Writing and Publishing

I’ve spent a good bit of time this past month preparing the Punk Archaeology volume for publication (hopefully within the next week or so) and laying out the volume dedicated to a series of short posts from last year’s 3D Thursday series of blog posts.

At the same time, I was thinking about this year’s series of posts on craft and archaeology, and it occurred to me that the process of managing a book from writing, to contributors to lay-out, represents an artisnal approach to production. As the artisan, I’ve managed just about every step in the process layout, with the appreciation that my late friend Joel Jonientz did much of the basic conceptualizing of the punk archaeology, cover design, and laid out the first draft, and Andrew Reinhard and Brandon Olson have done more than their share of copy editing for Punk Archaeology and 3D Thursday respectively.

Here are some of the things I’ve learned:

1. Book layout is hard. It has taken me endless hours of fussing (and still more on the horizon) to get the basic layout of the book right. Things like gutters, margins, and overset texts have become a preoccupation. I still can’t get pagination right: who realized that chapters almost always start on odd numbered pages? It has taken me weeks of fussing to get things right for even a relatively simple book design. If the technical details are not complex, the execution is.

2. Book production is invisible. While I’ve been laying out my own books, I’ve also been editing page proofs for Pyla-Koutsopetria I: Archaeological Survey of an Ancient Coastal Town for the ASOR Archaeological Report Series. As I’ve carefully re-read the text and made small corrections here or there throughout, I got to thinking how relatively invisible book designers, layout people, and even copy editors are within the system of academic production. So many of us academics consider ourselves sensitive to the various inequalities intrinsic to the various systems at play in our worlds. At the same time, I’ve never seen a particularly spirited defense of those folks who participate in the publishing industry below the levels of the clearly evil corporate overlords who spend their days converting the fruits of academic labors to the fruits of their table.

(With not a little embarrassment, I remember enabling a co-author to rewrite a good chunk of an article at the stage of page proofs, and the editors and production folks, through gritted-teeth, accepting our requests. As someone who is now spending time on the production side of publishing, I am becoming more and more aware of how our late-game creative decisions do not exist in a vacuum.)

3. The Heterotopia of Independent Publishing. Over the past few years, the potential of self or independent publishing has emerged as a largely unrealized threat set against the worst abuses of the academic publishing industry. As a blogger, I’m sure that I’ve expressed and even acted on some of those threats by pushing out pre-prints, sacrificing time that I could be spending producing products for publishers to make my ideas accessible on my blog, and by, finally, using my blog platform as an incubator for content that I will eventually publish with my low-fi press.

At the same time, by actually following through on becoming an independent/self-publisher, I’ve realized how much time and energy goes into the production process. The time and energy involved in preparing a manuscript for publication redirects my work flow from writing toward editing, layout, correspondence, and even financial matters. The result of this reassignment of energy is that I will be a less productive scholar – at least for the foreseeable future. 

If our concern is making scholarship accessible to a wide audience in an efficient way, self and independent publishing represents a way of streamlining the appearance of scholarly works in print and cutting through a certain amount of corporate overhead. On the other hand, it shifts the burden of production closer to the hands of the author (and much of this burden is invisible in traditional, corporate model of academic publishing).