Publishing Insights

Should You Publish Your Book With A University Press? | by Janice Harayda | Lit Life

You don’t need to be a professor or have an agent, and authors can make hundreds of thousands of dollars

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The four authors of “The Toni Morrison Book Club” / University of Wisconsin Press

When you hear the words “university presses,” you might think of scholarly books on dusty topics like the mirror as a symbol in Jane Austen’s Emma or the history of Class A football in North Dakota.

Or you might assume those presses won’t consider you if you aren’t a professor or that you can’t make money by publishing with them.

If you think any of those things, think again.

University presses do focus on scholarship for a well-defined academic audience. But most also publish books aimed at a general readership, written by authors who don’t teach at colleges.

Those books cover an array of topics in a surprising range of genres: among them memoirs, cookbooks, poetry, humor, and fiction, including children’s and young adult literature. Some make serious money.

A display of university press books at a trade show in Taipei / Wikimedia Commons CC

A famous example of a university press book that broke the mold was John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. Toole hoped to…


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