The Anthology is Going into Production

The process has been a hard one, and a long one too, but Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press) is finally, finally going into production. 

As you might imagine, this leaves me quite excited. Even surprisingly excited .... because, honestly, this whole process has been a nightmare. Please don't mistake me: I'm not the kind of academic who sees publishers as the enemy. Many honest, diligent people work in academic publishing; many are excited about their roles in providing the public with ground-breaking research. Nevertheless, I now understand all too readily the frustrations and rage that can lead academic authors into seeing publishers in adversarial terms, so, just to put my own feelings to rest, I'll write out my experiences with FDUP/R&L. Hopefully, this exercise will be cathartic so I can enjoy the months that remain before the book's launch date.

As some background, I initially contacted FDUP in February 2021 about my idea for Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival: A Critical Anthology. This was almost immediately after that year's MLA conference. The main reason I picked FDUP was because I greatly admired the work of its editor, James Gifford. Given that he studies fantasy and modernist poetry, I thought him uniquely suited to appreciate SPMAR ... and I was right. He accepted the project almost immediately, and I didn't even have to submit a formal proposal. My next nine months were spent putting the book together and acquiring permissions. These permissions required about $2500 of my owns funds, but I didn't mind ... at least then. Peer review lasted seven months, but this was fine too. The reviewer's feedback was excellent, and when I got my manuscript back in June 2022, I went to work immediately. My final manuscript was submitted to FDUP by Thanksgiving 2022.

Then crickets.

I didn't necessarily think I'd get an extended response back over winter break, but not even a confirmation of receipt of manuscript? That was weird. Now, previously, FDUP had generally been fantastic and quite responsive to emails. As a harbinger of things to come, however, all that began to change in September 2022. That's when I asked -- knowing that the manuscript was nearing finalization -- several important questions in regard to formatting. Yet the answers FDUP began giving me were either erratic, insufficient, or (in some cases) factually wrong. I also began asking for a letter of subvention. I needed this document in order to apply for funds from my university, and this required letter was just an easy one-page statement of costs. Yet despite sending FDUP a half dozen requests over the next six months, I never got one. The press's editor completely ghosted me ... and I've never heard of a UP doing that to an author under contract.

This lack of response frustrated me enough that I sent out queries to other presses, but I didn't yet have much urgency, and as this initial queries came to nothing, I stayed with FDUP. Nonetheless, my last response from FDUP came in February 2023, almost six months ago, a fact I consider grossly unprofessional. This unresponsiveness was somewhat mitigated, though, by the fact that Rowman & Littlefield took over the publication process. Soon, FDUP had nothing more to do with the anthology at all.

This eventually created its own set of problems (as I'll soon relate), but notably, I didn't then truly appreciate that R&L's "co-partnership" with FDUP meant that they would take over the production process completely. I guess FDUP's only real role was to offer the book an academic contract or not; I hear more UPs have been doing this (that is, outsourcing actual production to an academic trade publisher like R&L), but it also means that these UPs are required to follow the trade publisher's often shitty production guidelines. Had I properly understood this earlier, I might have paused longer before agreeing to work with FDUP. The two academic trade publishers best known to me, Palgrave Macmillan and Routledge, are infamous for churning out terrible, overpriced academic books, and honestly R&L isn't far behind. Luckily, my associate editor at R&L is Zachary Nycum, who has been absolutely fantastic to work with. If it wasn't for him, I'd have broken my contract, but even so things were touch-and-go for awhile.

Without going too much into the sordid details, when me and R&L were trying to sort out the formatting details that FDUP absolutely failed to address, it quickly became clear that R&L's pre-packaged style guide just wasn't equipped to handle an academic anthology like SPMAR. For instance, they absolutely forbade double spaces .... but, unfortunately, double spaces are the only way to represent caesuras, a vital necessity when printing alliterative poetry. Stuff like that. But we persevered.

Yet the darkest moment came when I asked R&L for the subvention letter that FDUP failed to supply. That's when R&L hit me with the following whopper: "We don't take subventions." Say what? I went through the roof. Honestly, I was apoplectic. Subventions are free money, and they enable publishers to reduce the list price of academic volumes, thus improving sales. Subventions have absolutely no downside. How does a publisher not take free money? Apparently, R&L gave me the following non-answer: they just don't, cuz .... um, they ain't a university press, even though they're co-partnered with a university press. I was too furious to let the issue go, and it's a good thing I didn't. Without an intervention, the hardcover price for SPMAR would have been $140. Not only does that prevent any lay reader from ever purchasing the book, but most university libraries wouldn't purchase the book at that price, either. Nobody would read the anthology, and although I would have gotten "academic" credit on my CV from a FDUP imprint, honestly, any book too expensive even for university libraries is just vanity publishing. I wouldn't have accepted that.

That's when my urgency began for contacting other publishers, and I'd have jumped ship immediately had any fish taken a nibble. Unfortunately, SPMAR is a very unusual genre of academic writing (the critical anthology), and despite a strongly stated target audience of medievalists, modern poetry scholars, Tolkienists, and some fan groups and lay readers, no university presses were willing to chance it. For instance, Cambridge UP said that they often marketed their books alongside similar titles, and they had nothing like SPMAR in their catalogue.

I might have broken my contract with R&L regardless, but I bitched loudly enough that R&L eventually reversed their standard practice and agreed to accept a subvention. The price tag was steeper than I had anticipated a $7500 subvention for a hardcover price of $70, and an eventual paperback price of $35. (If my university approves a subvention fund, they'd only supply $1500, so most of this subvention is out of pocket.) I tried offering a larger subvention for a lower list price, but R&L refused to budge any further. Still, hopefully at least some lay readers might buy the $35 paperback edition of SPMAR.

There were other issues with R&L, too. One was what they called "standard backlist price list." R&L wanted these to start after three years, which is just 18 months after the paperback edition for which I was paying $7500 , so I pressed and badgered and got that backlist price increase extended to five years. All this took several weeks of negotiation, but apparently I was "lucky" in the sense that R&L was willing to negotiate at all. Most academic trade publishers such as Palgrave Macmillan and Routledge refuse to stray whatsoever from their cookie-cutter layout formulas, no matter how sensible the straying. Although this might seem incredible, it's absolutely true. For example, every book published by Routledge has the exact same hideous cover design. So I owe a lot of gratitude to Zach Nycum for his willingness to lobby R&L on my behalf.

So that's the story. The last few months have been intensely frustrating, and I'm paying an extremely high out-of-pocket subvention, but I believe strongly in Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival, and it should be an important book. Everything has now finally been finalized. Hopefully the anthology will see print sometime in early 2024.