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Inside Collection (Report): The State of Scholarly Publishing in the History of Art and Architecture
In 2005, the typical hardcover art history-related title (published by an academic press) was about 300 pages long with just over 90 illustrations. Of course, typical page lengths varied from publisher to publisher, ranging from 250 to 400, while the typical number of illustrations varied from 40 to 200. (Additional information about minimum and maximum page lengths and numbers of illustrations may be found in the annotated questionnaire in Appendix E.)
The typical hardcover art history-related title also contained both color and black and white illustrations; the eleven university press editors who responded to the survey reported that, on average, 53% of their titles contained both color and black and white illustrations. Again, this varied widely from publisher to publisher, from 10% on the low side to 90% on the high side.
With these parameters in mind (300 pages, 90 illustrations, mixture of color and b/w illustrations), university press editors estimated the total cost of publishing a "typical" hardcover art history-related title at $41,438. (This is based on the responses of 8 editors who provided cost estimates for both illustrated and non-illustrated books.) By contrast, the total cost of publishing a typical hardcover title without illustrations was estimated at $23,000. On average, then, illustrated titles were estimated to cost about 80% more to produce than non-illustrated titles.
Interestingly, this specific ratio (that is, illustrated titles costing 80% more than non-illustrated titles) was not representative of any of the eight presses for which these figures were reported. Four presses reported ratios in the range of 117 to 138%, while four reported ratios in the range of 50 to 67%. In other words, there appear to be at least two different working models in use at university presses for the publication of illustrated books, one of which is substantially more costly (and one might assume, more elaborate) than the other.
Part of the higher costs associated with publishing illustrated books comes from having to pay permissions fees for the use of illustrations. All but one of the university press editors surveyed said that permissions costs had risen over the past ten years or so, but most said that these increases were not necessarily exorbitant. Several editors did say, however, that the process of dealing with permissions issues was becoming more onerous, involving both more work and more pressure to adhere to regulations.
University presses "rarely" pay permission costs, though. Such costs almost always fall to the authors of publications or to the authors' institutions. Managing the permissions process does involve significant investments of time at some university presses, while some presses spend very little time at all on this. For a typical art history-related title, the amount of time spent by press personnel on managing the permissions process ranged from "almost none" to "25% of one staff person's time." A very rough average across university presses would be about 40 hours of staff time per title.
Publishers of art history-related titles have long relied on subventions to cover a portion of the costs related to publishing in this area. University press editors estimated that just over half (54%) of such titles published in 2005 received subventions, and that these subventions covered just under one-fifth (18%) of all publication costs in this area. Most editors agreed that subventions are "as available as they used to be," but several noted that it takes diligence to obtain them.
Sources of subventions mentioned by these editors included the Millard Meiss Fund (CAA), the Kress Foundation, the Graham Foundation, the Driehaus Foundation, the Getty Foundation, the NEH, the Dedalus Foundation, the Newberry Library, the Wyeth Foundation, the Medieval Academy, the Kaplan Fund, the Paul Mellon Centre, as well as authors' home institutions, museums and, in a couple of cases, "in-house endowment funds." One editor noted that some subventions come from organizations that fund projects in specific regions (e.g., the Japan Foundation). Others noted that subventions may also come from private collectors, foreign ministries of culture and corporations. One editor said that, as a matter of course, "I always encourage my authors to talk to their chair/dean/vice president of research about funding. There is always a little money, even at the worst of times (and 2001-2004 qualified as 'worst of times')."
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This work is licensed by Lawrence McGill under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 2.0), and is an Open Educational Resource.
Last edited by Chuck Bearden on Sep 21, 2006 3:08 pm -0500.
