Rethinking Publishers

Eric W. Sager

I did not expect to publish a book towards the end of the eighth decade of my life. And if you had asked me, ten years ago, whether I would write a book about the meaning of history, I would have declared such a thing to be impossible. In retirement, however, I found myself determined to try to answer basic questions about the scholarly discipline that has absorbed my life. The project was at first entirely for my own edification. As I proceeded, I was persuaded that there might be something of interest to others, and so I decided to seek a publisher, and to persist with the search despite rejections. The story of what follows says something about rewards for persistence, and perhaps also something about our relationship with publishers – a relationship in which we historians may have more influence than we may realize. 

In April, 2024 I sent my book proposal to the editor of English-language History books at De Gruyter. I was not optimistic. I had previously sent the proposal to several publishers, including two in Canada, three in the United States, and two in the United Kingdom. Responses varied but were always negative. One Canadian press did not answer at all. Another Canadian press declared that they saw no market for the book: a response that puzzled me, since virtually every History Department offers courses in the areas of historiography or “history and theory”, and my proposed book was directed explicitly to students in such courses. One non-Canadian publisher sent the manuscript to readers. The three assessments came back after a delay of four months (the manuscript was not long – around 70,000 words). The reviews can best be described as perfunctory and insulting. One assessor checked a few boxes on the assessment form but wrote nothing at all – the form was blank. The other two reviews were no more useful than the first. I could say something about problems with peer reviewing, but that is another subject. From these reactions I concluded that there was something seriously off-putting about both the proposal and the manuscript.

Nevertheless, on 15^th April 2024 I sent my seven-page proposal to De Gruyter. Please bear with me – the dates are a key part of my story. A few days later the senior History editor asked me to send the entire manuscript. How strange: normally one waits weeks or months for any response to a book proposal (a vast trove of information about publishing timelines is available online). I sent the unrevised manuscript immediately, and two days later I had a totally unexpected response from this editor: we are “all” reading it now and “I absolutely love it”! You’ve got to be kidding me, I said to myself. But no – the manuscript was off to the editors of a series – the Politics of Historical Thinking – who reacted, I was told, with similar enthusiasm. Already by April 26^th the senior editor was talking about publishing The Thinking Historian as a paperback with a low price, and getting it into university bookstores and onto the desks of lecturers in several countries. All of this before I had seen peer reviews! 

I soon learned something that I had not realized, given my experience with other publishers: the book had already gone through a preliminary peer review. The editors in the Berlin offices were themselves qualified reviewers: they had doctorates in History. The series editors were senior scholars in fields that included historiography. The manuscript was sent immediately to other assessors – and the reports came to me within six weeks! Never in my career have I seen peer assessments done at such speed. Despite the speed, the reviews were rigorous and challenging. It took three months of intense work to revise the book. 

The rest of my story is about efficiency and even greater speed. On October 1^st I received a 14-point schedule of production for the book. The first proof, following copy editing, would come to me on October 30th. There followed deadlines for completion of, among other things, first proof corrections, preparation and submission of the index, implementation of last revisions and index corrections, delivery of author’s permission to print, start of the printing process (December 20^th), and expected publication date (February 3^rd). The publisher missed every one of their stated deadlines. They were not late – they were early! The speed had nothing to do with the pace at which I completed my tasks: it was entirely the result of speed at the publisher’s end. The printing process started three weeks prior to the scheduled date. The book appeared in print at least two weeks before 3^rd February. The entire time between submission of the unrevised manuscript and appearance of the printed book was eight months and three weeks. My previous record was fifteen months.

Even this is not the end of the story. Marketing the book, it turns out, is an engaged collaboration. I received a list of “Tips and Tricks for Book Promotion”. At the same time the senior History editor was at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting in New York, flogging my book, and somehow finding time to report to me on reactions. Potential reviewers, I was told, can get free copies through the De Gruyter web site – but better, said the senior editor, to tell any reviewers who want a copy to contact her directly because she is faster than the web site. As usual, emails from me received replies sent the next morning Berlin time (and on one occasion before their offices opened!).

Are there lessons here? One is obvious: examine a press carefully before sending a proposal, and look for a book series that fits with your work. Don’t submit a proposal or a manuscript that has not been previously reviewed by colleagues and revised. Also, and it’s easy for a senior scholar to say the following: if you do not receive a response to your proposal within six weeks, then pull the proposal and look elsewhere – you are not being taken seriously. And be bold enough to ask in advance about deadlines: two years from submission of a manuscript to publication date is not acceptable.

My experience with publishing since 1989, including three Canadian presses who accorded me great respect, allows me to observe the caution, perhaps timidity, of publishers. Anything experimental – anything that departs from the long tradition of impersonal, third-person, pseudo-objective writing – is unlikely to get past editors or reviewers. Consider, for instance, the crossing of the boundary between history and fiction by the French historian Ivan Jablonka. His Laëtitia: Ou la Fin des Hommes (Éditions du Seuil, 2016), the history of a murder and of violence against women, won prizes in France for fiction and had considerable impact in that country. So far Laëtitia has not been translated into English! It is hard to imagine any such boundary-fracturing work getting published in Canada. Yes, there is Donald Akenson’s “evocation of possibility” – At Face Value: The Life and Times of Eliza McCormack/John White (1990) – but who dares follow down such an unbeaten path? And who dares to write in the first-person, or within the mode of l’ego-histoire (the history in which the historian-self is integral to the analysis), as a few historians elsewhere have done? Try it, and wait for the inevitable rejections. And then persist: there may be a home for your work, if unorthodoxy is matched by quality.

Historians and academic publishers work in a state of mutual dependence that is constantly being negotiated. Authors may be more in control of the publishing experience than we realize, although the pressure to publish imposes constraints on the untenured. Today we have more publishing options than ever before, including open access publishing, platforms for electronic publishing, as well as self-publishing. The presence of alternatives gives us a degree of bargaining power. And if we persist, we can move publishers towards innovative and original forms and contents. We must have the courage to evoke the possible and even the improbable.

Eric W. Sager is Professor Emeritus, Department of History, University of Victoria. Sager is the author of Seafaring Labour (McGill-Queens UP, 1989), Inequality in Canada (McGill-Queen’s, 2020), and other books.