Dennis Lloyd could be forgiven if he felt nervous about his new job. After almost 10 years at the University Press of Florida, Mr. Lloyd has just taken over as director of the University of Wisconsin Press. Running a nonprofit scholarly publishing operation, especially one in a state-university system handed major budget cuts, isn’t a walk in the park these days.
But Mr. Lloyd sounds unfazed by what’s now expected of a press director. “I’m thrilled to be here,” he says. “I’m in an industry that constantly evolves, that constantly changes.”
The constriction of budgets, the decline of the monograph market, the arrival of digital publishing, the rise of open access: University presses have weathered many changes over the past decade. One recent shift hasn’t gotten much attention outside the scholarly publishing community: a major turnover in press leadership, as longtime directors retire and make way for a new set of leaders, including Mr. Lloyd.
Among the 139 presses that make up the membership of the Association of American University Presses, 39 have gotten new directors in the past three years — 21 in the past 12 months alone, according to Peter Berkery, the association’s executive director.
Some of the new leaders, like Columbia University Press’s Jennifer Crewe, have come up through the ranks. Some, like Mr. Lloyd and Tony Sanfilippo, at Ohio State, have moved over from other university presses; others, like John Sherer, at the University of North Carolina, built careers in the commercial scholarly publishing world.
Many of the new directors have marketing backgrounds — a departure from an old tradition in which directors usually came from the editors’ ranks. Mr. Lloyd, for instance, was director of sales and marketing at the Florida press before becoming deputy director; Mr. Sanfilippo held the top marketing job at Penn State University Press.
Throughout publishing, “the standard operating procedure was to reward editorial expertise with managerial responsibility,” Mr. Berkery says. But in an era in which directors spend a lot of time justifying their press’s existence to administrators, a background in marketing has become a survive-and-thrive skill. “Marketing also means discoverability and making university-press content findable on the Internet,” Mr. Berkery says.
The passing of the torch has taken place at presses big and small. The top job at one of the largest — the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press — switched over in July as the longtime director, Ellen W. Faran, was succeeded by Amy Brand. At the other end of the spectrum, the University of Nevada Press got a new director, Justin Race, this spring; the previous leader, Joanne O’Hare, had held the job for 14 years.
Other presses with new or newish directors include those of the Universities of Arizona, Arkansas, Illinois, Kansas, Missouri, Northern Illinois, and Rochester, along with New York University, Ohio State, Purdue, and Texas A&M.
No Mass Retreat
The past few years haven’t been the easiest of times for university presses, but it would be wrong to interpret the turnover as a mass retreat from nonprofit scholarly publishing. Many of the exiting directors have been in publishing a long time. They’ve come to a point at which it’s natural to think about doing something else.
“Just because you have this big, fabulous job doesn’t mean you have to do it until you fall over in your chair at your desk,” MIT’s Ms. Faran says. “I have had an amazing time for 12 years, and I want there to be a bridge between working and retiring that for me is just less intense. I want some evenings back, some weekends back, and not to have to be responsible for a hundred people.”
Looking back, Ms. Faran says that the biggest change she’s seen at the press has been the advent of digital publishing. A director’s job now includes paying attention to digital partnerships with vendors that distribute electronic versions of university-press books and journals, keeping tabs on new devices and markets, and thinking about how to set up XML (Extensible Markup Language) workflows to handle digital files. That’s a far cry from what book publishing required just 20 years ago.
For Ms. Faran, who admits to enjoying even the less glamorous, nuts-and-bolts aspects of the enterprise, like subsidiary licensing and subscription fulfillment, the variety is stimulating. It also carries a risk. “The danger of spreading yourself too thin is probably greater now,” she says. “I have a greater awareness now that we can’t do everything.”
That’s a hard but necessary lesson to absorb in an era driven by talk of innovation and disruption. Directors have learned that doing a few things well works better than trying to do everything, especially at smaller or medium-sized presses with fewer resources to expend on experimentation.
At Wisconsin, Mr. Lloyd inherits a list that’s “a little bit broad,” he says. In trying to match the university’s breadth of scholarship, “we may have said yes too often.” An overly varied list, he believes, makes it harder both to market and to compete for the best books in a given field.
He plans to identify core strengths and cultivate those, a process likely to take up a lot of the next year, in consultation with the press’s staff and series editors. As for the financial situation, “I knew coming in that the university was planning for a large budget cut,” he says. So far the press has been able to absorb the cuts, he says, and the administration has signaled that “they want us to thrive.”
At Ohio State, the new director, Tony Sanfilippo, inherited a different set of conditions: a press with what he calls “a nice endowment” (thanks to an Ohio-set best-selling novel from decades ago, And Ladies of the Club, by Helen Hooven Santmyer), and a list whittled down to only one field, literary studies, including two series on narrative theory. “Those books do quite well,” he says. “They have a fantastic reputation. We’re not going to mess with that.”
But the Ohio State press, too, needs to broaden its horizons, he says. There are good prospects close to home: for instance, bioethics, in league with the university’s bioethics center. “We have the expertise on campus to help us get a series started,” Mr. Sanfilippo says. “And there’s a real need for it.”
Ambassadors and Advocates
As they study spreadsheets and make decisions about how to reshape their publishing operations, the new directors must keep a close eye on one increasingly vital part of the job: university relations. That includes working with the campus library and being the press’s ambassador to the administration. It’s not enough just to publish good scholarship.
“All programs are being re-evaluated and looked at, and presses are one of those programs,” says Leila Salisbury. She’s been in university-press publishing for more than 20 years, the past seven of them as director of the University Press of Mississippi; before that she was marketing manager for the University Press of Kentucky. “Both sitting directors and directors coming in are having to redefine the relationship between the campus and their press.”
Ms. Salisbury helped organized a boot camp for new directors (those in the job less than three years) in June, at the most recent meeting of the presses’ association.
What did those who attended want to know? “A lot of it was about the politics of the campus and how you cultivate relationships on the campus,” she says. “Who should you be getting to know?”
As for Mr. Lloyd, at Wisconsin, he strikes a note of pragmatic optimism — or optimistic pragmatism — about the climate in which university presses now operate. The biggest challenge? “Shrinking sales, and just continuing to find a way for the finances to work,” he says. “There’s good work out there. There’s interesting research. We get our share of it. But making the best publishing decisions, making the best financial decisions, that’s the big challenges that faces all of us, not just Wisconsin.”
Jennifer Howard writes about research in the humanities, publishing, and other topics. Follow her on Twitter @JenHoward, or email her at jennifer.howard@chronicle.com.
