NYU Press had a record-breaking year for sales in FY 2020. In this interview with Ellen Chodosh, director of the Press since September 2014, she gives interesting insights into the role of academic press editors, why their authors are so often ahead of the zeitgeist, and the reason for this banner year.
Interviewer: Was 2018-2019 the strongest year for sales you’ve had during your tenure?
Ellen Chodosh (EC): We had an incredible sales year in FY2019 and never thought we’d be able to top it. But FY2020 turned out even better; sales went up by $400,000.
Interviewer: Mazel tov! What were the top-selling titles?
EC: Safiya Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism was our number one best seller for the third year in a row. Right behind it were Sabrina Strings’ Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia; Dayna Matthew’s Just Medicine: A Cure for Racial Inequality in American Health Care; Margaret Hagerman’s White Kids: Growing Up with Privilege in a Racially Divided America, and Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefanic. All of these titles except Just Medicine were among the top ten last year as well.
Interviewer: Why these particular titles at this particular time?
EC: All of these books are centered on race or racism in one form or another. COVID-19; the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others; and the Black Lives Matter protests opened people’s eyes to the racial inequalities and injustices in our society. Our publishing program has always spoken to those issues. The circumstances are heartbreaking, but we’re very proud that our authors are active participants in the important conversations taking place right now.
Interviewer: What do the strong sales say about your editors?
EC: Well, it certainly seems like they’re prescient! All of these books were signed up or published years ago; that’s the nature of scholarship. Academic research is often ahead of public discourse, and our editors carefully follow that research. They sign up projects that look to be making a significant contribution at the leading edge of their field. Sometimes the market for the books isn’t immediately obvious, but the world tends to catch up with the ideas that originate in the academy.
Interviewer: Why do books from university presses seem to present ideas that only turn up in trade publishing later on? Why are they so often ahead of their time?
EC: I teach Workshop in Academic Publishing in the School of Professional Studies’ graduate degree program in Publishing. As I always tell my students, ideas tend to begin in the academy because, for one thing, PhD students have to come up with fresh ideas for their dissertations. It’s like throwing a stone in the water: An idea ripples out and inspires a new one, and that one ripples out and so on. People build on the ideas that came before, and eventually a popular writer, or an academic with a gifted writing style, presents that idea to the general public. It isn’t unusual to see academic press titles cited in the bibliographies of popular non-fiction works. Very often, we had the idea first.
Learn more about the NYU Press and the titles currently offered on anti-racism and a myriad of other topics by visiting their website at nyupress.org.
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