenth-century stained glass will do, but it must be from Burgundy, not Paris or Chartrcs. You can always turn in a catalogue raisonné of some collection, although we have about exhausted the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
History. Say it's anthropology.
Anthropology. Say it's history.
History and Anthropology. Use the microcosm-macrocosm device. In history you must be able to see the universe in a grain of sand—say, Springfield, Massachusetts, in the eighteenth century. In anthropology you should be able to construct a symbolic universe from a rite of passage—say, a Javanese funeral.
V. Here are some tactical principles to follow, irrespective of field:
Be interdisciplinary. Mix fields; it makes you seem more innovative. You can even mix metaphors to show that you are at the cutting edge of the frontiers of knowledge. Emulate the Princeton faculty wife who remarked to a visiting dignitary at a university reception for members of the Institute for Advanced Study, "It's so nice of you people from the institute to come here and cross-fertilize us."
Be risky or, rather, appear to be. Say, in effect, "This is a farout book. I dare you to publish it." And then write something ordinary. When I was on the editorial board, I felt oppressed by creeping monographism, the tendency to write more and more about less and less, to smother subjects in erudition, and to reduce the idea-to-footnote ratio to the vanishing point. So I proposed a risk quota. We were to build risk taking into our regular publishing program by setting aside a half-dozen slots for unorthodox books. I thought we might even allot a risk book or two to each editor, with a minimum of vetoing by the editorial board, so that the editors could enjoy some free rein. As a result, the same kind of monographs continued to come in, but a new argument accompanied them: "It's a risky book; it will draw some criticism, but it will stir things up."
This made us all feel better.
Be revisionist. It is always good to overturn some "classic" thesis. But be careful to catch the cycle at the right moment,, because a revision of a revision has a way of making you seem, I to be back at square one.
Be naughty, just a little bit. A manuscript that is not merely risky but also risqué stands a chance of standing out from the other 1,119. This strategem is especially recommended for tables of contents, which in any case are all that most board members will be able to read. A recent example: "Sequential
!, Sex Reversal," "Conflict Situations for the Sex Ratio," "Outcrossed Hermaphrodites." We accepted this manuscript for our series on population biology without a blush. It is all about birds and bees, although it contains a section on barnacles too. Beforejoining the board, I had never considered the sex fife of barnacles.
VI. Choose the right title. Two principles prevail here: alliteration and the colon. The alliteration usually occurs in the main title. It should be short, suggestive, poetic if possible, and so literary that the reader can form only the foggiest idea oft the book's contents. Then comes the colon followed by a subtitle telling what the book is about. Sonic examples, chosen from the lists of "Manuscripts Submitted," which the press receives almost every week (I must admit that we chose very few oft hcsc for publication):
The Pause of the Pendulum: Portugal Between Revolution and
Counter-Revolution
Notice the prevalence of p's and the carryover of the alliteration from the main title to the subtitle. It's what I call the Peter Piper Principle. Thus:
Peril, Pestilence, and Perfidy: The Making of Colonial Lucknow, 856-~877
Pashas, Pilgrims, arid Provincial Groups: Ottoman' Rule in Damascus, 1807-18S8
The Promise of Punishment: Prisons in Nineteenth-Century France Pictures and Punishment: Art in the Service of Criminal Prosecution During the Florentine Renaissance
Why this domination of the letter p? I don't know, unless Peter Piper invaded the collective subconscious from the nursery. But variations are permitted. You may alliterate in the subtitle:
Women in Agriculture: Peasant Production and Proletarianization in Three Andean Regions
And you may use other letters. M is very good; it warms up the reader:
The Mediated Muse: English Translations of Ovid, 1560-1700
Measures and Men: Visual and Verbal Political Satire in Early Georgian England, from Pope to Churchill
Metaphors of Masculinity: Sex and Status in Andalusian Folklore
L can have a lilting, lyrical effect:
Lives, Lovers, and Lyrics: The Biographies of the Troubadours
R is also recommended. It revs up the reader:
Rhetoric, Royce, and Romanticism: The Impact of Idealism' on Nineteenth-Century Theories of Discourse
This last title illustrates another i~llpcrative: go trom tk
big to the small. A title should operate like a funnel. Suck the reader in by announcing something grand in the main titk: then squeeze him througl1 the subtitle into a monograph:
Reform, Repression, and Revolution: Radicalism and Loyalist the North-West of England, 1789-1803
Class, Conflict, and Control: Culture and Ideology in Two Neigh borhoods of Kingston, Jamaica
Personality and Politics: Hidden Patterns in Late Medici Art Patronage
Drink and Disorder: Temperance Reform in Cincinnatifrom ilk Washingtonian Revival to the WCTU
Land and Labor: Economic Dependency and Social Order in Spring field, Massachusetts, 1636-1703
The Irish Inner Circle: Slatemaking in Daley's Illinois
Neither Sleet, nor Snow, nor Sabbath: The Sunday Mail Controlversy, 1810-1830
Fashion and Fetishism: A History of Tight-Lacing and Other Fond of Body Sculpture in the West
By way of refinement, you can add a "from . . . to" construction. It conveys a sense of direction and seems to be especial!`; effective when alliterated with the letter c:
From Concessions to Confrontation: The Politics of the Mahar Community in Maharashtra
From Custom to Capital: The English Novel and the Industrial Revolution
From Clan to Class: The Relationship of Social Structure to Economic and Demographic Chance in Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1554-1850
Occasionally, but only with the greatest caution, it is permitted to stray from alliteration. But you must have very strong reasons, such as the need to overwhelm the reader by a blast of poetry:
Forked Branches: Unpublished Medieval Translations of Ezra Pound He Windless Perpetual Morning: Archetypal Primitive Symbolism in the Poetry of Theodore Roethke
The poetic touch naturally goes best with literary subjects:
Strange Chords, Lucent Verdure: Mastery and Madness in John Ruskin
But it may be used in art history:
The Armor of Light: Stained Glass in Western France, 1250-1325
And it will do nicely for any subject that is sufficiently deep:
The Secret of the Black Chrysanthemum: Charles Olson's Use of the Writings of C. G. Jung
Poetic effect also can be achieved by evocative use of the indefinite article:
A Complex Weave: The Writing of Thoreau's "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers " with the Text of the First Draft
A Playful Judgment: Satire and Society in Wilhelmine Germany
If you favor the definite article, you had better stick with alliteration:
The Sultan's Servants:
The Transformation of Ottoman Provincial Administration, 1550-1650
The Wanton Warrior: A Study of Elizabethan, Dramatic Convention and the Decline of Figural Representation
But a sufficiently vivid image can free you from the need to alliterate. Indeed, it can conjure up an entire civilisation, especially if it evokes territory in the eastern hemisphere:
Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Cities
Bear in the Land of Morning Calm: Soviet Policy Toward Korea, 1964-1968
The Pagoda, the Skull, and the Samurai
The last title provides a rare example of poetry triumphing over the colon. But you should never do without a subtitle unless you are absolutely ccrtai~l of the power of your poetry, thus:
Trumpets Blown in the Empty Night
I still don't know what that book was about, nor what the subject is of another manuscript without a subtitle that we received recently: Mostly Chaos. It seems to have something to do with physics.
A last class of exceptions concerns unorthodox moves, in which you take the reader by surprise instead of captivating him by sounds and images. With the strategem of the allembracing title, you are bound to get him somewhere and so may drop the alliteration:
Marxism and Domination: A Neo-Hegelian, Feminist, Psychoanalytic Theory of Sexual, Political, and Technological Liberations
Psychoaesthetics, Psychologism, Psychology: A Phenomenological Inquiry into Their Relations
You may even try to tickle the reader's funny bone:
On the Rocks: A Geology of Britain
Loom with a View: Vincent van Gogh "A Son Metier"
La Vie en Prose: Readings of Early French Novels
And finally, you can try to hit hint between the eyes:
The Phallic Imperative: An Analysis and Critique of Masculine Sexual Priorities
Certainly: A Refutation of Skepticism
I should end on that positive note. But in reviewing the strategies available to academic authors, I must confess to some skepticism about certainty of any sort in the publishing business—and to a secret admiration for two professors: the first is a physicist who called his books Lecture Notes for Astrophysical Sciences 522, the second a biologist who called his The Nesting Behavior of Dung Beetles. Neither, I'm sorry to say made it Into print.