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CAMPBELL PUBLISHERS STORY

David Mitchell started Campbell Publishers, a UK-based publishing company, to publish his books. Here are the reasons why.

“My first book, The Message of the Psalter, was published by JSOT: Sheffield Academic Press in 1997. They were pretty good to deal with. But they were bought over by a publisher called Continuum. Continuum were disappointing. They dragged their heels in paying the small royalty fees they owed me, and accused me of lying about not receiving royalty cheques which they had not sent. When they remaindered the book (making it no longer available in print), the copyright reverted to me as agreed in the contract. But they continued to sell my book illegally and licensed the pdf to Logos software. They duly went bust and were bought over by Bloomsbury, who continued to sub-publish my book for some fourteen years, unaware that the agreement Continuum had passed on to them was unlawful. I must add that, when I informed Bloomsbury of this situation, they did not delay to rectify it and quickly pay all that was due.

Having been bitten by Continuum, I was not in a hurry to offer books to other publishers. For a decade and a half, I confined my publications to academic articles. But by 2013, I was looking for ways to publish The Songs of Ascents. I sent a manuscript to Eerdmans, who said they would let me know. After six months, I contacted them and they had lost the manuscript. I sent another manuscript. Then, a while later, they told me they would not publish it. I then contacted Oxford University Press. After many months, they told me that my work was not mainstream enough. All this took more than a year.

WHAT I DID NEXT

At that time, I spoke to Richard Dumbrill, Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Musicology in London University, who had recommended The Songs of Ascents to OUP. He said, “Why don’t you publish POD [Print-on-Demand]? That’s how I published my book. It’s quite a respected format these days.” So I took on board what he said, and now I’m grateful for his advice. (At this point, my wife would add that she had been telling me to self-publish for eighteen months.) So, in 2015, I self-published with Amazon barcodes under the name Campbell Publications. A few years later, I set up the company as an independent publisher, called Campbell Publishers.

In other words, I publish my own books through my own publishing company. This suits me better in every possible way. Here are the reasons why.

REASONS WHY I PUBLISH AS CAMPBELL PUBLISHERS

  1. Self-publishing gives the best time-to-market. I can finish a book in the morning and have it on worldwide sale the same afternoon. In contrast, I was asked in April 2018 to write a 5,000-word chapter for a book on the Psalms for a big US publisher. The submission deadline was duly given as March 2020. So I submitted it well before the deadline. They said it would be published in 2021. Then it became November 2022. Then December. Then it finally appeared in March 2023. Five years!
  2. Once you submit your text to a publishing house, they “copy-edit” it. This means that your carefully-polished prose is “improved” by a junior member of staff who, if you’re really lucky, may have a degree in Religious Studies. The copy-editor will comb your text, looking for things that do not meet his or her own basic knowledge of good English—and do not imagine they are all native English speakers—and correct them. Then they will ask you continually to specify which scripture translation you are using, as if one were unable to make one’s own translations of scripture or other texts. Then there will be political correction to the latest newspeak. They will change AD (Anno domini) to CE (Common era), to please the imagined academic neutrality that thinks there is something “common” to Jews and Christians about the year AD 1.
  3. And then there is theological correction. In a chapter I recently published with a big US publisher, someone went through my text correcting YHVH to the imagined form, Yahweh. I received the proof, made various changes, including re-inserting YHVH, and told them I would like it kept that way. Then it came back to me for approval with my corrections inserted but—lo and behold—someone had “recorrected” YHVH back to ‘Yahweh’ the whole way through. (Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you had a direct line to Moses.) So the editor of the book contacted the copy-editor and asked him not to correct the YHVHs in my text. This, he stressed, was important to me. I then recorrected my text again and sent it back. When the final version came out – voilà – the YHVHs had once again been “corrected” to Yahweh. But not consistently. Instead, the article was a mixed bag of both forms. Three times they changed my text to what I did not want, despite being asked and agreeing to leave it alone. Beyond belief.
    Another time, someone went through one of my papers correcting “the time of the end” to “the end of time”, which is not at all the same. And then there are good old typos. In my Message of the Psalter, the copy-editor introduced an error to the Hebrew text on the dedication page of the book. (Thank you. That really made me look like I know what I’m talking about.) So much for the junior copy-editor.
  4. But this doesn’t happen just once. Oh no. The junior copy-editor then passes it on to the senior editor who applies his or her own hard-baked errors and prejudices and hobby-horses to your text. Then, if they can’t find someone else to interfere (though don’t bet on it!), they send you the text back for approval. You then have to spend hours combing through their “improvements” and explaining why you do not want them, while they try and justify them on the basis that they actually know best. Can you imagine the frustration, tedium, and sheer time-wasting of this process?
  5. But, I hear you say, surely a professional publisher will turn out a nicer end product. Don’t bet on that either. A young Singaporean Psalms scholar I know had his first book published recently by Pickwick. The entire cover graphic was displaced 0.7 cm to the left. The tails of the letters on the spine title actually wrap round onto the back cover, and the colour panels on the front page wrap round on to the spine. Well, you don’t get that on my books.
  6. With self-publishing, I am totally free of publishers’ demands. I do not need to make my books longer or shorter, or more or less popular, or with more or less illustrations, to suit them. My text can be whatever I like. I can present whatever arguments and opinions I like. My book layout can be any way I like, any size I like, with any fonts I like. I can keep UK spelling, which I like, since I’m a Brit. I can italicize what I like. And I can include any illustrations I like.
  7. More, I have total freedom over cover design. This is important to me. I like designing my own covers so that they match the book. Publishers can and do adorn serious books with covers that are irrelevant or incongruous or drab or downright ridiculous.
  8. I have total freedom to set my own prices so that my books are affordable to theology students, pastors, and private scholars, and my music is affordable to small groups. Big publishers don’t care much about this. I do. There is a big academic publisher in nearby Leuven who sell their new books in paperback for €90. Then, when the short print run is exhausted, they continue to sell the pdf for €80 a copy. Nice for them. Not so nice for their readers.
  9. I have total freedom to issue corrections, updates, and revisions, both in the large scale (new paragraphs) and small scale (correcting typos and errors). What publisher would allow that?
  10. I have total freedom to issue new editions any time I want. What publisher would allow that? And, more, I can choose whether or not my changes are of a scale to merit a new ISBN or not.
  11. Also, I know exactly where my books are selling, every day. I can tell how many books sell each day in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, the USA, the UK, or wherever people buy my books.
  12. On every book sold I receive a good royalty. Since I spend thousands of hours on a book, I can justify this only if my family get some reasonable return for it. Publishers, especially academic publishers, offer pitifully small royalties. The big US publisher I mentioned in (3) above offered me $100 for a 5,000-word article that took several weeks of work. (Don’t spend it all at once!) And, in publisher terms, that’s generous. The big Belgian publisher I spoke of above offers authors zero for their books. That’s right. Zippo. Zilch. Nada. Nix. Niente. An author may work for three, or four, or five, or more, years on a book and the publisher, who will make a lot of money from it, offers nothing at all. Is that fair? You never meet a poor publisher. Yet they are doing less work now than they ever did. In the past, theological books needed specialist printers who could read Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic. But now they just tell the author to send a print-ready pdf conformed to their house style and then, after one has tried to sort out the copy-editors errors, they send it to print—bam! So, honestly, publishers need to offer a much, much better deal.
  13. Further, I retain total control of my own copyright, to publish or withdraw, for full term of copyright, in any media I choose. But, if I were to confer my copyright on a publisher, they would then have the power to remainder (discontinue) my printed book at will, leaving me no opportunity to re-issue or update the book, while they continue to sell pdf copies at profit, until 70 years after my death, paying next to no royalties. Why?
  14. The only reasons to consider giving my royalty to a publisher would be to get (a) better promotion or (b) more academic kudos. But most of my readers don’t care too much about academic kudos. They know my work. And publishers all want you to promote your own work these days. The books I have sold with Campbell Publishers have far surpassed the sales of The Message of the Psalter through Sheffield Academic Press and Continuum.
  15. As a UK publisher, registered with Nielsen, my books can be bought all over the world. Further, Amazon is the biggest book-seller in the world, and my books are selling well there. They’re available in bookshops too. And it is global.

Here are the views of the late Professor David Clines of Sheffield on the frustrations of dealing with publishers:

I have been using academia.edu, and recently also ResearchGate, for publication of my research for some decades. I am not the only one. It has for me the following benefits:(1) The day I have finished a paper to my own satisfaction I have finished with it. It is now uploaded, out of my hands. I can turn immediately to my next project, and my uploaded paper will not come back for incessant re-tweaking. (2) I know that my paper will be immediately forwarded to all those people who have signed up as my followers. Wherever they live, and whatever their economic status (largely) they will have immediate, easy and free access. My readers will not be people who don’t mind waiting two or three years for a paper that is no longer my present concern, and who have the good fortune to work for an institution that can afford to subscribe to ATLA. (3) I will have done my little bit toward promoting equality of access to knowledge globally (I receive many thanks on this aspect). (4) If my paper is to be presented orally at a congress, the audience will be able to see it on their screen if they choose (I always begin by showing where they can locate it on Google), glance at the footnotes, go back over the wording, and behave like autonomous persons in charge of their own learning rather than passive receptacles for the presenter. (5) If my paper is not accepted for publication, or I lose the drive to hawk it around the journals, my thoughts — good, bad, or indifferent — are already available on the internet, and I will not have wasted my time.
If my work is any good, these benefits will accrue not only to myself, but to a quite large worldwide audience interested in my interests, and I am content.

Let me close with a quote from Glasstree, an online academic publisher.

The existing academic publishing model is broken, with traditional commercial publishers charging excessive prices for books or ridiculous book publishing charges to publish Open Access books. Academics or their supporting institutions are poorly paid for their content. Profit margins are strongly skewed towards the publisher, with crumbs for the author and/or their employers. Submission to publication times are far too lengthy and service and marketing support insufficient. Besides the lack of editorial assistance, marketing support, and a complete absence of urgency, traditional academic publishers are now often viewed as cherishing profits over the advancement of knowledge, and accommodate their shareholders over their authors.

“The existing academic publishing model is broken.” Nuff said. So that is the story of why I set up Campbell Publishers.

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