Pulling Forth The Potential of the Text
An interview with Ange Romeo-Hall, a musician and writer, who has been involved in editorial work on over 500 academic books at Cornell University Press
Working with and providing services to publishers around the world, be it Bible publishers or university presses, we, at 2K, feel the need and even the obligation to stay up to date or maybe even ahead of the curve regarding the developments in the rapidly changing business of publishing.
As part of our continual pursuit of insights and feedback on our concept development, we were delighted to get the chance to invite Ange Romeo-Hall from Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY, to visit us at our office in Denmark. Ange has built up a lot of experiences from her years in the publishing business and, as you will realise when reading our interview with her here below, she uses this experience to form thoughtful and considered opinions about the state as well as the possible future for academic publishers and the publishing business in general.
So it might be better if I put my blabbering to a halt and begin this interview by letting Ange introduce herself:
I am managing editor in the manuscript editing department at Cornell University Press; I’m also a writer, musician, longtime lover of words, empty-nester, and recent world traveler (thank you, 2K!). Our department oversees the editing and production of 120 new frontlist titles, 40 new paperbacks, numerous reprints, and 5–8 imports per year, along with the creation of ebooks. We project manage books from the scholarly monograph to general interest titles, including complex, highly illustrated texts. I began work at Cornell University Press in 1998 in the marketing department after moving to Ithaca from New York City where I worked in editorial production for magazines and as a freelance music journalist. With glee in 2000 I modulated to the manuscript editing department and since then have worked on over 500 books.
With that many years in the publishing business you may have had plenty of time to reflect on, what it is that makes publishers important and valuable institutions in our society. What is the primary function of a publisher?
It is to reach down inside the text, or the content, and pull forth its maximum potential. This means curating, developing, editing, designing, producing, and manufacturing it, and finally making it discoverable and available for use or sale now and in the future as formats evolve.
There is a direct relationship between an author’s work realising its full potential and the knowledge, experience, and expertise of the publishing team that shepherds it.
The goal is that the content—no matter the genre, from scientific research to a chapbook of poetry to a vehicle-repair manual—is transformed into its optimal form and presentation and reaches the reader who can use, enjoy, or be changed by it.
While this general task of “optimisation of form and presentation” might always have to be done by somebody or something, there are no guarantees that in the future it will be performed by publishers as we know them. A lot has been said about the disrupting nature of digital media – and especially in relation to publishing. How would you describe the challenges coming from the changes in the media ecology?
Many publishers are seeing disappointing sales figures right now. Is that because readers are distracted by a menu of media on multiple devices? Is the changing culture of instant and free access responsible for piracy and cleverness on the part of users accessing our content by other means? Have we not kept pace with a content delivery system that meets current needs or developed the right business model? Yes; yes; maybe; probably.
There are several ways to look at the challenges we currently face as scholarly publishers regarding plummeting income and the demand to adopt new technology and take risks. You have to look at the history and function of university press publishing and its stakeholders (i.e., to provide peer review for monographs as linked to the tenure system), university presses’ nonprofit status and limited financial resources and return, a culture that is very tradition centric and change averse, the sometimes invisible nature of scholarly presses not only to the general public but also to their own institutions, and a lack of awareness about the costs involved in turning a manuscript into a book for sale in any format, which we’ve learned from recent analysis is around $20,000 per title.
If a new external funding model for monographs (and therefore the tenure process) takes hold, if we can expand our thinking about content delivery and apply research about how content is being used and will be used, if we can be relieved even partly from the pressures of powerful marketplace players (Amazon) and explore how an open access model for certain works could be sustainable, if we explore more cooperative business models as university presses, we might have a more viable future fulfilling our fundamental mission of disseminating scholarship. I think the value and content we offer should remain the same. To riff a little, a kind of utopia for the student or scholar could be instant and free access to high-quality scholarship that comes to them because it knows they want it, readable on any device in a form that is well edited, beautiful, easy to navigate, cite, seek permission to quote, connectable with curated related research lists, and provides access to social media or a social reading opportunity that sparks additional ways of thinking about the work and new research directions. In this utopia that content publishers maintain could be living multiple lives rather than being a fixed product, like taxidermy!
Obviously digital technology has changed your position as publisher. What general strategic changes have been your response to these new technologies?
Yes, it has changed what we make, how we make it, and how we sell it. Our strategic response, which I imagine is standard across the university press world, has included ebook aggregators, metadata provision, print-on-demand digital printing technology, just-in-time publishing (lower print runs and reduced inventory costs).
If the new media ecology demands new production workflows, then your workflows in the editorial department would consequentially have to change too. What kinds of changes have you seen or initiated in the everyday editing work to better accommodate for the possibility of new (digital) outputs?
We have been making ebooks since 2010. Almost immediately we switched to Word Styles from angle-bracketed typecodes to facilitate the Word files’ transformation into and out of InDesign in preparation for output as XML, ePub, and mobi files. Our production editors have always been responsible for typecoding and verifying that elements are correctly identified for design and composition; the switch to Styles was smooth for us, our freelance copyeditors, and authors. We prepare ebook conversion orders that detail any issues such as foreign alphabets, where to move side bars, pull quotes, or margin notes, needed redactions, how to handle dual note systems, and so on and then proofing and approving the ebook files before release for sale. We now apply for CIP data (Cataloging in Publication Program, ed.) from the Library of Congress specifically for our ebooks so that these titles can enter the Library of Congress’s ebook metadata stream to boost discoverability of our ebooks by librarians and hopefully recover some library sales we enjoyed in the days before scientific journal subscription rates ate up book acquisition budgets.
How do you as publishing house evaluate your progress in adapting to changes around you?
You have to keep discussions open in house and evaluate whether you are responding to or anticipating the demands of the marketplace. You look to your peer presses to see if you are making more or less progress, stay abreast of listserv threads, attend annual meetings like aaup’s (Association of American University Presses, ed.), see what authors are asking for. You set annual goals and monitor your progress. You look at the staff: if people are quite comfortable and are doing their jobs the same way they have been for a decade, you might not be making much progress in adapting to change. Is there experimentation and risk taking? If so, even if there are failures, I would say an organisation is doing a good job of thinking ahead.
It could be argued that academic publications would gain even more functional benefits from being published digitally, given the scientific and information-based nature of the content, when compared to the narrative linear content of fiction literature. Subsequently, university presses would face greater challenges than publishers of fiction literature. Is that something, that you have experienced or foresee?
Sure, we have more moving parts in our books compared with novels. Even a book with no figures will have notes, a bibliography, extracts, lists, epigraphs, and so on; a book like one of our highly illustrated science texts will have scientific keys, boxes, numerous levels of subhead, appendices, multicolumn data-heavy tables, labeled figures. The former category presents no particular problem for reflowable ebooks, but the latter doesn’t translate well beyond a pdf when text needs to stay in a fixed position relative to figures or is complex and translates poorly to a small screen.
“You have to look at how the population is changing. I keep in mind a picture of the undergrad in a dorm room who would rather do research on her phone when writing a paper than cross campus to the library to browse the stacks”
On the other hand: Academic nonfiction content is often so complex that a digital publication (by which I mean more than just generating a digital print in the form of a PDF) either is too expensive to make or too cumbersome to use. Are these the reasons why we have yet to see the digital media revolutionise academic publishing to the extent that we have seen in fiction publishing (a revolution that sure enough seems to have lost its momentum, that is)?
I’d say that for nearly all of our books the current ebook technology is doable; there are a handful of books that simply don’t work in that format. I would ask the bigger question, do our current ebook formats realise the potential of the content and serve the reader such that the reader sees something of value the publisher has created that he or she cannot get elsewhere (for example from pirated versions, illegally scanned versions of print books, used copies, or however else readers might currently be accessing our books)? If, as publishers, we could assess the needs that are not being met by the users of our books and pivot in our thinking about technology away from the construct of the print book and toward functionality, we’d really be onto something. It circles back to the purpose of publishers’ being to realise the full potential of the content.
Finally, I would like your personal take on, what to think about the future of digital publishing and how you think it will replace, incorporate, or integrate with traditional print publishing.
You have to look at how the population is changing. I keep in mind a picture of the undergrad in a dorm room who would rather do research on her phone when writing a paper than cross campus to the library to browse the stacks; one of our authors in the airport finishing his manuscript, checking his citations on a tablet; a tree farmer in Indonesia with a smartphone scrolling for the latest research about seeds. Digital publishing, for certain scholarly content, may already be preferred over print in terms of how people are using the content (as distinct from how they are purchasing it); as the preference grows, however, with print-on-demand technology publishers will likely continue to offer readers a print version. Certain books will likely endure for some time in their print version as long as there is sales potential or funding to support that strategy: art books, photography books, anything you want to savour (collect/share/give) and read immersively, a work that warrants making a beautiful book and for which there is a demand in the marketplace. Overall I think the scholarly user will come to expect digital publishing and eventually accept digital-only publishing for many books; book lovers will continue to buy print books that honour that format best, and as long as there is a demand, publishers will continue to make them.
Romeo-Hall (born 1966) was educated at New York University. Her first job in publishing was in NYC in 1989 working as an assistant to a literary agent. She has worked in magazines, newspapers, as a freelance journalist for Rolling Stone and the Village Voice, and since 1998 in book publishing at Cornell University Press in the upstate city of Ithaca, New York, where she is currently managing editor. Her poetry has appeared in Mothering magazine and several literary journals.
