The U. of Missouri Press Almost Closed 4 Years Ago. Here’s How It Bounced Back.

Four years ago Timothy M. Wolfe, then president of the University of Missouri system, announced without warning that its academic press would shut down. The outcry was immediate and explosive.

“It was like somebody going into a library or university and burning it down,” says Bruce Joshua Miller. “With one stroke of the pen: destroyed.”

Mr. Miller, president of Miller Trade Book Marketing, has worked in academic publishing for more than 30 years. Along with Ned Stuckey-French, an associate professor of English at Florida State University, he galvanized a social-media movement that clamored for the press to stay open.

Eventually the movement got its way. Mr. Wolfe reversed his decision a few months later; the press stayed open for business.

But in the interim, it had to surrender every project it had in progress. Many authors took their books to other presses, and more than a year’s worth of revenue was lost, says David M. Rosenbaum, the press’s director.

After the reversal, the staff scrambled to compile a new list of authors, mainly by phoning scholars with whom it had already built relationships. The message: “We’re still here, we have the same clout, and we were going to do right by their books,” says Tracy Tritschler, the press’s business manager.

Missouri faced an extreme version of a challenge that has vexed many financially strapped academic presses: how to publish distinctive scholarly work and maintain fiscal stability.

The press has tried a range of tactics familiar to modern presses — strengthening ties to the flagship campus, homing in on its areas of expertise, and using metadata and analytics to contend with an ever-shifting publishing market that increasingly operates online. Those approaches have helped put the Missouri press on firmer footing, but the publisher’s challenges are far from over.

‘A Tight Walk’

In the aftermath of the near shutdown, the press’s staff was pared down. The press, which has about a dozen mostly full-time employees, used to operate with twice that number, says Mr. Rosenbaum. Layoffs mostly were made in the warehousing and fulfillment departments, which no longer exist. The cuts did not stem solely from the closure plan, Ms. Tritschler says. The press had undergone a wave of retirements and was already trying to reduce its deficits by 2012.

Still, the layoffs hurt. “We lost a lot of institutional memory that way, as well as the cost of laying people off,” says Mr. Rosenbaum. “It’s a cost that we still bear.” Meanwhile, he says, it took significant time for the press to recuperate from the steep drop in revenue spurred by the canceled projects.

The press’s annual subsidy from the university is now $400,000, the same level of support it received in 2012. That covers less than one-third of the press’s overall expenses, according to Mr. Rosenbaum. But “it’s not all doom and gloom,” he says.

He predicts the press will be self-supporting within two years. Since he was hired, in 2013, after working in commercial publishing, the press’s bottom line has improved by about $100,000 annually — first because it has cut expenses, but more recently because of growth in sales revenue.

Mr. Rosenbaum attributes some of the upswing to a renewed focus on what customers want. The press’s marketing staff has sharpened its collection of metadata, enabling it to predict the terms most likely to bring its books to the top of online search results.

The press also analyzes information about customers to market to them in a process that’s “remarkably similar to how we all imagine the Amazon algorithm works,” says Stephanie L. Williams, the marketing manager.

Another shift: The press has adjusted to diminishing demand for the traditional monograph, which had been a mainstay of academic publishing. “We are doing a good job of realistically assessing the size of the market and erring on the side of lower expectations,” Ms. Williams says.

Still, balancing the fiscal responsibilities of a business with the mission to publish work that might not otherwise be commercially available can be “a tight walk sometimes,” says Ms. Tritschler.

Like many other academic publishers, the Missouri press uses revenue from popular texts — like Dick Cole’s War: Doolittle Raider, Hump Pilot, Air Commando, by Dennis R. Okerstrom, an English professor at Park University, in Missouri — to subsidize the publication of books that are academically important but “can’t quite make it” on their own, Ms. Tritschler says. But every book is expected to at least cover its production costs.

“In the end it doesn’t matter how good of a book it is,” she says. “It has to be sellable.”

‘A Natural Home’

After it staved off closure, the press — which had previously operated under the university system’s auspices — moved under the wing and then onto the campus of the flagship, in Columbia. That rearrangement helped the press weave tighter bonds with the university community, says Ms. Tritschler. “Having this proximity has allowed us to open some doors that had been closed on us before.”

The new locale also allowed the press to develop relationships with Columbia-based organizations, like the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy, and to befriend scholars on the flagship campus with expertise in the press’s specialties.

Instead of publishing “orphans” — books on subjects on which the press does not have a significant backlist — Missouri has concentrated on topics that it considers areas of strength, such as African-American studies, literary criticism, local history, and journalism, says Ms. Tritschler.

A recently published book, Lloyd Gaines and the Fight to End Segregation, exemplifies that strategy. The text was written by William T. Horner, a professor of political science on the Columbia campus, and James W. Endersby, an associate professor in the same department.

The authors proposed the book to the university press right before it was temporarily shuttered. When he heard about the closure, Mr. Horner says he was upset: Even though other academic presses published on civil rights, the Missouri press had seemed like “such a natural home” for their work.

The book delves into a largely forgotten 1938 Supreme Court case in which Lloyd L. Gaines, an African-American man, successfully sued the University of Missouri School of Law after being denied admission based on his race. Mr. Gaines’s name now graces the university’s Black Culture Center.

The case is a touchstone for understanding the messy junction between race and higher education, one that is still being navigated by the university. Last fall student protests over race relations on the Columbia campus prompted Mr. Wolfe and the flagship’s chancellor, R. Bowen Loftin, to resign.

The book came out just as those protests were beginning. Though the timing was a coincidence, Mr. Horner says he and Mr. Endersby were aware of the controversy over race and how knowledge of the Gaines case could contribute to it.

“We both felt a real sense of responsibility in talking about things that happened a long time ago, but sort of saying this stuff still matters,” Mr. Horner says.

Courting Missouri professors and publishing on African-American history are nothing new for the press, says Mr. Rosenbaum, the director. Continuing to do so in light of the student protests extends the tradition. “That context is important to us,” he says, “but it’s always been important to us.”

‘Back in the Ballgame’

All presses, not just Missouri’s, have had to contend with the changing landscape of academic publishing, Ms. Tritschler says.

Library budgets continue to shrink. Local bricks-and-mortar bookstores used to provide a large chunk of presses’ revenue. But when megastores like Barnes & Noble cropped up, the local stores were crippled, and the book-buying process became centralized.

“You had a buyer in New York deciding what somebody in Columbia wanted to read,” she says.

The advent of online markets like Amazon “kind of put us back in the ballgame” by allowing the press to have as much visibility as larger publishers do, says Ms. Tritschler.

But partnerships with web monoliths can also have drawbacks. Because they provide a hefty portion of sales, online retailers have leverage, enabling them to demand that academic presses meet their deadlines and standards.

Presses also have to grapple with the mounting push toward open-access publishing, which “nobody’s figured out how to pay for yet,” says Mr. Miller, the book marketer.

Despite the disruption caused by its near closure, the Missouri press has stayed committed to its mission of publishing original work by, for, and about Missourians, says Ms. Tritschler, who has worked there for 28 years.

“It could have been easier to try to find another job, or whatever, because of the stresses and strain,” she says. “But everybody around here, we don’t look at this as just another job.”