Mellen Press

The Edwin Mellen Press asks three questions when it does receive a proposal:

• What would this manuscript contribute to the scholarly discussion?
• How would this manuscript advance, qualify, or redirect the state of the question?
• How does the author relate what he or she has to say to what other scholars in this field are discussing?

These questions at their base depend on a prior question, namely, Why has the author written this manuscript? We ask this question first because we do not want to publish books that simply reiterate what scholars already know, on the one hand, and because we do not want to publish books written primarily for non-scholars, on the other hand. Instead, we want to publish books that add scholarly information to what is already known.

To get at the contribution to scholarship, then, we focus on the author’s idea behind the manuscript. What is new in the author’s argument, analysis, or information? How will this advance the scholarly conversation?

The job of the publisher’s editor is to decide whether this idea for a book is a good one. Only when the editor is convinced of this is an author’s proposal submitted to the Editorial Board. For those proposals endorsed by this board, a publishing agreement is issued to the author.

Every manuscript must be peer reviewed when it is completed.  Yet, the peer reviewer is not making a decision about publication; that has already been made by the editorial board. Mellen wants to provide each author both editorial guidance and critical feedback until the final manuscript is completed.

Sometimes this process is ongoing as in the case of three series begun in the 1980s: Opera Reference Index, Toyko War Crimes transscripts, and Schleiermacher Translations.

Image credit: chantall / 123RF Stock Photo

Authors and university administrators frequently ask us, “What percentage of book proposals do you accept?”Our answer is 20 percent.

That is, in 2006 when we last ran the numbers, The Edwin Mellen Press considered 1983 proposals for publication, and we published 396 new titles. This is just a hair’s width under 20 percent. This ratio has remained about the same for the past ten years.

What does a publication rate of 20 percent mean? Read more

Over the past 30 years, academic publishing has often become a matter of sales and budgets. Book proposals are accepted or declined based on the sales projections or net financial anticipations. New scholars with recent dissertations are told to rewrite them in order to increase sales. And so on.

Money has become the primary agenda for all publishers, not just university presses and Independent Scholarly Publishers (ISPs). Jason Epstein’s Book Business: Publishing Past, Present, and Future (W.W. Norton, 2002) documents how since the 1950s profits have needed to be returned to owners and investors. Andre Schiffrin, The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read (Verso, 2001), is even clearer. He notes how editors know the return on investment down to several decimal points because their salaries and bonuses on linked to such returns (107).

I venture a reason beneath business.

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The Edwin Mellen Press has a long history of its authors and their books winning awards. As I review the lists, I find these to be especially notable:

Best Scholarly Work on Medieval Music and the University

The Harp and The Soul Studies in Early Medieval Music and Its Role in the Intellectual Climate of the Early University, edited by Nancy van Deusen

Winner of the 1992 Jewish Book Committee Award in recognition of excellence in literary scholarship

A. M. Klein, the Father of Canadian Jewish Literature Essays in the Poetics of Humanistic Politics by Rachel Feldhay Brenner
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Has your proposal for publishing a scholarly work met with silence or a sales pitch on making it more saleable? Many authors who approach scholarly or university presses are surprised that often authors are asked to rewrite radically their manuscripts.

How, then, are other scholarly publishers able to offer publishing agreements for the same proposals? I contend that this is the difference between two basic approaches to scholarly publishing.

Many publishers continue to employ a traditional calculation in their business model: They divide their fixed overheads by the number of titles and apply this average to each title. Then each title needs to earn back through sales that amount, which can range widely (from  $4,000 to $40,000 per book, depending on the publisher and its overheads).

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Publishers or literary agents many times speak of a proposal’s “fit.” This assessment can be positive or negative as in, “Your proposal doesn’t quite fit what we are seeking.” Many authors become frustrated after they have heard this a few times.

What is meant by fit? What are the factors that shape such fit or lack of it? And, why are these factors so important?

GENRE

A book’s intended readership–not the author qualifications–determines its kind or type. When a scholar, for example, publishes a children’s illustrated book, then that book is still a children’s book, not an academic one.

Such type or kind is a book’s genre. Genres are wide-ranging: textbooks, novels, bibliographies, poetry, biography, primary sources, monographs, essays, or young adult fantasy to name a few.

Publishers (and the literary agents who serve them­) first determine whether the publisher even publishes titles in your proposal’s genre. If your genre is not on that list, then your proposal will not fit.

TOPIC

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“In the future when the historian sifts through the debris of our era, oversaturated with information, once the dross has been cast aside, more than a few of the things that remain will be bound in the covers of The Edwin Mellen Press.” – Charles S. Kraszewski, King’s College

“Various publishers … said they would love to publish [my manuscript]. But they also felt that there was simply no market …Then I sent [it] to the Edwin Mellen Press and … it has received over thirty reviews in major academic journals. … I strongly endorse the Edwin Mellen Press. – Irving Hexham, University of Calgary

“Since my books were aimed primarily at those doing scholarly research, I chose to have them published by the Edwin Mellen Press, a company with an outstanding reputation. … a contributing factor toward my promotion from associate to full professor.” – Jon Ceander Mitchell, University of Massachusetts Read more