The Ever-Evolving Landscape of Scholarly Book Publishing
From the New Books Network's Book of the Day Podcast
When I put down William Germano’s Getting It Published (University of Chicago Press, 2016), I looked up and began to wonder. I wondered about the book on gnomic poetry in Medieval Greek I had read over the weekend. I wondered about the PDF conference volume on my desktop between other PDFs downloaded at my university library. Casting an eye to the bookshelves along my wall, I looked at the spines of all those books there, upright and peaceful in their rows, and I wondered just who the people behind the books were: who printed the bindings and pages, who stocked backlisted copies in the warehouse, who encouraged booksellers to buy, who adopted the book project early stages, who chauffeured the manuscript through marketing, which editor oversaw production while which harried professor, between lectures biting into a sandwich, flipped the pages and weighed the arguments and challenged the ideas.
Getting It Published opens up the other spaces which are part of every book. There’s quite a lot that goes into those books on our Works Cited lists, and we don’t know. Or we don’t know enough, anyway.
As the subtitle announces, Getting It Publishing is the guide to knowing everything a scholar needs to know about where his or her research goes. A deft hand at elegant and lucid prose style, Germano has the industry experience, the university experience, and the teaching experience to know what writers of research will need when it’s their own manuscript that’s becoming the next book on a shelf (or PDF on a desktop).
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Daniel Shea heads Scholarly Communication, a Special Series on the New Books Network. Daniel is Director of the Writing Program at Heidelberg University, Germany.
William Germano is dean of the faculty of humanities and social sciences and professor of English literature at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Previously, he served as editor in chief at Columbia University Press and vice president and publishing director at Routledge. He is the author of From Dissertation to Book, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
