Essentials of Publishing Qualitative Research

Mitchell Allen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781315429274
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Research & Methodology in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Getting a qualitative article or book published involves more than simply doing the research, writing it up, and sending it off. You also need to know how to navigate the social relations of presenting your work to the journal editor or book publisher—and how to craft your message to them—if you want to be successful. Written by a highly-respected publisher of qualitative research, this brief, practical resource shows you how to identify the right home for your work. It also guides you through the publications process-- from crafting the abstract to writing, production, and marketing--once you've found the best publisher. The author -demystifies what publishers and journal editors do, how they make their decisions on qualitative articles, research studies, and methods books;-discusses edited books, how to publish from your dissertation, and when to consider open access and electronic publications; and-includes case studies, appendixes, forms, and resources to help the aspiring academic.

Chapter 1
Inside the Black Box

Publishing is a business. Like McDonald's. Bank of America. Google. Standard Oil. The neighborhood Korean-run convenience store. The coke dealer under the railroad bridge. In our late-capitalist world, it's make money or die. The irony here is how publishing houses make money—on your intellectual property. Those warehouses full of books—they're the unsold ones. They're not assets to the company, but liabilities, taking up space, charged inventory storage fees by the distributor, taxed by the government. Useless. Other than that, there's little to own—some ratty office furniture, a bunch of computers, and occasionally a warehouse building on the other side of the tracks.

What is valuable to the publisher is all that intellectual property, all those contracts for books and articles that you, the author, signed and returned without a second thought. Maybe you read them first and, because of the frightful legal language, signed, scanned, emailed, and hoped for the best. What you have that a publisher wants is your ideas. Your words. That's what enriches them, the ability to package and sell the intellectual property created by you and thousands of other scholars. Like you once worried about hiding your diary from your parents, you need to protect your intellectual property.

Protecting your intellectual property is all about that request to "sign a contract" for publication of your book, article, or other writing. With few exceptions, the signed contract transfers the ownership of that material to the publisher. You may have written it, but it's no longer yours. Somewhere in that skyscraper on Fifth Avenue, or the warehouse at the edge of your university town, along with all those jumbled filing cabinets, dusty computers, and office copies of books, sit file drawers of signed contracts, the crown jewels of the publishing house.

The issue in publishing ethics that riles scholars the most is this link between publication and capitalism. Scholarly writing is sold by global media conglomerates at high prices with little benefit going back to the researcher. Scholarly ideas become commodities, assessed for their commercial potential as much as for their intellectual contributions, under a capitalist-controlled publishing model. Unfortunately, global capitalism is likely to be here for a while, probably for our collective lifetimes. Get over it.

You're in this environment and, as scholars, there are few ways out. You need to publish. Your dean tells you that. Your department chair. Your colleagues. And, for all the lip service about the importance of service and teaching, you're still mostly judged and rewarded on your publication record. You have to play this game to be a successful academic.

What I'm going to try to do here is give you a perspective on the rules of the game so you can strategize to be more successful. As qualitative researchers you know that everything is contingent, socially constructed, enmeshed in human desires, goals, and interactions. Don't think for a moment that publishing is any different. Tine best scholars aren't always rewarded with voluminous publications. The mediocre aren't always penalized by being kept out of the key journals and book publishers. Yes, you should do good work. But also you should know the rules. That will help you succeed.

If there is any consolation here, it is that you are a qualitative researcher. Though the qualitative enterprise ranges from people conducting semi-structured interviews as part of large, well-funded biomedical research projects to conceptual artists translating research into abstract sculptures in public parks, you have at least one thing in common with other qualitative researchers. You're trained to deal with these contingent, socially constructed situations. You should even be good at it. Unlike the engineer or biochemist, human interactions are your specialty. Read on, I'll teach you how to use it.

Dimensions of the Publishing Industry

As qualitative researchers, you will first want to know the nature of the domain you are studying before you get too deeply into your ethnography. So we'll start with some current (2013–2015) statistics, at least about publishing in the United States. Don't worry, you won't have to do any multivariate analyses. Consider this your village survey.

• There are almost 1.5 million books published in the United States every year. Eighty percent are self-published (Bowker 2014).
• There are almost 100,000 academic journals, publishing 1.8 million articles a year (journalseek.net). About 10,000 of them are open access journals (doaj.org).
• The US publishing industry is close to a $30 billion business (Milliot 2014).
• Amazon is the largest customer of almost every book publisher in the United States, maybe the world (Milliot 2015).
• Currently eBooks represent about 20 percent of all book sales, and have flattened off from their phenomenal growth (Milliot 2014). Fiction is the most common category sold as eBooks. It is a much smaller percentage of scholarly books. At Left Coast, my company, it was 5–6 percent of sales in 2014.
• Of the 12 largest publishing companies in the world, four of them are academic journal publishers (Milliot 2014).
• Of the world's 50 largest presses, two of them (Oxford, Cambridge) are university presses (Milliot 2014).
• Publishers need to earn money to stay in business. That's the capitalist way. It applies equally to Fortune 500 publishers and to university presses and small poetry establishments.
• Some of these presses rake in profits that seems outsized to their role as conveyors of scholarly knowledge. Elsevier, for example, reported a 36 percent net profit in 2011 on sales volume of $3.2 billion (Economist 2011). Even the not-for-profit Oxford University Presses reported sales of $1 billion in 2010–2011, with a surplus (read "profit") of 19 percent (Oxford University Press 2011, p. 5). Impressive.

• Smaller academic presses don't command anywhere close to this rate of profitability, if any, so scale seems to matter. In the global flow of scholarly information, big is more sustainable than small.
• When it comes to academic publishing, there are more articles out there to be published than there are journal issues to fill and more books waiting to be published than there are publishing slots at all the legitimate scholarly book publishers. It's a buyer's market. You're the seller. You need to sell a journal editor or a publisher on your work.

I'll help you with that last point.

Why should you listen to me? I have experienced almost 40 years in academic publishing–first with two medium-sized scholarly presses (Sage, Rowman & Littlefield), then with two presses (AltaMira, Left Coast) that I started myself.

I've been responsible for publishing almost 1,500 books, started 30 or 40 new journals, and brought many existing journals to the companies I worked for. I served as editor of two journals for a brief period. I've been responsible for publishing books and journals in most social science and humanities fields and the professional fields related to them. I was actively involved in the growth of publishing qualitative methods and qualitative studies, launched half a dozen qualitative journals, and published several hundred qualitative books. And, as a PhD (UCLA) and adjunct university professor (Mills College) myself, I've been on both sides of this process. I have the scars to prove it.

A Short History of Publishing

The tension between publishers and authors of texts goes back to the very beginnings of writing. From ancient Mesopotamian royal and temple archives, to Greco-Roman libraries, to medieval monasteries, those who wrote usually did so beholden to those in power, whether it was the temple, palace, or church. Most authors in medieval and early modern times were sponsored by a patron, who commissioned, protected, encouraged, and usually controlled the nature of their work (Finkelstein and McCleery 2005, p. 72). It was only with the development of mass produced texts afforded by Guttenberg's printing press that the concept of a printer/bookseller was invented as someone who both produced books and marketed them to buyers (Hellinga 2007, p. 217). They became the patron of the author and, as before, controlled his or her work. Some of these booksellers morphed into the earliest publishers in the nineteenth century (Finkelstein andMcCleery2005,p.86). The actions of early European printers/publishers were often restricted by state regulations and censorship, such as the British Licensing Act of 1662 (Feather 2007b, p. 524). That tension between the publishing industry and the state over control of publications has carried forward to this day. The producers of the contested commodities, the authors, were rarely considered in the conflicts between power and commerce. It was only with the advent of author copyright in the eighteenth century that rights of the author to his or her works finally began to be considered (Finkelstein and McCleery 2005, p.75–76). But even then, control of publication usually still rested in the hands of the publisher.

As the distribution of publications went from local to regional to national to global, the need for large global systems to advertise availability became crucial to the success of published work. These mechanisms exist within the current commercial publishing infrastructure. Publication of a new book in English anywhere on the globe is routed through the databases of RR Bowker in the United States or Nielsen in the UK to bookstores, academic libraries, and library wholesalers worldwide. Journal articles are similarly publicized through systems such as Thomson-Reuters Web of Science or EBSCO Discovery. These systems connect with search engines to make the availability of these ideas known to scholars everywhere. The lone scholar wishing to reach colleagues in Munich, Mali, Myanmar, and Minnesota could not possibly duplicate this system. The global information flow favors large-scale media institutions.

Even the idea of a publishing "industry" is a misnomer. Publication outlets range from the lone scholar posting her latest data or musings on the web, to university-based publication outlets for faculty and students, to not-for-profit professional publishers, including university presses and other not-for-profit organizations. For-profit presses range from the miniscule one-book publishing operations of enterprising scholars to the publishing arms of global media conglomerates. A similar panoply of publishing establishments produce scholarly journals, newsletters, and other periodicals. More recently, there has been the emergence of a group of digital archives to house raw data and scholarly analyses.

An Equally Short History of Qualitative Publishing

Qualitative research has been around as long as academic publishing. Most social science fields and professions, like education, social work, and nursing, began by writing descriptive pieces about their findings. Case studies ruled.

With the advent of the computer age in the 1950s, social scientists thought they could really do "science" with massive computer runs. In my early years of publishing, I was involved in publishing lots of political scientists producing the results of multi-year, multi-institutional, multi-national projects that were attempting to quantify such easy concepts as the causes of war and peace. Lots of books got produced and, as you all know, war disappeared.

Anthropology, original home of ethnography, was always qualitative. And, as a result, there was little need for anthropologists to be explicit in writing about their methods. It was a craft, hand taught by senior members of the guild. Other than the British Notes and Queries in Anthropology, they didn't produce a field methods text until Pertti Pelto's Anthropological Research in 1970. Conversely, qualitative sociologists, defensively posturing against their much more numerous quantitative colleagues, wrote much in this area: Blumer, Strauss/Glaser, Becker, and Garfinkel were all pioneers in self-consciously writing about their qualitative strategies. A few university presses published significant numbers of qualitative studies by sociologists and anthropologists back in those early days.

Best known for publishing qualitative research is Sage Publications, which began doing so in the late 1970s. I was privileged to be part of Sage's development, responsible for its qualitative books from 1980 until 1995. A journal entitled Urban Life And Culture (now Journal Of Contemporary Ethnography) fit their urban studies publishing program and was launched in 1971, product of a group of West Coast symbolic interactions who studied deviance and everyday life on the urban fringe. Accompanying the journal were a series of ethnographies of urban life, John Johnson's Sociological Observations series, and Sage's first qualitative methods book, Jack Douglas's Investigative Social Research (1976).

Beginning in the mid-1980s, the success of Sage's quantitative and program evaluation publications led to the nascent world of qualitative researchers, then located mostly in the fields of education and sociology. A parallel series to Sage's little green statistics books, in blue, was begun in 1984. Through its various acquisitions editors working in multiple disciplines on both sides of the Atlantic, Sage began collecting a stable of key writers. Egon Guba, Yvonna Lincoln, Matthew Miles, John Creswell, David Fetterman, and Robert Stake were signed up from education. William Foote Whyte, Norman Denzin, and Anselm Strauss came from sociology. Anthropologists Russ Bernard and Harry Wolcott began publishing texts for Sage. Janice Morse brought in an audience of nursing researchers with her journal, Qualitative Health Research. John Van Maanen and others came from management and organizational studies. All wrote key texts for Sage in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The capstone publication became Denzin and Lincoln's 1994 Handbook Of Qualitative Research, whose four editions (number five coming in 2016) have tracked the changes in qualitative research ever since. Nor was Sage alone. Academic Press, Routledge, University of Chicago Press, Temple University Press, and others actively expanded their qualitative publishing during this time.

By the mid-1990s, interest in qualitative research had boomed in various scholarly and professional fields—management, public health, psychology, communication, gerontology, family therapy and, eventually, political science. Discipline-focused qualitative books appeared to match the generic ones. Imaginative variations in qualitative methodology, many taken from other research fields, developed: focus groups, action research, discourse analysis, phenomenology. A raft of different publication types offered something for everyone, from textbooks to journals to text analysis software. Publishers working in various academic fields were drawn toward qualitative research because of the growing interest in those fields. Sage's methodology editors moved to other publishing houses—AltaMira Press, Guilford Press, Left Coast—and created competing lists of books. More recent movements toward arts-based research, community-based research, and mixed methods research represent yet another generation of this growth.

Open the Door, Look Inside

So how do publishers monetize the filing cabinet of signed contracts and the jumble of words that you and many others spewed out on your computers? How do they acquire capital, real financial capital, the kind that gives vice presidents leased Mercedes and trips to the Bahamas, not the kind of social capital that exists in the academic world?

Traditionally, it's been a straightforward process. Take your intellectual property, prettify it with some good editing, design, and an attractive cover; proofread it; print it; put boxes of it in a warehouse, then promote it to interested scholars like yourself or to the libraries you haunt. That model has been working since the start of the Gutenberg publishing enterprise.

To accomplish all this most efficiently, large publishing houses are broken into departments or divisions. Even the term for these institutions is worth noting. A publishing "house" rarely looks like a house if it's more than a two person operation (though Left Coast worked out of our suburban home for seven years). "Publisher" is another standard term. Or a "press," though it is extremely rare that you'll find anything more than a photocopy machine resembling a printing press in their offices.

Table 1.1: Divisions of a Publishing House

▶ Acquisitions

▶ Production

▶ Distribution

▶ Sales and Marketing

▶ Administration and Finance

Let's open the front door of a hypothetical publishing "house," Qualitative Press, Inc., and see who is inside.

The book division takes up the first two floors. Turn left at the door and you'll find the acquisitions department, the friendliest and most familiar to scholars. These acquisitions editors (also called sponsoring editors) are responsible for finding and selecting the books the press is going to publish. They usually have to answer to (and convince) an editorial director or publisher that your idea is a good one. Book acquiring editors are also the ones wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Inside the Black Box
• 2. Start With Your Research Project
• 3. Finding the Right Journal
• 4. Writing, Reviewing, and Revising Your Article
• 5. Finding the Right Book Publisher
• 6. The Book Proposal
• 7. Writing the Damn Thing
• 8. Understanding Publishing Contracts
• 9. The Production Process
• 10. Marketing Your Work
• 11. The Brave New World of Electronic Publishing
• 12. Coda
• Appendix A: Key Resources about Publishing
• Appendix B: Left Coast Author's Marketing Questionnaire
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author