Before turning to Slavica Publishers and its story and experiences, let me begin from the end—the future of scholarly publishing, in general and in Slavistics. There was a short thread about this on SEELangs in the spring of 1995, with some very perceptive comments from David Birnbaum and George Fowler. Most of the SEELangs participants during that time were more concerned about which immersion heater to take to Russia these days, and similar more pressing questions, so the discussion expired after three or four replies to my initial posting (which was occasioned by a very stimulating and alarming article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by the Director of the Pennsylvania State University Press; Thatcher 1995).
The common wisdom is that the book will soon be replaced by electronic (computerized) publication. Although I do agree that for most purposes the scholarly book will eventually become electronic, that time is much further in the future and has many more difficulties than many recognize. The first obstacle is very obvious: differing standards. One example: a quick look at the many continuing postings about Cyrillic and other character sets on SEELangs will bring this home rapidly. At a time when most people still have to go to considerable effort to be able to read a straight text posting in Cyrillic, we cannot even think of trying to make electronic transmission the only method for the many characters and special formatting requirements of Slavic linguistics. At Slavica Publishers we still frequently run into authors who want to have a special character made, or at least want us to make a special character in our fonts to match one that they have made in their fonts.
What will a writer do who wants a special character? Will s/he describe it in a short note inside the text? If the medium is entirely graphic, then of course special characters are no problem, but how do you search a graphic text for key words to find the topics that you are interested in? The technical difficulties involved are enormous and have not been adequately addressed yet. Unicode is certainly a major step forward, since it (at least in theory) describes unambiguously all the characters of all modern languages, plus many diacritic and other marks, but in fact it is lacking even some of the most basic symbols needed for work with Old Church Slavonic or Old East Slavic texts, such as different kinds of jus malyj, a jotated jat’ character, and many others.
Even if the standards were worked out, it is clearly the case that it will be some time before all Slavists even in North America have adequate computing equipment and access to on-line services to permit us to restrict distribution to electronic means. There is also the issue of how much time it takes to learn to use the equipment and services. While we can probably assume that today’s school children will grow up knowing computers much as my generation knew typewriters, this still leaves a long period when scholars currently active will not wish to take the time out to learn how to use all the electronic resources currently available (not to mention the fact that the information keeps changing so rapidly that only a minority are willing to try to keep up).
Another barrier is the amount of time that will pass until Slavists in other countries all have the equipment available to an adequate degree. Given the current state of computing and the economic situation in Eastern European countries and the CIS (not to mention those parts of the Third World that have Slavists), it will surely be at least ten years, and possibly longer, until general computing availability equals that now available in North America and much of Western Europe. By that time some, or perhaps most, of the technical problems cited above will almost certainly have been solved.
Human factors also enter into the question: there is no doubt that reading a computer screen is much harder on the eyes than reading a book, and with poor eyesight and eyestrain already being occupational hazards for scholars, many will be reluctant to aggravate the problem by giving up their printed materials for computers. I suspect that a compromise will eventually be reached in which the most frequently-used (and therefore most economically viable) books, such as textbooks, will remain in hard-copy form, and scholarly materials, especially those which need to be searched and/or updated frequently (such as bibliographies, dictionaries, data bases, and other reference works), will shift increasingly to electronic format. New technical achievements such as the flat panel display and ever-larger screens may help overcome some of the physiological barriers to wider acceptance of electronic publication.
Since the prestige and refereed status of a journal or publishing com-pany is so important to scholars and to those who promote them and give them raises (or don’t), electronic publishing also raises questions of “gate-keeping”. Unless electronic publishing is to become a totally unregulated and unrefereed wasteland, mechanisms will have to be put into place to perform the same functions that editors and editorial boards now perform. While one might idealistically assume that some scholars will do these things out of sheer love for the field, without compensation, the people who now work for publishing companies probably won’t, since they have to earn a living. Since at least the most prestigious publishers, and many others as well, pay referees, editors, copy editors, circulation directors, etc., somebody will still have to be paid to perform these functions with electronic publishing, which will mean having a payment system in place for those who access electronic publications. Such a system is not hard to create, but again it will take some time and negotiation and work.
I have heard it suggested that there is no need for “gatekeeping”: people will read what is posted and decide for themselves whether it is good or not. The fact is that we depend upon refereeing to help us decide what to take the time to read. Refereeing explains why the journal Language has a much wider circulation and is read more than any other linguistics journal. When I pick up an issue of Language, I know that I may disagree with some of the articles and reviews, some will be boring or irrelevant to me, and some may be incomprehensible, but at least they will be competent. When I started graduate school in 1957, a person who had a good command of several languages and a fair amount of free time could read almost everything worthwhile coming out in Slavic linguistics, with some time left over for general linguistics and other fields. This has not been the case for many years now: we all depend upon the reputation of journals and book publishers, as well as reviews, to help us decide what to read, since there is no hope of reading everything. When looking at most journals, I tend to look at the reviews before the articles, and some surveys I have seen quoted show that this is a common attitude. Some type of “gatekeeping” will probably always be necessary. The materials which do not pass muster may still be posted electronically, just as they are now published by less demanding publishers (I never cease to be amazed at how many really poor manuscripts rejected by Slavica turn up as books elsewhere. Of course, Slavica certainly makes mistakes: there are some things that I now wish that we had not turned down, and I would like to “unpublish” a half-dozen or so of our books if I could).
Electronic publication does have many major advantages over traditional publication methods; for example, it eliminates the start-up cost of a reprint and the storage costs and inventory taxes which eat Slavica alive (both discussed below). In spite of some such advantages which are available now, the complications involved in switching to electronic publication are endless, and I need not belabor them further. The switch will eventually come, but I believe that it will take place gradually over a fairly long period, with certain types of publications making the switch more quickly than others. In the meantime we will still have a majority of works in Slavistics published in the traditional way, and I I propose to talk about this traditional way, based both upon the experience of my own company, Slavica Publishers, and upon my observations of many other companies over the last forty years[1].
After coming to the end, the future, I must go back to the beginning: how Slavica started and grew, and what can be learned from our experience; but some of that part might make more sense if the reader will bear with me for a discussion of the economics and mechanics of publishing and bookselling in our field.
Let me note at the outset that there is a real hrarchy in the sales potential of books, and that Slavic linguistics is at the absolute bottom of that hierarchy. It is no accident that most of the better-known university and commercial presses which publish in the Slavic field do not publish any Slavic linguistics. While I don’t want to point fingers at specific publishers, just think back to the book exhibits you looked at when you were last at a AAASS convention or to the publishers’ catalogs you received in the mail: how many had lots of political science and history and some literature and literary criticism, and a few reference works, and how many had Slavic linguistics? Political science, economics, sociology, and history sell best; literature comes next, and linguistics is last. If a linguistics book has more general appeal outside of the Slavic field, it does much better. There simply aren’t enough Slavic linguists and libraries that buy books in our field. Slavica’s approximate average break-even point for scholarly books is 600 copies sold, and only a few books in linguistics have ever reached that point. Most Slavic linguistics books sell between 250 and 350 copies. Our break-even point is raised by the relatively low prices of our books, but it is lowered by our unusually low overhead costs.
Thatcher notes that the Pennsylvania State University Press has published about 150 titles in literary criticism since 1985, of which 65 percent have sold fewer than 500 copies, and 91 percent have sold fewer than 800 copies. Even putting the books in paperback didn’t help: 74 percent of their paperback titles since 1985 have sold fewer than 500 copies.[2] The more general type of books on literary criticism published by PSU Press sell better than books of Slavic literary criticism, and if literary criticism, which sells better than linguistics by a considerable margin, sells so badly, it is clear that the market for Slavic linguistics in the West is simply not adequate to support books in the field without some additional support. There are basically three possibilities for increasing income: 1) broaden the market; 2) raise prices considerably; 3) ask for subventions.
Broadening the market is hindered in the USA by a fashionable idea among libraries at present: that libraries should specialize more in what they collect (thus buying less in certain fields, such as Slavic) and depend correspondingly more upon interlibrary loan. This means that instead of selling ten copies of a given book to Big Ten universities,[3] all of which have active Russian or Slavic departments, one might sell four or five, and the others would borrow it when requested. This idea, which has been put into practice in many places, simply means that publishers have to find some other way of getting their money: higher prices, taking subventions, or publishing fewer books with low sales potential.
The greatest potential area for broadening the market is in Eastern Europe and the CIS, but even after the events of 1989 through 1991, most Slavists and libraries in those countries don’t have the money for serious acquisition of Western books and periodicals. Even before the recent political changes, I tried repeatedly and in several countries (Russia, Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, and Bulgaria) to sell Slavica books, going so far as to offer to take local currency or local books as payment, but met unvarying rejection. The most annoying rejection was perhaps from a large Zagreb book importer and exporter, who asked why anybody in Croatia (or, at that time, Yugoslavia) would want to buy or read a Slavica book, since “mi imamo svoje knjige” (‘we have our own books’). Broadening the market significantly does not seem to be a realistic option at this point, given both attitudes and financial realities (we do ship a substantial number of free copies of all of our books and journals to libraries and scholars in Eastern Europe and the CIS, so that some copies will be available in each country, but there are obvious limits to how much of that we can afford, and in any case it doesn’t bring in money).
We could raise our prices significantly, which would bring our break-even point down much lower, but doing so would negate one of our main reasons for existence: trying to offer books at affordable prices. It is also true that in many cases price increases decrease the number of copies sold and thus are sometimes self-defeating. Our unusually low overhead (e.g., simple catalogs instead of fancier ones with slick paper, lots of illustrations, and color) helps keep prices down, but can only do so much.
Asking for subventions from authors or their universities is an option that we rejected rather early in our existence. In my opinion (and that of many others), some presses (although by no means all) have abused the subvention system, and the acceptance of a work has depended as much or more upon the availability of enough subvention to guarantee a profit than upon the quality of the work. We decided that in order to make it clear that quality would be the decisive factor for Slavica, we would not accept money beyond the cost of camera-ready copy.
We have used a type of “indirect subvention” often used by university presses: the profits from some profitable titles cover the losses on other books. Since some (but not all textbooks) can be quite profitable, we used the gains on textbooks to cover the losses on scholarly books.
This worked quite well while we were just about the only publishers willing to publish new textbooks in the field, but the enrollment boom of the late 1980s brought a large number of publishers into the field who had not been active in it before, or who had pulled out during the hard times of the 1970s and early 1980s. These publishers, often well-funded, major names in publishing, have been putting out new textbooks and investing sums that we simply don’t have at our command, and they do not have the drag of scholarly books to offset textbook sales (since they don’t publish scholarly books in the field). Many of the new textbooks vary from passable to quite good (in my opinion), and that fact, combined with the attraction of something new, has severely cut into our own textbook sales, thus in turn removing the “subvention” for our scholarly books. I find it ironic that many of these new textbooks were supported in part by grants from the same agencies, offices, and boards (both governmental and private) which try to promote “pure” scholarship, since by in effect subsidizing major publishers who don’t publish scholarly materials in the field, or publish a limited amount or only in certain subfields, these agencies have helped cut the ground out from under publishers such as Slavica which would publish the results of the “pure” research. Although the costs of producing some of the books were beyond our means, in other cases we were never given a chance to consider or bid on books that we could have published.
Our costs break down into five major categories: production, advertising, storage, shipping, and general operating costs. Production is primarily typesetting (which we are about to stop doing, as soon as the next double issue of IJSLP, #39–40, is ready) and printing. We have typeset quite a few books and journals at our own expense, but have discovered that we simply cannot pay for typesetting on most books and journals without losing more money than we can afford on that publication. Typesetting a work not infrequently costs quite a bit more than printing it.
Printing is a place where one can save considerable money by cutting corners, but the quality of the resulting book is quite different. From the beginning, we opted for quality instead of lowest possible cost. Slavica has always used a sewn binding on every book (except for two thin early books, and some recent teacher’s manuals, all of which were too thin to sew with our printer’s equipment). This costs considerably more than the “perfect” binding (cut off the back and glue the cover to it) used for most paperbacks and some hardcovers, but it produces books which almost never fall apart, no matter how hard they are used; they also lie flatter when opened, and it is easy for libraries to rebind them (even paperbacks) if heavy use makes this necessary. We also shrink-wrap each book individually, since this insures that the book will come to the buyer in much better condition, and we shifted from long-life to completely acid-free paper for all scholarly books over ten years ago (acid-free paper won’t crumble, as most older Soviet books do). All of these items raise production costs, but they ensure books that will last. As a percentage of the total cost of running the company, the extra costs for the higher-quality book are not so great, but the difference in results is great.
Advertising includes not only catalogs, but also exhibits at conven-tions and review copies, plus occasional advertisements in journals and convention programs. Buying advertisements in journals is generally a losing proposition: charges per page are usually high, and except for books of very wide appeal, the cost per sale is exorbitant. Moreover, many journals segregate all advertisements in the back, where many readers never bother to look. Can you imagine how many advertisers would continue advertising in Time or the New Yorker or the New York Times if all the advertisements were put together at the very end of the publication? Since our primary advertising is catalogs, we have a major handicap when compared to university presses: as non-profit organizations, they can mail their catalogs in the USA for about half of what it costs us, because of the postal subsidy built into the rates of non-profit organizations.
Shipping is a grin-and-bear-it thing: the $2 per order that we have charged for more than a dozen years (to go to $3 on January 1) does not begin to cover the cost of shipping, if one factors in the wages of the person who does the shipping, the rental of the shipping room, the cost of the box, and postage.
Storage is a major problem: since our books typically keep selling over many years (we are still selling about eighty percent of the titles that we have ever published), storage costs become very significant (and our warehouse has just raised their rates to nearly triple what they had been). We also pay a substantial inventory tax each year on the value of our unsold books and journals.
General operating costs include many things: wages for the three people (all part-time by their own choice)[4] who work at Slavica (my own situation is special; I currently receive $2,400 per year as salary, which is enough to keep me covered as an employee by Slavica’s liability and other insurance); rent on our office, storage rooms, and warehouse space; postage costs; insurance; payroll taxes; office supplies; telephone and fax; computers; royalties; and much more. Since many of these costs are the same or nearly the same regardless of the number of books published, it is obviously better to publish more books each year, but since each book takes a finite amount of my time, our yearly output has dropped from an average of 15 to an average of 8 since I became Chair of our department at Ohio State University in 1990.
As mentioned above, we now ask for camera-ready copy for all new books and journals, but do not ask for subsidies beyond camera-ready copy, unless the author wants something that we would not normally put into the book (e.g., a dust jacket, which is discarded at once by virtually all academic libraries, but adds considerably to the cost of producing a book; color printing in the text, which is very expensive; a hard cover on a small book which would normally get a soft cover to keep the price down).
Unlike some presses, especially scholarly ones, we do pay royalties. There are two basic scales, although specific circumstances may dictate some deviation from these. For textbooks, which can be expected to sell reasonable numbers, and may make a profit, in most cases royalties are 10% of list price (not the net price, which is less, and is the figure used by many publishers). For scholarly books, where our average break-even point is 600 copies sold, we begin royalties from the 601st copy. Since, as noted above, relatively few scholarly books in our restricted field sell 600 copies, this means no royalties on most scholarly books, but we see no reason why we should compound our losses on scholarly books by paying royalties before we break even. We began by paying royalties on most scholarly books from the first copy, but as we realized just how much money we were losing, we gradually moved the starting point to the 201st, then the 301st, then the 401st, and finally to the current 601st.
Royalties are not paid on books given away free (author’s copies, desk copies of textbooks, review copies to journals, gifts [as mentioned above, we give away a substantial number of copies to libraries and schol-ars in Eastern Europe and the CIS], copies displayed at exhibits [the exhib-it organizers normally keep the copy as part of their fee and resell it]).
Authors get the normal 10 free copies of the book (if there is more than one author, the free copies are split equally), and the right to buy additional copies of their own book in lots of five or more at 40% off list price. Authors who want substantial numbers of additional copies can get them at a discount of more than 40% by making special arrangements with us before the book is printed.
If books sell well enough to justify a reprint, we reprint titles as our supply gets low. This applies mostly to textbooks; very few scholarly books have sold enough to justify a reprint. In the past we have normally kept books in print (“in print” means available for sale, as opposed to “out of print”, or sold out) as long as any copies remained to sell. We are at present reconsidering this policy for several reasons.
Most scholarly books have a definite sales curve: the largest number are sold in the second year, when many of the reviews appear, and our advertising and other notices have made individuals and libraries aware of the book’s existence. The sales in the first and third year are most often about equal, although less than in the second year. From the fourth year onward, sales generally decline steadily, and after several years most books sell very few copies per year (some titles as few as two or three; many between five and ten). We regularly display some older titles at conferences, list them in catalogs, and three times recently we have printed a large complete catalog, which contained quotations from reviews, and which was sent to a large number of persons and libraries world-wide. Although the catalogs produced a brief increase in sales for some books, the general results confirmed our previous experience: once a book has been out for a certain number of years (exactly how many varies from book to book), its sales will be minimal no matter what we do. A few scholarly books defy this pattern and sell significant numbers each year for an indefinite period, but this is relatively uncommon.
Having a stock of titles which don’t sell distorts our tax situation because of the way the IRS treats inventory. As an example, suppose that we print 1000 books for a cost of $1000 and we sell 500 of them at $2 each. Common sense says that we have broken even for the year, since we have spent $1000 and taken in $1000. The IRS, however, says: “Wait, you have $500 worth of inventory remaining in the other 500 copies, and you may not deduct this expense until you either sell the books or get rid of them (pulp them, give them away, etc.). You have therefore made a profit of $500 on the copies sold. Please hand over the taxes you owe on the profit.” Behind the IRS are the State of Ohio and the City of Columbus, which also tax us on the same imaginary profit. Then again comes the State of Ohio, which says: “You have property which is subject to the inventory tax; pay up!”
As a result of these laws, one could go broke by breaking even, since as long as one does not get rid of unsold inventory, it creates a fictitious profit on which one has to pay taxes. In this way, a situation which is apparently break-even, or even moderately profitable, becomes a money-losing one. Since even textbooks are only printed once every three to five years, on the average, and since scholarly books are usually printed once and sell for many years, we wind up with a large inventory and therefore substantial taxes which have major impact on our finances. In particular, it causes cash flow problems, since our money is tied up in inventory and we may not have as much cash available for other purposes as we need. Our inventory sits in the warehouse unsold and holding our money like a sponge.
In view of this policy of the IRS (fought out in the “Thor Power Tool Decision” before the Supreme Court), many publishers have destroyed almost all inventory back beyond a certain date. The alternative, for books which sell a lot of copies, is to print the books each year as needed. This works only if a book sells a lot of copies; Slavica only has three or four books which sell enough copies to justify yearly printing. Even on those books, yearly printing would severely cut or eliminate profits on those books, since the cost of printing a copy of a book declines greatly as more copies are printed. For example, whereas it might cost $3000 to print 200 copies of a given book (for an average cost of $15 each), additional copies printed at the same time might cost only $3 each. If one prints 1000 copies for $5400 and sells them over several years, the average cost of $5.40 per book instead of $15 makes a very significant difference. The fixed costs of making plates, getting the prpresses running, setting up the binding machin-ery, etc., are a very large part of the costs of printing books in small num-bers. This is why we often cannot do a reprint of a book that is still selling well when we run out of stock: if we do a reprint, we will sell another 100 or 200, but we need to sell 500 or so, even on a reprint, to break even. Printing a year’s worth of a scholarly book is just not an option.
Various publishers use different formulas to price a book. We don’t use a simplistic formula at Slavica, but in general our printing costs are about one-third total expenses (the other two-thirds goes into the items mentioned in section 2.2 above: advertising, storage, shipping, and general operating costs). This means that if we pay $5.40 to print a book, we need to sell it for at least $16.20; since we give discounts of 10–40% to all buyers (averaging just a bit over 20%), the list price would have to be $20.25. This is a manageable list price; if the cost per book were $15, printing costs would be a larger percentage of total expenses, but we would still have to have a list price of at least $40, and far fewer copies would be sold.
The best solution seems to be to print a reasonable supply the first time around (although guessing how many copies a book will sell is a very uncertain business), and to hope for the best. This means that sometimes we print too few copies, and the book sells out before everybody who wants it has bought it, but much more commonly we have more books than buyers, and the extra books sit in the warehouse. This is a situation faced by virtually all publishers, and nobody seems to have found a good solution to it yet.
Publishers use two basic solutions: one is to try to get rid of the extra books at sale prices, the other is to scrap the books (politely known as “recycling”). Having frequent sales leads to a “don’t buy now, I can get it cheaper later” attitude, which means that the publisher loses the immediate income needed to pay for current expenses. Recycling (a.k.a. destroying perfectly good books) rends the soul of any scholar. To discourage people from waiting for sales, we have only had two in the past: one when we hit our 100th title in 1982, and the other (only to previous buyers) in 1987 to see what would happen. The 1982 sale was a modest success; the one in 1987 barely covered the costs of printing and mailing the special catalog. During 1996, from January 1 through June 30, we are having our third, and probably final, sale, in which we will offer discounts up to 45% on almost all scholarly books which we published before 1992 (textbooks and recent scholarly books will not be included in the special discounts). Many of titles which remain in small numbers will, we hope, sell out during this sale. Some other titles will be recycled to avoid the continuing costs and paperwork associated with keeping in stock titles which sell five or six copies per year.
In the past we have taken two steps to deal with excess inventory: first, we have raised prices on some older books every two to four years to keep the prices of older books in line with those of more recent books (just as one should not expect to buy a house in 1995 at 1985 prices, neither should one expect to buy other goods produced in 1985 at the older prices; the books have been producing storage costs, taxes, and tying up capital during those ten years). Second, we have periodically disposed of excess inventory by pulping it (or in one case, giving a large number of books to a foundation which was to distribute them in Eastern Europe and the CIS).
One of Slavica’s greatest financial innovations has been the idea of giving the same discount to all buyers. If you buy directly by mail, most publish-ers not only charge you the list price that you would pay in a store, but they also charge shipping fees on top of that price, so sending your money directly to the publisher actually costs you more. This has always annoyed me (and still does). Our reasoning was that a person who sends the money with the order should be able to buy the book as cheaply as a book dealer who may not pay for several months. Reaction from buyers has been very positive, but as far as I know, no other publisher in our field has adopted this policy, although I think that they would be wise to do so, since indiv-iduals pay in advance, whereas bookstores pay much later (or, sometimes, never), and it is in the publisher’s interest to get the money up front.
As can be seen from the preceding discussion, the finances of publishing are not simply paying for the printing of the book or journal, putting out a catalog, and waiting for the orders and profit to roll in. Scholarly publishing has to be run like any other business, and I probably spend more time on general business matters than on the scholarly aspects of the enterprise, such as evaluating manuscripts. Ideally an operation like Slavica should be run by a full-time manager and several assistants, like any normal publishing operation, and it should have solid financing to begin. We had none of these, but we had the fortunate circumstance that I had a full-time job as a college professor, and I was able to run the business completely from my apartment for about ten years, typing invoices, packing and shipping the books, storing unsold books in my basement. Slavica was built above all on “sweat equity”.
Although there are no textbooks on how to run a business like Slavica, and the existing books and newsletters for small publishing companies are aimed primarily at a very different type of publisher, we have managed to survive and grow by a combination of luck and hard work. At this point I will go back to the beginning and sketch briefly Slavica Publishers’ growth to a publisher with over 240 book titles and 60 issues of four journals published to date. Although this is a journal of Slavic linguistics, I will not confine myself to linguistics only, since most of us have interests to one extent or another in such areas as cultural and intellectual history, history proper, literature, folklore, general linguistics, and so forth.
Between 1957, when I began graduate school, and 1967, when I received my Ph.D. and finished my sixth year of full-time teaching, there were basically two major Western publishers of scholarly books in Slavic linguistics: Carl Winter Verlag in Heidelberg, which had put out a dis-tinguished list between the 1890s and 1930s, but which has done a limited amount after World War II (with some notable exceptions, such as the Vasmer and Fraenkel etymological dictionaries of Russian and Lithuanian and the Shevelov historical phonology series), and Mouton in the Hague. While Mouton put out a great many good books, both originals and reprints, many persons remained dissatisfied with both their pricing and their quality control.
Other publishers in Germany and elsewhere in Europe flirted with publishing in Slavic, but most seem to have decided that the market was too small. The biggest commitment eventually came from Kubon & Sagner, a world-class book dealer that added several lines of Slavistic publications to go with their sales of books and journals from the East, and several smaller publishers jumped in during the 1970s and 1980s.
In almost complete and blissful ignorance of what publishing was, I decided to start a publishing company that would do things better, keep prices lower, bring things out fast, make a profit, and, of course, not take too much of the time I needed for teaching and research. In the summer of 1966 I registered Slavica Publishers as a company in Cambridge, MA, and began to look for things to publish. Our first book was the third Festschrift for my teacher, Roman Jakobson (Gribble 1968).[5] The second was the first formal printed edition of Alexander Lipson’s Russian Course. Lipson was crucial to the survival and growth of Slavica in three ways: first, he made a substantial investment in the company, which was incorporated in early 1968;[6] second, the income from the sales of his book carried us over the early years when I was busy making all kinds of mistakes in getting the company going and learning about the publishing business; and third, he provided a lot of encouragement and wise counsel. Without Lipson, Slavica would probably not have lasted beyond the third or fourth book.
We did about one book per year through 1973. At the end of that year we had seven books out. The outlets for scholarly books and textbooks in our field had mostly dried up by that time, and by early 1974 we suddenly found authors seeking us out, instead of our having to seek them out. I also made the decision to try a reprint of Ushakov’s four-volume diction-ary. Doing it involved a lot of money for a fledgling company, and I tried offering it for a very low price to customers who would order and pay in advance. There were so few orders that I almost canceled the project. After much hesitation I went ahead, and in the end the entire printing sold out in about five years, producing a significant profit. This profit helped us expand further and rather rapidly during the second half of ththe 1970s.
In the 1980s we got into textbook publishing on a much larger scale. Although textbooks can lose a lot of money rapidly if they don’t work out well, a successful textbook is the fastest way to make money, and we had enough successes, including some that we took over from major publishers which had pulled out of the foreign-language field, that our cash flow became fairly healthy. At that point I decided to try paying for our typesetting of more books, and took on more employees. This led to near-bankruptcy in the middle 1980s, but as full-time employees left anwere replaced by part-timers, and we stopped contracting to pay for the typesetting, our finances improved. The general upswing in Slavic enrollments in the late 1980s and early 1990s helped greatly, just as the downturn over the past three or four years has hurt very much.
One of the biggest hazards has always been the fact that most academics don’t keep to deadlines very well: only a minority of the books that we have published have come in on time and completely ready. The record is probably held by one book that took twelve years to go from first submission to publication, but there are several more that took eight or ten years, and a lot that took five or six. Just this autumn alone, I have had five titles that failed to come in on time and thus could not be published as planned. Since budgeting must be done, delays in publication have serious financial implications.
The reverse side of the delays is the expectation by some authors that I will drop whatever else I may be doing to read and handle their manuscript the moment it finally does come in, no matter how late. This is one of my greatest aggravations (although I must confess that since I am perpetually overworked, Slavica’s record for slow handling of many manuscripts is something that I am not proud of).
Refereeing is obviously tied to the handling of manuscripts, and it is one of the biggest problems we have. Many scholars are reluctant to take the time to read a book manuscript thoroughly, since it takes a lot of their own time, and we pay only $150 for an evaluation. University presses often manage to get evaluations free from their own faculty, but since we are not a university press, we can’t use that method. Even when a scholar agrees, s/he will often not be able to get to the manuscript for some time.
In many cases, I have made the decisions myself. If the manuscript is clearly deficient in English, or if the writer clearly can’t handle the scholarly conventions, or if the work is in an area that we don’t publish in (e.g., political science, or metaphysical poems), it goes back quickly. The majority of manuscripts or proposals received by Slavica never make it past this first stage. If the book is by the preeminent specialist in the field, I don’t bother to get a reader. In the majority of cases, we get one reader, although in some cases we use as many as three. Getting more readers would obviously be better, but it often is simply not practical. Where I feel competent to judge a book, I act as reader, sometimes with an additional reader from outside Slavica.
Running a publishing company, like running any other business, requires a lot of different skills. For example, since going to a copyright lawyer with every question is not possible, one must become moderately knowledgeable about questions of copyright. One must also learn about contracts (although of course our standard contract was checked thoroughly by a lawyer), computers (including a lot of information about formatting and fonts), managing people, making budgets, taxes (and the endless paperwork connected with them), insurance, slander and libel, putting out catalogs, mailing lists, working with data bases and spreadsheets, running an office, and so forth. A surprising amount of this information came in handy when I became Department Chair.
Mailing lists and sources for compiling them has always been a big question. Our mailing list at present has about 10,500 current names of individuals, libraries, and institutions in the USA and another 3,000 outside of the USA. This mailing list, which takes enormous amounts of time to keep current, has been the key to our survival, since it allows us to mail to those, and only those, persons and institutions most likely to be interested in our publications. Paradoxically, because of the peculiarities of the United States Postal Service and the Canadian Postal Service, it is actually much more expensive to ship catalogs to Canada by surface mail than to ship them to Europe or Australia or Japan by air mail. Learning about obscure but important matters such as the cheapest way to mail catalogs is a good example of the kind of thing that has claimed much of my attention for 25 years.
When I was invited to submit this article, the Editors suggested that I talk about our journal Folia Slavica and about books that we have not been able to do but would have liked to do. The impetus for FS came from much the same attitude as the Editors of JSL expressed: “If not now, when?, and if not us, who?” To me this is a very sensible attitude. At the time we decided to go ahead with FS, the International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics had suspended publication, the journal Russian Linguistics had not yet begun, and there were few outlets for articles on Slavic linguistics in North America and Western Europe. We also decided that we would do some things that most journals won’t do: we published articles up to about 100 pages, we gave review authors unlimited space, we offered to publish data (e.g., editions of manuscripts, sets of data on defined topics), which again was against the rules of most journals. We also had an attitude that we were the “younger generation,” and perhaps we could do it better. Now that I’m part of the older generation, I see that such distinctions are silly at best.
By setting up a six-person Editorship, we hoped to avoid overbur-dening any one person. As it turned out, Howard Aronson and Ernest Scatton each wound up with nearly sole responsibility for more than one individual issue, but the system worked quite well.
Folia Slavica did quite well in the beginning, but then the standard problem set in: not enough good material came in on a regular basis. Once the publication schedule fell behind, we got even fewer submissions and the number of subscriptions dropped. By the time we had produced eight volumes, both IJSLP and Russian Linguistics were coming out regularly, and several other journals (such as SEEJ) were publishing more linguistics than previously. We simply bowed to the inevitable and cancelled FS.
I do wish that more journals would adopt some of our policies. What, for example, is a person to do with an article that needs 70 or 80 pages? Almost no journal will accept it, but it is too short to make a book. The author is left with a set of unpalatable choices: split the work into several interrelated articles and try to publish them separately (this at best necessitates considerable repetition of information, so that the reader of each article can understand it without having the others), puff the article up to at least 120 pages so that it can become a short book, or try to write some other articles on the same topic that can be spliced together to make a book. I also feel that we need more places to publish archival materials, editions of short manuscripts, bibliographies, etc. Some journals in the CIS and Eastern Europe will publish such items, but few here will.
There are a lot of books that I would have liked to publish, but have not. One of the biggest problems with our field is that people too often prefer to work on minor topics rather than attempting ambitious works of broader scope.
One of the most useful scholarly books Slavica has published, I believe, is Rado Lencek’s Structure and History of Slovene. In one book we have a good sketch of the contemporary language and its dialects, a short cultural and linguistic history of the language, sample texts, and an extensive bibliography. We need a book like this for each Slavic and Baltic language (or, preferably, two more detailed ones: one on the history of the language and another on the modern language). The recently published The Slavonic Languages, edited by Bernard Comrie and Greville Corbett, is a magnificent book, but the amount of space allotted to each language is simply too little.
Over the years I have tried to get various people to write books similar to Rado’s, or to arrange for a pair of books on the various languages, but have met with remarkably little enthusiasm for the idea. The most common objection was simply that it would take a lot of time. Yes, it would take a lot of time, but would such books not be worth a lot more to the field than most of what is published today? Our graduate students don’t have adequate descriptions of many of the languages to work from, and bibliographical control is in a deplorable state. If we do not have the will to publish basic books, why should we keep putting out ever more exotic things?
There are other works I would like to see, but I have found that one can seldom talk people into writing things; one can only consider what is offered. The Office of Education and the Center for Applied Linguistics have repeatedly done surveys of teaching materials for Slavic and East European languages, and repeatedly found almost all gaps, and very few materials, but people still are not willing to tackle writing dictionaries, textbooks, readers, and reference grammars. We do have some happy exceptions, such as Swan’s Polish series and his Slovak textbook, Marder’s Russian dictionary, and some others, but they still remain exceptions.
I cannot close without mentioning a couple of the more bizarre and interesting experiences Slavica has had over the years. We have a file in the office entitled “Curiosities”, which contains some of the stranger letters and proposals we have received over the years, but two of my favorites involve printer’s errors.
The one took place in 1989, when we printed five books at one time with one printer. As I was flipping through Clayton’s book of papers from the 1985 Washington World Congress (Issues in Russian and Czech Literature), I went from the middle of an article on Russian literature in English on p. 96 to a linguistic text in Macedonian on p. 97. After considerable checking, we found that the printer had put signatures (32-page folded sheets) from Elson’s Macedonian Verbal Morphology into the binding machine for Clayton’s book, and about one-third of the copies were thus misbound. These copies were scattered through the printing of 500, so several readers got a surprise before we found the error and stopped shipment (the first two copies, which we had checked carefully when the book came out, were both among the good copies, as luck would have it).
The second instance involved the American Contributions to the 1978 International Congress of Slavists. I found out what had happened only when an insurance adjuster called me the following autumn, because the printer was suing the company which made the glue for binding the books. It seems that in the plant of the glue company somebody had mislabeled glue containers: some which held glue for beer-bottle labels had been given labels indicating that they contained glue for book binding. The mix-up was not discovered for three and a half days, during which time the printer bound a lot of books with beer-label glue.
Apparently beer-label glue has two important characteristics: since beer bottles are often put in tubs and coolers with ice and water, the beer-label glue has to be very tenacious and stiff, so that the labels won’t fall off easily. On the other hand, since many of the bottles are recycled, the labels have to come off if sufficient force is applied. When used in book binding, this seems to have produced books which did not want to open (the stiffness), but once one did manage to pry them open, the book pages fell out of the cover (the removability feature). Since we were sewing our books, the printer was able to scrape off the glue and apply the correct glue without reprinting, so the papers made it to the Congress on time, but all the other books were “perfect bound”, where the glue is forced into the spine and between the ends of the pages, and so cannot be removed, so all those books had to be reprinted, which took another several weeks.
Comrie, Bernard and Greville G. Corbett, eds. (1993) The Slavonic languages. London: Routledge.
Gribble, Charles E., ed. (1968) Studies presented to Roman Jakobson by his students. Cambridge, MA: Slavica.
Lencek, Rado. (1982) Structure and history of the Slovene language. Columbus, OH: Slavica.
Shulevitz, Judith. (1995) “Keepers of the tenure track”. New York Times book review., 29 October 1995, 46–47.
Thatcher, Sanford G. (1995) “The crisis in scholarly communication”. The chronicle of higher education, 3 March 1995, B1–2.
Received: 21 November 1995
Slavica Publishers, Inc.
P.O. Box 14388
Columbus, OH 43214–0388
Dept. of Slavic and East European Languages and Literatures
The Ohio State University
Columbus, OH 43210
[1] There has been a great deal of discussion about implementing electronic publishing, especially in journals for publishers and librarians. For example, in the July 1995 issue of the Journal of Scholarly Publishing, four of the six articles deal with electronic publishing (“Marketing Electronic Products”, “The Cost of Implementing an Electronic Journal”, “Where Does Scholarly Electronic Publishing Get You?”, and “On the Future of the Book, or Does It Have a Future?”).
[2] Thatcher is also quoted in a first-rate article, “Keepers of the Tenure Track”, by Judith Shulevitz (1995). Her two-page article should give all university administrators some serious indigestion about how the pressure to publish a lot and quickly has perverted both scholarly publishing and the probationary process before tenure.
[3] Of course the Big Ten isn’t really ten schools, since Pennsylvania State is now in, and Chicago is in for all purposes but athletics, and there are various other quibbles, such as the existence of large Slavic departments at both major campuses of the University of Illinois; but I trust my kindly, indulgent, and perceptive reader will grant me some oversimplifications here and there.
[4] We will celebrate the fifteenth anniversary at Slavica of one of these people, Mary Lou McCabe, in January. Having Mary Lou to work with has been one of the best things that ever happened to Slavica; my only real regret is that she has never been willing to go to full-time.
[5] Jakobson had already had Festschriften for his sixtieth and seventieth birthdays, filled with memorable papers by many of the greatest scholars in the world. This volume was conceived as a tribute to him by his most recent students, some still in graduate school and some who had finished recently. It contained the first or almost first publications of many who went on to become major figures in the scholarly world, and has continued to sell a modest number of copies each year right up to the present. It was intended to mark his retirement from Harvard in 1967, but like any proper scholarly book, it was late, but only by a year, which is about as on-time as one usually gets in this business.
[6] Other much-needed money and support in the first years came from Robert Szulkin, Robert Rothstein, and Joseph Manson.