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In private conversations and in group sessions, editors consistently identified the high cost of illustration programs as the factor specific to art history publication that has adversely affected the volume of book publication in the field in recent years. Our detailed survey of 17 editors of art history books at leading university and commercial presses confirms that the costs of illustration programs are as onerous to publishers as they are to authors.1 Without considering the costs of permissions (stray parts of which are also borne by many publishers), editors identified high average production cost differentials between art history books and books without illustrations. According to the survey, the cost of producing a typical art history book (c. 30 to over 150 illustrations) ranges from $7,500 to $75,000. The survey respondents reported the cost of producing an un-illustrated book to range from $3,600 to $45,000. More meaningfully, the survey shows that, for individual publishers, the production of an average un-illustrated book ranges from 10 percent to 66 percent of the production of an average art history book. When limiting the survey results to the university presses, the average cost of publishing an un-illustrated book is $23,000 (in round numbers), and the cost of the average art history book is $41,400, 80 percent more.
The primary costs of illustration programs are incurred in the design, layout, and offset printing processes. Although all books require design, layout, and printing, illustrated books necessarily go through more phases of layout review and correction, including time-consuming consultations between editors, designers, and authors. Particularly vital, and often contested, decisions include sizes of illustrations relative to the page and to each other and locations of illustrations in relation to argument and to overall design of the page. Black-and-white illustrations necessitate grayscale checks, sometimes by the image provider as well as the author. The accurate transfer of a color image onto the printed page involves an elaborate color separation process, and for color the offset result more typically requires the approval of the image supplier. Paper quality and finishing varnishes can have dramatic effects on image registration, and it is not unheard of for initial print runs to be rejected by the publisher because color calibration or paper quality turns out to be inadequate. Although such costs are borne in part by printers, changes of paper and delays in publication inevitably incur additional expenses for publishers.
The supervision and enforcement of the permissions regime generate another, and rarely analyzed, cost to art history publishers.2 Thirteen of the 17 editors surveyed gave estimates of the staff time dedicated to image permissions management. While five cited almost no staff time and one found the answer entirely variable per author, seven estimated between 20 and 80 staff hours per book. In conversation, a university press editor noted that a well-illustrated book, defined as having at least 50 images, takes an average of 100 hours of permission management by her assistant.
In light of escalating production costs and declining sales, presses can ill afford to produce art historical monographs in the 1000+ print runs that were still standard only a decade ago. Such print runs yield undesirable inventory maintenance costs. As publishers seek to avoid high inventories, per-copy costs and prices go up, and so does the risk to authors and readers of books going out of print.
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This work is licensed by Hilary Ballon and Mariet Westermann under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 2.0), and is an Open Educational Resource.
Last edited by Chuck Bearden on Dec 1, 2006 4:48 pm -0600.
"Also from Rice University Press"