The University Press and the Art of Just Pricing

    Think about your own personal backlist, the pieces you wrote years and years ago that haven’t been cited in a decade or more and, truth be told, didn’t get a heck of a lot of play even when they were first published.  Suppose someone contacted you out of the blue to ask for permission to reprint one of those articles.  How would you react? 

    Naturally, there would be an initial moment of Ralph Kramden-esque euphoria – “Alice, we’re sittin’ on a gold mine!”  But when you came to your senses, you would probably realize, sadly, that the market value of your old work is roughly zero, any excerpting or reprinting presents a matchless opportunity to get the work in front of new eyes, and the obvious thing to do is simply to grant permission unconditionally.  Perhaps you might ask for a nominal sum, though for my own part, I find it difficult to imagine having the courage (nerve? gall?) to do so, and in fact have never asked for money in exchange for permission.

    This is why neither of us is editor of a university press.  In the bizarre world of academic publishing, everything has a just price, set if not divinely then by the customs of our people from time out of mind.  I had the occasion to discover this recently when seeking permission to reprint short excerpts from several works in a forthcoming casebook I have written with Guy Charles, Election Law in the American Political System (Aspen).  For your enlightenment, here is the relevant correspondence between me and the editor of a well-known university press:

    Gardner:  "The amount of text I am asking to use is five paragraphs – about 800 words.  The price I have been quoted is $645 – nearly a dollar a word.  They are good words, to be sure, but that price is – and I really don’t know how to say this delicately – absurd.  We would like to excerpt from one essay in a collection . . . that is [more than 25] years old. . . .  I note that [the collection] is listed on Amazon’s best-seller list at number 2,769,366. . . .  The figure of $645 that I’ve been quoted . . . bears no relation to the value of the underlying asset.  Requests for similar works we have submitted through the Copyright Clearinghouse Center have come in priced between about $44 and $80. . . . "

    Editor: "I can appreciate that from your perspective . . . the fee appears high.  We do not, however, calculate our permission fees based on Amazon rankings, the age of the material, or the value others place on it.  Such indicators are highly subjective and changeable and would result in unjustifiable inequities.  Rather, we use a very specific fee chart . . . .  We cannot negotiate a special rate for you based on your particular circumstances, as we must treat every request equally. "

Oh, I see, your fees are established by a CHART – well, why didn’t you say so?  And who indeed would be so foolish as to take into account “the value other place on” a work?  Ridiculous!  Yes, of course you must “treat every request equally”; we wouldn’t want any authors to feel bad if their permissions went out at a price reflecting their actual value, would we? 

    No wonder university presses are in trouble!

Comments

[T]

This is a very funny post, and an exchange that is all-too-familiar. Thanks for sharing it. I remember the surprise/shock/pain that I felt when I learned that anyone would ask to be paid for me to publicize a small excerpt of their work more broadly; it seemed completely backwards to me. (This, in turn, reminds me of the first time that I rented an apartment in NYC. It was advertised as a "fourth floor walk-up," which I assumed--because it was mentioned in the ad--was a good thing.)

[Tamara Piety]

This is funny and depressing all at once.

[Bill Turnier]

I suggest that you write the author telling him/her that you would like to include his/her work, enclose a copy of the correspondence and tell the author you will be using a substitute piece by another author because of the unco-operative reaction of the publisher and cc the publisher. Then see what happens.

[Barbara Fister]

The author will probably be horrified, puzzled, or angry, but won't probably have a single thing they can do about it, unless they managed to hold onto some right to say "uh,no" or can prove that the publisher doesn't actually have the rights they are claiming. (Sometimes publishers act as if they have rights they never actually acquired because now they do acquire them but weren't so organized in the past; quite a few claims in the Georgia State case were throw out because Oxford and Cambridge couldn't prove they owned rights they were claiming.) Moral of the story: don't publish without reading the fine print unless you don't care whether anyone actually uses your work.

[Peter Yu]

It's the other way round. Authors don't need to "prove that the publisher doesn't actually have the rights they are claiming." Instead, the publisher has to prove that it has obtained the claimed rights. If I were the author, I would grant permission right away. If was unsure whether I had given away my rights, because I no longer had the author's contract, I would ask the publisher for a copy.

It may be a good idea for authors to start insisting on retaining copyright in all their academic works (other than books). I've had this policy for more than a decade, and so far no publisher has ever said no. For some established publishers, it did take some time and effort to negotiate. But it's much better to spend time and energy to negotiate up front than spending the same or more amount of time and energy to obtain permission down the road.

[Matt]

University presses are one of the few businesses around that think that when demand goes down, price should go up. Sometimes people tell me that the people running the presses are experts, so the fact that their practices seem so nuts must just be an appearance- there must be something rational behind it. The fact that they are pretty much all doing horribly seems to suggest that that's not so, though.