In 1995, I wrote an article for the Chronicle of Higher
Education outlining the problems of publishing scholarly books in
literary criticism and explaining why the Penn State University Press
could no longer afford to remain active in this field. Of the 150 books
about literature the Press had put out in the previous decade, 65% had
sold fewer than 500 copies, 91% fewer than 800 copies, and only 3% more
than 1,000. The pattern of sales in this discipline had eroded to the
point where a press without much of a subsidy from its parent university
could not sustain a publishing program in it anymore. It seemed clear even
then that what we scholarly publishers have come to call the problem of
“endangered species” would be spreading to other disciplines
over time. Five years later, in an article I wrote for the newsletter of
APSA's Organized Section on Comparative Politics (2000), I analyzed
data that seemed to show that field to be heading in the same direction as
literary studies, and I concluded with not a great deal of hope for the
future. Recently, at the invitation of the Association for Political
Theory, I turned my attention to the subfield of political theory and
offered this paper as background for the session on book publishing at the
conference in November 2006. While many of the same pressures remain in
place to bedevil university presses, and it would be premature surely to
claim that we are out of the woods yet, there have been some significant
changes that give reason to think the future may not be quite as gloomy as
it appeared back at the turn of the millennium.This article was initially prepared as a background paper for
the Association for Political Theory conference plenary session, November
4, 2006.