The Opportunities and Pitfalls of Academic Self-Publishing
Self-publishing a book is an unusual decision in academia. Academics are expected to write books for publishers with a high reputation in their respective fields. By comparison, self-publishing has academic cred slightly above scribbling on cocktail napkins. I had been pretty successful at publishing articles in top publications for my field when I decided to self-publish a book and fund it through a Kickstarter campaign in 2018, which generated around $11,000 in income. My self-publishing experience was overall positive and it brought me funding and attention that I wouldn’t otherwise have been able to secure. Since that point, I’ve published with academic presses. My latest book, Recoding Politics: The Infrastructural Organizing of Code for America, comes out through MIT Press this fall. Of course, I’ve now been an academic editor and writing coach for over five years. So I thought it would be worth now reflecting on my self-publishing experience and the opportunities and pitfalls self-publishing presents for academic authors.
To be clear, I’m not knocking academic presses as a whole. They give authors creative control, host excellent series, and offer inexpensive paperback versions of well-edited books. For example, I really respect Andrew Chadwick’s Digital Politics series for Oxford and MIT Press’ Science, Technology & Society series. MIT Press also now is aggressively pursing open-access publishing and collaborating with new distribution partners like Penguin. But other presses aren’t making academic publishing accessible enough—even to the academics in their audience. Consider that in 2015, I published a chapter from my dissertation in an edited volume that is only sold in a $195 hardcover book. My chapter was a descriptive piece that traced the evolution social network sites to mobile apps. The same year I published a theoretical article on the same topic in the open-access online journal The International Journal of Communication. The latter article became my most-cited piece of scholarship and has been cited 580 times as of late Febuary, 2024. People still come up to me at conferences to talk about it and clients want to work with me because they too are writing books on affordances. The expensive hardcover, which still looks pretty on my shelf, has been cited six times and I can’t remember anyone mentioning they read it. The conceptual article in IJOC was probably more useful to researchers than a descriptive chapter. Still, it is also true that the book was expensive and unavailable to all but the academics lucky enough to have access to a library that purchased a copy.
Low royalty rates is another reason to consider self-publishing because royalty rates for academic books hover in the range of 10–12% of net sales. This means that for each book sold, each author will receive just 10–12% of the remaining money, minus costs to the press from editing and production. Royalty income matters less for authors who are professors, since they are already earning income through their salaried job. Still, with a crowdfunding model, you can generate interest in a writing project while securing all of the gross income. The downside is that with a Kickstarter, it’s your responsibility to take over all the responsibilities of a publisher. After I received funding, it was my responsibility to locate an artist for the cover, work with an editor to refine my manuscript, print the book, and send it to my Kickstarter supporters. Also, remember that I still had to pay taxes on the Kickstarter funding since, technically, it was income!
The biggest downside of running a Kickstarter was the labor it required. At the end of the day, Kickstarter’s higher rewards came at the cost of hundreds of hours of additional labor—which most academics simply don’t have the time for. Scholars may note I fell into a trap of precarious labor—working under insecure conditions for diminishing returns and little benefits. This was true, if not exactly Kickstarter’s doing. During the time I self-published my Kickstarter book, I was an adjunct teaching two courses per semester and driving a beat-up RAV4 between Long Beach, Burbank, and UCLA. In a good year, I made $20k. (Yes, I would have made more as a barista, thank you for noticing—and I still own a RAV4!)
My Kickstarter for the book Civic Technology: The True Story of Hackers for Good
Still, the word-of-mouth from the Kickstarter campaign opened new and entirely unexpected funding streams. The catchy title alone garnered interest, as it was the first to capture interest in the phrase “civic tech.” For years, I received occasional emails from public-sector technologists who were training cohorts of fellows or volunteers and needed a relevant book to give them. I sold a few unopened boxes of 50 books for $30 each. If you do the math, that’s far more than an academic author will likely receive, even if their book sold well over several years! That said, self-publishing distances you from the expertise and labor offered by a book publisher. The downside of “DIY” is you truly have to do it all yourself. I boxed up and shipped several hundred books, even to far-flung places where I miscalculated shipping and lost money. I made mistakes because I didn’t know much about the production side of publishing.
Nearly a decade after I started writing my Kickstarter book, I now see self-funding and academic publishing as two options with different risks and rewards. Writing and self-publishing a book “your way” is high risk and high reward. It can help you find joy in your work and make your ideas relevant to new audiences but is extremely difficult to manage. By contrast, publishing with an academic press is a low-risk, low-reward option. It likely won’t generate funding or interest from general audiences, but most academics don’t need those benefits. They need an established, name-brand press on their CV to attain tenure. Here’s the question I come back to: Is your primary goal to write for wider audiences, or is your primary goal to network with fellow academics and advance your career?
Is your primary goal to write for wider audiences, or is your primary goal to network with fellow academics and advance your career?
There’s not an objectively correct answer to this question. In fact, your response to this question may change over time. An assistant professor once confided to me that she wished she could do more research in the local community. The problem was that she needed to publish to obtain tenure. She didn’t feel comfortable entertaining the idea of doing more research that would result in more accessible publications. I got the sense she regarded research that connected with local community and public institutions as too time-intensive. It was a lot of commitment for speculative rewards. This perception speaks volumes about how professors self-police definitions of “real research.” For this reason, writing a Kickstarter-funded book raised a few eyebrows when I was on the tenure-track job market. That said, it brought me into conversations with new audiences.
The book I wrote told stories about “civic tech,” which was then a growing movement of community activists, designers, software engineers and hip bureaucrats trying to improve democratic institutions. This vibrant scene grew beneath me as I researched the ideas behind open data, and how civic concepts were worked through in “civic hackathons.” In 2016 I also worked for the city of Los Angeles and volunteered for my city of Long Beach—in the thick of the same public sector my professor friend mentioned above was afraid to engage with. My decision to self-publish a book was the right one for me at the time since I was trying to situate myself as a subject matter expert in a growing field. I didn’t become a freelance researcher or career bureaucrat. Instead, I went further down the rabbit hole of editing and writing coaching. Still, in an alternate universe where more doors opened for me, maybe I would now still be working at LA City Hall or have been hired by a public sector consultancy.
Maybe you are the person to tell stories that matter to a movement of people. If that’s your goal, consider self-publishing through a crowdfunding model.
Any search for an entirely perfect publishing model will quickly get smashed on the rocks of reality. Self-publishing a book through crowdfunding is no different. In the last decade, we’ve seen experimentation, like Inkshares, a crowdfunding website specifically for books, which was launched in 2013 and is still going. In some disciplines, using Kickstarter is even used as a “front end” to pressing a larger number of books. For example, the art press Aperture integrated Kickstarter campaigns to launch many of its books. Art book publishers are now demanding authors come to them with evidence of an existing audience, which a Kickstarter can demonstrate. In the last decade, crowdfunding has evolved from being a radical idea to an established funding strategy.
Crowdfunding helped my book reach an interdisciplinary audience of academics and non-academics. The hype it required could be easily integrated with online publicity campaigns to get the word out. If people liked its ideas, they supported it. By being backed directly I could also deliver a full-color softcover book for a reasonable $30. I paid my designer and editor fair market rates. This kind of control can’t be obtained through existing academic publishers. Back then, self-published crowdfunding was also the right fit for this project and my career stage. For these reasons, I still think self-publishing is an option that academics should discuss and treat seriously as a viable option. Maybe you are the person to tell stories that matter to a movement of people. If that’s your goal, consider self-publishing through a crowdfunding model.