At Startup

Rice University Press was founded by Rice University’s Charles Henry, Vice Provost and University Librarian, and W. Joseph King, Associate Provost and Executive Director of Connexions, an open-source educational materials program, developed at Rice, whose software was to constitute the digital publishing platform for RUP. The Rice University provost, to whom the editor in chief reported, provided the startup funding for the press. The provost intended the funding to be temporary and that the press thrive after five years entirely on support from elsewhere; he directed the press to be immediately aggressive in soliciting funding from outside Rice.

Shortly after the editor in chief was hired, the two founders left Rice University for positions elsewhere. Although they kept their positions on the press—Charles Henry as publisher, W. Joseph King as chairman of the board—their departures left the press without a strong advocate in the university administration, the provost not being as invested in the success of the project as were the founders.

There was a great deal of interest outside Rice in the launch of the press. Before the editor in chief was hired, the Wall Street Journal published a front-page story on RUP, several academic and mainstream publications also ran stories,[8] and proposals and manuscripts immediately started coming in over the transom. This combination of extramural interest and intramural pressure to generate revenue dictated the press’s early direction. Rather than build a reliable production system, form an editorial board, and establish procedures for formal evaluation and peer review of manuscripts, and only then begin evaluating and accepting proposals, the press instead engaged in all stages simultaneously, using production of the first acceptable titles as tests of Connexions and the press’s overall print and online production systems.

By January 2008, a year after launching into full operation, RUP had four titles (one published before the editor in chief’s hiring) available both in purchasable print-on-demand and online (viewable for free) formats. After the first year of operation, the press had examined and rejected approximately 50 submissions.

Generally, Rice University Press authors were much more interested in overall readership of their work than in sales of its print versions.[9] This proved particularly true when, in early 2009, the press tallied online readership numbers (numbers of unique visitors) for its first titles, all but one of which had been online for less than one year:

 
Print sales, as expected, were low, with Images of Memorable Cases being the runaway best seller at 573 copies. The other titles in 2007–8 sold fewer than 100 copies each in their first year.[11]

Unexpected Barriers to Proper Operation

Production of titles online and in print notwithstanding, all of RUP’s technical platforms were essentially in beta, and it proved challenging to meet the press’s self-imposed production schedule while fixing bugs at every stage along the production cycle. RUP encountered numerous unanticipated problems involving both technical and marketing matters. On the technical side, every platform at every stage of production was a moving one. Connexions frequently updated its code, introducing new errors into production of online titles; RUP’s print/accounting vendor, Qoop, Inc., frequently updated its code, similarly introducing new errors in print production; and the two printers RUP used, through Qoop (Book Factory, in Dayton, Ohio; and ColorCentric, in Rochester, NY), also were constantly updating their software, with similar side effects. As a result, the press would no sooner get all phases of production operating smoothly than a new problem would unexpectedly arise. At one point, printed books that had been appearing regularly without flaw suddenly started shipping with random large dots printed throughout, in place of the appropriate English-language characters. Another time, a book that had been shipping clothbound with a dust jacket showed up at a customer’s home one day as a laminated hardback. At yet another, RUP’s freight company, DHL, went bankrupt. A year later, color printing that had been painstakingly brought to an acceptable stage suddenly took a turn for the substandard when a printer began using less expensive equipment without telling the press of the change—affecting not only new titles, but new orders for previously published titles. Even Microsoft’s updating of its Office suite, which introduced the new .docx file format, added a layer of complexity and correction to press operations, as Connexions did not at first support it.

The net result of this constant instability throughout our production system was a great deal of anxiety, putting out of fires, calming of authors and customers, and adding extra phases of ordering/proofing print copies before releasing a given title for sale.[12] This sand in the gears of the press was all the more vexing because of the image the press enjoyed[13] of being a digital, friction-free publisher capable of bringing out titles of stellar quality in record time.

RUP was further burdened on the editorial side by its inability to flow online versions of books directly into print layout, as per the founders’ vision. Instead, the press had to send its edited Word files both to Connexions and to a freelance book designer, with the result that the editor in chief had to work with two versions of each title. So when it came time to proof the galleys for the print version of the book, any changes or corrections made to that file also had to be made, separately, to the online version. It took substantial effort and thinking to do all this work on parallel instead of single tracks.[14]

Even more challenging were distribution problems of print titles. Surprisingly, in 2007–10 the overwhelming majority of college professors (even in the digital humanities) still ordered books for classroom instruction through campus bookstores, which in turn ordered from distributors and expected 40 percent discounts and full return privileges. University libraries also nearly always ordered from distributors, and distributors expected discounts and return privileges as well. Even more vexing: bookstores and distributors expected to submit paper purchase orders and pay 30 to 90 days after accepting delivery, thus expecting publishers not only to accept returns but also to take on a substantial accounting burden. RUP’s print-on-demand system could not accommodate returns, its pricing model could not accommodate discounts, and its distribution system could not accommodate paper purchase orders—that is, all transactions had to be done through an RUP online store set up on the press’s print-on-demand vendor’s website, with purchasers using either a credit card, a debit card, or a PayPal account. Libraries and university professors never seemed able to come to terms with this distribution model, upon which RUP relied in order to streamline and automate its accounting.

A further unexpected disappointment: RUP could not list its titles at Amazon.com, both because Amazon has its own print-on-demand operation and does not list competing POD operations and because Amazon’s discount policy destroyed the press’s pricing model.

The net effect of all these distribution problems made it much more difficult than expected to sell books, particularly to libraries. The press essentially was trying to move customers from the world of the past, where they resided, to the world of the future, which RUP occupied, with neither able to meet in the present.

A Potemkin Publisher

By the beginning of 2009, RUP had published 7 titles, had 7 more in production, and had 22 under contract through 2014. It was about to launch an impressive new series, called Literature by Design, that would bring back into print forgotten classic books known for both their literary quality and their design; each volume was to be edited by a leading contemporary scholar who also would contribute an afterword. The publisher and the editor in chief[15] had each made several speeches at academic and publishing conferences, raising the profile of the press, and displays of its published titles were consistently met with surprise and high praise. The quality and quantity of submitted manuscripts had risen exponentially, and RUP felt it was on a trajectory toward becoming a major force in academic publishing.

But for all its outward signs of vitality, the press was still essentially a one-man operation whose various production stages were held together by the high-tech equivalent of baling wire and chewing gum. It had reached the point where it needed more support if it was to grow, debug and smooth out its production systems, meet rising demand, and pursue partnerships with other digital humanities experiments.[16] Because the press was known to most people only through its website and its publications, it appeared to be much more robust, stable, and better supported than it was in reality.

The press was further weakened by a lack of nonfinancial support from the Rice campus community. It proved extremely difficult to recruit faculty members to Rice’s editorial board, and those that did consent to serve did so reluctantly and participated hardly at all in press decision making, orchestration of peer review, or editorial oversight. Interest elsewhere in the Rice faculty consisted solely of authors asking the press to publish their manuscripts.[17] Well into its third year of operation, the vast majority of the university’s community did not know of the press’s existence.

Beginning of the End

Having reached the point where it needed to secure funding for expansion and optimization, the press began aggressively pursuing foundation funding in 2009. But foundations expressed interest in supporting the press only if Rice University increased its support, and this stance goaded the university administration into reexamining the worth of having a press at all rather than considering more robust support. It was only the last-minute intervention of the press’s editorial board that prevented closure of the press in December 2009, and that proved to be merely a stay of execution. The provost and the editorial board finally agreed to bring in consultants to evaluate the press and recommend whether to continue it (and if so, how). After two days of meetings in spring 2010, the consultants recommended that Rice continue the press with considerably more support, as the resources and commitment required to realize the press’s ambitious visions were substantially more than Rice had committed to that date.

Shortly thereafter, Rice’s provost convened a meeting with the editorial board to discuss the consultants’ recommendation. Board members argued that the press should continue, but when the provost, aware of board members’ collective disengagement, asked them what they would be willing to do “to help the press succeed,” there was no response. This left the provost feeling caught in a bind: The press had been solicited by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to apply for a grant, but to allow the press to formally apply raised the possibility of Rice’s lack of support for the press (as evidenced both by the lack of university funding and by the editorial board’s disinterest) bringing considerable embarrassment to the university during Mellon’s due diligence process. He and the editorial board director therefore decided it was best not to pursue the grant opportunity, and the decision was made to close the press down.

At the time, the editorial board’s passivity was largely attributed to a budget-cutting effort under way at Rice. The school was suffering from a shrinking endowment brought on by the 2009 financial crisis, and as the budget ax fell in department after department, what little faculty support there was for the press evaporated, even on the editorial board. One board member explained that “Rice faculty is a collection of vested interests” and that faculty members could be counted on for support only when times were flush. One of the visiting consultants made a similar observation, describing the press as “low-hanging fruit for budget cutters.” A few months after the consultants’ report was issued, the press was closed down, and it ceased operations in September 2010. The Rice University Press editor in chief would subsequently cite as preventable reasons for the press’s closure the inability of the press to garner support on campus, both from the university administration and from faculty, and his own failure to make a case to the Rice community for the value of a press to its parent institution.

Board of Directors

Rice University Press had from the outset an outstanding board of directors, but the press never properly engaged its membership. Board members were spread out all over the country, and RUP had no money to fly them to meetings. In three years, the press convened only one board meeting, which only a few members were able to attend.[18] Closer board involvement would likely have resulted in stronger advocacy for the press and better guidance, particularly of its early operations.

Editorial Board

The editor in chief waited nearly a year to appoint an editorial board and was insufficiently selective in choosing its membership. The editorial board had no understanding of the rationale behind RUP’s digital model and was oblivious to the crisis confronting traditional academic publishing. Particularly unfortunate was the departure of the most knowledgeable and engaged board member to UCLA shortly after he signed on with the press. It would have been better to more carefully select editorial board members, have them in position before the press began work on titles, and have them direct the editorial vision of the press from the beginning.

Our Platform and Systems

Because the press felt pressured to generate revenues from sales as soon as possible, it began print publication before having a stable publishing platform. Anxiety over revenue contributed to an apparent lack of editorial focus, with the press’s first four titles being a medical book, a book on Houston artists by a nonacademic author, a book on a nineteenth-century organization of New York etchers by an unaffiliated scholar, and a scholarly work on the paintings and poetry of noted religious studies scholar Elliot R. Wolfson. Not only did RUP run into significant production problems with each book as the press struggled to iron out wrinkles in its unproven digital systems, but it also sent confusing signals to the public as to the nature of its editorial vision. In retrospect, it would have been better to devote at least a year to testing and improving production systems, developing a solid plan and editorial vision, and getting an editorial board established and more firmly in control.

Foresight

RUP’s cost model for the long term—that is, for when the press was firmly established, with a stable platform—was sound. The idea that one could make a quality press sustainable by reducing cost to the point where it could operate with proper editorial principles and cover costs with a small endowment and income from sales was, to judge from the RUP experience, correct. The founders erred, though, in applying the long-term model to the startup phase. The press needed more investment at the beginning so that its production in the long term could be efficient enough to run at the low cost originally envisioned. The press failed to anticipate the number and scope of problems in its digital systems at every stage from posting and editing content online to printing and selling books. At a minimum, RUP needed its own Connexions content specialist in place from Day One, to optimize Connexions for book publishing. The editor in chief also was mistaken in thinking that he could launch a press with no money for marketing and promotion and without needed resources for testing and debugging the print production and distribution end of press operations. Further, RUP was unprepared for the degree to which college professors and libraries relied on bookstores and distributors for acquisition.

Managing Expectations

Possibly because RUP was publishing in a way never done before, because it consistently encountered and overcame daunting technical obstacles, and because its founders were justifiably pleased with the look of its printed books, the press operated from the assumption that the academic world would generally regard its publications as miraculous. Instead, they tended to compare them with traditionally published books without regard for how they were produced. Authors also harbored unrealistic expectations about everything from production values to schedule.[19] RUP needed an orientation packet for new authors that properly prepared them for the perils of publishing on a platform that was essentially experimental. And the editor in chief should have been more open with authors about the rickety state of the press’s production systems.

Vision

Possibly because the editor in chief was so absorbed in overcoming technical challenges, he grew too narrowly focused on print monographs. He should have devoted most of his energy to exploring new forms of scholarly argument—true digital humanities publications—with print being a secondary product line. Instead, he came to think of RUP as a print publisher whose titles were also posted online—a much less ambitious (and less useful) vision. The academic publisher of the future will not be a purveyor of printed books. Even in the pre-iPad age, this was fatally shortsighted.

Aesthetics

Connexions was designed to be extensible and sustainable and thus had an extremely simple interface. As a one-size-fits-all, open-source educational materials platform, its bare-bones look was sufficient. But interface standards in digital humanities are such that Connexions looks hopelessly backward to users from that arena. Authors and readers complained about it constantly—not only its look, but its relative lack of functionality.[20] RUP needed its own dedicated server with its own flavor of Connexions, so as to add the press’s own interface and added functionality and to free itself from the huge population of Connexions users whose number drastically slowed down the site’s performance.

Campus Presence and Profile

The press came under criticism on the Rice campus for not being a more visible presence there, both physically and politically—a circumstance worsened drastically by the departure from the provost’s office of the press’s publisher and board chairman and the subsequent departure of the university’s Dean of Humanities. It was generally regarded as part of the press’s mission to serve Rice academic departments, persistently advertise itself, and make a case for its value to the Rice community. That is, RUP was expected to market its publishing services to Rice’s academic departments and schools whether or not those entities had any worthwhile publishing projects.[21] The implication that a publishing house is not worth a university’s investment unless it serves the university itself makes it all but impossible to make the press an academically credible enterprise in the eyes of the wider academic community. RUP’s founders and advocates see the mission of a press as one of service to the world of scholarship; but within the walls of a university, enterprises with no constituency (that is, enterprises that don’t directly advance vested interests within the campus) are easy targets for budget cutters, as no one has a direct material interest in their survival.[22] It seems now that it was a mistake to have set this experiment up within a university. That is, it would have been better managed and sustained as an enterprise independent of a single academic institution.