The Kingmaker
If you thought getting into Harvard College was tough, you haven’t tried to slip a manuscript under the thin-rimmed glasses of Bill Sisler. While Byerly Hall is stingy enough with a 10.9 percent acceptance rate, it’s outclassed by the enigmatic Kittridge Hall just past the Quad, home to Harvard University Press (HUP) and Sisler, its director. Just 140 new books a year make it past the four layers of internal editing, outside reviews and faculty consideration to see the light of print, while at least 10 times that number find their way to the circular file annually. And while rejection from the College doesn’t spell the end of one’s career—most applicants can rely on acceptance from a number of “safety” schools—there’s no such thing as a “safety” press. For a young academic whose chances at tenure depend on having books published by reputable presses, a snub from Sisler can prove a crippling career setback.
The economic downturn has made publication decisions more important than ever. Job listings, especially for tenure-track positions, were down 20 percent this year according to the Modern Language Association (MLA). Of course, the fiercer the competition for a diminishing number of purely academic titles, the finer the hairs Sisler and his editors must split when deciding whom to publish—and the greater the power they wield.
But sending postdocs and professors on the path to stardom isn’t high on Sisler’s list of priorities. Over his 12 years as director, he has improved communication between editors, expanded the sciences book list, investigated taking HUP online and consolidated the power of his own office. As the rest of the industry has caught up to the innovations that modernized HUP 30 years ago, Sisler has kept Harvard at the forefront of the publishing world. The ever-increasing numbers of academic dreams he defers are nothing more than the unavoidable human collateral damage from keeping HUP prestigious and fiscally solvent.
Academic presses may be the only companies in America devoted to selling products that most people don’t want. While the rest of the publishing industry chases after bestsellers, university presses are designed to print academically important but economically unviable works of scholarship. According to an article by Sisler in Learned Publishing magazine, university presses produce nearly 15 percent of the titles published annually, but earn under two percent of total industry revenues, and account for just one tenth of a percent of all books sold in the country.
Before the last quarter century, the academic press focused almost entirely on highly academic books with negligible mass-market appeal. But while they still do not exist to make a profit, they are subject to constantly increasing pressures to make ends meet. Harvard led the way for the industry’s response to fiscal reality in the early 1970’s, according to HUP Marketing Director Paul Adams, when then-University President Derek C. Bok hired Arthur Rosenthal, the head of commercial publishing house BasicBooks, to run HUP. Rosenthal brought a more market-driven approach to the press, actively promoting books and publishing works of greater general interest, and bringing HUP dramatically closer to the black and ahead of the pack.
HUP’s competitors quickly followed Rosenthal’s direction, and the Chinese wall around the academic press began to crumble. Today, Sisler says, the University expects HUP to be financially self-sufficient—a tall order in the current economy even for strictly commercial publishing houses.
Sisler says he has reacted by emphasizing what he calls “scholarship plus”: academically credible books with popular appeal. Today, these books constitute up to 40 percent of HUP’s catalogue. “A place like Harvard is uniquely positioned to bring scholarship to a general audience that readers who are not specialists can trust,” says HUP Humanities Editor Kathleen McDermott. “Yet we do it in ways that they can access—books that they can read without having to keep up in the field...To be able to manage the popular books and the academic books is really a feat, and Harvard’s managing it. And I think a lot of the credit goes to Bill.”
While Sisler has strengthened HUP’s position in the industry, he inherited an operation that, like its namesake, was accustomed to standing on top of the academic pyramid. In fact, Adams says, its affiliation with Harvard is one of the most influential factors in its preeminence. “People take us very seriously,” he says. “That’s the one thing I suppose we have a leg up on other companies around is that Harvard is a great brand name. The brand, if you get crass, is a good thing.”
Since its founding in 1913, the press has published countless award winners, including classics like John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, and its choices can set trends in the publishing industry—like the move to semi-commercial publishing itself.
But Sisler’s focus on the “plus” in “scholarship plus” subtracts from the number of slots available to people writing in academic fields without commercial possibilities. And aspiring scholars frequently confront an informal “two-book” rule—to be considered for a tenured humanities position at a top university, many departments expect that a candidate have two books published and favorably reviewed. “University presses play a crucial role in the whole process by which people get tenure,” says Cogan University Professor and MLA President Stephen J. Greenblatt.
The vast majority of top universities require young scholars in the humanities to have published before they are granted tenure-track jobs. “That means, almost always, getting a book published by a university press,” Greenblatt says. “So obviously university presses are to a considerable degree participating in the tenure process whether they fully acknowledge they are doing that or not.” And many of the manuscripts HUP reviews have tenure application written all over them. “A lot of books that we publish, the author is either up for tenure or going to be up for tenure,” Adams says. “A lot of the books we do are either revised dissertations or sometimes the second book or sometimes the third book, and they do play a role in tenure.”
Editors working under Sisler harbor no illusions about the academic life-and-death consequences of the decisions they make, along with their colleagues at a handful of other top presses. But they’ve steeled themselves to the necessity of saying no 10 times out of 11. “It’s certainly in mind that it’s important to these young scholars, to assistant professors to Ph.D.’s on the job markets, that a prestigious press would publish their book,” McDermott says. “That cannot, of course, be the first and only reason to publish the work.”
Upwards of 90 percent of submissions never make it past the proposal stage, according to Sisler, and most that make it on to the next stage have been actively solicited by editors. “The majority of things we publish don’t come in over the transom,” he says. “The value of an acquisitions editor is in her or his contacts.”
A proposal must be approved by an acquisitions editor and at a general editorial meeting before an author is invited to complete a manuscript. Once a draft is finished, HUP sends out a copy to a few experts for review. “It forces the author if it’s done right to really think about what his peers are going to say before the book is reviewed out there,” Sisler says. “Instead of getting whacked when the book is published, we can fix things before the book ever sees the light of day.”
Finally, a book has to win the approval of the Syndics, a group of 12 senior faculty members that serve as “gatekeepers” for the Harvard name, according to Sisler. Although they rarely reject works, he says, “they are the quality control that justifies calling this the Harvard University Press.”
This process could seem daunting to a young professor, but one fortunate enough to be granted entrance to Sisler’s expansive corner office overlooking a quiet, pretty Cambridge neighborhood might be disarmed by his easygoing style. It’s hard to be intimidated by this friendly, unimposing man, about six feet tall and slightly balding, with soft eyes behind round thin-rimmed glasses—until you remember that one word from him can land you a coveted job at a premier university. The walls are lined with the oeuvre of those who have won his favor—one is covered by a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. It’s a testament to Sisler’s command that he can maintain a sense of cleanliness and order in the room despite the stacks of books obscuring every available surface.
Since taking control of HUP in 1990, Sisler has quietly centralized power in his office. When HUP’s last editor-in-chief, Aida Donald, stepped down in June 2000, Sisler conducted a search to replace her, but, he says succinctly, no one “fit the bill.” No one besides Bill Sisler, that is—he took on the responsibilities of editor-in-chief himself instead. “The bottom line,” he says, “is the buck stops here.”
Surprisingly, Sisler’s elimination of HUP’s second-in-command position met with nary a whimper from his subordinates. Many editors say the press has become a more democratic and consensus-based institution since he assumed the reins despite the increase in his formal authority. HUP’s editors say he provides an overall coherent direction but respects their autonomy. “The editors he’s hired have been told that they have the capacity to shape their own lists and follow their own instincts as to what to publish,” says Michael G. Fisher ’73, a science editor. “He doesn’t tell editors what areas to work in—he lets that come from the editor.” Adams has similar praise for Sisler’s style. “Bill has been a terrific manager, especially for this kind of organization,” he says. “He’s a smart publisher, he’s personable, he’s accessible, and he runs the company not at a distance but benignly, at least fair-mindedly. He expects his managers to do their jobs—he doesn’t do their jobs.”
Despite working as a humanities editor at Johns Hopkins University Press and Oxford University Press before taking over HUP, Sisler pushed the press to expand in the sciences. Regardless of field, Sisler says he is uncompromising in his dedication to publishing top-tier scholarship. “The number one thing is quality,” he says. “If you make $5 million a year and publish junk, that’s not fulfilling our mission. If we publish the best stuff we can find and come close to breaking even, that should be of value to the university.”
But coming close to breaking even is no small feat for an academic press in a floundering economy. Strictly academic books are caught in an economic downward spiral. The costs of publishing them are no less than more popular books, but with so few people interested in purchasing them, the per-unit cost can frequently be exorbitant.
In turn, these high prices dissuade potential buyers from actually purchasing the books. “I’m reluctant to assign my classes scholarly books to buy, because they are very expensive,” says Greenblatt.
These economic realities are encroaching closer and closer on the once-protected world of academic printing. “Monographs and dissertation publishing has become quite difficult for the simple reason that they don’t sell in large enough numbers,” McDermott says. “As most university presses are self-supporting, they need to really take a hard look at the balance of books that will sell and the academic books that are part of our mandate.”
With declining revenues, the industry as a whole has been forced to cut its losses. “You can only lose so much money on so many books—the university doesn’t want to pay for this,” says Sisler. “So we have to say collectively, not just Harvard University Press, how many of these books can we lose money on?...Scholars in [unprofitable] disciplines are going to worry, ‘Where am I going to get my books published?’”