Stanford university Press: Stanford briefs

by Matthew ismail (Director of Collection Development, Central Michigan University) <ismai1md@cmich.edu> Agamben, they were a combination of two or three such short

Written by Matthew Ismail based on a WebEx conversation with Alan Harvey, Director of the Stanford University Press on June 25, 2019. Interviews were sometimes edited for clarity.

Every press with a brief book series approaches these series differently. Some presses have viewed brief books as a format best suited to working with ideas in progress; others (less successful) have viewed them as an opportunity to sell chapters of longer, already published, electronic books. The Stanford university Press Stanford Briefs series approaches brief books as another publishing option beyond the traditional academic monograph.

Alan Harvey, Director of the Stanford university Press, remarked that the origins of the Briefs originated, not so much in a specific desire to publish brief books, as in a willingness to experiment at a time — late 2010 to early 2011 — when the publishing world was challenged to innovate due to the digitization of the traditionally print-based scholarly communication system and the impetus of open access.

Harvey remarked that the event that led to the founding of the Briefs was pretty straightforward. The press had an author who had published with them already and he had just completed another book. The author got in touch with his editor and said he was planning to publish another book that was related to his previous Stanford book, but presumed that they wouldn’t be interested because it was only a hundred and ten pages long. The author was considering publishing it elsewhere, but since he needed to clear some rights with Stanford university Press anyway, he thought he would offer them the right of first refusal.

When the series editor came to Harvey to see what he thought about publishing a hundred and ten page book, which was out of their usual requirements for a scholarly monograph, Harvey and she discussed the question of whether letting such a fine piece of work go due to artificial page limits was really a good idea. They had a project in hand that was a hundred pages long and an author who was ready to publish it. Why not consider publishing it?

The title of this work, in fact, was The Physics of Business Growth, and as Harvey began to read the manuscript, he found that the focus of the book was on how businesses can grow, diverge and develop. “The major theme of the book is that a business shouldn’t put all their eggs in one basket and then hope that all of their business goes there. Companies should, rather, try lots of small experiments and make them quick and cheap and put only the resources you need into it so that you could pull out quickly if it doesn’t work. This seemed to be a really compelling argument for doing exactly that with this book! I told the rest of the team, ‘Well, why don’t we start a series of them [brief books]? There’s no point in doing just one. Why don’t we see if there are other ideas out there?’”

Harvey also said that another matter had come up around the same time concerning their philosophy list, which was a list of critical theory or continental philosophy. “We were publishing Derrida and Agamben and all of the other European, continental, philosophers. What would typically happen is that we would learn of a project they had published, and we would go to their publisher and ask about publishing them. sixty pages, so we would put two, three, or four of them together and make a longer book. If you look at any of the books that we publish with Derrida and the early couple that we published with

These were typically works in printed form between forty to volumes. In Italy, in fact, they print them in pamphlet form and sell them in train stations.

“I don’t remember exactly what year is it was — probably 2009 or 2010 — but we had an essay from Agamben called What is an Apparatus? We had the essay, but nothing to pair it with. So, we made the decision to publish it on its own. I think with front and back matter it was about eighty printed pages and, though we weren’t sure what the market would be, it sold exactly the same number of copies as every other philosophy book we published.”

It’s interesting that, though Harvey says the Briefs were initially considered as a digital-first book — since that seemed like a good way to take advantage of the brief format — roughly 85% of their early sales were actually in print and that has been true for almost every book in the Briefs series published since then.

This is actually an important point for publishers who think that they must choose between print and digital formats with such a book series. Harvey said, “I kept saying to everybody that the two markets don’t mix. There’s a digital market and there’s a print market. If you don’t produce digital you just lose that portion of the market. If you don’t produce print, you lose that portion of the market. I mean there’s some bleed in the middle; but when you’re talking 85% — 15% even if that bleeds five percent in the middle it still doesn’t make any difference — you have to do both.”

Something else that Harvey has found working on the Briefs is that “it’s actually much harder to write a short book than a long book and the Briefs require much more work by our editors.” Being clear and concise in a format that does not allow the author to slowly build an argument and present all the supporting evidence can be quite challenging, and Briefs thus require a lot of development work. Given that Briefs are also cheaper than traditional monographs, “all of that editorial work doesn’t pay off in terms of revenue — it pays off in terms of sales, but those sales are all at a tiny margin, so we cap the number of Briefs anyone can do in a year.”

When I asked Harvey what sort of project is ideal for the series, he said, “For me it’s going to be a book project that has a point of view and that doesn’t need to spend fifty pages positioning itself within the literature. It’s there, it’s something that people will immediately grasp, you can give a two-page introduction and then you can just dive straight into what you want to say…It is actually telling you something and has an opinion rather than saying, ‘I’m going to survey what everyone else has done and then add some new research to that.’ There’s a particular scholarly trajectory that people want, and I think the Briefs should violate that.”

That violation of previous expectations is an important reason that the Briefs has been so successful in creating a new and compelling format for authors who want to write their work at the length that is natural to it.