Essential knowledge about scholarly book publishing that every author should have. Get weekly tips on writing and publishing your scholarly book from developmental editor and publishing consultant Laura Portwood-Stacer, PhD.
Meet an acquiring editor at Columbia University Press
Published 2 days ago • 14 min read
The Manuscript Works Newsletter
Essential knowledge on scholarly book publishing that every author should have
Hello Manuscript Workers!
This week I'm sharing a new kind of conversation that I hope will become a regular series for the newsletter: a chance to get acquainted with an acquiring editor at a scholarly press.
Today's conversation will feature Alyssa M. Napier, editor in sociology and Black studies at Columbia University Press. I first became acquainted with Alyssa when I attended her panel at the Association of University Presses conference this past June. She mentioned that she was relatively new to her acquisitions role at CUP, and I thought "Hey! I bet I have some authors who would want to know about Alyssa and would appreciate hearing about the books she's looking to acquire as she builds her list." I then reached out to Alyssa to ask if I could interview her for this newsletter and, luckily for all of us, she said yes!
I'd like to continue doing this sort of thing in future newsletters. So if you are an acquisitions editor (or series editor) at a scholarly publisher who would like to get in front of about ten thousand scholarly authors to tell them about what you do and what you're looking for, I'd love to have you. If you're an author who'd like to hear from a particular editor, let me know that too. You can reply directly to this newsletter.
I plan to prioritize early-career editors, editors moving into new positions and building new lists, and editors who may not have had as much opportunity to speak directly to scholarly authors, so that these interviews will be as mutually beneficial as possible. But of course I welcome anyone who'd like to express interest in participating!
And now for my conversation with Alyssa M. Napier...
Laura Portwood-Stacer: Thank you for chatting with me today! Could you start by sharing who you are, where you work, and what your role is there?
Alyssa M. Napier: I am the recently appointed sociology and Black studies editor at Columbia University Press. This means I handle the sociology list and I'm in charge of the Black Lives in the Diaspora series. The series is one part of a larger partnership between Columbia University Press and Howard University that aims to diversify the voices in Black studies publishing, and then also hopefully eventually diversify publishing itself.
Those are two separate but closely-related goals. For example, in the Black Lives in Diaspora series, we have about eight books that are already published and plenty more in the pipeline. Our focus with those books is to publish books that take Black studies into a more global and diasporic focus. So that's one way of diversifying the Black studies landscape.
Another way is to focus on authors at institutions, such as HBCUs, that don't necessarily have a lot of resources to support their authors with publishing. How can we reach HBCU scholars? And so within the context of the book series, I really hope to do a lot of community building and connecting authors with various resources so that we’re not just acquiring books by authors at institutions that don't have resources, but we're actually supporting them through the entire process as well.
For fun, I like to play table-top role playing games (my favorite are collaborative world-building games like The Quiet Year), and I've recently started sawing away at the violin again after a ten-year hiatus. For non-work-related reading, I'm obsessed with space, especially Mars, and I will never say no to a good romance novel recommendation.
LPS: What other kinds of projects are you looking for these days, outside of the Black Lives in the Diaspora series? Is there something that has come into the press recently that has really excited you?
AMN: As I mentioned with the series, I am really interested in supporting HBCU scholars and scholarship. So, both scholars who are at HBCUs and also scholarship about HBCUs. Also in terms of Black studies, I would love work that thinks about Black joy. About community and resistance and agency and building alternative worlds. Think Robin D.G. Kelley's Freedom Dreams, anything in that vein, I would be obsessed with.
In terms of my sociology list, I'm really leaning into social movements, organizing theories of resistance, ethnographies of resistance. One of our books that has done really well that I would like to think of as an example of the kind of thing that I really like is Dana Fisher’s Saving Ourselves, which also leans into the climate and the environment focus of our sociology list as well. We have a series called Society and the Environment, for which Dana Fisher is the series coeditor along with Evan Schofer.
We also have a new series in science and technology studies. I am a failed chemist. I did my undergraduate work in chemistry and both of my parents are engineers, so I spent a lot of time in the lab and in science circles. I just have a fascination with the cultural worlds of scientists and the relationship between science people and non-science people and how all of that is governed. And so I'm really excited about doing science studies and specifically looking at work that questions a lot of the traditional narratives of how and why we do science.
And then finally, I have a background in education research. Columbia is not specifically an education press, but I am really interested in educational sociology and looking at anything that pertains to youth agency and youth politics and things like that.
LPS: Do you have any regional specialties at Columbia University Press? I work with authors who sometimes wonder whether they can only publish with certain presses if their research is set in a particular geographic location.
AMN: We do have certain focuses. So for example, our global politics editor has a focus on the Middle East and a focus on East Asia. And we have an American politics editor, who obviously focuses on the US. In the Black Lives series, though, that series is specifically focused on the global diaspora. And so there isn't really a geographical limit there.
There are areas that we've published a lot in, but that doesn't necessarily mean we can't change focus. If someone came to me with a book set in a country we've never published about, what I might do is I might see what are the other ways in which there's synergy between that book and other books on our list. Are they asking the same questions that other books on our list are asking, but just in a different context? Or is this something where the author would really benefit from another press that has a strong focus in this area?
A good example of that is Indigenous studies. You know there are some presses that have a strong focus in Indigenous studies. Their network is there, they go to those conferences. And that's not Columbia, but that doesn't mean that I wouldn't love a book about, for instance, the ad hoc university at the top of Mauna Kea during that resistance. I want to find somebody who is doing research on that because it connects to a lot of the nodes of things that I'm really interested in: education, social movements, climate or environmental resistance. And even though we don't necessarily have any other books that are focusing on Indigenous studies or Indigenous social movements, there would be enough synergy with other things on our list that there's enough resonance. It's all in the same family.
You can't always judge from what has been published, what direction an editor wants to take a list. I just took over the sociology list, so all of the books that are going to be published for the next couple years are not books that I've personally acquired. And so it doesn't actually give someone a good sense of what I'm interested in. Talking to me would give someone a better sense. Shoot your shot and if you're rejected, don't take that personally. It might just mean that the editor isn't necessarily as interested as another editor might be.
LPS: So you are kind of new in this role and most people who go to the Columbia University Press website won’t know the context that the next couple years of books were acquired by the previous editor. Can you talk about the challenge that poses? What should authors understand about working with someone who is new in an editorial role? If someone's been working with your predecessor, and now that the predecessor is gone, how do you work with that author now?
AMN: I can start with the last question. That’s what I've been focusing on in the past few months since I've taken over the role. For context, I was the assistant working on this list before I got promoted to take over. So in a lot of ways, that puts me in a pretty good position to take over projects because I have some background on them, at least ones that are at the later stages. I have been in contact with the authors via email already.
But the assistant editor job is very different from the editor job. At this point I have to do both jobs, because I don't have my own assistant. I still have to do a lot of the logistical administrative work of an assistant. But the editor work involves relationship building, understanding the vision that the author and the previous editor had for the book, and doing my best to try to help get the author towards that vision.
It also means making sure that I'm not overcommitting too early to things that I might not be able to do because I'm still getting on board, but also making sure that people know that their projects still matter. I’m setting expectations and managing people's expectations for what I will be able to do.
LPS: Could you talk a little bit more about that role of the assistant editor and what you wish authors understood about it?
AMN: The primary thing that I want to convey is to treat editorial assistants or assistant editors or associate editors like publishing professionals, because they are. One thing that authors may not know is within the hierarchy of presses, there is this assistant tier that is actually a few different jobs. So you can start off as an editorial assistant, and then get promoted to assistant editor and then get promoted to associate editor. Within those tiers, you're taking on more and more responsibility. As an assistant editor you might be acquiring your own books, but you're still assisting two other editors at the same time.
Somebody's title and the way that people get promoted does not always correlate to the amount of work that they're doing and the amount of experience they have. You may be introduced to someone as an assistant, but that doesn't necessarily give you a good idea of everything that they have on their plate, or how much expertise they have. Regardless, your job is not to figure out if this person is secretly more competent than you think they are given their job title.
These are publishing professionals and in a lot of cases they might know more about the job of preparing your book for production than your editor does, because editors might not be working in the nitty gritty of manuscript preparation, depending on the press. The editor may not know all of the rules. That is the job of people on the assistant level. And so assistants are the ones who know what our production team will let us get away with, what the deadlines are, how long things are going to take.
LPS: Do you have any other advice to give to authors?
AMN: Be clear with editors what your vision for your book is, so that they can then say early on whether or not it will work for them. There are a lot of constraints that are not even something that acquisitions editors determine. We're constrained by budget. We're constrained by production. We're constrained by publicity and marketing staff size. There are so many different ways in which the kinds of books that we can publish are not determined by what acquisitions editors want.
So a book that we might want, we may not even be able to do just because of the specifications of the book, right? A book may need to be in color because that's just the best representation of the book, but we, for budgetary reasons, cannot produce a book like this, so I might reject it because of our own limitations. It's not because your book's bad. It's just because I won't be able to convince other people in the press that this is something that we can take on.
So it's important to make sure that you convey that vision early on, so that we're parting ways amicably early enough in the process. And so people don't feel frustrated by not being able to produce the kind of book that they originally had a vision for. On the other hand, If I see a project and I'm really excited about it and someone says, this needs 25 color photos, I might still take that meeting. But then I would be transparent and I would say, “Are you interested in moving forward even though we can't make these colorful prints happen?” We might be able to find other ways to satisfy the author's vision.
I would recommend having conversations about what you want for your book much earlier than the contract stage, so you're not surprised after you've already gone through a round of peer review and faculty committee approval, and you may feel really pressured to just get that contract done. If certain things are a deal breaker for you—if you're assembling a photo book and the color is really important—then say that in your book proposal. If you're worried that an editor might take a spec the wrong way, then you can also just say, “Open to feedback,” or “Open to revision based on what peer reviewers say."
LPS: That's super helpful and aligns with what I tell my authors. Make your dealbreaker specs clear up front and indicate flexibility where you have it.
AMN: Yes. I also want to say something to authors who may be comparing their experience with other authors at the same press or with experiences they've had at different presses. I just want to emphasize that all presses are different and have different limitations and different ways of working, and even editors within one press may be different as well.
I do think it's important to share knowledge, and people should be open and transparent about their experiences throughout publishing. But if you are experiencing something at your press that's different from what a friend experienced, there are all sorts of reasons why that might be the case.
The last thing that I want to say is that everyone in higher education, everyone affiliated with the university system is under attack right now. I would just encourage authors to see university press publishing staff as other higher ed workers, and that we're in solidarity with you. We are doing our best to navigate these difficult waters in the same way that you are. So I want to encourage a sense of solidarity in my relationships with my authors, and in the ways that we recognize all sorts of disruptions are happening for people right now and how we have to accommodate the work that we do to account for that.
LPS: Thank you so much for sharing your perspective, Alyssa! If any of my newsletter readers want to get in touch with you to pitch a book for one of your lists, how can they do that?
AMN: They can send a book proposal and any sample chapters they have to amn2221@columbia.edu. No need to ask for permission—you can send me your proposal materials without a preliminary query about it.
LPS: Because I know authors will be wondering about this—can they email you before they have a proposal ready to share with you? What if they want to meet with you at an upcoming conference but they haven't written their proposal yet?
AMN: If you know Columbia UP will be at a conference, you're welcome to email me to set up a meeting or stop by our booth in the exhibit hall to chat, even without a proposal. For cold emails, I think you have a better shot of getting rejected without a proposal. I don't know how other editors think about this, but if you send just a description of something to me, then I'm going to be trying to figure out if I want to spend more time on it. The more information that I have that will draw me in, the better chance there is of me wanting to follow up. This is not to say that no proposal means no follow-up. You just have a better shot of a follow-up the more information that you provide me.
I should also say that Columbia University Press has proposal guidelines and so even if you've written your book proposal based on another press's guidelines, make sure that you've still covered what we ask for in our guidelines. Giving me that information is important, because that's one step less that I have to take to figure out if I want your book.
It's not just me who's making publication decisions. Colleagues in acquisitions and sales, and members of our faculty committee are also part of those decisions. They will be asking me for the information in the proposal guidelines. I should be able to advocate for your book based on the book proposal, and if I'm missing information, then I can't do the best advocacy work.
LPS: Thank you for explaining that. It is so helpful for people to understand the “why” underlying these things that might seem like arbitrary requirements or rules. It's not because you're like a formatting stickler. You need to do your job and authors can help you help them.
Thank you so much for speaking with me, Alyssa. I hope you get a lot of exciting new book projects in your inbox soon!
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Essential knowledge about scholarly book publishing that every author should have. Get weekly tips on writing and publishing your scholarly book from developmental editor and publishing consultant Laura Portwood-Stacer, PhD.