The university of North Carolina, press hell be our guest unc press is celebrating. Its 100th anniversary. But first some news from the publishing world. Well the publisher simon and schuster is currently in the midst of an unusual free book giveaway. Its an effort to help bridge the growing divides facing america today. The book publisher is giving away the digital audiobook and ebook editions of amanda. Ripleys book high conflict why we get trapped and how we get out and anna sales. Lets talk about the hard things the lifechanging conversations that connect us. In discussing this giveaway simon and schuster ceo. Jonathan karp said quote perhaps if we all get a little bit better at having those Difficult Conversations will begin to find more common ground. He added that the Supreme Court decision on roe versus wade along with debates on guns the 2020 election, january 6th Climate Change and immigration were on his mind as well in coming up with the idea of the giveaway. And speaking of simon and schuster. The company is nearing a key trial date in its proposed merger with publishing giant Penguin Random house. It was in 2020 that the paramount global company, which is the parent of Simon Schuster agreed to sell it to Penguin Random house two billion dollars was the sale price and now that sale was challenged by the Justice Department who sought the block the deal over antitrust concerns. Now the trial starts august 1st in the Us District Court for the district of columbia. And now were going to turn our attention to a very specialized kind of press and this is the University Presses. John sharer is the director of unc press mr. Chair. What does a University Press do or an academic . Press do well, theres probably a hundred and fifty hundred and sixty different members of the association of University Presses and they all do slightly different things, but in general the things that we have in common is we are we are based usually at a university or an institution of higher learning. Were doing a type of publication that the commercial marketplace just doesnt support usually an academically focused issue or topic we call these monographs these specialized humanities volumes, and then we do peer review which is a rigorous external review of every manuscript and every journal that we publish and having worked in both trade and University Press publishing. I will say theres not a return on investment in peer review, which is one of the reasons that the commercial marketplace doesnt support it, but it enhances books it helps keeps us out of trouble. It helps stop publishing people who just want to pump their fist and make points and actually focus on the research and the argument at hand. Well you spent several years with basic books, which is part of the shet group. Very large publisher. Why did you transition to presses, you know, its it basic is where a lot of University Press authors went when they wanted to move the decimal point sometimes on the financial arrangement that they had with a publisher. And so it was not a a big jump to go from from basic to to unc. Im a unc grad so i had actually worked briefly at the press after i graduated in the late 80s. So i was familiar with it and it was just a unique opportunity to kind of go back to my own roots, but all so to focus on trade publishing i was described as a kind of a conveyor belt. Theres just always a new big important book they have to focus on and some of the things that were looking at unc press are thinking about doing publishing in different ways and trying to change the way publishing happens and think about publishing in the 21st century as opposed to kind of legacy process of publishing. So its an exciting place to be actually mr. Scheer. Whats the connection of unc press to the university of North Carolina . Yeah. Its a good question. So we reside on the unc chapel hill campus, which is kind of the Flagship Institution of the unc but actually an affiliate of the unc the statewide system, which has 17 campuses going all the way from western carolina, which is almost in tennessee to Elizabeth City state, which is almost in norfolk virginia. And so we actually have an affiliation throughout the unc system, which we are really proud of and is part of the areas of innovation because we want to have an understanding for what the various campuses throughout unc one and they want everything from open textbooks to humanitys readers to new journals. And so its really expanding their horizons of what were doing as a publisher, but youre an arm of the university. Yeah. Well, we are separate 501c3 nonprofit, but we report structurally into it. Were odd. We are unusual. We were founded a hundred years ago by faculty members of unc chapel hill, but always as a separate institution and i think the idea there was to make sure there wasnt too much pressure from the campus to publish what they wanted us to publish. So theres always been friction is probably too strong a word but deliberate intent to make sure that we werent disorder this reflexive publication arm of the campus. Can readers find unc published books in their local bookstores or on amazon . Yeah. Well they can find everything on amazon, which is one of the great things about amazon. I would say we published about 110 books a year and about 20 of those we expect to be in bookstores. Theyre meant for a general audience. Especially we post a lot of books about the state of North Carolina and about the south rate large and so we want all those books to all be there. We actually have some stores in North Carolina that are great. They actually have unc press sections, which is funny because nobody walks into a bookstore, you know, looking for something new by simon and schuster right . They what they want books by individual authors, but i think a lot of our stores have that sense of community that we do as well that they want to support the publisher. So, how are you different than say Harvard Press or yale, press yeah. In some ways. Were very similar. In fact the functions that we do are just like we did at basics so we acquire books we edit them. We design them we manufacture them. We market them and then but i think its its kind of the type of book that were looking. That so even though were using the same sets of tools and processes. The books themselves are are a little bit more. Im comfortable saying esoteric because again, thats what the marketplace doesnt support. Well, i would also say a lot of the iv presses many of them look more like trade presses and a little bit less maybe like unc unc were deliberately, you know, 3 4 of our list is is academic monographs. These are books that are going to sell anywhere between 400 and 800 copies. So that is a deliberate choice that we are making because we think that is the part of the humanities kind of scholarly fields that needs the most support and so we have the resources and thats where we apply them and the the definition of monograph you can kind of take the word apart it is a book about a single topic and so it is more narrow in focused deliberately. So in fact during the period youve process sometimes some of our authors who are writing monographs are make these kind of extrapolations and sometimes the peer review processes. No, you actually need to focus on argument and it sounds delimiting, but its actually part of the the academic process that that scholars go through as part of their tenure process in particular if youre a if you want to be tenured in a humanities field you frequently have to publish in one or two monographs with the University Press as part of your tenure package, but that said i dont want them to sound more narrow than they need to we had a revised dissertation published as a monograph. That was a finalist for the National Book of ward and on the long list for the pulitzer prize, so theyre not inherently narrow, but they just they tend to be mr. Chair. Do you exclusively publish unc professors their dissertations . Yeah. Thats thats a question. I get asked a lot and and actually not at all is the funny answer and it takes a little explaining and i guess the way i equate it is theres an art museum on campus as well, but the art isnt of students and unc faculty. Its its world class art. Theres a performing arts program and the performing arts program doesnt have performances by unc students and unc faculty. It has a worldclass art program. And so i think the idea with a University Press on campus. Not so much to i mean we work a lot with local faculty and do workshops and things like that. But one of the things that a flagship campus is once is a worldclass publisher in their midst, thats what were doing. Lets go through the numbers again. How many books do you publish a year . Its about 110. Were in a growth mode. So were probably gonna be about 140150 within a couple years and then we published about about 18 journals as well. How many employees at unc press . So we kind of run two businesses at the press. We have the press itself, which is about 45 employees. And then we have a Publishing Services division that we created about 15 years ago called longleaf services. Its doing sort of the back end of publishing the fulfillment sales accounts receivable and all that. So weve got another 2530 people working there revenues. So revenues at unc, press weve actually its better to say this now because weve had a couple of outstanding years. So when i got to the press in 2012, we were constantly between 4. 5 and 5 Million Dollars last year. We were at almost 7 Million Dollars that was kind of the big pandemic year and then the year that we just completed. We were a little bit closer to six Million Dollars. So were doing quite well, but still a pretty modest basic was a 30 Million Dollar publisher when i was there so that and so that money are you making are you making a profit . No. No, are you breaking even no so i can give you the heres the math on an average scholarly monograph so it costs us between 25 and 35,000 to get that book. Peerreviewed acquired copy edited manufactured distributed put into the marketplace. Were going to generate between 15 and 25,000 dollars in revenue. So when i signed a contract for a new scholarly monograph, im digging a ten thousand dollar debt knowingly, like we exist to do that now we get support from we get some support from the state. We have an endowment. We published some regional trade books that generate a little bit more income that helps support the scholarly list, but the way i like to think about it is the scholarly list is at the tip of the pyramid in terms of mission. That is why we exist and these other things that were doing are in support of that. So you are a nonprofit youve done fundraising as well. Correct . Yeah, we we do a lot of fundraising. Do you do that . One person at a time. Its im lucky because i have inherited a program there were people with a vision in the 70s that started a Fundraising Program at unc press. So its an endowment essentially is the the key tool that we use. Most presses dont have this. Its a really hard thing to do. Independence from the University Also gives us a little bit of leverage sometimes if youre totally embedded in the university the fundraising priorities may not be for the University Press there may be other things that want to do it. So weve been kind of in this narrow slot thats given us a chance to do it, you know really well and we just talked to people who care about publishing they care about North Carolina they care about the south because our our origin story is founded in 1922 there is in 1922. There is no publishing in the south except religious publishing people are printing bibles and hymnals and missiles, but theres no secular publishing in the south. So when the press was founded it was an affirmative act to say the south was a region that is worthiest study. So we continue to embrace that notion and theres people who love the south and care about that and thats the thats the kind of the coach dream that we pull on. So, where do you have your books printed theyre printed usually one of three places. Most of our books are printed at a printer in michigan. We have a we do some illustrated books and theyre done that kind of various places depending on who has the right paper and and pricing and then we have a print on demand facility in with our warehouse in la verne, tennessee where we do a lot of printing john chair. You mentioned that your revenues went up during the pandemic. What happened . Yeah. Its a good question. I mean, i personally bought more books and Jigsaw Puzzles during the pandemic than i had throughout my whole life. So i think i think two things happened one is people reading the book was a fairly safe thing to do during a pandem. And then the press also has a long history of publishing books about race and social justice. And so when the country was kind of on fire a little bit in the summer of 2020 a lot of the books that we had published that used to sell just a couple hundred copies a year started selling a couple of thousand copies a year. So we were its funny because a lot of those books that we had published we had done at a loss and then suddenly you had this, you know, almost a windfall and it was it was a strange thing because we knew this was there was a very troubling external environment. Theres a lot of precarity and yet we were having this kind of like economic success and it was almost difficult to navigate how to do that and how to make sure that people were being rewarded and compensated, but also, i think there was a sense that we were doing our Mission Better than we ever had before during the pandemic. What about dropping the paywall . Yeah, so that was an interesting thing. So what happened was we used these intermediaries to get our ebooks into academic libraries and when you know when everything kind of broke down in march of 2020, i remember i had to drive up to unc asheville to retrieve my daughter. It felt like a scene of a dystopian novel these aggregators. They came to us and they said people are disconnected from their books. They either left their physical books on shelves or the ip address that they used to access the digital collection all went, you know all broke down and they basically said to us, hey people have already bought these books and you need to give them access to it. Well this, you know i said we had a good year but in march and april our sales hit a brick wall like we thought we were just gonna get locked up for a long time and so on the one hand we were confronted with this shortterm economic challenge now the other hand weve got these people coming to us saying hey, you should open up all your books. And i came to the conclusion that you know in a time of crisis is when you really have to kind of show your stripes who you are as a Mission Oriented organization. So we said lets do it. Well open up the paywalls. Let make everything accessible all of our scholarly books accessible and then a really fascinating thing happened, which is first of all the usage went through the roof, so they had to you know, the people who aggregate these additions had to redraw their charts to make a bigger y access so that they could show the you know, the exponential increase in youth in use which is great because there is this kind of declension narrative about monographs being less and less relevant and turns out that it might be that business model. That is the problem and not the monographs themselves. So we saw the usage and then at the same time print sales went up and theres an argument that were trying to test which is if you actually let people read Digital Editions particularly if scholarly books that theyre likely to engage digitally, but they may pivot to print and so we look a little bit different than a lot of other Media Industries where digital is kind of both the discovery device and the us what were seeing, is that for or specialized texts people discover digitally, but they frequently want print and doesnt seem to be a generational thing. Theres a lot of evidence that thats that school kids want print textbooks as long as theyre affordable. So it was it was an experiment that we never could have constructed ourselves in normal times, but we i think we learned a valuable lesson that that we can afford to disseminate our scholarship more broadly than ever by making by reducing the friction and the paywalls and the Digital Editions. Well having a stable business on top of it and and now we can show usage in a way we can show global usage in a way that was inconceivable in a printbased marketplace where we really struggle to ship books and to you know areas of the world where weve historically not not disseminated scholarship particularly. Well now as the country is opening up, is that paywall still down . So we we put the paintballs back because we were quite ready to go there but we are we are we are using that what we learn from that and were actually were participating in a study that the nehs funded to systematically. Look at what happens to print sales of monographs where the Digital Edition is free because we want to understand what happens to sales go down. Are they the same or do they potentially go up because people have discovered them and found them in a way that they wouldnt in the first place once we have a better understanding of that then we will we will look at trying to do a little bit more systematically. The way i like to think about it is we need to kind of get off this Cost Recovery model of publishing where we want to fund ourselves by selling things and have people think of it as publishing as a service so that we are fund the creation of this scholarship and the dissemination of it and sure we can do some Cost Recovery and make most of our costs covered. But but if you think of publishing as a service, then were in the business of pushing it out as broadly as possible and having that type of impact john sure. Im assuming that your Marketing Budget is smaller than it was at basic. It is smaller than it was a basic although i think as a percentage maybe it isnt and it is actually my biggest budget line item at unc press. So this is another myth at a lot of people think that University Presses dont you know market their books, but i actually got as many employees and marketing as any other department and they spend a lot of money and they work really hard and its its partly because because when you market a book you might sell it and that helps keep the finances intact, but again, were in the mission of dissemination. And so sometimes we do things in marketing what doesnt necessarily return and investment where it generates a sale, but it gets a book out there gets something talked about and so marketing is a huge huge part of our what were doing. Well you talk to us a little bit about some of the monographs or very academic dissertations that you publish but there are some books that make money for unc press and i want to point out one of them, which is mama dips kitchen. Yeah. What is mama dips kitchen, so there was this woman named Mildred Council who africanamerican she grew up. Rural impoverished and she moved to chapel hill and she was a chef in a kitchen and then she eventually opened her own restaurant and i believe in the late 1980s in chapel hill in chapel hill and its it was one of the first soul food restaurants in a place like chapel hill and so in the late 90s one of our editors approached her and said, you know you need to do a cookbook and ill tell you i think at the time it wasnt perceived as a particularly commercial enterprise. It was still it had the restaurant i had a reputation but it wasnt sort of globally known and in fact, i think some people questioned like why press . Publishing a soul food cookbook a cookbook or any cookbook and ill tell you the argument is. Weve always been looking. To do a type of publishing again. The commercial marketplace doesnt represent and at that time soul food wasnt a type of food where people made cookbooks. It was not perceived as something that was like worthy of cookbooks and so art we engaged at this because we thought hey, this is an important part of the south as soul food and it needs to be documented just in the way way the other things get documented. We got lucky and she got onto qvc and so it turns out thats all you do in marketing is get your author on qvc and everything kind of goes from there. So it ended up its our bestselling book in our history because of that continues to sell this day a military Council Passed away about four or five years ago, but continued to be one of our most successful books, but also its beautiful because it aligns with our mission as well as being kind of commercially successful how many copies probably around 300,000. And still selling today selling still is the restaurant still open it no mildred pennies it is. Yeah, her family has taken it on the next generation of it. So well, i also read in Publishers Weekly that the bestselling book that unc press had during the pandemic was a field guide to mushrooms of the carolinas. Where are we going here . Yeah, so we historically published a lot of regional books reference books, and i have to tell you when we signed this book up it it felt like something sort of esoteric to as well. Its you know 400 pay hesitate before signing no guide to mushrooms. We didnt hesitate because we we like doing books like this, but we didnt see it as something that was gonna earn us any money. It was kind of a, you know, kind of out of mission and you know 650 species documented, but we published it right at the beginning of the pandem and it turns out i think a lot of people went out and did mushroom forging during the pandemic and so its been a big success for us now when an author gets successful such as imani perry you published may we forever stand shes a professor at princeton when she gets successful, does she leave the University Press and go to a commercial press . Well imani so prolific that i think shes worked with a number of presses and i think i think the way someone like her thinks about it is that theres a type of book that a University Press might be a little bit more careful and deliberate in publishing and then theres a type of book like south to america which probably needs the full muscle that they trade house and so shes i would call her shes sort of like a portfolio author she writes different types of books for almost for different audiences and maybe forever stand is for a general audience, but its a much more narrow book than her kind of broad book about the south. So i like to think that presses can kind of coexist. Theres almost you know you were talking about harvard and yale. Theres almost no book that we published when i was at basic and i can say this because im not there anymore that a great University Press couldnt have also done but one of the great things about the Publishing Business is is the variety of it that theres different places to go it a lot of authors just she had a Good Relationship with our editor who you know, she really wanted to work with him for a book and so it just a lot of it is about personal relationships as well. I want to talk about the 1940s the free in North Carolina by a very wellknown historian. Is this the first book that john . Hope franklin wrote . It was his first book it was his revised dissertation, and it was an attempt to debunk the myth that freed that were had the kind of the full body of rights in antebellum south now. This is a great example of a monograph. So this is a very this is simply about North Carolina and its a certain time period but this is the book that sets the foundation from from bondage slavery from slavery freedom. Excuse me, which becomes the textbook that many of us grew up with and so thats a great thats a great example of an author who starts by writing monographs. Learns how to write how to research how to cite and then to how to think more expansively and then goes on to you know, this illustrious career and we have a series and endowed series named after him or we still publish books in his honor every year. Whats another book that surprised you that youve published either good surprise or bad surprise . Yeah. I only talk about good surprises. There was so free nickel North Carolina was 1943 a year later. We published a book by a guy named Eric Williams called capitalism and slavery and so these days this idea of looking at slavery through the lens of capitalism is kind of common youre seeing or seeing lots of historians do it economic historians, but in 1944, it was not a common thing and it was definitely not a common thing for a person of color to write such a book. So Eric Williams was went on to be the Prime Minister of trinidad and tobago, but before that he was a professor Political Science up at Howard University here and so he writes the one of the first books to make the argument that the Industrial Revolution which made our modern world was funded by the capital that was derived from the slave trade. So very powerful argument coming from a very eloquent speaker this book of it. Its interesting. This book had been in print in north america and the caribbean for you know, since 1944. It did not really been widely available internationally. We did a reissue of it two years ago, and we did a license with Penguin Classics in the uk and they took it on and they got an article written in the guardian about how this book this seminal book. Not really been available in the uk. Sold a bunch of copies became a uk bestseller 80 years after publication. So all of the authors out there whos think youve got a chance . Did you see benefits from that . Absolutely absolutely because its sort of a global marketplace. Theres lots of guardian readers here. And again, this this goes to this idea that not everything is about generating sales. Its about generating impact and so for us, you know, these two books published at a time, you know in the 1940s when there were not a lot of African American scholars being published anywhere much less at University Presses. Its a really important time period for us and im really proud that these books are both remained in print constantly and promoted to this day. Well, congratulations on your hundredth anniversary. John chair is the director of unc press in chapel hill. Computer and youre watching about books. This is book tvs programming podcast, which looks at the business of publishing. Well each week dozens of books get reviewed and national and local publications. Here are some of the new books recently reviewed. In her political column in the washington times, Jennifer Harper says that former george w bush, press secretary ari fleischers new book about the media suppression deception snobbery and bias articulates. How many people feel about the news media . Team america by Robert Oconnell is reviewed in the wall street journal. Its about four heroes of American Military history generals eisenhower patton, macarthur and marshall. Reviewer jonathan. Jordan says that the book is a quote delicious blend of insight with in history and a punchpacked introduction to four great military minds. Some other recently published books include republican congresswoman of colorado. Lauren boberts autobiography my american life. Speaker Newt Gingrich has authored another book entitled defeating Big Government socialism the former speaker of the house has had at least 14 New York Times bestsellers. And finally, New York Times magazine writer mark liebevich released. Thank you for your servitude. Donald trumps washington and the price of submission. Well another book that was just published is former nasa deputy director. Lori garvers reflections on her career and efforts to make space more accessible. The book is titled escaping gravity my quest to transform nasa and launch a new space age. Ms. Garver recently sat down with Washington Post space reporter Christian Davenport to talk about the book. This is part of book tvs afterwards program. Heres a portion. We know that we went to the moon to be the russians and because of that we established a crash program. So we set things up in a race type of format and that meant we were pouring money in to do things one time and that didnt build a sustainable program. Not a fault of nasas because they were asked to win the race and they achieve that amazing accomplishment, but it did not create an environment where you could do things in a way that left a more sustainable less costly program and in fact it gave us three verse incentives. Companies and congress who had developed capabilities people in their districts infrastructure needed to or were incentivized to use those very facilities, which were much overbuilt for the mission of the shuttle which was to reduce the cost of space transportation nasa. Wanted to employ their contractors. They wanted to employ the people who worked in these institutions and just kept going that made the future programs expensive by design. And a reminder that afterwards airs every sunday night on book tv at 10 pm. Well coming up in august on cspans monthly deep dive Author Interview program in depth. Its talk show host and columnist larry elder now mr. Elder ran and lost for governor in 2021 in california. Hes the author of several books including 10 things. You cant say in america and whats race got to do with it. Now mr. Elder will be taking your phone calls on sunday, august 7th. Well, thanks for joining us on about books a podcast and program produced by cspans book tv. You can listen to it in the entire library of cspan podcast on the cspan now app or wherever you get your podcasts. You arethank you all so much fog out tonight. My name is amalie and i am the Events Coordinator here at bookstore magic. So before we get started, i just have a few logistics to point out about how tonights gonna go first off. We do ask that you keep your mask on at all times while well at this event. We will be doing a hand raised audience q a towards the end of the event. So please start thinking of questions to ask aft