Yesterday, I had the pleasure of leading a discussion with Eileen A. Fradenburg Joy, co-director of punctum books and editor of my punctum book, About That Life: Barry Lopez and the Art of Community. This was part of my regular academic work, as it was a program I set up via the Open Learning & Teaching Collaborative (CoLab) at Plymouth State University. On the CoLab website, we’ve set up a page with some resource links and a video of the conversation.
I share this here because this Patreon was set up as a mostly-Open successor to my first experience with Open Access: The Mumpsimus blog. Of course, I didn’t know that the blog was Open Access; I just thought of it as a thing I was writing on the internet. But my passion for Open began there, because I got to experience the benefits and challenges of Open immediately. All sorts of people I could never have predicted found me, including folks who have become some of my best friends … and folks who just wanted to tell me I was a pretentious blowhard who knew nothing about anything and should probably die. (Oh, and who hates white people. And men. Yes, I got some emails and comments saying that.)
I talk more about my journey to embracing Open Access in the conversation with Eileen. Having About That Life available via various places (Open Library, JSTOR, Google Play, etc.) is invigorating and satisfying. That the paperback is available for a reasonable price (helping to cover punctum’s costs) is important. It’s an accessible, affordable book. That’s the goal.
What we don’t talk about in the CoLab conversation — because it’s a large question that would have derailed what we wanted to talk about — is Open outside of the academic context. I expect Eileen and I have bigger differences there, although probably not gigantic ideological differences, just ones of tactics and perspective in what I have begun to think of as the capitalist now.
I’ve used Creative Commons licenses to create plenty of non-academic, Open material — The Mumpsimus is CC licensed, as is this Patreon. I try to release one short story per year via my website with a CC license, and I’m pleased that when those stories were collected in The Last Vanishing Man, Third Man Books included the licenses on the copyright page, no questions asked. (Which is legally correct, but it doesn’t mean publishers always like it!)
But I do think of Open differently for trade publication rather than academic publication. (And yes, of course, there are ways these realms can and often should overlap, but I’m talking general principles here.) The basic concept of academic publishing is that it is not for economic profit. Everything good and distinct about academic publishing collapses the minute profit becomes the primary motive. Profit — or, more accurately, funding — generally has to be part of the conversation because few academic publishers have such huge endowments that they can spend money to publish books without worrying about how they will make more money to continue publishing books. But once academic publishers are paying close attention to the return on investment of what they publish, they are no longer able to serve their primary mission to contribute to the knowledge commons regardless of whether there is an established demand for what is published. Academic research must allow lots of room for seemingly useless knowledge, because otherwise everything we value about research disappears. This is one of the reasons why higher education in the US right now is facing such a crisis: our universities have been taken over by administrators who rarely know how even to begin to value research that isn’t instrumentalized and beholden to the assumptions of the moment.
Academic publishing exists to contribute to the knowledge commons. Trade publishing is different in that its reasons for being are many. Trade publishing is similar to academic publishing in that to sustain success it has to invest in books that may not have any predictable hope of selling many copies, but the reason for trade publishing doing this is not about contributing to a commons but rather about the inability of anybody to predict all of the factors that make books sell (or not). For a long time, the basic idea of publishing was to have a few big bestsellers fund everything else. That’s changed over recent decades, with corporate conglomeration leading to more and more pressure for every book to be a bestseller or not be published at all, but the principal is going to still hold in some form or another, because there just aren’t enough sure-fire bestsellers to go around.
(Certainly, sometimes editors and publishers will invest in a book they doubt has any commercial appeal but which they believe makes an important contribution to the world. That’s wonderful and should be celebrated, but it’s also fairly rare, and seldom encouraged as good business practice. Even if publishers just want to release weird books they think nobody will buy, if they have a distributor then the distributor is going to be asking about marketing and sales. Now and then a publisher can build an entire brand on weird books they think nobody will buy and that in and of itself becomes a selling point. )
(For the details of book sales, be sure to read Lincoln Michel’s excellent piece, “No, Most Books Don’t Sell Only a Dozen Copies” and his new follow-up, “Yes, People Do Buy Books”.)
Anyway, all of this is to say: I am more careful about opening access to trade books than to academic books — because people’s livelihoods depend on trade books in a way they do not depend on academic books. For myself, too, I feel a bit more possessive of my non-academic work than of my academic work. The academic work is for an academic community. It’s for the sake of knowledge. It’s a type of sharing and I want it shared as accessibly as possible. It has pretty much no commercial potential.
My non-academic writing, particularly my fiction, I want more control of. Though most of my fiction doesn’t earn more than three digits of income, occasionally something nice happens like a short story gets optioned and then turned into a movie, making more money than all of my books combined and helping me pay for grad school. I don’t make a living off of my writing, nor have I ever expected to, but I want other people to be able to make a living off of their artistic labors. Indeed, I want more people to be able to live off of their writing than are currently able to do so. That means protecting some flawed but useful structures like copyright.
So please check out my conversation with Eileen and other friends, think about Open Access (particularly with regard to academic work), and let’s keep talking about how we publish and who we publish for.
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image by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
