Feminist Publishing at Routledge
Hello everyone. I’m really glad to be here. I have enjoyed listening to the other people
present on feminist publishing, because I do grapple with what it means to ‘do’ feminist
publishing, and it is good to get other perspectives from outside my own community. I
may be a bit of an anomaly in publishing in that Routledge is the only press where I’ve
worked. I taught middle school social studies for three years before moving into
publishing, and I went through the Pace University publishing program. I started my
second career thinking I would work at a trade house editing fiction (doesn’t everyone?)
and an internship at Routledge was all it took to get me to switch to scholarly publishing.
I was very lucky to work with a strong feminist mentor as I was learning the trade, and I
do feel like I learned a lot from her example. I try to apply these lessons in my present
situation, which is at the same press, but following a very different publishing model.
Slide #2
I’m sure that all of this first part is review for most people in the audience, but I thought I
would go through it quickly to give Routledge its place in the overall scheme of scholarly
publishing. Generally, you can break down scholarly publishing into three different
categories—textbook publishers, academic presses, and university presses. Textbook
publishers, like McGraw-Hill and Prentice Hall, develop books for use in courses. They
have sales reps that travel to campuses, and they give away masses of examination copies
and other materials in order to try to get key adoptions of their titles.
Academic presses publish scholarly books and journals, including advanced-level
textbooks. They sell to libraries, individuals, and through adoptions, and give away
examination copies of texts, but on a more limited basis. These include companies like
Routledge, Blackwell, Rowman & Littlefield, and so forth.
Slide #3
University presses publish original scholarly work, sometimes including journals or trade
books, including regional titles meant for a general audience. They sell to libraries and
individuals, and do get some course adoptions. They are often self-sufficient, but also
have financial ties to their university in the form of an endowment or subsidy, with the
greater responsibility of publishing the work of the scholars therein. I actually think that
our focus on textbooks is opening the market for the university presses to publish some of
the more supplemental type research that we used to do a lot more of, and which is their
bread and butter. They can do much more for a first book on a good subject than we can.
For us it would just be competing for sales and marketing time with the bigger textbooks.
Slide #4
Routledge itself has gone through several iterations through the years, even during the
time that I’ve worked there. Right now, Routledge operates as an imprint of Taylor &
Francis Books, which is the book publishing arm of Informa, PLC, “the leading provider
of specialist information to the global academic and scientific, professional and
commercial business communities via publishing, events, and performance
improvement.” Routledge itself has over 7,000 books on the backlist, and we publish
over a thousand books a year in the humanities and social sciences.
Slide #5
Our main focus is on producing lower-level and advanced textbooks, scholarly work of
different sorts, and hybrid volumes, which might include (Slide #6) edited anthologies,
books of original research, or reference volumes like handbooks or practitioner
references.
Slide #7
Routledge is well known in scholarly circles for its embrace of cultural studies, and
‘doing things a little differently’—edgy or outré. I personally think we owe a lot of that
reputation to Bill Germano, who was a publishing director at Routledge for many years.
He was one of the first people working in the New York office, and really was
responsible for bringing in many of the now-classic authors we have on our lists. Back
then, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was hard to find new research published in the
fields of queer studies, women’s studies, race and gender, and other areas, such as film
criticism. Bill was on the forefront of bringing those topics to the company and taking a
chance that they would sell. It was a great intersection of a cultural moment and seizing a
publishing opportunity. Now there are many presses who’ve moved into these areas, but I
do think that Routledge was one of the first scholarly presses to really commit to those
topics. Other editors working with Bill picked up on that aesthetic, and really built up the
reputation of the press as the place to go for studies on race, class, gender, or sexuality.
However, as the company’s focus has changed from publishing new research to reaching
a course market, we’ve been faced with the challenge of translating the reputation of
Routledge into a more user-friendly, course-situated model.
(greatest hits/now slides) (Slides 8,9,10,11)
Slide #12
One way we do maintain our focus on publishing new research is with our Routledge
Research program. This is a program for first books or higher-level research, published
within series, and aimed at a library market, so that grad students or other researchers in
the field can have access to material they might need, but which isn’t really appropriate
for a course. Some of the relevant series include: Routledge Research in Gender and
History, New Approaches in Sociology: Studies in Social Inequality, Social Change,
and Social Justice, which is edited by Nancy Naples (University of Connecticut) and
Routledge Research in Gender and Society (no series editor) – both of these are
sociology series – and our Routledge/UNRISD Research in Gender and Development
(UNRISD stands for United Nations Research Institute for Social Development). The
books in the UNRISD span across the social sciences, though they are mostly
politics/geography/economics oriented. Also, a really well known Geography series:
Routledge International Studies in Women and Place, edited by Janet Momsen
(University of California-Davis) and Jan Monk (University of Arizona).
Slide #13
Feminist publishing at Routledge is a tricky thing to define, and I’ve been thinking about
it a lot lately. It is of course a personal choice of any particular editor at any given time
whether or not to concentrate on feminist issues amongst their acquisitions. Also, since
we operate on different lists independently from one another (for example, I’m the
history editor, so I only publish books on history—we have editors covering other
subjects as well), if someone leaves, there is no guarantee that the person who replaces
them will be a feminist. And, although I would argue that most people working at
Routledge would consider themselves feminists, we’re not exactly a ‘feminist press’, so
we do have to take the market and the list into consideration. For example, gender
remains a vital category of publishing in history or sociology, but the philosophy editor
has told me that she’s tried publishing feminist philosophy titles, and they just don’t sell
enough to be profitable. Finally, the projects must fit into one of those categories I
described earlier, such as a text, or reference type book.
Slide #14
Some considerations we think about when choosing a project include the market—where
we’re going to try to place the book, in which disciplines and in which professional
organizations—who are we going to target?
Slide #15
Who will read the book? Who is it written for? Who is it speaking to? Does it make sense
to publish alongside everything else we do?
Slide #16
Are there any other books on this topic we can look to for a model? Should this even be
something that we should publish? Are there any other presses that might be a better fit?
That does happen, by the way. I get pitched a lot of projects that don’t fit into our current
publishing model, so if a project sounds good, I often suggest that the author take it to
another press, especially if I know that press has published books like that one before.
And finally, that all-important question: Who will buy the book? (And secondly, can we
reach those people?)
Slide #17
Some challenges that I face as a feminist trying to publish feminist and women’s history
include competition from other presses for the same sorts of projects, either by topic or
by type of book, pressure from the market to publish things that reliably sell, or that
people want to read, battling other editors or marketing people within the company who
aren’t feminists, and then the more esoteric question of what makes a feminist? Is
publishing women’s issues enough? When does a ‘women’s issue’ book become feminist
publishing?
Slide #18
And finally, I am a feminist, personally, and I try to support the women who work in
feminist and women’s history as much as I can. It’s not enough, because I’m constrained
by the bounds of the press and the realities of the market, but I do try, and I see my role,
and that of my colleagues as trying to keep women’s issues and gender as a broad
category in the forefront of what we publish, and to find innovative ways of helping that
material reach the widest possible audience, yet still remaining on the leading edge in
terms of the research content that we publish.