Authoring a PhD

find one or several in your field then they may offer the most attractive option open to you. These firms tend to be quicker off the mark than university presses, more insistent on reasonable length (70,000 wordbooks, better at dissemination, and more commercial in their approach.
They make their money by having a large catalogue of titles and producing relatively small runs of copies at fairly high prices. The limit for first-print runs has comedown from
(say) 300 or 400 copies ten years ago to below 100 copies now. And warehouse publishing can take place with digital printing machines technology that can cost-effectively generate single hardback copies of books from the publisher’s formatted text database in response to individual orders. This publish on demand approach means that your book may never go out of print. In someways this is a plus point for you, since your text remains available so long as people go directly to the publisher, and you do not need to worry about it being remaindered. On the debit side, the publisher can retain the copyright for its full term (now
70 years) without many real copies ever getting into circulation. And bookshops and major retailers like www.amazon.com may still robustly list your book as unavailable, whatever its notional status.
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Less well-known university presses also have some commitment to monographs, but usually a highly selective one, focusing on only a few fields or on their own doctoral students. If your university has its own press it is always well worth trying them, even if they do not have a big list in your field.
You may also try another university press that happens to have a good list in your topic area or subdiscipline. Because they do fewer books these presses may produce your work faster than the top-rank university presses. But their big drawback is that their catalogues usually have a much lesser circulation, so the chances of your work being noticed in the profession are much smaller. Sometimes their books are also less prestigiously produced. And because the smaller university presses do less work in this line, they may ask for shorter manuscripts to keep their risk exposure down.
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Smaller or lesser-known commercial publishers have more specialist lists, smaller internet-and-mail-only marketing 5 AUTHORING AP H D

operations, and often higher prices and shorter print runs.
But they are otherwise similar operations to the bigger firms.
They are distinguished from vanity presses by being commercially reliant on achieving sales and they still sign contracts with their authors. In practice, the payment of author fees is usually either completely nominal or (in view of the noncommercial character of monograph publishing)
the firm may ask that it be waived entirely. Some commercial publishers may also look fora partial subsidy to help finance the costs of issuing monographs. It is well worth exploring whether some form of limited subsidy maybe available to help secure book publication of your research. Potential sources are your own department or university, where little-known funds often lurk for years without anyone bidding to them for assistance national or regional-level professional associations in your discipline;
and some kinds of foundations or charities. Ask your advisers and departmental colleagues if they have any suggestions here this kind of information is often hard for graduate students to find out unaided.
Included in the category of smaller commercial publishers with monograph lists there area diverse range of companies. Some of them are medium-sized firms, well known and long established. Others are reputable or well- regarded companies, but quite newly formed. There are also many startup companies with an unproven track record and potentially uncertain futures. Try to find out as much as you can about companies before getting involved with them, and be reasonably sceptical about promises from smaller outfits. Make sure that you get sight of previous books and catalogues that the firm has produced, and checkout the company Website and its facilities. It is very important for your career track purposes that your book should be properly edited, designed and printed to a good standard, and that it should be effectively distributed and publicized so that potential readers get to hear about it.
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