Duke Press, which is housed in Brightleaf Square, is considered medium-to-large among its peers. This places the Press's book publishing program among the 20 largest at American universities.
This is the third in a three-part series about Duke University Press.
Fredric Jameson, literature professor and one of the academy’s foremost postmodernist thinkers, has published his work with academic presses at Yale, Cornell and Berkeley, but he has a lasting devotion to Duke University Press. He was on the faculty board of Duke Press for five years and has always had a close relationship with its editors while publishing two books and considering a third.
“They’re right down the street really,” Jameson said. “Each of the presses, it depends a lot on the editors and what they go after, and the editors sort of set the tone. Duke has always been relatively informal. It’s a new press, or started up again in a new way.”
Duke Press, which is housed in Brightleaf Square, is considered medium-to-large among its peers for publishing close to 120 books and 34 journals a year. This places the Press’s book publishing program among the 20 largest at American universities, and the journals program in the top five.
Editors, graphic designers and marketing managers work within a maze of red-brick walls and open doors at the remodeled tobacco warehouse, collaborating for years with authors in a process that largely follows industry standards but spawns an end-product that sets new ones.
“We look to publish something new in the field, something that pushes the boundaries of a discipline,” Assistant Editor Miriam Angress said.
Especially since Stanley Fish stepped down as chair of the English Department in order to take over and restore the Press’ financial and reputational stability, Duke Press has sharpened the cutting edge for humanities and social sciences by bringing together disciplines and engaging in new theoretical trends. Cultural studies is one of its major trend-setting arenas, as well as Latin American studies, anthropology, gay and lesbian studies, American studies and Asian studies.
Blind admission
Unlike commercial publishers, where the primary aim is to make money, academic presses aim to add to the academic dialogue. “We consider our markets—who we are trying to get our books to—as academics,” said Emily Young, associate director and marketing manager at Duke Press. “What motivates us to publish is quite unique.”
Academic press editors find authors to publish books from many different avenues. Editors will attend academic meetings—some occurring just once a year for a particular field—and meet up-and-coming authors, who also submit their manuscripts on their own. Ken Wissoker, editor-in-chief of Duke Press, turns down between 25 and 30 book proposals a week.
In the world of bestsellers and blockbusters, agents do all the brokering, so they reject those 25 to 30 monographs, not an editor. “In a way, trade can be a lot more cutthroat,” Wissoker said. “For one thing, the books have to make money—that’s almost the sole criteria. So it’s very pressured for the agent and the author.”
Getting on the publishing docket may “exist to serve the specialist,” as Jameson puts it, but quickly experts are dissecting authors’ manuscripts during peer reviews. Experts in the field review and freely comment on the manuscript in a “single blind” process in which anonymous readers are assigned to a manuscript.
In the rest of the publishing industry, an author usually works with friends and colleagues as a support system, gaining an editor once the manuscript is bought up. But a stringent academic review, like at Duke, will involve two peer reviewers and an editor.
“At a trade press, what I’ve found is that the only person to look at your book is your editor, who isn’t necessarily an expert in your area,” said Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology Orin Starn, who recently published his book, Ishi’s Brain: In Search of America’s Last “Wild” Indian, with W.W. Norton and Co. “It’s a little scary that it hasn’t been held up to the same scholarly standards.”
Last line of defense
After a thumbs-up from the reviewers, the book wins a contract, only to continue in the revision process until polished—and that can take anywhere from one to three or more years. “You have a very long process that really uses the press as a kind of broker between what the author has to do and what the reviewers have to do,” Wissoker explained.
Duke Press’ faculty board, consisting of 10 to 12 faculty members from different University departments, meets once a month to review the book selection. With the charge of reading clips of the polished manuscript and giving a book the go-ahead, the faculty board serves as a “last line of quality control” before production, said Starn, chair of the board.
“We cannot publish it without their approval,” said Angress, the assistant editor. “We’re very careful not to bring things to the board until we think they will approve it. It’s very rare for them to turn something down but very, very rarely have they not approved something.”
Production then begins and takes about 10 to 11 months to complete. A copy-editor suggests changes to the author, and the design, proof-reading and marketing processes launch. The author looks over a typed-up version for errors and creates an index. At last, the book goes to the printer and then the nearby warehouse, ready to sell.
Aligned for success
As the competitive marketplace grows for both commercial and academic presses, Duke University Press tries to get its books out to the masses, everywhere from megastores to the Regulator Bookshop on Ninth Street and the Gothic Bookshop in the Bryan Center. But while other academic presses struggle to break even, Duke Press takes the inherent economic downfalls in stride, relying instead on the University’s intellectual backbone to flourish—and on outside connections to press on.
“We interact in the same marketplace as a Barnes & Noble,” Young said, “but we have a relationship with the strengths of Duke as an institution. When we plan what to publish, the universe of possibilities is the world—who might approach us and who might we approach. In particular, there’s many Duke faculty that we have a strong relationship with—Frederic Jameson, Stanley Fish—but where you come from is usually not connected to where you publish.”
Starn has also published with Rutgers University Press but admires the ties that professors at Duke maintain with their school’s publishing house. “For a Duke professor, it can be a very good experience working with the Press because the Press is in town,” he said. “You can meet with the editor; often you have a personal relationship. Publishing with a press in a different place can be a more impersonal and uncertain process because you don’t know exactly who you are dealing with or what to expect,” he said.
So when talk leaked out about his two new projects, editors approached Starn informally from the beginning. And even for Jameson, revered for his work on “the cultural logic of late capitalism,” the line between buddy and business is blurred.
“I know the editors very well. They know what I’ve been working on,” Jameson said. “I don’t know how we decided, but they knew that I was planning a book like this, and I would show them pieces of it. So it was kind of a back and forth thing.”
In the end, though, Duke Press’ personal connections are only the beginning.
“Really, university presses provide our society with a foundation of thoughtful writing and research that make university presses indispensable,” Starn said, “and Duke University Press is one of the best of them.”
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