The Big Sigh
by P.D. Lesko
I don’t know a lot about academic publishing–or book publishing in general for that matter. Somehow, I don’t think it’s so very different from magazine publishing, however. One produces a printed product aimed at a targeted demographic and then goes about selling the product. Magazine publishers have the added task, if advertising is accepted, of going out and finding potential advertisers and convincing them that print advertising is not an expense, but rather an investment. It is through this part of my job that I come into regular contact with academic press marketing staff, and why I have a bit of firsthand knowledge about the current fiscal stresses facing academic book publishers. My conversation usually goes something like this:
“Hi X, this is Pat Lesko from the Adjunct Advocate. How are you?”
“Hi Pat. I’m great! Just got back from our sales meeting in______( fill in your favorite exotic location). How are things at The Advocate?”
“Great, great (This is standard sales patter. You say this even if you have a broken leg and your biggest advertiser has suddenly pulled out of the upcoming issue.) So, how are sales?”
BIG SIGH. “In the toilet. Our marketing budget got cut in half.”
Translation: I’m not going to be able to advertise in your magazine.
“Sorry to hear that. You know, almost 50 percent of faculty are part-time now….”
“Really?”
“Yep,” I say, “So, how much of your marketing budget are you putting toward reaching adjuncts?”
BIG SIGH. “Adjuncts don’t buy scholarly books. When we have a book that’s a good fit, we hit them with direct mail.”
Well, dear readers, here’s my theory. Adjuncts do buy scholarly books. And the academic presses are not reaching you through direct mail. They’d like to. However, the largest list of temporary faculty in the United States (149,000 individuals) belongs to the Adjunct Advocate. There are no other comprehensive lists to be had–not from the scholarly associations and not from the mailing list companies that specialize in higher education. The bottom line is really quite simple: academic presses are marketing their wares to an ever-shrinking pool of tenure-line and tenured faculty.
Instead of marketing comprehensively to temporary faculty, academic press publishers tweak direct mail pieces, cut the number of books published, lay off staff, trim already slim marketing budgets, exhibit at more conferences and fiddle with the list of disciplines in which they publish while Rome burns. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not deriding their efforts toward profitability. No business can survive without regular fine-tuning. What I am deriding is the fact that very, very few people in academic publishing have made the connection between the growing number of adjunct faculty and the shrinking sales which are beginning to regularly plague their industry.
Where did all the book buyers go? There are 500,000 of them, and they’re waiting for academic press publishers and marketing staff to take note of the fact that it is no longer 1975. Adjunct faculty comprise almost half of the professoriate, and buy scholarly books; they conduct research and participate fully in their professional lives. Anyone who believes otherwise is simply just not doing solid market research.
BIG SIGH
