I work for Princeton University Press, often
referred to as PUP (the initials, not the word). It's vaguely
possible that I will
fill this page with information about what I do and what goes on
around me; possibly this page will contain
information that will help people understand what goes on in
university publishing, and perhaps in publishing in general.
Chapter 1: Overview of Princeton University Press
What does the press do? We publish academic books.
We publish books by qualified writers across the country and around
the world (not just at Princeton). Some of the books PUP publishes are readable by the general
public, some are used as textbooks or supplements to undergraduate
or graduate courses, and some just aren’t very readable at all,
unless you have had advanced training in the relevant field. We no
longer publish journals.
We sell our books to bookstores large and small. We also sell to
individuals via the website and catalogs. We don't have a
dedicated retail store.
Furthermore, there is no actual press anymore. Princeton
was one of the last university presses to actually print things, but
it doesn’t anymore. The presses used to be located at the
editorial offices, and then they moved to a separate location, and
then, in 1986 (if I remember correctly), they closed. So, now we
get books from other companies, mostly American ones, with the
exception of the folks who do color printing for our art books. (Apparently,
the color printing machines require more manual labor, which is
cheaper in other parts of the world: therefore, no one in the US can
afford to run the machines against the foreign competition.)
In our building are housed people who acquire
manuscripts and make contracts with the authors (editorial),
the people who design the covers (design), the people who
promote the book to the media (publicity), the people who
promote the book to the public (marketing), the people who
find buyers for the book (sales), and the people who see that
the manuscript becomes a book (production). There’s also the tech
staff and accounting.
Chapter 2: Being Hired as the Sales Assistant
Hello all,
As you know, I moved to Princeton, NJ in September 2003. I spent
a lot of time looking for a job with no success. I babysat in the
afternoons and evenings. Finally, in January I signed up with a temp
agency - they got me a two-month full-time temp job at Educational
Testing Service. As that assignment was ending, I spotted an opening
at Princeton
University Press. I applied.
They wanted to interview me! They did, and the interview went
well. Nice people. Then I left Princeton to visit my brother Charlie
in Atlanta, GA for a week. When I got back, I called the Press to
see what they had decided. They had decided to hire me!
I'm very excited about this job for several reasons, in no
particular order.
1. It's a full-time permanent job. My first ever. With, like, a
salary and stuff.
2. It's in publishing. I wanted a job in publishing. I like
books.
3. Rather than just make me do boring stuff, they will make me do
boring stuff and also prepare me for a career.
4. The darn building is only about a mile away. No commute. I can
bike or walk if I want. Or park in the nearby free parking lot.
5. The building adjacent to the Press is the computer science
department, where my fiancé Aquinas is in his first year of a
Princeton University PhD.
I will be "Sales Assistant," working under the "Assistant Sales
Director" and the "Sales Director" as part of the "Sales and
Marketing" division. Sales targets book stores/distributors, whereas
marketing targets individuals. Publicity, which is also something
located in my building, targets the media. Also in my building are
editorial people who find and edit new book manuscripts. There are
also some production/design people.
It's sales but it's not selling. I will be providing support for
the operations of the sales department. I will be doing clerical
work, responding to customer queries, providing materials for the
sales force, and assisting in the twice-a-year sales conferences.
The next sales conference is coming up soon, and will introduce the
sales people to the books which will be produced this summer and
available in the fall.
I report for work Monday March 22, 2004.
Signed,
A very happy
Lucy Day Werts
Chapter 3: Being the Sales Assistant
So, what about sales? What do I do? I'm an assistant, so I do
a lot of clerical and administrative tasks. I photocopy, file,
mail stuff, gather documents, create documents, do data entry. This
is all stuff I’ve done before at a summer or part-time job. But the
difference is that now I’m doing it for a publisher, and I’m
actually supposed to understand the documents I interact with. I’m
also learning what people around me are doing. I interact some with
publicity, with designers, with copywriters, with subsidiary rights
people, with salesmen, with editors and their assistants. I get to
see what everyone else is doing.
This is particularly the case during the sales conference. There
are two conferences each year, one in the spring to release the fall
catalog of books, and one in the fall to release the spring catalog
of books. Before the sales conference, I have to print and
photocopy and retrieve a lot of materials for the sales
representatives. I help my boss with a lot of miscellaneous jobs,
one of which is to assign codes to every book in the Fall catalog.
That means I have to read the catalog, and figure out what kind of
book each book is. I also have to print out the cover designs for
many of the books. Interestingly enough, the sales reps use
book jackets as sales tools; bookbuyers routinely judge books by
their covers!
(During the actual sales conference, aside from eat, all I do is
listen. The sales reps are there to listen and learn about the new
books, but because of the work I do, the information isn't new to
me. I attend meetings where the editors explain to marketing and
sales what the books are about and who will want to read them.)
Chapter 4: Visiting the Warehouse
Visiting sales reps and new staff are periodically offered the
chance to visit our warehouse. Some people find this a more or less
ho-hum experience, but not me. You may say it's just a warehouse,
but it's not just a warehouse. It's a warehouse full of books.
Lots and lots of books. . .
Together, two non-profit university publishers, Princeton University
Press and University of California Press set up a for-profit
business separate from either one for the purpose of receiving and
shipping their published books. That business is called
California-Princeton Fulfillment Services. We refer to it as CPFS,
or just "the warehouse". The warehouse is located in Ewing,
between Trenton and Princeton.
What does the warehouse do? The warehouse receives books
from the people who manufacture them. When the warehouse receives books, they
bill and fill orders for those
books. They can take orders from individuals as well as
wholesalers. And that's it. Books come in, books go out.
Except, sometimes they don't go out. Sometimes whole
pallets of overstock books will sit up on the huge steel shelves for years. Sometimes that is intentional---the press will have printed enough
copies of a book at once to last a very long time. But
sometimes it means that someone has estimated badly.
And sometimes the books go out---and then come back. The
sales department happily sells books in large quantities to
wholesalers and retail book chains. But the job of the sales
department, of the press, doesn't end there, the way you might think
it does. We have to make sure that people buy the books from
them, that one by one, the books are being taken from the stores to
people's houses to be read. If we don't help push the sales
all the way through to the individual customer, the books come back
to the warehouse from the wholesalers and retail book chains. We
get returns. This struck me as a little unfair---the press carries all the
risk of selling the book and the bookstore carries none. Almost every large sale we make can also be unmade, if the book
sells poorly. The bookstore looses the opportunity to have
given space to a better book, but we lose much more---we have to try
to sell the same book again, only now we know that it isn't very
popular.
And sometimes the returns come back unsalable. Some stores
send brand-new books back to the warehouse in shoddy packaging.
A book that was undamaged when we sent it out, when it sat on their
shelf, will come back to us damaged---after we've credited them full
amount of the un-purchase. Then what happens to it? We
can't sell it at the regular price, because it's damaged, flawed, or
as we say, "hurt." We can't sell hurt books at a cheaper price,
because we're still trying to sell other copies of the book at full
retail, and do not wish to undercut ourselves. We can't donate
them, because the people who would be interested in owning the
book are the people we're trying to sell to. Hurt books,
therefore, are destroyed.
Speaking of destroyed, recall that notice in the
front of some paperback books that says something like, Don't buy
this book if the cover is missing. Let me explain
that. Not all damaged books make it back to the warehouse to
be pulped. If a store finds that a book was damaged on its way
from the warehouse, they can request a replacement copy. But
there is no reason for us or them to pay to ship the damaged book
back to the warehouse to prove it was damaged---we don't want the
damaged book back, because we'd just have to destroy it anyway. We do require proof, however, that the damaged book isn't being sold
despite the supposed damage. So, the store rips off the cover
and sends just the cover back to the warehouse, and then throws the
book away. We send them a new copy, and hopefully the coverless
book is destroyed, since the warehouse and therefore the publisher
and author will never get any money from anyone in exchange for it.
So, if all goes well, we sell the book to a chain, they sell the
book to a person, and there are no returns and nothing gets damaged
and no one has to ask for a replacement or a refund. Everyone
lives happily ever after.
Chapter 5: Further Meditations of the Sales Assistant
Some people really love books. They will search and
search for a particular hard-to-find book They will, for
example, call a publisher and ask if the publisher has any copies of
a book that they already know is out-of-print. Why
do people do this? If a book is out-of-print, that means that
there are no more copies at the publisher. If there were, we'd
be selling them, and it wouldn't be out-of-print. They
must think we have a secret special part of the warehouse where we
keep the last ten copies of everything we've ever sold. Or
maybe they think that the walls of our cubicles are made of stacks
of out-of-print books which are available to buy if only they just
ask. They need to ask a book dealer, not a book publisher.
That being said, new technology is enabling publishers to bring
out-of-print books back into stock. It's called print on
demand. There are some books we sell which we don't have any
copies of at all. If someone orders one of those books, we
will call up the printer and literally ask him to print one
copy. You can only make paperbacks this way, not hardbacks. Also, it can't be done for books with color inside, or books with
photographs, even if they're black and white. But most books
are just text, so it works out okay.
About the economics of print runs: we also use the
print-on-demand printers to print "galley" or advance copies
of
books to send to reviewers before the book is ready. We don't
send out galley copies for every book we publish. Sometimes,
like with art books, it's just not possible. My guess is that
sometimes we are sending out so few review copies that we can't
afford to print advance books. Sometimes it is probably just a
matter of the timing of the printing of the book and the release
date of the book. But when we do print galley copies, we pay a
setup fee and we pay a per book fee based on the number of pages. The books we get are very plain looking, unlike the books produced
one at a time for customers: they have their color covers, but
without any special effects that will appear on the jacket, and
there is no color on the spine or the back of the
book. The text inside is sometimes largely unformatted. But
the funny thing is, each of these plain paperback advance copies
costs us more than the final hardback edition! Such is the
nature of economies of scale---the smaller the quantity, the higher
the unit cost. Thus it is that larger commercial presses send
out thousands of review copies (rather than a couple hundred) which
are fully as elaborate as the final book will be, complete with
embossing on the cover, even!
And who are we sending the books to? Reviewers. There
are people working at magazines and newspapers across the country
who can give our books a boost by putting them in the public eye. We send them copies, (sometimes advance copies) of our books, and/or
some other publicity materials. We get suggestions from the
author about publications that are relevant, and we keep our own
lists. Sometimes reviewers fax or call to request a book
they've heard about and have interest in. Then they examine,
skim, and/or read the book and perhaps write a review which perhaps
gets published. The process has a lot of... flexibility. It sounds like a great job, right? Get paid to read books? Well, some caveats: the demand for book reviewers is shrinking. Print book reviews are being squeezed out of newspapers. Less
space is being dedicated to books as time goes by, not more. The world is changing to accommodate a news market which is
increasingly digital. Perhaps book reviews will become digital in
their turn. It may be that they have to! Also, the
writing end of the job is more important than the reading one. It is difficult to write concise, informative book reviews. No
one cares whether you are good at reading, so long as you're good at
writing. Another caveat is that does not seem to be anyone's
full-time job. A journalist writing for a magazine might
occasionally do a book review among his other article assignments,
for example, but not be dedicated to doing them every day of every
week, or even every issue of every magazine. But beyond that,
it seems that most book reviewers are part-time and/or freelance
workers rather than full-time staff of a company. This
revelation should put an end to any wistful dreams of having a job
where all that happens is that people send you books for free and
pay you to read them. Ha!
However, there is another job, perhaps a job with a more stable
market, that involves reading for money. It's called copyediting (or copy editing, depending on who you ask). As
long as people write books, other people will be hired to go over
them and make corrections. And to do that, you read, slowly,
and check for "Clarity, Coherency, Consistency, and Correctness,"
according to Amy Einsohn, author of The Copyeditor's Handbook. This job also is not as simple as reading for pleasure. It
takes someone who is fastidious, diplomatic, and reliable. Good
luck with that.
Chapter 6: Becoming a Production Editor and Learning LaTeX
[to come]
Chapter 7: Completed Projects
- Palmer & Morgan: A Theory of Foreign Policy [Amazon]
- Cowen: Good and Plenty [Amazon]
- Kudla, Rapoport and Yang: Modular Forms and Special Cycles
on Shimura Curves [Amazon]
- Miller & Takloo-Bighash: Invitation to Modern Number Theory
[Amazon]
- Epstein: Classical Mathematical Logic [Amazon]
- Campbell: Why We Vote [Amazon]
- Levine: Darwin Loves You [Amazon]
- Strichartz: Differential Equations on Fractals [Amazon]
- Horadam: Hadamard Matrices and Their Applications [Amazon]
- Marcus: Between Women [Amazon]
- Baik, Kriecherbauer, McLaughlin, and Miller: Discrete
Orthogonal Polynomials [Amazon]
- Schwartz: Spherical CR Geometry and Dehn Surgery [Amazon]
- Hendry & Nielsen: Econometric Modeling [Amazon]
- Kollár: Lectures on Resolution of Singularities [Amazon]
- Kiritsis: String Theory in a Nutshell [Amazon]
- Miller & Page: Complex Adaptive Systems [Amazon]
- Maoz: Astrophysics in a Nutshell [Amazon]
- Bourgain, Kenig, and Klainerman: Mathematical Analysis of
Nonlinear Dispersive Equations [Amazon]
- Lindley: Promoting Peace with Information [Amazon]
- Hannan, Pólos, and Carroll: Logics of Organization Theory
[Amazon]
- Harman: Prime-Detecting Sieves [Amazon]
- Frank: Dynamics of Cancer [Amazon]
- Howell & Pevehouse: While Dangers Gather [Amazon]
-
Roach:
Wave Scattering by Time-Dependent Perturbations [Amazon]
-
Bartov:
Erased
[Amazon]
- Keeling
&
Rohani:
Modeling
Infectious Diseases [Amazon]
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