So Paul Krugman posted this bit on the slow demise of academic journals the other day, and it reminded me of this article from a couple years back on shadow scholarship. These articles have been on my mind a bit lately because I'm writing an essay on an aspect of Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos - which has rapidly grown to the size of a small book, with no sign of stopping - and in a few months when it is (hopefully) finished, I want to publish it. The question I'm facing is which direction to take: pursue a more traditional print publishing deal, or to publish it myself as an ebook.
There are a lot of barriers to print publishing; I have a couple publishers I can contact, but I'd pretty much be calling them cold. It would take months for the thing to be edited, laid out, proofed, printed, and shipped, and for a large part of that time I'd be hands-off. Digital publishing, which I really like, requires more effort on my part - but I can pretty much do all the work necessary on my laptop, with total control of the project up to and including release. Not as pretty or as well-edited as it would be from a publisher, but I probably would mark the price as bottom dollar anyway - money isn't the issue here; I'll probably never even cover the costs of my research materials no matter which way I publish.
Another aspect to consider is academic interest and acceptance. Academia is moving at a faster pace these days, it's not just publish or perish - graduate students and professors in many disciplines hardly ever darken the door of traditional libraries, they do a lot of their research online, reading blogs and e-journals and papers or abstracts, delving into obscure and arcane databases pertinent to their discipline. And well they should, because that's the way of the future: even textbooks are being released as ebooks these days, sometimes sold by chapter. But, and there is always a but, I'm concerned about being brushed off as another crazy kid writing some crap that no serious Mythos scholar is ever going to read, just because it's an ebook and not in print. Even (perhaps especially) if they tear it up, I want peer review. A peer review that points out your flaws or points out the holes in your essay is at least taking you seriously.
And the scholarship of weird literature is not exactly up to speed on the latest internet academic standards, or we'd be able to download copies of Lovecraft Studies off iTunes for 99 cents each. It's not that there aren't academic Lovecraft/Mythos ebooks available - there just aren't a lot available, and there are serious gaps. I'm concerned a new work by an unknown author will get lost in the shuffle of general Mythos/Lovecraftian ebook crap. Typing "Cthulhu" in Amazon's Kindle store, for example, yields 188 results. De Camp's biography of Lovecraft is available as an ebook, but not Joshi's; The H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia is available, but not Harm's The Cthulhu Mythos Encyclopedia. Given the gaps involved, I'm a bit torn over how to proceed...other than to continue and plug away at the essay.
Any thoughts?
Academic Ebooks
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Ancient History
- Demon
- Posts: 6550
- Joined: Sat Dec 28, 2002 5:39 pm
It doesn't hurt you to pursue traditional publishing, but if you don't see results from that I wouldn't hesitate to recommend you self-publish it online. You're right that you're going to need to put extra effort into 1. editing and 2. promotion, which is the job those publishers get paid for. The internet doesn't replace them, only the distributor, so self-publishing means you have to do their job, and if you don't do it as well as they would have, you're definitely not going to get the results.
So edit it properly, like it was someone else's work, or else pay someone qualified to do it. Get it reviewed by informed peers, so you know it's not just the product of another crazy kid writing some crap no serious Mythos scholar is ever going to read. Network, both with those people, and with others, such that they tell others; if it's good enough, they're going to do so. If it isn't, then it doesn't really matter how few people read it.
[edit: fixin' shit.]
So edit it properly, like it was someone else's work, or else pay someone qualified to do it. Get it reviewed by informed peers, so you know it's not just the product of another crazy kid writing some crap no serious Mythos scholar is ever going to read. Network, both with those people, and with others, such that they tell others; if it's good enough, they're going to do so. If it isn't, then it doesn't really matter how few people read it.
[edit: fixin' shit.]
Last edited by 3278 on Thu Jan 19, 2012 10:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Ancient History
- Demon
- Posts: 6550
- Joined: Sat Dec 28, 2002 5:39 pm