Vyg bib contract

worthenh who-is-at garnet.berkeley.edu
Wed, 31 Jul 1996 14:18:05 -0700

Dear xmca-ers:

About a year ago Mike Cole let me take a look at a 179-page Vygotsky
bibliography that included not only a list of his work but lists of the
discussion of Vygotsky in the USSR and USA, the Netherlands, Switzerland,
France, Italy, Canada, Scandinavia, Spain, Germany, Central Europe, Viet Nam,
Puerto Rico, Japan and India -- and fifteen pages on the intellectual roots of
Vygotsky. I was fascinated. Needless to say, my initial impulse was to
photocopy it and hand it out to all my friends. Luckily, the document had not
only the author's professional address (Seminaire de Psychologie, Universite de
Neuchatel in Switzerland) but also a phone number in Rocky Mount, North
Carolina, so before I committed copyright infringement, I gave him a call.
Turns out that Dr. Mohamed ElHammoumi, the author, has revised the bibilography
up to 250 pages and is working out a publication arrangement with University
Press of America in Lanham, Maryland. I offered to announce the publication of
the book on this list and through any other channels that I could get access to.

My focus then became trying to find out the date of publication and ordering
information and the price of the book. At this point, a glitch developed, and
so I am coming to this list to ask for help. The publisher (Nancy Ulrich is
the acquisitions editor there, and my contact) expects a pre-publication
guaranteed sale of between 100 and 120 copies. I would like to know how usual
this arrangement is, and whether anyone on this list has had experience with
such an arrangement or experience with University Press of America.

Through my own work in the National Writers Union (I'm a grievance officer,
which means that I try to work out contract enforcement problems that writers
are having with publishers, editors, distributors, etc) I've dealt with a number
of subsidy presses, meaning presses where the writer has to pay the whole cost
of printing or a portion of the cost. For those who don't follow this kind of
stuff, in the trade book business, subsidy press publication has become much
more common in the last 2 or 3 years since the old publishing houses have been
purchased by non-publishing corporations like General Electric, Time Warner and
Westinghouse, and since desktop publishing has made it possible for print shops
to design and manufacture books quite easily. So subsidy publishers are filling
a market niche in a quite predictable way. However, I have not done much
grievance work in the academic publishing world. The "deal" in academia has
more to do with points toward tenure or promotion than royalties, press runs,
subsidiary rights, etc; and naturally, we don't have very many members who are
publishing with university presses. (In fact, I've done only one such
grievance, for a woman who, when she realized that the university press was
serious about claiming copyright, took her manuscript back and shopped it
elsewhere.) But specifically, I have not run into the "guaranteed sale"
arrangement before either in trade or academic contexts.

ElHammoumi's Vygotsky bibliography is being published in this manner. He is
ready to send off the camera-ready manuscript right now, but he (like me) is
wary of this item in his contract. Does anyone on this list have experience
with this press -- University Press of America, 4720 Boston Way, Lanham,
Maryland? Or with a publication arrangement involving a guaranteed
pre-publication sale? If so, would you be willing to describe your experience
to me? Dr. ElHammoumi does not have email; I will send along any responses to
him by snail.

Thank you --

Helena Worthen
worthenh who-is-at garnet.berkeley.edu