he minnesota review n.s. 61-62 (2004)

Willis Regier with Jeffrey J. Williams

In Defense of Academic Publishing: An Interview with Willis Regier

Willis Regier is the director of the University of Illinois Press. This interview took place in the Chicago Hilton during the Midwest MLA convention on 9 November 2003. It was conducted by Jeffrey J. Williams, editor of minnesota review, and transcribed by Jason Arthur, editorial assistant for the review and a doctoral student at University of Missouri.

Williams: By now it's a familiar story that university press publishing is in dire straits, as there is less funding from home universities and more bottomline pressure. How do you see the state of university press publishing right now?

Regier: Helen Tartar [formerly humanities editor at Stanford UP, now at Fordham] referred to the growing gap between the rich and the poor in universities and how that is also reflected in university presses. It's true the presses that have been around longer have established a stronger backlist and endowments or the financial support of a well-endowed university and are much better placed to get through the current crisis than presses that are supported by state budgets. We can see this pretty clearly in what's happened to the University of California Press. Having thrived for years on trade publishing, it's now encountered the same problem trade publishers encountered at the turn of the millennium: the very rapid contraction in sales. Suddenly, they had a lot of books they couldn't sell, and they had a deficit. They had to respond by cutting their list, and they haven’t cut it simply in trade books but in academic monographs with small markets.

Williams: One solution that MLA has proposed is that the requirements for tenure move away from books and more to articles. Lindsay Waters [humanities editor at Harvard UP] has particularly criticized academics for having foisted off their jobs evaluating tenure candidates onto presses. On the other hand, university presses are supposed to exist to accommodate scholarship. What do you think of the advice to shift tenure requirements?

Regier: I don't have the statistics off the top of my head, but they indicate that the professoriate has not grown anything like the rate that the number of publications apparently has. Because it has been perceived that it is easier to publish books, more books have been required for tenure and promotion. This, I think, has been a vicious circle, and the best way to break it is to reduce the demands of quantity and to begin real assessment of tenure and review by the quality of the publication. I have spoken with administrators about Lindsay Waters' proposal for reducing the quantifying aspects of tenure and promotion. To a person, they say that quantity is pretty much a suggestion, but that the actual evaluation of tenure and promotion is done on the basis of quality.

Williams: I'm not sure if that's entirely true. It's difficult to judge quality, but quantity is one thing you can readily measure.

Regier: You're more involved in this than I am. I can certainly see that, for good reasons and bad excuses, tenure committees may not adequately come to terms with the materials they are provided for assessment. And that concerns me. But what I can see from where I sit is that the pressure put on academic authors to publish more has led to an inclination by the authors to spread their time over more projects, rather than to devote that time to making a project really good. What we come up with are two mediocre books where we might have one really good book. That seems to be a very bad trade off.

Williams: One other factor in the shift in publishing is the shift in bookstores, the rise of the Barnes and Noble empire and so on, that are geared toward mega-sales. And then there's also Amazon, which has changed the way most people I know buy books.

Regier: Those are different phenomena with different consequences that are now long-range enough that we can really begin to make some sensible assessments of them. The advent of the superstore has been treated with great excitement because of the presumption that it was bringing people into stores again. People had ceased to come in very regularly or in very large numbers to the independent bookstores, but they were coming into the superstores and seeing books that they might not otherwise been attracted to, and purchasing them. The expansion of Barnes and Noble in particular required the filling of shelves with as much variety as possible. At first university presses were great beneficiaries of this. We had books that some people wanted. They added a patina of distinction to the books being offered in the bookstores. They filled shelves.

What has happened since the mid 90s is a stabilization of the ordering patterns from Barnes and Noble, regardless of the number of stores they're building. While we might expect that our growth would correlate with their growth, that has not occurred. In large part that is due to the profit motive of the bookstores, which is best generated by putting out books with high margins and high turnovers. Our books are neither high margin nor high turnover, at least not usually. There was a comment by one Barnes and Noble buyer that depressed me some years ago—it was all too candid but something we needed to hear: "University press books are furniture for the coffee shop."

Williams: What do you see as the specific role of university presses? Obviously as a press director, you have a decisive part in working that out.

Regier: One major reason I appreciate your interest in this topic and everything it touches is your awareness that a university press, working at the top of its form, does more than convert manuscripts into books. It actually has value. The economic pressures of state university presses have been so awful in the last three years that university presses find themselves caught in a bind that they are required by their administration to justify the value they add and at the same time to diminish their input into projects in order to increase their output, which leads to more books with less care.

What I think Illinois needs to do, or at least try to do, is make the value extensive. We need to take the effort we normally would have done by second nature, continue to invest in making the books the best they can be, and make the books bear the cost that they have to bear in order to have that value. Otherwise I think we're first of all hypocritical, and secondly we're defeating the purpose of the author in making the scholarship as enduring as possible.

Williams: Could you give me an example? How would that work out with a particular title?

Regier: If all we needed to do was produce as many books as we possibly could, with a fixed sum for manufacturing costs and other investments, we would not proofread. Any number of major university presses do not proofread. It would be shocking to your readership to have a list of university presses, with very high prestige, who do not provide proofreading. Proofreading is simply one thing; the preparation of the index is another—many books are badly indexed—a lot of the copyediting is superficial. The amount of time the acquisitions editor is able to invest in the project as it's developing is directly affected by how many books that acquisitions editor has to generate in the course of a year. The more we do, the less we can care about each thing. Right now the market pressures move away from having the press care more for each individual project in order to produce more. It is a vicious circle.

Williams: Ironically, trade presses that I know work more with authors; the editors work with the author a lot, usually from the proposal on. The editors typically have to do only a few books a year—say six or eight. You'd think that a commercial press would spend less time, but it's actually the opposite. The editors have a lot of investment in each book because there's a lot riding on each book. Academic presses, as far as I know, demand that editors do many more books. I remember, from when I worked at Routledge back in the early 90s, that the numbers kept going up, from something like twelve to eighteen a year. Now it might be more. How many books do Illinois editors do a year? And how many do you think they should do?

Regier: Another impulse for a university press to publish more books has been as a response to the splintering of disciplines into subdisciplines. As English literature, to take a broad example, broke down into Victorian, Renaissance, Restoration, you had three audiences instead of one. In the last thirty years you might have six sub-branches for Restoration literature, seven for twentieth-century, and these don't pay much attention to each other most of the time. Since the sub-branches have fewer people, there are fewer buyers for each book. In order to generate the same amount of income per year, a university press has to publish more books to reach the same readership. That has made academic publishing more extensive. But that is also part of a very strange equation between production of the academic environment and the consumption of the academic environment, which should be more or less correlative, but in the last two years has not been. That's for technical reasons that have nothing to do with the size of the audience.

Williams: The technical reasons being libraries?

Regier: Libraries, electronic publishing, I could guess on some other things. But the other part of your question was what do we normally anticipate a good acquisition editor will acquire. At most presses the standard has been about twenty new books to be transmitted every year. If it were only twenty books, that would be fine. But a good acquisitions editor probably works at any time with somewhere between a hundred and two hundred books in order to produce twenty in the course of a year. In order to get the most out of those hundred to two hundred projects, the acquisitions editor has to be more or less attentive to the best and most promising of those projects.

Williams: So there's a Darwinian aspect to it; even with twenty books, an editor has two weeks for every book, given vacation and traveling. Two weeks is not a long time for a book. Added to that are past books. And for every book that an editor does, he or she probably has to work on three: one gets poor reader's reports and doesn't get done, one gets signed somewhere else, and the third one gets signed. I don't think people understand how it works from the inside, which explains why they might not get a lot of attention.

Regier: Acquisitions editors are by and large overworked devotees of scholarship. The ones that I know best and that have been the most successful over the course of many years have managed to succeed by somehow having reservoirs of energy to permit them to put in literally sixty hours a week. When that number is not just thrown out but taken seriously, you're talking five days of twelve hours. I do not know many people in the university who work that hard. I know lots of people who say they do. But if university professors worked as hard as university press acquisitions editors, we would have a lot better scholarship.

Williams: One phrase that I like to use, adapting Benjamin's phrase "the author as producer," is "the editor as producer." Especially in an era of cultural studies, I think that we should be more aware of editors as intellectual producers. Sometimes there's the idea that editors are peripheral service workers, but on the other hand academics acknowledge if not fear editors because of their central role. When we were talking before you used the phrase "editor as creator." That might be an apt modification, since Benjamin has a specific political goal in mind. Could you comment on how you see the editor as a creator?

Regier: An acquisitions editor creates in a handful of important ways. The most obvious is not in the creation of books, but in the creation of relationships with authors and series editors. This requires sensitivity, creativity, foresight, a knowledge of materials, a knowledge of resources, and a sense of what the output will be and for whom. An acquisitions editor usually spends his or her time thinking about a specific book and how that book can be improved; I don't know that they particularly create it. The experience of an acquisitions editor can assist an author in breaking out of a cocoon of assuming that certain things are original when they're not, trendy when they're not—or they're just trendy, or they're just original, but not particularly significant.

The most important work an acquisitions editor does is to try to make sure that the length of the project is commensurate with its topicality and author. There is a huge problem with manuscripts being too long, and for good reasons—authors are reluctant to abbreviate or cut. When I look over the difference between manuscripts that originally come to us and the books that are eventually generated, the work of the press that's most visible to me and the most valuable is what we took out of it. That is the most invisible to the market and readership and doesn't seem particularly creative by most measures, but it in fact is what helps that book find its way to a readership and develop an enduring reputation.

Williams: I have to confess I'm a hands-on, if not heavy-handed, editor. I am a ruthless cutter; I try to leave people's things as they said them, but more intensified, like the flavors in a sauce. Sometimes people are a little stunned at first, but they usually appreciate if it comes out better and sharper.

You mentioned that a lot of the job of an editor is social, making relations among people. You mentioned series editors; that strikes me as a relatively new phenomenon, that presses use to offshore some of their work.

Regier: If a staff editor is required to double the output in an area, a very quick way to do it is, instead of supervising manuscripts, to supervise series editors who supervise manuscripts. Then the acquisitions editor simply becomes a super manager. The more direct work of acquisition and shaping falls to series editors. Acquisitions editors love series editors who are willing to take on all the responsibilities that normally are associated with acquisition, including the guidance of revisions. But a large number of series editors simply behave as shortcuts to the acquisitions editors without any editorial intervention at all. That too serves a useful function for presses simply trying to increase their number of books, but I would be hard-pressed to say that it actually helps the world of scholarship in the long run. The generation of mediocrity is after all nothing more than the generation of white paper.

Williams: What specifically do you do at Illinois? You're director of the press and have been since 1999. What is your goal there?

Regier: This is why people stay in university publishing if they can: at the end of the day, and that day may be two years or five years away, you have a book which maybe never would have existed, and certainly wouldn't have existed in the same way without your participation in its creation. Of course it's much more rewarding when the author or coauthors feel the same way toward you. A good acquisitions editor will have the kind of relationship that is going to endure. It is a very bad acquisitions editor who thinks only of the book and not of the author; these are the editors who have their minds set upon market measures only. Unfortunately the market has become a force within all of the university, not just the university press.

The university has found itself ill-equipped to make what should be an obvious defense for the intellectual value of its enterprises, including the university press, particularly now, when the major problems facing us are cable TV, the internet, stepping onto an airplane. These are problems that have very little to do with economic factors and have everything to do with how human beings treat other human beings or speak to other human beings. This is the time for the humanities and publishers of the humanities to step forward and show what good it can do and always has done. One major problem is that we've been taken for granted and we have taken ourselves for granted. Now that the situation is increasingly desperate, it is increasingly difficult to respond with slogans or a cry for help. A really carefully established, sensible defense can be made, even on economic grounds, for the work we do. For instance, in the sciences—this may shock people in the humanities—an author, having gone through rigorous review and finding an essay accepted for a journal, has the honor of paying for seeing it published. And the per-page charge for a scientist in a major scientific journal can be $1,500 or more.

Williams: Really? Because they have major grants?

Regier: Right, that can pay for it, or the university's budget pays for it. That is considered standard operating procedure in order to support the publication of science. If we charged $200 a page from every author whose book we publish, we would have no economic problem, and we could rapidly expand. But the university has a disconnect, à la C. P. Snow, between the scientific, engineering, and medical faculties and the humanities and social sciences. Even if a university administrator thinks that the humanities are secondary disciplines (they're nice to have, they're important for a liberal education, but they're not as important as chemistry and physics), the price they pay to have a university press on campus to help the humanities and social sciences operate and do their job and improve the research and excitement within those faculties is a bargain. A single laboratory for a chemist can be a million dollars a year; that would not be unusual. A typical subsidy for a state university press is much less than a million dollars a year, and it's not simply supporting the chemists. It's supporting three, four, five departments.

Williams: With what you're doing at Illinois now, what are you excited about coming up? What are the high points?

Regier: The exciting work coming out of acquisitions is primarily coming from our editor-in-chief, Joan Catapano, and her young acquisitions editors, plus my predecessor, Dick Wentworth, who was the director of Illinois for more than twenty years. What Dick does, and does superbly, is sports history. He was aware that people would be interested in sports history before the field existed. Now it does exist—there are caucuses and conventions about it—and he's already established a list for it. Joan Catapano is developing lists that are geared to her heart, which I think are going to do a lot of good scholarly work. She's doing work on international film directors, trying to get us away from the complete Hollywoodization of film. She and her editors are very interested in ethnic behaviors within the United States and how they adapt. She's retaining the strength of Illinois in labor history, immigration history. Illinois has one of the best lists of African American Studies, and it's worth saying that our literary lists of African American Studies are doing really fine, thank you. We're developing lists in American music. American religion is more important than it's ever been. We have a very strong list on Mormons, and if anyone is curious about belief systems and how they promulgate they should study the Mormons. It's phenomenal.

Williams: Before you were at Illinois, you were at Nebraska for a good number of years. I'm fascinated with how we come to do what we do; can you talk about how you came to do publishing?

Regier: I did all my undergraduate and graduate work, through PhD, at the University of Nebraska. Its English department has the good fortune to have a highly-regarded literary journal called the Prairie Schooner; it was my good fortune as a Master's student to be assigned to the Schooner. I was interested in literary journals, and became more interested because of my experience with that. That lasted throughout the rest of my graduate education.

Williams: What year did you start grad school?

Regier: 71, and I got my PhD in 78. In 1979 the University of Nebraska Press was looking for a humanities editor. They were not happy with the kinds of applications they were getting. People, for one reason or another, didn't want to move to Lincoln. So they asked the English department whether they had anybody with editorial experience who might be able to be a humanities editor at the press. I had the good fortune of having a dissertation director who was highly regarded, Paul Olsen, and my friends at the Prairie Schooner recommended me. I was invited to apply, I got the job, and it worked out.

Williams: What was your dissertation on?

Regier: Ezra Pound and e. e. cummings. One reason I was very interested in Ezra Pound was his heavy involvement in literary journals and how much that had to do with his development as an editor and beyond that as a writer with his own reputation.

Williams: That was the early 70s, so it was before the theory movement hit?

Regier: In my PhD years I was reading Derrida and Foucault. Major translations were just appearing and the first great wave of Derrida was in the early 70s.

Williams: You worked for the Prairie Schooner; did you have an interest in creative writing?

Regier: Oh yes, again I think because of Ezra Pound, with poetry.

Williams: It strikes me that many editors I know, especially those who are directors now or well-established acquisitions editors, got PhDs in literature at about the same time, like Bill Germano, who has a PhD from Indiana. It's partly because, contrary to the idea that the job crisis hit in the late 80s, it started around 1970, from what I understand. It's part an accidental fact, but it formed a generation of editors that changed things and that ushered in literary theory. Am I right about that?

Regier: Absolutely. In the late 70s and early 80s, university presses were undergoing a rapid professionalization in all departments.

Williams: What were they like before?

Regier: They were pretty much adjunct people, spouses of faculty, people who didn't work all that well in the English departments, so they found a place for them at the university press. This certainly differed from press to press, but most of the smaller state university presses up until the 70s were pretty much sleepy institutions, which operated primarily for the sake of the faculty of the university. But in the 70s and 80s there was a huge transformation, as it became more professionalized. (That applies to the entire university, now that I think about it.) University presses became much more concerned about the market of books as they ceased to think that they were going to be able to depend upon library sales and scholarly sales, and as authors demanded that their books go beyond simply library markets. So the marketing departments were professionalized. The acquisitions editors in my cohort were given the responsibility of bringing projects in rather than waiting for somebody to send them a book. The specialized recruitment of manuscripts seriously began then.

Williams: It's also covalent with the pressure on research in the humanities; there were higher requirements for tenure and more new books needed to be published. But the work also seemed to be infused with a certain kind of excitement. I like to call it "the theory generation," at least in literary criticism. Do you see a generational changing of the guard now in publishing?

Regier: We're going through a cohort shift at Illinois, or rather have just made the first major effort. People hired by my predecessor have reached retirement age. So within the last year, we've hired three new acquisitions editors, a managing editor, production manager, business manager, and marketing manager. We're a brand new press; we're ready for the next generation.

We're very concerned at Illinois about preparing the next generation of university publishers. And that takes any number of shapes. University press editors are all too white. It seems to me obvious that we need to bring in people from different ethnic backgrounds, with all the things that motivate them, and bring them into academic publishing. In Champaign it's been made possible because we have an enlightened administration that is willing to pay for interns. We have three interns who are African American students and who otherwise wouldn't care two cents about a university press, but have been brought in and caught the stimulation that wonderfully exists at most university presses, and are now showing an interest in the possibility of making this a career, or at least a step to a career in publishing. Maybe it will be one in ten that actually do, but it's better than where we were. I wish this were replicable throughout the country, but I think we're just really fortunate that the University of Illinois has this administration.

Williams: That's good to hear. What characterizes your cohort as opposed to the current cohort coming in?

Regier: I wish I knew more younger acquisitions editors so I could answer this question better, but I can only speak from those few with whom I've worked at our press and a few elsewhere. I have to say they're very impressive young people. They're very bright, they're very smart, they love books, they love scholarship, they recognize why most people get into being an editor. It's in their heart. What they need to learn is the difference between a seductive idea and an appealing book. There are acquisitions editors who can go forty years and never learn that difference. If the young acquisitions editors I've seen learn that in two or three years, they'll be doing wonderful work. We don't publish ideas, we publish books. It's a hard difference for young academic editors to recognize, particularly when under a quota.

We spoke earlier about twenty books a year being a normal quota for an acquisitions editor. In commercial publishing, there's no such thing as a title quota. There's a numbers quota—so many millions of dollars out of your frontlist per year. If that were applied to university presses, it would give a financial reason for closing most university presses. I can't think of more than half a dozen acquisitions editors and university presses who are able to generate that kind of income, and they certainly can't do it quickly. They have been able to do it because they've had the time to develop the work.

Something that bothers me tremendously about the market pressure on university presses and the annual budget cycle is that a scholarly field is not built in a year. An academic book cannot be written or edited in a year. The long-range planning and investments necessary for a field to develop and thrive require a commitment and a faith, which will not see a good balance sheet perhaps in ten or fifteen years, but which can make phenomenal differences to the culture if given the opportunity to make a statement.

Williams: I like your distinction between a seductive idea and an appealing book. How can you tell the difference between the two? Can you give an example?

Regier: If I were to give you a specific example I might embarrass people unnecessarily. The seductive idea can become nothing more than a trendy catchphrase. It can also become a reductive leitmotif. And it can excuse everything else that goes wrong with the book, like bad organization, clumsy prose, inadequate citation, all of the other things that are considered to be, with good reason, the traditional good ingredients of a good book.

Williams: What are some of the moments that stand out that you had at Nebraska, in your fifteen years there, or at Hopkins?

Regier: Shortly after I was hired at Nebraska, my editor-in-chief said that I would have a great career if, at the end of it, I'd published ten or twelve books that will outlive me. I thought that had to be an underestimate. I was going to do much better than that. But now that I am well into my career, I see the wisdom of that kind of measure. I don't know that I have published my ten or twelve. I don't think so. But the experiences I treasure are ones I think would be obvious to most people: working with Derrida, working with Avital Ronell, working with Hershel Parker on his huge biography of Herman Melville, meeting Shimon Perez and publishing his book on Israel, working with Tom Matthiessen on his history of ancient Greek music. These are great experiences, the kind that make this profession at times seem like a dream come true.

If I had followed my anticipated career path and become an English professor, I would have met lots of wonderful people who teach English. But in my current career I meet heads of state, people in music, classics, anthropology, soil science, entomology, you name it. It's pretty much up to me whom I want to meet, because most people are willing to talk to a press director. It's a terrific position to occupy within the university, because it gives such access to so many wonderful people. This is also something that was good advice I got as a raw rookie: appreciate the kind of situation that an acquisitions editor is in, that he or she can aspire to meet the most intelligent people in the profession and have some hope of actually having a conversation with them. If my acquisitions editors were just freshman PhDs and they asked to meet some major professor at Harvard or Yale, they probably would find that difficult to do. But as acquisitions editors, they probably will succeed in at least getting a conversation. That can lead to very exciting intellectual avenues.

Williams: Now to the nuts and bolts of doing a book: what are the steps and stages you go through to do a book?

Regier: If the author has good ideas and is having trouble choosing between them, the best friend of the moment can be the acquisitions editor. One of the things an acquisitions editor is looking for is the enthusiasm of the author, which I distinguish from hype or any kind of pathology. If an author has a truly exciting idea, is it going to be able to keep that author and editor excited for the period of time it's going to take to write and publish the book?

Incidentally, this bears on how much time one should spend revising the dissertation. One major problem with scholars who try to revise their dissertations is that they've lost interest. This was my own case. By the time I was finished, I was sick of it. I didn't want to spend any more time on it. The pressure to make the most of it and get it into print as a book can actually be counterproductive, because it can sour the scholar on the scholarship. It can take away the best reward of it—the thrill of research and discovery. I have quarrels (kind and cordial) with the English department at the University of Illinois about this issue. They believe, traditionally, that when an assistant professor is brought in, he or she needs to groom the dissertation into a book, and then begin the next book. I don't think that's necessarily true.

Williams: It would be hard not to do that and get tenured, given those tenure clocks.

Regier: But again that is under the presumption that you need a book. Dissertations are published—not very well, but they’re available. The fact that anything is published once is starting to become publication generally, and what ought to be a book is becoming a different question. With all the competition we are now seeing, from electronic publishing, from print on demand, from used bookstores, I expect that we are going to see that the status of the academic book will be higher than ever.

Williams: Christopher Hitchens recently published a book called Letters to a Young Intellectual (playing off Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet). If you were to do a "Letters to a Young Author," what would you advise? I might come up to you at a conference, say, at MLA, and ask if you're interested?

Regier: This is no real secret, Jeffrey, but frequently an acquisitions editor will say, "Send me your chapter," simply to end the conversation as tactfully as possible. Most of the best books come through personal channels. Either I already know the author because I've worked with him or her, or the author knows somebody with whom I've worked who serves as an intermediary. My predecessor, Dick Wentworth, loved doing first books. He thought that was his reason for existing. He did it superbly. But that's unusual. I don't share that. I sense the duty of doing first books, but the best books I've done, I think, are second and third books. That has been largely due to the reduced pressure on the author, which then becomes reduced pressure on me. There is more time available for developing an idea. If a detour is taken and proven to be a dead end, we can accept it as that. We don't have to somehow salvage it as a chapter.

If you came up with your idea for "Letters to a Young Author," I'd like to talk about it right away to see whether we had enough to talk about, which would be an indication of whether there's a book there. We would then work out a tentative schedule, subject to all kinds of variations, where you would try to achieve a certain set of goals. And I'd enjoy working with you and watching it grow, and I'd hope you would stay in touch with me as ideas came in. I would want to see it a chapter or two at a time.

Williams: So you work with authors quite a bit? Both seeding things and bringing them along.

Regier: A lot.

Williams: Usually people send proposals in the beginning. What's the difference between a good and bad proposal?

Regier: Essentially a good proposal contains a good physical description of the project as you foresee it, a reason for it existing, and a reason for me to publish it. If it's a great project in human genomics, they should go to Hopkins. But if it's a really good project on African American literature, I will probably be interested in it. It's appropriate to me. Another important thing is length. Acquisitions editors have been yelling around the country for years that manuscripts need to be shorter—three hundred pages or less typescript, double-spaced, with all notes and apparatus.

Williams: My motto for conferences is that nobody has ever complained about a shorter paper.

Regier: Right, right, right.

Williams: What I find a lot of times in proposals is misdirected rhetoric: authors are trying prove themselves to their dissertation directors, rather than trying to hook somebody who might not be in their exact field or with their particular interests.

Regier: What you're touching on, Jeffrey, is the illusion that some authors have that acquisitions editors are fools, and that they don't really see twenty or thirty proposals a day, and that if you use magic language you're going to get their attention. In fact, what is going to matter to the acquisitions editor most of all will be the credentials of the author (is the project appropriate to the educational background of the author?), whether the presentation is well-prepared, and whether the topic is appropriate. If none of those things work, then it won't matter what language is used.

Williams: Do you have any tips?

Regier: I never tire of repeating "stay away from edited collections." It is a dismal way to make a career.

Williams: Now I find out; I've done a few!

Regier: I'm speaking to a journal editor. One of the complaints I heard frequently at Hopkins is that books of edited essays were competing with journals for the best essays. We need to take those complaints seriously. Journals are such a vital and important part of our discourse.

Williams: Any other tips?

Regier: There has been a huge appetite for simultaneous paperbacks; authors have begun to negotiate this as part of their contracts. If an author comes to me and says he'd like a simultaneous paperback, I'll wish him well. It is not for you to tell me how to publish your book. I have to amortize my cost as best I can and it's a whole lot easier to do that with a clothbound book with a jacket, and besides, your book is going to last longer.

Williams: Any other tips, to end on a more upbeat note?

Regier: Here I'll speak a little from my own experience. When I was feeling pressure to publish scholarship, I was always beset by questions like, "whom do I have to cite?" "whom do I have to respond to?" "what, on some imaginary checklist, do I have to include to make sure that this is going to be taken seriously?" All of that turned out to be irrelevant. What is really most important is being interested in a topic in such a way that you can convey that interest to others. If you had tried it out on a spouse or group of friends, an advisor or other people in faculty, and you find that they're interested in it too, the chances are you are going to interest a publisher. But if what you say bores you, you can be sure it's going to bore an editor. Choose something interesting.

Willis Regier is the director of the University of Illinois Press.