This month's Books-on-Law Book Review section features an exclusive interview with Niko Pfund, the Director & Editor-in-Chief of New York University Press, recorded on January 7, 1998. The interview is provided here in both audio and transcribed form.   Mr. Pfund neither saw these questions in advance of the interview, nor has seen or edited his remarks.

The Editors

• Audio interview with Niko Pfund (requires RealPlayer)
• Transcript of interview with Niko Pfund
• How to Get (& Not Get) Published
• Advances, Printing Runs, & Pricing
• Placement, Advertising, & Remaindering
• Production Process & Reviews
• Expectations of Authors & Editorial Boards
• Ideological & Advocacy Publishing
• Trade vs. University Presses
• Why Publish with NYU Press?
• Talkback

Listen in RealAudio. . .

Good morning Niko.  Thank you for agreeing to be interviewed here for Books-on-Law.   My co-editor, Ron Collins, was not able to attend today, but he and I have prepared a series of questions for you that fall generally into three categories.  Let me describe those categories.  First, I am going to be asking you functional questions -- questions that focus on the operational practices of New York University Press.   Second, I am going to ask you ideological questions -- inquiries that focus on the political and philosophical views of NYU Press.  Then, finally, market competition or comparison questions -- inquiries that focus more globally on the relative advantages and disadvantages of publishing with NYU Press or university presses in general.

Collins & Skover: Let us begin with some basic information that should be of interest to prospective law authors.  About how many books, whether law-related or not, does NYU Press contract for annually?

Pfund:  I would say in the neighborhood of about 150 a year.

Collins & Skover: What percentage does that represent of the total number of manuscripts and book proposals submitted to you in a year?

Pfund: I think we receive, in the average year, about 2,500 unsolicited proposals.  And, I would say, of those, maybe a third of the 150 [put under contract] originally have been unsolicited, and the remaining 100 that we put under contract, I think, are probably books that we have devised ourselves or specifically sought somebody and commissioned them to do.  So our press, I think, perhaps more so than many university presses, makes a real point of being proactive in its acquisitions.

Collins & Skover: What percentage of the books contracted for are actually published?

Pfund: Oh, I would say almost 100 percent.  For only maybe five percent, for various reasons, authors maybe can’t complete them.  In my seven years at the Press, there have only been two cases where a book that was under contract, after tremendous numbers of revisions and rounds of rewrites, was deemed unacceptable.

Collins & Skover: About how many law-related books does NYU contract for annually?

Pfund:  I would say probably about fifteen to twenty-five, depending upon the year.

Collins & Skover: Now, we'd like to talk about what things an author can and cannot do to assure publication.  What sort of things can an author of a completed manuscript do to assure that his or her work will not be published, in your view?

Pfund:  Well, the one thing that I have become increasingly skeptical of is the phrase "the general reader."  I have a cartoon from the New Yorker on my bulletin board of a bespectacled professor with a salt-and-pepper beard and a tweed jacket speaking at a cocktail party and saying "I have the hopes, I trust not completely unfounded, that my work will extend beyond the reaches of academe."   And I think, while certainly that’s something that we as publishers hope as well, given the information that we have at our fingertips, that is much more often the exception than the rule.

There are some subjects that, by themselves, the very nature of the subject, or even the nature of the discipline sometimes, make it very difficult for a book to be a general-interest book.  The number of general interest readers (meaning people who read anywhere from six to ten non-fiction books a year) who are not in the academy, I think, is not tremendous -- especially when you take out the history book clubs and the military history, and so forth.  We tend to be very skeptical about that, unless it’s in fact true.

What I always encourage people to do is to investigate a little bit which presses publish in what areas.  If somebody sends us a book in Securities Studies or in Latin American Literature, we almost certainly will not publish it, because those are not fields in which we publish.  So, my first bit of advice for [authors who wish to submit manuscripts to] university publishers would be: get your hands on a copy of the Association of American University Presses Directory, which lists every series that individual presses publish.  It lists the rosters of the individual presses and the names and the e-mail addresses, mailing addresses.  And really tailor your submissions so that there is the sense that you have done some work -- and we get the sense that it’s not this "pan"-submission that has gone out to twenty-five editors in the hope of getting a nibble somewhere.  That’s not so much for reasons of jealousy or anything; it’s simply because we respect it when people seem to be "in the know."  A proposal that is somehow convincing, that projects the author, is credentialed in some way, that helps.  Just something that really is authoritative and not self-delusional.

Collins & Skover: We're going to ask the flip side of that question.   We asked you what kind of things an author could do that would actually discourage your interest in the book.  What are some of the things that are likely to catch your eye in a positive way in an unpublished manuscript?

Pfund: What I particularly look for these days is something that is either contrarian or counter-intuitive.  There is nothing that dulls the edge of a publishing program more quickly than books that do nothing but preach to the converted and that are entirely predictable in their conclusions.  While it certainly helps if you have a good subject, it’s crucial that you have a good subject and that you do something with that subject.  I looked a couple of years ago at a marvelously interesting manuscript on women’s magazines -- the history of women’s magazines -- but, as I was reading through it, I was not able to discern any overarching thesis, and that is a real problem.

There has to be some hook, some angle, that will push it forward.  For instance, we are in the process right now of bringing out a book called, rather provocatively, Constitutional Stupidities, Constitutional Tragedies.  [Editors' Note: This book has been published recently.]  Especially in the wake of the number of celebrations of the Constitution that went on ten years ago, the idea of focusing on those provisions in the Constitution that people object to struck me as being a very, very interesting one.   Those are the kinds of things, particularly, that I’m looking for.

There are, to my mind, really two types of books in terms of subject matter.   There are those that identify a subject that nobody has covered before.  For instance, there was a book that was published a little while ago, the history of cosmetic surgery in America (I don’t know of any other comprehensive history of cosmetic surgery in America).  And there are those books that identify a subject about which much has been written, but try to move it in a new direction.  For instance, Arthur Austin at Case Western Reserve University is doing a book for us called The Empire Strikes Back.  [Editors' Note: This book, also, has been published recently.]   It is about the role of outsiders, the critical race folks, and the more establishment folks, and the battle over legal education -- which is, in some ways, an attempt to mediate between the Farber-Sherry folks and the Delgados and Derrick Bells, and so forth.  What I liked about that is that it always kept me guessing.  I never knew where he was going to come down.   It was not predictable to me, and that, I thought, was tremendously appealing.

Collins & Skover:  Is it best to submit an outline of a book, a sample chapter, or a completed manuscript, in your view? In some sense, what this question is going for, in addition to subject interest, is: how much are you likely to make your decisions based on the excellence in writing?

Pfund:  Increasingly, increasingly.  There was a piece in the New York Times just last week in their year-end issue of the publishing industry.   One of the points the piece made is that publishers -- especially the trade publishers, now that they are abandoning some of the five-million-dollar advance-celebrity biographies -- are focusing increasingly on writing.  Looking at the bestsellers’ list. You have Cold Mountain; you have Angela's Ashes; you have these books that define themselves, and have distinguished themselves, by the quality of their writing.  Given the nature of academic books, where the empiricism is more important than the writing, it’s a little bit less the case with us; but, certainly, good writing is essential.

I don’t look for any very specific format.  What I look for is a packet of materials that is going to give me a good overall sense of the project, and something that’s going to answer all the obvious questions that I might have.  Such as: What does each chapter purport to do?  When does the author hope to complete it?   Who does the author think might be a hard-target audience for the book that I might not know about?  Not just people interested in law, history, education -- these sorts of things.  For instance, for a book we signed up called The Culture and Conflict Reader, I didn’t know that there are ten Masters programs in Alternative Dispute Resolution in this country that might use it.  Now, that was a very useful figure for me, for our committee: to be able to say there are these ten programs.  That kind of information is very helpful from a readership and a marketing standpoint.  Editorially, [I want] just something that will really place the work in the literature, will give me a sense of the work that the person has done, and will sell me on the project.

Collins & Skover: So, there really isn’t a preference, in your view, between a sample chapter, a completed manuscript, or just an outline?

Pfund:  Well, I think people can spare themselves the xeroxing.  If somebody sends me a proposal and it’s interesting to me, I’ll just give them a call or send an e-mail, and say: "Please send me the full manuscript if it’s available, or send me some more materials" (which is a very straightforward transaction).  Whereas, if it’s something that’s not going to be of interest to me (which statistically is more likely), then it entails sending back the whole manuscript.  So, in some ways, the more concise and compact the materials initially (especially an unsolicited manuscript), the better.

Collins & Skover: How about publishing advances?  Do you give them, and, if so, what is the range?  Can you give us some specific figures or examples?

Pfund:  Sure.  I think university presses have had to be more competitive, as have all presses, and we certainly give advances.  We give advances based in many cases on proposals.  The advances tend to range very widely.  Most of our advances tend to be in the one-to-three thousand dollar range.

We tend to print for three years, and we’d like to have the advance covered by the initial print run.  Now, that’s not to say that there aren’t books that we’ve paid advances in the five figures for.  There was a book that we published several years ago that we competed for in an auction.  It was a short history of Bosnia, which we ended up paying twenty thousand dollars for, which (at the time for us) was a fairly significant figure.  But, by-and-large, [advances] tend to be in the sub-five thousand dollar range.  And it is determined entirely by the sales expectations.

Collins & Skover: You mentioned that you would like, generally, to have a three-year run.  We were going to ask what the average printing is -- or the first run -- of a typical law-related book?

Pfund:  This is one of the things that’s very difficult to theorize about generally; each university press is so different.  Although the general charters are similar, each press is beholden to its university in different ways.   Our parent institution, for instance, pressures us to keep our inventory down; so we tend to like to print very conservatively initially.

We tend to print as few copies as we possibly can, really, and then go back to print several times ideally.  For instance, take an anthology that we published called Immigrants Out, about the resurgence of nativism and the history of nativism in America.   That was a book for which I had every hope that we would sell somewhere between three and five thousand copies in the first few years.  But we could afford to print, I thought, two thousand; and so, we printed two thousand, initially, in paperback.   And we have now just gone back to press a little bit over a year after it’s been out.  In terms of the momentum of the book, just everybody is enthusiastic about it when you go back to print, rather than anxiously sweating out the first print run.   So, that has held us in good stead.  Due to economies of scale, financially it can be a little bit disadvantageous to do that; but that generally has been the way we’ve approached it.

[B]asically, it’s hard to say what is our print run for a law book.  Because what we have tried to do with our Law & Legal Studies Program is to print and publish books that will hopefully extend somewhat beyond a sub-group of folks within a particular field in legal studies.  So, our print runs, I would say, for our law books have been significantly higher than many print runs of other university presses publishing in law.   I would say that, basically, for our hard covers, we really can’t afford these days to publish current runs in fewer than a thousand.  So, that makes it very prohibitive.  For our general-interest law books that are published initially in hard cover, I would say, two thousand to three thousand.  For the books that are published simultaneously -- with the library edition, hard cover, and then a paperback -- I would say, for the library edition we print about three hundred hard covers, and then print in the neighborhood of two to three thousand paperbacks.

Collins & Skover: Now, let’s talk about the pricing of books.   Does the author typically have any say in how the price of a book is decided?   If a price is prohibitive -- say over $40.00 -- then the likelihood of bookstores carrying it declines.  So, to what extent is the author involved in pricing, and how do you decide the pricing?

Pfund:  Well, of course, ideally every book we publish would be $25.00 or less.  But, when you’re in the business for awhile, you realize that there are some books -- regardless of what their price is, regardless of how beautiful they might be (pause)  .  .  .  .  If it’s a book on Comparative European law, it is going to have a certain audience.  And law books, frankly, are less price-sensitive than books in many other fields, because there are law schools and various other institutions that will purchase them, regardless of whether they are $24.00 or $45.00.  Again, our kind of law publishing is a very particular type of publishing.   We’re not Michie, or Foundation, or West, or Oceana.  We publish, generally, a very small vector in the overall legal publishing pie.

We certainly consult with the authors (and, again, there is no reason to be mysterious about this).  But the relationship between what it costs us to physically manufacture a book and the list price that we end up pricing the book -- that ratio is one-to-five.   So, if it’s costing us $5.00 to publish a book, we need to price it at $25.00.   And this is where the editor is always saying we need to cut back on the footnotes, we need to keep the length down.  There is, obviously, a direct relationship among length, production cost, and list price.

So, it’s very difficult for an author to say: "Here is my 800-page manuscript.  Any way you can keep the price down to $30.00?"  That’s not going to happen.  If the book is basically 250 pages or [fewer], we can probably keep it under $30.00, if we think that that is going to make a difference.  But, if we only think the book is going to sell 500 copies, then we might price it at $45.00, because we need to recover our investment.

Collins & Skover: What about whether a book is printed in cloth or in paper?  How is that decided?

Pfund: There are three ways in which to publish academic books these days.   You can publish them as high-priced monographs (the majority of law books are published in that way), and you can publish them in what’s known as essentially a "trade hard cover;" or you can publish them simultaneously.  It basically depends on what the profile of the book is.  The two major issues are the subject and the writing.  Because, once again, if you have a great subject and the writing is completely impossible and dense, then it doesn’t really help to place it at a low price because you will just be seen as trying to dupe the book review community, and that doesn’t hold anyone in good stead.  If somebody looks at a book and says, "Hey, that’s a terrific jacket and the subject is interesting!", picks it up and finds [himself or herself] slamming into one obstacle after another trying to read the book in terms of the style, then that’s a self-defeating approach.

We think of it in terms of the readership.  Is there potentially a college audience for the book?  For the Immigrants book I mentioned earlier, we clearly thought that there were going to be supplementary course adoptions for that book; in other words, the book would be used as a supplementary text -- not just in Law, but, hopefully, also in Sociology and History and Political Science courses.  And that, in fact, was the case.  So, that was a book that was absolutely correct to publish simultaneously in cloth and paperback.

Generally, these days, it is virtually impossible to publish an anthology in a hard-cover edition only.  Institutions shy away from anthologies, as not really contributing, and being sort-of not unified, and so forth.  The only kinds of anthologies right now that we are really publishing are those that are targeted towards a course-use readership, and that means that we would publish them simultaneously.

Collins & Skover: Can you explain the process by which book buyers, wholesalers, and book chains decide whether to carry a book, or how many books to carry?   For example, many a time a book is published, but is seldom, if ever, seen in one’s local bookstore.

Pfund:  I think that most authors would be absolutely horrified to know the process by which this occurs.  In an age where the retail aspect of book-selling has become essential as to the chains, the power to decide the fate of the book and the exposure of the book is oftentimes in the hands of a very few people.  These people are besieged by publishing sales representatives who go to them and say, "Here’s a new catalog," twice a year.  "Let’s go through it and talk about which wonderful books of ours you want to stock in your store."

Given the restrictions of time, what they will do is go through it in a very brusque way.  And they will look at the title; they will look at the author to see if the author rings any bells; they might, if the author has previously published books, look up the sales record of the author; and then they will make that decision.  These are essentially buyers who will say we will take 300 copies of this and put it in these stores -- two copies in each store.

What happened when you had the superstore expansion is that the superstores essentially overbought.  They were very bullish and, in fact as it turned out, over-enthusiastic about the sales of many academic books.  So they bought all these academic books, and the publishers thought, "Hey, this is terrific! This is really wonderful for us! God bless the superstores!"  Then suddenly, about two summers ago, there was this massive flood of returns when they cleaned out their warehouses, and we found ourselves awash in books we thought had sold.

So everybody had got their comeuppance, and the Barnes & Nobles and Borders have been ordering much more conservatively.  That’s problematic for many publishers.   There are some small publishers that can’t even really get their books stocked because the amount of business they do with the chains is so little that it’s really not worth their while.  Also, we have to bear in mind that these things have been constantly changing.  We’re talking about an environment that has undergone a tremendous change in just the last five years.  The topography of retail book-selling has changed completely.  The number of independent bookstores is way down.   Hundreds of them have closed, and so to theorize about it in any sweeping way is really problematic.  But I think it’s safe to say that, if you have a book by an author (even if it’s an author [who] hasn’t published before), if it’s on a topical relevant subject, it will likely get into stores.

It also depends on their ability now to track the books according to their tracking systems by computer.  The shelf-life of a book   .   .    .   is shorter (much shorter) than it used to be.  The independent bookstores used to leave the books on the shelves for months, if not years; and now, if those books don’t sell, they are in and out much more quickly.  That makes it very difficult for those of us who publish books that have these long, slow, steady sales, rather than the more spiky-type sales profiles.

Collins & Skover: How much do you typically budget for advertising purposes -- marketing purposes -- of a law-related book at NYU Press?  What sort of things do you do to promote such a book?

Pfund: Again, it’s very difficult to say.  It depends on the book.   It depends entirely on the book.  There are books where you could run a full-page New York Times ad for them, and it would have a negligible effect on sales.  Of course, this is a bone of some contention between authors and publishers.   The publishers, of course, have the experience of seeing how ads translate into book sales, which is, in sum, virtually not at all, and know that advertising really is more or less a means of getting the word out about the book, getting the book into people’s consciousness.  That doesn’t necessarily translate into sales for our types of books.  Which is not to say that we don’t advertise and advertise aggressively; but the fact is that, in terms of actually selling the books, the things that work for us are readings or our direct mail -- trying to get a very targeted group of folks who’d be interested in a book, and sending them information about it, and offering a book at a discount.

An example that comes immediately to mind is a book that we published on the black-rage defense a little while ago right here in the Bay Area.  Paul Harris, the author, spoke at Cody’s, one of the better and larger bookstores in Berkeley, and sold, I think, in the neighborhood of eighty books at this reading.  Cody’s, apparently, has said that that was one of the most successful readings it ever had.  Paul is a very good speaker.  That is really the way in which the books get sold and the books move.

Also, one of the things we’ve now started to do -- in the best tradition of "push technology," in the nascent tradition of "push technology" -- is to have an e-mail list of folks that, when we publish books in their fields  .   .  .  and we’ve actually started doing this in law, because law professors tend to be mostly pretty well-connected and wired  .  .  .   we are e-mailing them whenever a new book comes out -- just the basic information about the book -- and saying, "If you’d like to order it, just click here," and so forth.  I think that’s going to prove to be a very effective strategy; and it builds a community of people who are interested not just in the press, but in the kinds of books that we publish.

But, in terms of hard dollars for advertising, it really depends entirely on the book.   I mean, there may be some books that are so specialized that we are just going to advertise them in one to two journals.  And then there are others that we will give a much broader advertising profile.  Again, I think one of the things that we do quite well is that we are very candid and very straightforward about this at every stage.   We don’t try to lure people into our fold by duping them with grand strategies that we then don’t follow through on.

Collins & Skover: What happens if, let’s say after six or eight months, a book is not selling as you expected it to?  Does it sit in the warehouse?   Is it remaindered?  Is it sold for pulp?

Pfund:  Well, I think that six to eight months  .  .  .   .  Thankfully, it hasn’t gotten so bad that that’s the window.   I think the window for us is probably more eighteen to twenty-four months where we start to say, if the book has really performed far below expectations, that we need to think about what to do about it.  What we, in fact, do about it can be any number of things.

If the book has been published in hard cover, we might say, "Okay, let’s give it another go with the paperback. Let’s bring out the paperback a bit earlier than we thought."  We may do a partial remainder, which is to sell a portion of the stock at a lower price.  It’s unlikely that we would essentially pulp a book that we’ve published.  Not only is it unlikely, it would be unprecedented for us to essentially trash a book that we have published less than, I would say, at least four or five years, even now.

That’s not because we’re better people than the trade presses.   It’s because we have a different mandate and a different charter.  We don’t have quite  .  .  .  the profit expectations that the trade presses do, which are beholden to venture capitalists and to shareholders; and we are not taxed on our inventory.  That makes a difference, as well -- a big difference.   There was that article in Lingua Franca a while ago which said that the university presses used to just leave the books sitting on the shelves.  I think Oxford University Press had the world record for the longest time it took for the initial print run of a book to sell out, which was something like eighty-three years.  But I think that record will remain unbroken for the foreseeable future.

Collins & Skover: A thing of the past?

Pfund:  Yes.  One of the things that we also do is to make every effort to inform our authors of what we’re thinking, so that there are no surprises.

Collins & Skover: What say, if any, do authors have in the design of a book and in its cover?

Pfund: We, I think, more so than most, really try to involve the authors in this process.  I know, in fact, that we have not essentially overruled the authors in my time there.  If they detested a jacket, we have not said, "Okay.  We are going with this jacket, and you’re just going to have to deal with it."   That is actually one of the more contested issues, and makes for some of the more interesting debates.

When I started off at Oxford, one of my jobs was to try to mediate between the author, the editor for the book (I was an editorial assistant), the marketing manager for the book, and the designer of the book jacket, and try to come up with a satisfactory solution -- which was oftentimes virtually impossible because everybody is just coming to this from a different standpoint.  What we’ll do at the early stage is say to an author, even when we’re signing the book up or the manuscript has just been submitted, "What are your thoughts on the jacket?  Do you have any images in mind that you think would work particularly well?  If you don’t, spend the next four or five or six months as the book is going through the process, looking at the world through the filter of what you might like to see on your book jacket; and, if you see an image that might work, try to get a print of that image and talk to us about it."

We can do some research ourselves, of course, but the most successful jackets are those where the author presents us with either an idea or an image, and we then get to work on it.  We will run a photocopy of the image by the author and say, "What do you think?"  There are those jackets where the initial design comes in and everybody says, "Oh, my goodness, this is just terrific!" -- and it just sails right through because it’s just right.  Then, there are those that you have to tinker with a little bit.  There are those where you get three or four designs, and it immediately doesn’t look right.  So that’s one of the more interesting stages in the whole process.

Collins & Skover: Your response focused very heavily on the cover.   What about the interior design of the book?  Does the author have any say in that?  Does the author have any say in the type of paper, the font that’s used, etc.?

Pfund:  Certainly, if an author says this is a design that I particularly liked, we will make every effort to match that design.  That does happen from time to time.  Many authors aren’t that focused on design, particularly in law.  I think that in a number of other areas -- obviously, if you are doing a book in photography, that’s much more of a concern.  It does reach the point where you say to yourself, we are the crafts-people.  And, in terms of the type of paper that’s used and so forth, given the way in which the paper is ordered (we tend to order paper in large bulk), it becomes very difficult oftentimes to say, "Okay, we want to use a particular type of ivory or cream for this book."  That means that we then have to order a very small quantity, which can be very expensive.  Because, again, it’s all economies of scale.  So, we certainly solicit that input if people want to give it.  That’s a part of the process where, I think, we leave that to ourselves a little bit more, certainly more so than the jacket.

Collins & Skover: Let’s talk about reviews and the importance of reviews.  Just how important, in your opinion, are reviews in Publisher’s Weekly and the major papers for the sale of books?

Pfund:  Very important.  Very important.  I think there is no better way in which to get the book into people’s consciousness, and in which to sell a book ultimately, than a strong review in a high-profile publication.  So, yes, those are very important.  What becomes clear when one makes these sales calls to the New York Times and other places is just the absolutely astonishing pressure that the folks who work there are under.  When I go to the New York Times a couple times a year -- as you walk into the office there are these large laundry hampers, canvas laundry hampers, that fill up, several of them, over the course of the day with just books that are sent in for review.  Some people spend their entire days physically opening the packages and going through and trying to filter out many of the books, and get to the ones that are, in fact, likely candidates for publication.  But, yes, in a nutshell, very important.

Collins & Skover: What about a bad review?  How much does a bad review affect the marketing of a book, in your view?

Pfund:  It depends on why the review is bad.  If the review says this book is poorly written, is repetitive, says nothing other people haven’t said, and is not a good book, that’s not going to help things.  If it is an ideologically bad review, I think it can be fine.  If it’s that somebody clearly disagrees with the book, or finds it politically problematic, that’s the type of review that can oftentimes help the book.  We definitely make the distinction between the reviews that criticize the book from an ideological standpoint and criticize the book as a literary work.

Collins & Skover:  In your experience, what are the most common false expectations that authors have?

Pfund:  Well, I think [all authors], when they come into publishing (especially academic publishing), [are] astonished at how low the print runs are, how modest the sales can be, even of books that get high-profile reviews, depending upon the subject.  One of the reasons I’m happy to do an interview like this, is that it’s absolutely important and crucial for editors to educate their authors.  So that for me is a very important part of the process.  But, to generalize about expectations that people have -- I guess that’s a very difficult question to answer because it just varies tremendously from discipline and from person to person.

Collins & Skover: One last operational question, Niko.  Gordon Massman, the former acquisitions editor at Westview Press, asked us to ask you the following question.  Just how independent are you from the faculty editorial board?   That is, how really autonomous are you when it comes to making publishing decisions?

Pfund:  Are you asking me particularly or, in general, university presses?

Collins & Skover: You in particular.

Pfund:  Well, I think the answer to that is that the more financial autonomy one has, the greater the editorial autonomy tends to be.  NYU Press went through a period in the late '70s (and this is something that has been handed down to me) where the Press was losing a fairly significant amount of money and, thus, essentially lost a lot of editorial control.  I think that, if one is essentially floating one’s own boat as much as is possible (and, by that, I mean is not receiving certain formal subsidies from the university, and so forth -- and I emphasize formal, because I think there is not a university press in the country that does not receive informal subsidies that are absolutely vital and crucial), then one tends to have a good bit more editorial autonomy than if one does not.

I think one of the things that’s going to become a tremendous issue in the years to come (and is already becoming more and more of an issue for a free university press and university press directors) is development or, less euphemistically, fundraising.  I think that that’s something that presses are going to have to do more and more.   The more one does fundraising, the more one necessarily needs to become enmeshed with various university folks.  So, speaking just for the Press, we have tended to be quite autonomous in the '90s.  And that has, in fact, partially facilitated our success.  Because we have been able, with certain projects, to push forward perhaps a little bit more quickly in terms of acquiring them, simply because we’ve had good experiences with similar projects in the past.  And it’s just a snowballing effect that has continued.

Collins & Skover: Let’s move on to some of our ideological questions.   Do you publish right-of-center books at all?  For example, would you publish the kind of books that Regnery Gateway publishes?

Pfund:  I think we’d probably not publish the kind of books that Regnery Gateway publishes.  We definitely consider ourselves to be a "pan"-ideological publisher.  For instance, we have an economics list that is certainly quite right-of-center, very laissez-faire, and it reflects the economics emphasis at the University.  This varies, again, very much from discipline to discipline.  You have to basically take a look and see what your constituency is, and try to carve out a niche for yourself.

When I came to NYU from Oxford University Press, I didn’t really have much of an interest in publishing in Law, because I didn’t really see how it could be fruitfully done.  The type of law books that Oxford published, for the most part, were fairly staid books -- very monographic -- and that was not something that I could feasibly do at the Press.  As I traveled around the country and talked to people at various law schools, it became clear to me that there was this generation of young, very smart, more activist-oriented scholars, who were, in fact, working very much along parallel lines with many of the people in the Humanities and Social Sciences.  They struck me as being a very good network of folks, people who mentored extremely well, and who really were informed by this idea that law is not the Langdellian ideal as existing in this removed, abstract world -- but, rather, there is a great dialectic between law and society.

That, I thought, was quite appealing.  That is primarily why our list has evolved the way it has.  I think it’s absolutely crucial that a university press reflect all the various constituents of the university, and that it not be just an ideological-type press.  I think that the dangers of that -- of publishing strictly according to one ideology -- are apparent when you look at the rise and fall of certain presses that have essentially defined themselves or allied themselves with one particular ideology.

Collins & Skover: What do you think of advocacy publishing?  In other words, how much of a publishing decision is, in fact, political?

Pfund: Having said what I just said moments ago, I think that it’s very difficult (and also not desirable) for an editor to try to keep her or his politics completely outside of his or her acquisitions.  What I have found over the years is that, in fact, the books for which I oftentimes am the best editor are those with which I disagree politically.  Because it enables me to counter some of the arguments made and try to say, "I found this unconvincing, and this unconvincing," and to try to anticipate many of the criticisms that people will have of the book politically or ideologically.

I am all for advocacy publishing.  I think advocacy publishing is important work.   I think that the university presses increasingly are the places where people go to put forward new ideas and to try to change paradigms, or to try to anticipate developments.  I think that it’s also smart publishing; because if you publish to a certain group of folks who are activists and have a real vested interest -- a political interest -- in their work, that creates an audience and a readership for itself.   Both from an ideological and from strictly a publishing standpoint, it’s nice when those two intersect.  I’m all for it. I think that it’s very useful to have a book that provokes and causes people to think about a subject, even if they disagree with it entirely and will slam it.  As I alluded to you earlier, one of the blurbs on the back panel of a book that I saw said, "I disagree utterly with every word in this book, but it’s very compelling and absorbing."  I think that’s important, and I don’t think we should shy away from that.

Collins & Skover: The book you were referring to, we think, is the book by Daniel Farber and Suzanna Sherry, Beyond All Reason.  [Editor's Note: See the exchange, published in our last issue, on the Farber-Sherry book.]  In fact, my next question relates exactly to that.  In their newly published book, Professors Farber and Sherry take aim at multi-culturalism as a form of legal scholarship.   That is, they take on many of the thinkers that are likely to be published by New York University Press.  In their words, "Radical multi-culturalism is destructive of the very goals it wishes to affirm."  Do you see such books as this as yet another backlash against the kinds of works that NYU is known to publish?   And, if so, what do you make of this?

Pfund: Well, I don’t really think of it as being a backlash against the kind of books that we like to publish.  I see it as an important next step in the ongoing debates about curricular reform and multi-culturalism and the role of activism in legal education.  I think it’s important that these sorts of debates are waged.

There was a conference at Yale not long ago where Harlan Dalton made the point that it’s crucial that we’re able to confront one another and disagree and shout at one another.  I don’t see the role of the publisher as being threatened by these sorts of debates.  I think that any publisher who’s that thin-skinned is in the wrong business.  I think that, if you publish aggressively and politically, then you invariably are going to have some of your work slammed.  Anyone who finds themselves angst-ridden by this, that is really ill-founded.

The idea is to figure out a way in which to respond sensibly to it, but I think the key thing is not to conflate the role of author and of publisher.  The publisher is the person who is, in a sense, the facilitator -- to try to engender some of these debates and to try to move them ahead and along, if not resolve them (which I think is often impossible).  It’s not something that gives me great pause at all.  And, in fact, I think it, in some ways, is a validation of some of the things that we do.

Collins & Skover: Niko, what do you think of the New Press?

Pfund:  I think the New Press is terrific!  I have enormous respect for André Schiffrin, who is somebody I think has done extremely important publishing, and who has crafted this new model of a publishing house when the old model was no longer working, given the shifts that took place at Pantheon.  Yes, I have enormous respect for it.  I think that many of the books they publish are very similar to the kinds of books that we publish, and I think it’s some important work.  In fact, André and I tend to go head-to-head for some books, and I think that that kind of healthy competition is to everyone’s advantage.

Collins & Skover: Niko, there have been stories about how some presses (and they will go unnamed) contract for an untold number of exotic books, float them for a short while, and then abandon them if they’re not picked up immediately.  Does this happen, and just how much of a danger is this for authors, both generally and at NYU Press?

Pfund:  Well, I think for the kind of authors and for the kind of publishing we’ve been talking about, I don’t see it as being much of a peril.

When authors are considering whether to publish with a trade press or with a university press  .  .  .  I think, for the people in particular disciplines (in Sociology, in Law), there really are relatively-speaking few folks who are likely to be able to make that leap, and for whom that leap is going to be a sensible and a profitable one.  By profitable, I mean not just in terms of money, but in terms of the overall package.  Again, it comes back to the issue of charter and mandate.

The charter and the mandate of commercial presses is essentially to make money.   They are trade presses.  That is what they do.  Whereas, university presses -- even though the financial pressure has increased tremendously over the years -- are, by-and-large, staffed by people who continue to feel a sense of obligation to the overall project that we’re engaged in.  I had an experience a couple of years ago where I was competing with a trade press for a book, and the author ultimately went with the trade press.  The book was, I think, remaindered in a year-and-a-half. It sold out of the first printing, but barely, and then they didn’t feel that they wanted to reprint it, so the book was out of stock.  They weren’t going to reprint it, so it was essentially out of print; and the author then approached me and inquired whether, in fact, we’d be interested in picking it up.  That’s just not a viable proposition for us because, in fact, the majority of the audience had already been reached, and we didn’t see a long-term sale for it.  So, while we might have kept it in print for another four or five years, selling a couple hundred copies a year even, in fact, it ended up being a rather disadvantageous situation for him.

I think that one needs to go into it with one’s eyes open.  These days, especially in the wake of what’s been happening in the last couple of years with some of the presses that published more academic writing -- Free Press, Basic, Addison-Wesley, Houghton-Mifflin, and so forth -- I think that they themselves are approaching academic writing with much greater caution.  So, I think it’s going to become more and more difficult to make that leap.  This pertains somewhat to this idea of university presses stepping into the void, essentially becoming the surrogate trade presses.

While I think that is partially happening in certain ways, I also think that it’s been presented in too facile a way as the solution.  Because, the fact is that there is a whole level of book -- a whole model of book -- which is essentially that of the enterprising editor approaching somebody who has written, let’s say, a lead essay in Harper’s or in the Atlantic Monthly and saying, "Hey, that was a very interesting essay.  You thought about expanding it into a short book?"  Most oftentimes these folks are journalists, and they say, "Well, I’d like to do it, but I would need $50,000 to take a nine-month sabbatical from my job."  Then the presses provide that, and the book then -- maybe because it’s a current events book or a policy book, or maybe because it’s the kind of book that gets reviewed a lot, but doesn’t get bought very much, precisely because it’s gotten so many reviews -- doesn’t sell very well.  They’ll print 15,000 copies, and they’ll sell 12,000, and they’ll get 3,000 back in returns.  That is not the kind of model of book that the university presses are going to pick up.  I think that it’s going to get increasingly difficult for journalists to publish those kinds of books.

For me, what’s a good litmus test or a good indicator of this, in fact, is we have a group of used bookstands in front of our library where people are just selling books.   I often look through those, and I’m always astonished to find how esoteric some of the titles are that Norton and some of the larger trade presses were publishing as recently as the late '70s and early '80s.  I look at some of the books and think, "Wow! There are some university presses now that wouldn’t be able to publish those books.  They would be hard-pressed to make ends meet on those books."   So, I think, in Law there are not that many people, aside from the Richard Posners and the Dworkins and so forth, who are really going to be able to make that leap into the trade.

Collins & Skover: You actually have fed into my next question.  You are discussing the pluses of publishing with a university press over a trade press.   Perhaps we can expand on that by asking what are, in your opinion, the respective downsides and the respective pluses of publishing with a university press?

Pfund:  Well, I think that, in terms of the downsides, by-and-large, our sales forces are, of course, smaller than some of the trade presses.  If you’re publishing, let’s say, a college text, oftentimes the textbook publishers have sales forces that are particularly targeted to going to campuses and talking to individual professors who teach large introductory classes, trying to get them to adopt the books.   I think that the market penetration, certainly in the retail chains, is lesser for university presses than for some of the commercial houses.

So, certainly, those are downsides for books that potentially could make that leap.   I really do honestly feel (and, of course, my objectivity on this is suspect) that especially now -- more so now than ten years ago -- the university presses can do a lot of things that the commercial presses do.  Again, more so than in years past. Precisely because we’ve had to.  We’ve just had to adapt.  We’re no longer able to simply sit back and publish a book, and know that it’s going to sell 800 or 1,000 copies to libraries, and know that we’re going to make our investment back that way.  That really has forced our hand in some ways.

Collins & Skover: Has that, in fact, produced one of these downsides? In that the university press can no longer afford, if you will, to act as a non-commercial press?

Pfund:  Unquestionably.  Unquestionably.  Right now there is a tremendous sense of unease in certain fields, precisely because the university presses are not able to publish in those fields anymore.  I think that any editor or any director or any marketing manager who denies engaging in a form of triage -- of saying that there are certain kinds of books we know we are going to sell five hundred copies of; we’ve had them under contract for six years; certainly the ground has shifted under our feet, but we’ll fulfill our obligation to publish the book; but we know that this book is going to sell "X" number of copies, and we’re not going to spend an enormous amount of money on it -- I think that any press that denies that is not being entirely truthful.  I think that we’ve had to do that, and everybody’s had to do that, and I think that things are going to become increasingly competitive.

As I was saying to you before, there are few places where, if you, as a press, come in significantly under budget in terms of sales, but you’ve had some terrific reviews, that those reviews are going to compensate for your budgetary shortcoming.   That’s just the way it’s gone.  A lot has been written about this by James Shapiro and a range of other people; but a lot of the money that used to go into the universities from the Government is gone.  Humanities and Social Sciences have suffered for it, and the libraries have suffered for it.  The libraries are besieged by these various different platforms of technology; they’re trying to figure out when to invest in what -- and it’s not as if any of these new technologies have replaced old technologies.  It’s just been heaped one upon the other, and their budget for acquisitions has not gotten any bigger, and often has shrunk.

It’s been a squeeze.  But, there was, I think, an article in the New Yorker saying, ever since publishing has been an industry, it’s been in crisis.   There was a report published in 1973 called "The Crisis of Scholarly Publishing," so it’s essentially a never-ending crisis; which, of course, does not make it any more soothing when you consider yourself to be in the midst of a whole new and different crisis.  But, these are all things that influence the kinds of books we can publish, and there are simply certain kinds of books that we cannot publish anymore.

While we, on the one hand, have this obligation to fulfill that part of our charter, on the other, I don’t think you’re going to find a lot of directors and editors who are going to publish themselves out of work -- out of a job -- to fulfill that charter.   Not to go on here too long -- one of the things that some people have proposed is that, when universities create junior faculty lines, they include in those lines $5,000 or $6,000 that the author can use as a subvention to place the manuscript -- the work.   As long as books continue to serve as these tenuring and credentializing vehicles, something needs to happen.  This is less the case in Law and, say, in Economics than it is in other disciplines; because in Law you’re evaluated based upon where you’ve published your law review articles.  But in many disciplines -- in Literature and History, Politics and Sociology -- your ability to get published is really the one of the big deciding factors in how your career is going to go -- whether you’re going to get a job, whether you’re going to be able to keep the job, etc.   There are some real disparities and some real fault-lines in the whole process right now.

Collins & Skover: One last question here, Niko.  What, if anything, does NYU Press do that other university presses may not?  In other words, why would I want to publish with NYU Press over, say, Duke University Press?

Pfund:  Well, I think that one of the things that we do very well is that we are, for lack of a better term, a very user-friendly press, an author-friendly press.   If you go through our past catalogues in the last five to seven years, you’re going to find very few disgruntled authors.  And that, for us, goes a long way.

It’s always amazed me how far you can get in this world by returning people’s phone calls.  Even if you’re returning the phone call and the answer to the question that was posed is essentially no, if it’s addressed honestly and straightforwardly, then, oftentimes, it’s better than if you waited for three weeks and came back with an affirmative answer.  I think that is really the way in which we have defined ourselves, as a press that you would like to come back to.  We’ve, in fact, found that  . .  .  because I have no delusions about the fact that, given the history and the reputation of, let’s say, the Sociology Department at the University of Chicago, if there is a young professor who wants to publish a manuscript and is looking for an academic career and has offers from the University of Chicago and from us, that, in many ways, it may be more advantageous for them to publish with the University of Chicago  .  .  .  but, at the same time, what we’ve found is that once those people have oftentimes got their tenure books out of the way, they’re coming back to us to do their next books, and the books that they want to have some fun with.  That is, I think, certainly a niche that we’ve carved out.

We have really come from a press that was distributed by Columbia University Press as recently as 1990 and had a very low profile, was publishing almost entirely high-priced monographs, to the point where we’re a press that is publishing some of the most provocative, some of the most timely, books of any university press.  That is really how we’ve defined our list -- as, oftentimes, deliberately eclectic -- but the kind of book that, when you look at it, when you read the copy for it, your brain will somehow be tickled or stimulated, and your thinking will somehow be rearranged and challenged.   I think that is good company to keep.

Collins & Skover: Thank you very much, Niko, for taking your time to answer questions for the Books-on-Law section of JURIST.

Pfund:  My pleasure.

Where you have the last word...

The interview is very interesting and informative, raising many of the questions authors have about finding and working with a publisher. I very recently published a book with NYU Press and deal regularly with Niko. He is a very engaging and responsive editor ... user friendly, as he puts it.

Randall Bezanson
University of Iowa Law School

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© Ronald K.L. Collins and David Skover, 1998. —————————————————————————————
JURIST: The Law Professors' Network™ is directed by Professor Bernard J. Hibbitts, Associate Dean for Communications & Information Technology, University of Pittsburgh School of Law, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, in consultation with an international Advisory Board. E-mail JURIST at JURIST@law.pitt.edu.

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