Published Fall 2006
 
Publishing Ideas:
An Interview with Eric Zinner
Academic publishing has changed over the past twenty years. It experienced what one magazine called "the Routledge Revolution," publishing more timely books and adopting some of the tricks of the trade of commercial publishing (for instance, the famous pink cover of the 1990 edition of Gender Trouble). In part it responded to changes in scholarly work, in literary and cultural studies the profusion of theory and pursuits like gay and lesbian studies, queer theory, postcolonial studies, ethnic studies, disability studies, and so on. And in part it responded to bottomline pressures, as universities seemed to become fully market-driven enterprises and scaled back support for traditional humanistic ventures like subsidized publishing.
Eric Zinner is one of the leading editors in a new generation of academic publishers. After receiving an MA in cultural studies at Carnegie Mellon and doing an internship at Tikkun, he joined the revolution at Routledge in 1993, working his way up from an editorial assistant to editor. In 1996 he moved to NYU Press as editor, and since 2000 has been editorial director there.
This interview took place on 29 September 2006 at the NYU Press offices near Union Square in lower Manhattan. It was conducted by Jeffrey J. Williams, editor of minnesota review, and transcribed by David Cerniglia and Heather Steffen, editorial staff of the review while PhD students in the literary and cultural studies program at Carnegie Mellon University.
Williams: What makes a university press? Why is it different from other publishers? How would you define the role of a university press?
Zinner: Start with a hard one, huh? For one thing—and I don't mean this to sound utopian—university presses are fundamentally different in that they are devoted to ideas. There's increasing fiscal pressure on us to behave in more businesslike ways, but what fundamentally excites and drives a university press is the same thing that drives the academy—the big ideas. You may have said the same thing of commercial publishing in the immediate post-war period, maybe up through the 60s, the heyday of the Jason Epstein years, but nobody would say that now. There are a couple of small imprints that are more intellectual than others, but there's no question that they're making decisions that are entirely rooted in salability. It's not that we don't think about that—of course we do—but we're a reflection of the imperfect meritocracy of the academy. The best ideas get published. That's really what we're about, and I don't think you can say that of commercial publishing or textbook publishing.
Williams: How is the job of a university press editor different from that of a trade editor?
Zinner: One simple way is the notion of the list and of list-building. University press editors are always assigned certain disciplines—so you have a sociology editor or history editor—and we see it as our job to sculpt that list. Trade editors don't recognize that at all. They may, through their own set of interests, gravitate toward a certain area, but you rarely find a trade editor who wouldn't acquire any interesting book that struck their fancy. So the notion of list-building is unique to university press publishing.
Williams: As editorial director at NYU, what is your idea or vision for the press? Among people in theory and cultural studies, NYU has definitely risen in profile, beginning in the mid-90s when Niko Pfund directed it, and I think that, under your directorship, the list has solidified as a "go-to" press.
Zinner: I certainly like to hear that. NYU is an unusual university and the press reflects the peculiar and fast history of this place. We're celebrating our ninetieth anniversary this year, so NYUP is one of the older American university presses around, although you probably wouldn't know that because there are few people who could name an NYU Press book that was published more than 20 years ago. When I got here a decade ago, I wandered around the stacks and I found some interesting moments—in the late 60s and early 70s, there was some very smart publishing on avant garde art, film, and some great biographies—but given the long history of the press there was not really a lot there. Likewise, NYU itself had been a kind of a secondary commuter school for a long time. Over a very short period, and after some significant fundraising, they started to build the university rapidly, and the distinct feature of it was that they built it around the humanities instead of the sciences. I think everybody remembers Andrew Ross's hire here, at least a dozen years ago, to start the American studies program. That was emblematic and they just ran from there. It was a very specific, strategic decision about how they were going to quickly build a reputation.
The press itself went from not being of particular note—it had some good lists for example in psychology and psychoanalysis, but as a whole it was unfocused, with no real list-building, no real sense of "We own this part of the academy and this is what we're identified with," and few signature books that it was known for. Then, just about the time when I started at Routledge, I began to notice some energy coming from NYU, and that was primarily due to Niko Pfund, who had been hired from Oxford and really started to shake and bake down here. When he hired me, three years later, there were some very good things happening, but shooting out in a lot of different directions. So Niko hired me to start the cultural and media studies list. I dabbled a little bit in anthropology, in science studies, in performance studies, but literary and cultural studies and media studies was the broad mandate.
I had good luck in bringing some authors I'd worked with at Routledge, who, much to their credit, recognized that the most important name on the spine was theirs and not ours and were willing to take the risk. Interestingly, it was easier with more senior people—Kaja Silverman, Tania Modleski, Andrew Ross, Cary Nelson, and a lot of others—who simply wanted to work with someone whose vision they shared, whom they trusted was going to do right by them and was going to give them the freedom to write the way they wanted to write. Their name would carry the day and, as long as we published smartly, they'd be fine. I have tremendous respect for the folks who came over early on.
Williams: You came here in 1996 and, when Niko left, you became editorial director. What year was that?
Zinner: That was 2000 when he left, and I was technically acting editor-in-chief until we got our new director, and then I became editorial director in the beginning of 2001. So the mandate expanded, obviously, as editorial director. It's not just my list, but shaping the entire press. One of the things I wanted to do was simply focus the list. It was unusual for a university press of our size not to have a focus. There are four groups that the AAUP puts university presses into, by sales, one being the smallest and four the largest. Group three, which NYU is in, has gross sales of three to six million dollars annually. We were unusual for a group three press in that the diversity of the list was notable, and we covered a broad expanse of the social sciences and the humanities.
If you look at some of our cohort, like UNC, their reputation is built largely around a single list. UNC has a tremendous American history list; they have other lists as well, but if you ask anybody about UNC, they say American history. Minnesota, certainly for a number of years, was linked the most with the THL [Theory and History of Literature] series and with a certain body of theory. So for me, the task was to focus the list while keeping our diversity, and to try to stop what we call "orphan books" that don't feed into list-building and our core mission. And then trying to figure out what our strengths really were.
When I was at Routledge, everyone always assumed it was some explicit mandate that we were going to be the cultural studies press and that was not only going to be reflected in the humanities list but in the philosophy list and the history list and the politics list. But that was never the case. It was a natural outcome of the editors being together in a live setting, editorial meeting after editorial meeting, talking together, traveling together, so that your ideas grow together and you want your list to have some resonance with what other people are doing. What they had there was a stable group of editors who had been together for a long time who had begun to direct their lists towards one another.
I suppose you can make a somewhat artificial decision, "We are going to be the main press in law." We've been doing some of that, making decisions about where our real emphasis is going to be, but I was trying to draw from what our natural strengths were. One of the things that was coalescing—in fact from our law list, and from cultural studies, history, sociology, and even from psychology and religion—was an overall focus on race and ethnicity. We were doing some really exciting work, like Ian F. Haney Lopez's White by Law, which is one of the most important books in the modern era of NYU and a foundational work in critical race theory that has been taught and circulated everywhere. Obviously it's not the only thing we do, but it is something that we do extremely well and were doing early on. We also do a lot of gender and sexuality studies; that is one of those things that started to coalesce mostly naturally, but also with a little bit of encouragement. And then we've identified nodes as they pop up, like disability studies and children's history and culture, again, not just out of what you might assume would be a natural discipline. Part of what's exciting going from editor to editor-in-chief is being able to see those pieces and help them work together.
Williams: You were at Routledge in the early 90s, in its heyday, although that moment waned in the mid-90s. Maybe you could talk about that experience.
Zinner: When I arrived in, I guess it would have been 93, they were really peaking. They had been building that project for almost ten years and owned huge swaths of the humanities in a way that's hard to appreciate now because there's really no equivalent.
Williams: What swaths did they own?
Zinner: Certainly whatever we were calling cultural studies. It was like the Blob that Ate New York. Everybody wanted to be under the umbrella of cultural studies, so it just kept expanding and expanding, starting with Hebdige's early youth studies and that kind of ethnography. And obviously lesbian and gay studies, which Routledge helped establish.
Williams: We usually attribute how fields get formed to names of key theorists, but, especially if you take the institution seriously, presses have that function.
Zinner: I agree. You would have to ask historians of the field, but from where I sit presses have carried significant legitimizing force. It seems now like an old moment, but postmodernism, as an object of study, was happening at Routledge more than anywhere else. And then the transition to postcolonialism, publishing Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha and many others. Also Routledge was very much at the center of what was going on in film theory. Again it seems old now, but film theory was at the time intellectually highly generative for other fields. Also feminist philosophy—Linda Nicholson, Judith Butler—and the whole body of multicultural history exemplified by Unequal Sisters. It's taken for granted now, but these were all groundbreaking moments.
What Routledge did was not just publish a book, but publicize it. They would get the books the attention they needed, get the Village Voice to say, "If you want to know what you need to know, buy this book."
Another thing, in publishing terms, was that they broke down publishing practices and introduced publishing genres that didn't exist before in the scholarly publishing world. Readers, for instance. Those readers that we all know, the Cultural Studies Reader, the Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, and the many that followed, they really helped establish parts of the field. As a general practice, they were not considered legitimate scholarly contributions at the time, and Routledge legitimized them. It opened up a faster moving notion of how one agglomerated knowledge, how one put ideas together and got them out quickly.
It was also the recognition that a solo-author book might take another four or five years, but if there was enough interesting work going on right now, we could coalesce that in a book. Again, that had tremendous effects in legitimizing a new area, and people could teach with those readers. They immediately could go to their chair and say, "This is what gay and lesbian studies looks like and this is my text."
Of course, Routledge was also known, more than anything else, as trendy or cutting edge—trendy being the underbelly of cutting edge, with the taint of the fleeting, the not well considered, the not rigorous. I think most would say they were guilty of that, but that was part of the price one paid if you were going to be out in front.
Williams: You've mentioned some of the positive lessons that you've taken from Routledge. What are some of the negative lessons?
Zinner: Routledge—at least in that incarnation—was being destroyed. Virtually all the editors who had helped make it happen, people who had been there for a long time, left, and it was falling to pieces at the time.
Williams: Because there was corporate pressure for higher profits?
Zinner: Enormous pressure. They were basically preparing it to be sold, and the quickest way to increase your bottomline is to decrease cost, and the quickest way to decrease costs is to fire people or, better yet, get them to leave on their own, so they were busy hacking away. They had a half thought-through notion that they wanted to be more of a textbook publisher, but without bringing the resources they would need to accomplish that.
But if you look at the longer history of the place, the commercial pressures that were unique to Routledge as opposed to university presses had some salutary effects. I felt it made editors be more creative about putting books together. They had to think more about audiences, imagining very specifically: where is this book going to go, who is actually going to read it, who is going to buy it, how is it going to circulate? They were much more aggressive about marketing and publicity than was common at the time. You've written about the academostar; they invented that or at least heavily contributed to it. It was unheard of, at the time, that you would promote individual scholars over the body of work. It wasn't all good, but it did shake things up.
Gatekeeping, with all its connotations, is central to the original mandate of university presses. But as an orthodoxy it can be restrictive to presses and scholars. We've tried to stretch that notion at the press to allow us to do the work we think needs doing in emerging and interdisciplinary fields. NYU had been built on non-traditional lines and was sort of a nouveau riche university, built with its own rules, and the press itself was a hybrid in that way. It's 90 years old but it did not have a tremendous legacy that it was trying to live up to, and it didn't have a whole set of practices that it had to repeat over and over again. That made room not just to respond to what's going on in the academy, but to have an active role in helping shape ideas. In publishing, that excites me the most—to be able to identify exciting ideas, promote them, amplify them, and get them rolling, to get them in conversation with other ideas in relevant fields and get them in circulation.
Williams: The metaphor I like to use, adapting Walter Benjamin's phrase "the author as producer," is "the editor as producer." Editors are not just service providers or functionaries but, especially the good editors, have good ideas to push people in directions that they might not have thought of themselves or were reluctant to pursue.
Zinner: Absolutely. Academic editors are usually called "acquiring editors." That tells you something. The notion of a commissioning editor is what I prefer. You're going out and saying, "I want to put these people and these ideas together, and I want it realized in a volume like this."
Williams: Give me an example of how you would do that.
Zinner: Soon after I got to NYU, I noticed that Henry Jenkins was doing some really interesting, groundbreaking work around children's culture, basically in a bottom-up approach. The way youth and children had been studied until then had been a kind of media effects approach—how are children influenced by media?—and he tried to understand what children did with the culture they had. How do they make their own culture? How do they interpret it? I was excited by that and felt there was something larger there. We talked about what became the Children's Culture Reader, which frames these ideas and draws out the history of the people doing it.
Or, in a similar vein, a primer or introduction. When I first got here I was very excited about what was going on in science studies, but even though it was difficult to understand for people outside the field, I felt there was a lot to offer. So I asked David Hess at RPI to write an intro to science studies, which was a successful book for science studies and for us. And we had the same experience with an intro to queer theory, a hundred-page book that is one of our bestselling titles ever. By the way, it was written by an Australian, because I think American academics unfortunately get very little credit for that kind of work.
Williams: Ironically it can influence the field for the next twenty years, since that will be the entryway for most students to find out about it.
Zinner: If you get scholars in their quiet moments who have done those kinds of books, they will admit that their role in editing this crucial reader or writing that primer may well be more influential than their more original work might ever be. It can also play itself out in series. That's on a broader scale than just a reader or a primer, when you see an area or a field that you really want to promote, particularly if it's interdisciplinary. You can put some interesting people together to try to make that happen.
And then there are the straight-up commissioned books. I had been a friend and admirer of Rickie Solinger, the women's history scholar, for many years, and she had been writing a series of books on reproductive rights, one of which was Wake Up Little Suzie, a history of single pregnancy and race before Roe v. Wade. She was moving on to write other things, but I begged her to write a synthetic history of reproductive politics in America, because I felt like it needed to be done and there was absolutely nobody better to write it. It came out last fall and it's a stunning book. There are numerous examples like that.
Williams: Are there any other negative lessons you've learned from Routledge—not to pick on Routledge—or from your years at NYU?
Zinner: I suppose one of the lessons is a pretty old-fashioned one. We've been doing some brainstorming here within the press including the dean of libraries, to whom we report, as well as speaking to some foundations and with the provost, and it comes back to foundational ideas about scholarly excellence. I talked about breaking some of the more hidebound traditions of university press publishing, but at the same time I'm concerned about some of what's going on in university press publishing, particularly what I see as an overall retreat from the humanities, which any university press person will tell you is among the least profitable parts of publishing.
Williams: I'm sure readings of William Faulkner or other famous literary figures, not to mention not-so-famous figures, are not likely sell a lot of copies. Sometimes I'll talk to friends who are upset that press editors don't seem interested in their book, but they don't realize the editor is thinking they'll be lucky if they sell 250 copies.
Zinner: That's the blunt edge of the financial pressure. Publishers make themselves feel better by saying, "Well, some other press will pick it up." But it says something, frankly, if the most prestigious presses back out of certain areas. That's sending an unmistakable message. It used to be understood that university presses supported the development of scholarship, period. That's one of the agreements that has broken down, and no one has really been able to articulate what the current standing agreement is. The agreement between the universities and the presses, and the libraries and departments, has degraded drastically over the last decade, and it's unclear what the rules are now.
Williams: It used to be that libraries had standing orders, and an ordinary book in English would get something like 700 or 800 orders just to start with.
Zinner: It was understood as a good in its own right. It didn't need any other justification—it's a contribution to scholarship. Nobody really thought of the fact that there are 120 university presses and there are over 4,000 institutions of higher education. It's a minority of universities who contribute to publishing, but that seemed to be understood as a kind of noblesse oblige, with the larger and wealthier state and private universities providing that service.
One of the other crucial generic changes in publishing terms that Routledge helped along was the paperback. Until then books were published primarily in hardback editions, and that's what libraries would buy, high-priced cloth editions. Routledge almost always did simultaneous hardback and paperback editions, and that started to change the rules about how academics bought books. For Routledge the majority of the sales actually went to individual scholars, not to libraries, and everyone else started to mimic that. It's a longer story, but it started to change the finances of publishing. You did dual editions, depending on the libraries to buy the $70 hardback even though the $20 paperback was available. That's broken down, so that even though the library may still only buy 250 copies, maybe 100 of those now are paperbacks. They make paperbacks really well now, and if it ever falls apart they can bind it up or replace it for less money than the hardback.
The reaction of the presses, particularly group three presses who do a lot of the paperback publishing, is to jack up the paperback price. At some point that's going to break down as well, so what do you do? Do you go back to hardbacks? Do you just start producing $35 paperbacks? The model has to give somewhere.
You should interview a librarian at some point, because their mandate has changed tremendously. They're affected more than even we are. Digital publishing has remade the whole work of library science. What they're looking for has really changed, so we don't know what's next.
Williams: In looking over the world of academic publishing, have you seen any things that particularly worked or things that didn't work? Do you have any pointers to give?
Zinner: There's a tension, at least for a press our size, between being heavily identified with and heavily invested in one area as opposed to having a broad set of fields. Certain presses rise up very quickly because they become known for and attached to a particular set of ideas, a particular moment in the academy. I'm thinking about Minnesota with THL and that moment of French theory. There's something productive about that but there's also a monitory note to be struck—the historical worm turns, and you can't turn a publishing house around on a dime. Minnesota is doing great things now, but it's different. If you're aligned too much with a particular intellectual moment and it turns, you're left holding the bag—you've still got 50 books signed up, and it has a momentum of its own. That's something we've discussed a lot in-house because I've been tempted at times to devote more resources and energy toward one field or area, but I've always been held back by recognizing that part of our strength is that we have eight major fields that we publish in. The cautionary note is sort of like those newsletters you get from your 401(k) that say your mutual funds should be diversified.
I think the project of the academy is the long durée. There are ideas that you want to promote and push, but there are also things that are just flashes in the pan. You become very excited about something that this scholar's excited about, and then a few years later it becomes almost an ironic joke. I've certainly, over my career, learned by reminding myself and becoming reinvested in what academe is about, what scholars do best, and trying to reflect that as best we can.
Williams: You mentioned the shift in the university and university presses away from the humanities. What are you doing about that shift?
Zinner: I don't know if I'd say the universities themselves are moving away from the humanities. They would argue—I've had this conversation with administrators—that they're simply going where the students are. Obviously that's a dialectical relationship and I don't think they've really thought through where students get their sense of value from, but I'd meet them halfway and say that it's not entirely the university that made all these incoming students want to go to the economics department instead of comp lit. I've spoken to some university administrators who say that, if you really want to match student body to faculty, our humanities programs are over-funded. They've got many more students in econ, say, per faculty than in, say, this very robust history or comp lit department, where the actual number of degrees granted isn't that great. I've heard this from folks at Ivy League schools just over the last few years; people have even framed it as a kind of post-9/11 moment, as a reinvestment in fields that are more political.
Part of what we're trying to do is be a smarter and more intriguing publisher in all of our fields. One of the great compliments I got was when somebody came by our booth at MLA and said, "You know, I walk by your booth and I see a lot of books I'd just love to pick up and read." I like the sense that we are bringing and positioning enough books that spoke to someone's core sense of curiosity. They're scholarly in a broad sense, not just the sense that "I do nineteenth-century American lit and I'm only interested in the books that feed my scholarship," but "I'm an intellectual being, I have a lot of curiosities, and this might trigger a whole different set of ideas." That's certainly part of what we've tried to do, and we've all got to try to do more of that. It's not just about packaging; it's also about the writerly and methodological approach.
How you do it is to get to authors early and have a sincere conversation with them about who they would want to read this. My first question is always, "Who's your audience for this?" Often scholars will give a vague answer about "people in my field," but I really try to get them to think concretely, to imagine it as a particular technology—who's picking it up, who's actually throwing their money down to buy this thing, and how are they using it? When they open up those first two pages, who's really reading this and what are they reading it for? Do these parts really need to be there for this kind of audience? I want it to be a conscious decision, so you don't fool yourself into thinking, "I'll write this and then later I'll think about audience and hope that it's interesting to all these people."
Part of it's also responding to the promise of multidisciplinarity, which I am and the press is certainly invested in. But it's also a challenge about methods and narrative to be able to write those books. For instance, part of the reason Ian's book, White by Law, worked is because it's providing a fundamental service in interpreting a body of scholarship that not that many people outside of law are qualified to do, and he wrote it in such a way that it's enormously productive for people in other fields. Everybody can't do that, and every work doesn't lend itself to it, but one of the more exciting things we do is getting people to read outside their field. That's one of my great pleasures.
Williams: I'm skeptical about some of the celebrations of interdisciplinarity. A person in English might cite a sociologist, but most likely it wouldn't be in a way that a sociologist would use or recognize, nor in a sociological frame. It's not necessarily out of recalcitrance, but simply that it's hard enough to keep up in one's home field and discipline. And in part it's from training in grad school onwards, that frames which issues people take up and how one approaches them.
Zinner: I think people are fairly parochial readers in the American academy. That's why it's of great satisfaction when we can show folks something that would be of use to them and it comes out of a different field. I know that it's tough when it's written with different terms and styles, and with a set of background contexts that are unique. But they have to work through it.
I was among a group of editors, mostly from trade presses, who met with people who ran various media outlets of importance to us. We met with Publishers' Weekly, NPR, someone from the Wall Street Journal, and Sam Tanenhaus, who has just become the new editor of the New York Times Book Review, and we had some very interesting and productive talks. We wanted to hear what was interesting to them, and they wanted to hear what challenges we faced—a conversation beyond just pitching books, because normally they see editors and publishing types as only tying to get them to review our books. To make a long story short, one of the things I said to Sam, as the kind of university press representative, was, "Look, I get so frustrated when you guys review university press books, and you have the almost obligatory criticism of the turgid writing. Obviously you need to say so if it's true, but you're reading it the wrong way. University press publishing is really driven by ideas. If you're irritated by the recursiveness of it, well, that's part of what makes scholarship scholarship. If you want journalism, review journalism. But don't review scholars and expect them to both have the depth of scholars and write like journalists. Very few people can pull that off." And he really heard it. Later in the year we were talking to him about some books and he said—he was reviewing a book by another university press—"The writing's not that great, but I think it's an important book and the ideas are important." To me, that's what universities and university presses are about: we're where ideas come from. In this country, we drive ideas, and university presses are the major outlet for them.
Williams: That's nicely put, and a good defense of the university. Alongside all of the physical changes in publishing, it also seems to me that there's a new generation of editors that's come up and now hold significant positions. When I worked at Routledge [in 1989-1990], all four of the editors had PhDs, three in English and one in philosophy, and I think that was fairly typical of that generation of editors. They were academically trained, roughly in the 60s generation, but because of the crimped academic job market even back then, they segued into publishing. The model is different now. Younger editors usually have some academic training—you have a master's in cultural studies—but didn't want to be professors and came into it more through internships instead of PhD programs.
Zinner: That's true. At Routledge, their editors were drawn from a somewhat different model. Up until that point scholarly editors mostly had a PhD in the relevant fields although it was beginning to change even then. Is it strictly generational? No. But you do see both a different model of university press editor and a different model of an academic. They've developed together. On the editor's side, it used to be you had a PhD in the field and you acquired in that field. It even used to be that university presses regularly gave sabbaticals to their editors because the assumption was that they had their own projects that they were working on. There was a very porous border between academe and university press publishing. That started to break down when you got people acquiring in more than one field, and it became an expectation. I remember when I was at Routledge, Marlie Wasserman, who's now the director of Rutgers University Press, was there, and she said that a good university press editor ought to be able to acquire in virtually any field. She herself had acquired in a number of fields and done it extremely well. I think that marked a fundamental change in the way university press editors understood their charge.
Williams: It was more a gentlemanly side job or an academic adjunct job before?
Zinner: I just think that they were much more closely married, where the scholar and the editor were engaged in effectively the same thing. And I think that has pulled apart, where the editor and scholar are not engaged in exactly the same thing with the exact same goals. It was easier then because there were almost no fiscal pressures, so you could simply say, "I'm going to publish the best and the brightest in my field, period." Then it's strictly a matter of vetting—whoever gets the best reviews gets published. I don't want to simplify too much, and I know they were doing more than that, but there are all sorts of new considerations that go into who you're going to publish now.
On the academic side, I think that you have a whole generation that's come up who are much less shy about the professionalizing bits of their jobs, both in the way they conduct themselves in their university and in publishing. It used to be that I'd find almost an aversion to publishing. It was a scholar's closest contact with commerce and the delicate almost seemed to be soiled by it. They didn't really want to be too invested in selling—in selling the book, or in selling themselves. Now most scholars are right in there. They want to know what we're doing to get this book out there, and they're not going to be shy about it. They'll say, "Tell me what I need to do." Frankly, that's part of what I look for in an author. It's not just about the book; I'm looking at the entire scholar and who they are, what their intellectual trajectory is, who they're circulating among and influencing, what sort of broad vision they have, because this is someone you want to establish a long-term relationship with.
Williams: That leads to more nuts-and-bolts questions that I want to ask. How do you find a book?
Zinner: A number of ways. Travel, both to campuses and conferences. Campus travel is more directed. I'll come to Carnegie Mellon and University of Pittsburgh, call the relevant departments, make appointments with people, have a more leisurely chance to talk with people about their work. Conferences, as we all know, are more of a zoo, but a tremendous opportunity to speak to the maximum amount of people in a particular field from across the country. And then there are smaller-scale conferences that we go to as well. Particularly in New York; almost any day of the week during the semester there are things you can go to, just here at NYU.
Williams: Do you get books mostly through contacts?
Zinner: Contacts, networks, and there are blind submissions. Not a very high percentage of those turn out to be things we're interested in, but certainly some do.
Williams: How many submissions do you get, and how many do you do?
Zinner: Blind? Me personally, I get dozens a week. But I'd say less than five percent of blind submissions turn into books.
Other places we find things are journals. You read an interesting essay and contact the writer. Obviously now there's also a lot of listserv surfing. There are some very good listservs out there. I'll do some of that, but not a lot. The same with some very good blogs. And then you get to know more senior people in the field who turn you on to colleagues, students, and networks that run through there. After you've been in it for a while, people do come to you. It's blind, but there are the people who have a good sense of what we do, they know our list, they're writing to us and to me by name with specific projects in mind. Often it's "I don't know you but Jeff thought it'd be good." So it's not quite blind, and again the longer you've been in this, and whenever you've developed a cohesive list, you get things. Particularly in those niche areas, like disability studies—a field we've helped establish—I get a lot of great stuff, so there's a way in which it becomes a kind of feedback loop.
Williams: What is your advice for somebody to get you interested in a book?
Zinner: The first level is simply to spend some time getting to know who's doing what. That's your work, spending a little time collecting some catalogues. Now a lot of that can be done online, so it's not hard. That's also to say, frankly, that there's no excuse for sending somebody a project when they don't have a list in that field. I still get a lot of proposals from people sending me things in fields we don't publish in.
Williams: Do you expect people to send you a proposal and a chapter? I know a lot of people who have dissertations that they've revised and they wonder if they should send the whole kit and kaboodle.
Zinner: Certainly not unless we've asked for it. If it's a first approach, it's almost always a well-done proposal, cv, and a sample chapter. That's more than sufficient, and in fact, often if it's a first pass, just a cover letter and proposal. An editor will know within seconds broadly whether it's for them or not, and the closer it is to what they're interested in, the more time they spend with it to figure out whether it's really something they want to proceed with.
Williams: What makes a good proposal?
Zinner: Concision, clarity, the structure of the proposal. We actually have a link on our website that describes it, and I think a lot of presses do. The components of it are pretty basic—I hesitate to say a thesis statement, but that's effectively what it is. You start with a précis, right upfront, the old tenth-grade inverted triangle style of writing, the broadest statement first, and then a quick recap of the terrain that you're covering, the kind of materials that you're working with, some hint of the methodological approach, and its resonances in the field. Then you can drop into a slightly longer version of what its place in the field is, what's motivating it, what it's struggling with or for.
Williams: About how long are they?
Zinner: Getting back to tenth grade, as the teacher always said, as long as it needs to be. I wouldn't go on for more than a few pages, really, and it can be as short as two or three pages.
Williams: I've seen a lot of friends' proposals, especially from people who don't have their first book out yet, and they'll be twelve pages, and a very dense twelve pages. They'll start out with "As Foucault or Judith Butler has argued," and it'll be more like an exam than saying "this is my view." I know, having worked at Routledge, that this would turn an editor off. If Foucault already said it, why should there be a new book? And what does it do that's distinctive?
Zinner: If I'm interested I'll work my way through it, but your job is—if you've seen my desk or if you've seen other editors' desks and the kind of volume that we get—to make it as easy on the editor as possible. You want to do some of our work for us, and one of the ways you can do that is to set up the book quickly and tell us immediately what the hell it's about. Don't set the intellectual stakes first, that comes later, and it will save a lot of time for us to decide whether it makes sense for our list. Situate the book – "I'm interested in environmental justice and my core concern is…." I can quickly get a sense of who that person's intellectual interlocutors are, what body of literature it's coming out of, but also I can tell the audience. The marketing pieces of a proposal we ask for are really important, and that's where you more concretely set the outlines of your field—"Its core audiences are cultural anthropology and sociology, these are the kinds of classes it might be taught in, it's akin to these three books, but usefully different in these three ways."
Williams: Although I frequently find, in reading proposals, people say their book will be of interest to a wide audience, when it might actually sell two hundred copies to people in nineteenth-century American literature who work on Melville. People often don't have a realistic view of what their actual audience or market is.
Zinner: I think most editors probably just ignore that. I don't want the judgment of the author in that sense, I want the resonant context of the fields. In articulating what the audiences are, I think one common mistake that people make is that it's an additive model—"my book is going to be of interest to" and then they list nine fields and subfields. They're imagining that the outline of their audience is a circle around all those fields, but what an editor is imagining is more like where the circles intersect. So if you're saying it's cultural anthropology and cultural studies and media studies, it's not all those fields, it's where they cross over, which is a small number. Which is fine, and there is no need to try and make it seem larger than it is.
Williams: What are some other pointers—both good features of a proposal and not so good features?
Zinner: Well, there's also the cover letter, which is important. Often an editor won't even get to the proposal because a good cover letter has told you already a lot of the basic information. They shouldn't be at all shy of saying if they've met you already or if you have mutual friends or if they were sent to you by an advisor or senior person in their field. And who you are, your title, all that, right upfront. You've got to use everything you have. Even for more senior people, if you've published a book already, list that upfront, first paragraph. If that book got great reviews, don't be shy about it; if you won a prize tell me about it, or if you got a major fellowship. This is the time to use those things. I recognize that it feels like self-promotion, but go ahead and do it.
One mistake that people, mostly junior scholars, make is excessive informality. I'm really not much of a stickler, but I have people I don't know and I've never met calling me "Dear Eric," particularly with emails. I do think it's a function of the email generation, but I don't like it personally. Take yourself seriously and I'll take you seriously.
Williams: It's a business letter.
Zinner: Yes. If we're opening a pile of letters, is it on letterhead? Are there grammatical mistakes in your cv or cover letter? Is that deadly? No. But does it send a message? Yes. I've had letters that are addressed to the wrong editor; they've clearly sent it to four or five presses and they reference the wrong press. I understand, but if you can't take the time to properly put your materials together, why should I take the time on it? It's just the obvious things, the stuff they tell you when you're applying for a job. Bill Germano's book, Getting It Published, is very good for all this.
To go back to what we mentioned before, I always appreciate when someone truly understands and knows our list. A lot of people say "I like your list," but it's clear to me immediately when they really know it. And it's always a nice compliment when they say, "These three books are really exciting to me and I see myself in line with those." It tells us that you understand our list and understand where your work fits.
Williams: We've talked about Routledge a bit, where you got your first job in academic publishing, and I'm curious to find out more about your trajectory. Why did you go into publishing?
Zinner: Because I was a lousy grad student. I was in grad school at Carnegie Mellon and after I'd been in the master's program for a year, I went to do an internship at Tikkun and fell in love with it. Part of what I fell in love with was not just the work being done there, although I did love the political immediacy of it; I loved the kind of meta-work of publishing, which is to say I wasn't writing so much as facilitating.
I couldn't take the formlessness of grad student life. I loved the intensity of the learning, but I needed some structure, and that's one thing I immediately glommed onto. I got up in the morning, I went to work, and then, even more important, I was able to stop work at the end of the day. One of the things I couldn't take as a grad student was feeling like it was always there. I could never enjoy anything—you could always be working.
Anyway, I went to the city [New York], originally to try to get a job in magazine publishing. Coincidentally Tikkun had just moved from Oakland to New York, so I started working with them. I didn't have a full-time gig, though, and as far as the lefty magazine scene in New York, once you got past The Nation and Harper's, you were pretty much done. So my second set of interests was scholarly publishing, which I frankly didn't know all that much about, but I understood that there was some degree of verisimilitude between magazine publishing and book publishing, and clearly the scholarly part was what was going to interest me. I got the job at Routledge the old-fashioned way—from a newspaper ad. At the time people found jobs in the classifieds section of the New York Times, which really does place us as dinosaurs now. It turned out to be the editorial assistant to the editor-in-chief, Bill Germano, who happened to be the king of cultural studies, and so the job was perfect for me. That was a tremendous place to be at the time. The transition from being in one of the few true cultural studies programs in the country to being at Routledge at that time, working with Bill, Maureen MacGrogan, Marlie, and a bunch of other people who were there, was really incredible.
Williams: I tell people working at Routledge was my second grad school. Now you're directing the editorial program at NYU Press, as well as signing books. How do you see things going from here?
Zinner: What's interesting to me now is, as George Bush the First said, the vision thing. I enjoy enormously working with the editors on their work and brainstorming with them and seeing what they produce. As director, you are involved, along with the books, in some longer-term issues and have a broader perspective about the direction of the press. The major challenge is contending with what we all think of as the crisis in scholarly publishing. That's really our work over the next five years, first and foremost positioning the press in a way that it cannot just survive but thrive and do some important work. And in the course of that, helping scholars. We're all in this together and have to get through this period. Thinking through the broad questions of scholarly communication together, with other university presses and with scholars, that's really the major challenge right now.
There's been a lot of talk since I've been in publishing about the promise of digital publishing. Talk about utopian ideas—obviously a lot of that didn't come to pass. To date, most of the questions around digital publishing have circulated around questions of production and distribution, which are interesting but not really central to editorial questions. What I've started to see that does intrigue me, and I want to be involved in, is what Henry Jenkins talks about in his new book for us about collective intelligence, social computing, and networked intelligence: Are there epistemological issues at stake? Not just distribution and production questions, but is digital publishing starting to affect the generation of ideas?
I don't care as much about the delivery system, whether you can dial it up on your phone or whatever. It's ideas that we all are interested in. It's like the old saying, "We're in the business of transportation, I don't care if you take a train or a plane." Well, we're in the business of scholarly communication. People get a little hung up, I think, on the technologies, whether it's a book or something else. Not that there aren't important issues to think through regarding intellectual property and copyright, but the core issues for all of us as scholars are the intellectual and epistemological stakes. I don't know what all of them are yet, but there are some really smart people starting to think about whether it's going to change the model of how scholars produce ideas, how we as publishers are involved in that, and how we help promote and amplify ideas.
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