Something of a shockwave ran through the publishing world in Spring 2019 when Stanford University announced it could no longer support its University Press, and that the venerable and high-prestige Stanford University Press (founded in 1892) would be closing. A shock, but for many, no real surprise, as a chilly wind had been blowing through the academic monograph publishing industry for several years. Outside of a shelter under the wing of a giant multinational (Routledge, Wiley), or life as a tiny niche labor-of-love press, is there a future? The Stanford story, despite its subsequent temporary stay of execution, said – maybe not.

So we were intrigued to hear of an independent scholarly monograph publisher who wasn’t complaining about the chill. One which was expanding, not consolidating; was broadening its publishing horizons, not narrowing them; and that was staying – solidly and defiantly – rooted in publishing academic books for a university market. That led us to learn the story of Cambridge Scholars Publishing (CSP) and seeing a publisher taking the refreshing approach of doing simple things, well.

Surprising things

Newcastle upon Tyne, located in the north-east corner of England, is not a traditional location for an academic publisher. But that’s just one of a few surprising and intriguing things about CSP. Just a short walk down windy Welbeck Road, Newcastle, in the former shipbuilding area of Walker, near the River Tyne and just a few miles from the chilly North Sea, tells you that you are not in the genteel heartland of British academic publishing in London, Oxford or Cambridge. And there’s a second surprising thing – why Cambridge Scholars Publishing 200 miles north of that ancient university city?

CSP was founded in Cambridge, by Cambridge University academics, as something of a hobby enterprise. When the founder moved to Durham University a few years later, he relocated his business to the nearby city of Newcastle and kept the name. And when he left the UK in 2010, he sold the business to a small group of Newcastle-based businesspeople. And there’s a third surprising thing – the management team which has steered CSP through the choppy waters of scholarly monograph publishing for the last ten years, are not career publishers.

But let’s get back to the windy and somewhat gritty reality of Welbeck Road in Newcastle, for a moment, and the imposing red-brick edifice of the Lady Stephenson Library, home to CSP. The district of Walker is not what anyone would describe as genteel. Unemployment is high, and what one would describe as ‘knowledge work’ is mostly unknown. Like much of the UK’s former industrial heartland, it has been badly hit by the decline of heavy industry, and further battered by the post-2008 crash. In 2013, the city closed down the historic Lady Stephenson Library in Walker, after more than 100 years of serving the local community, and it stood unoccupied for a year until CSP, looking for a home for its expanding publishing business, took it on and restored it. For a publisher that serves a library audience, a converted library is a fitting, if somewhat quirky, location.

And now number four on the list of surprising things: CSP published more than 700 titles this year. Yes, it’s a way off the output from the global behemoths like Routledge, but it’s very substantial for a publisher that has flown happily under the radar for many years. To put that in perspective, Stanford University Press, whose story we opened with, publishes about 140 titles. CSP’s 700-odd titles carry a fraction of that kind of overhead—and the business makes a trading profit, not a loss.

So we are getting a sense of the unexpected – Cambridge in Newcastle; a scholarly publisher in a location better-known for ships and soccer (Newcastle United’s long-suffering and intensely loyal supporters are the stuff of legend in the UK); a relatively small academic publisher with a surprisingly large output. And, for those who know publishing, a successful and vibrant independent publisher of scholarly monographs and edited collections. Some bright sunshine, in what many see as a sunset industry.

Let’s step through those imposing wooden library doors, and learn a little more about CSP.

Commitment to long-form research

‘Cambridge Scholars Publishing are committed to supporting long-form research dissemination in all our fields of academic and scholarly publishing, through the publication of monographs and edited collections. This is, and will remain, our core focus.‘

So reads one of the solicitation messages the CSP commissioning team use to request book proposals. But how is it that CSP can support such a large, and diverse, publishing output? It is common knowledge in the industry that, barring a very few titles, typical academic monographs sell in small numbers. And, in an age when it has become common for scholars to pay to have their research published, CSP operates like a traditional academic press, publishing on the academic merit of research and not collecting fees to publish from authors or editors. The cost of type-setting, cover design, and copyediting is absorbed by CSP from the start. Like many smaller presses, CSP does pre-publication proposal review, and then relies on desk editors to work with authors when a manuscript is submitted.

John Peters, CSP’s Publishing Advisor, explains CSP business approach:

Decisions to publish are not taken on likely sales or profitability (which is unusual in a commercial publisher). The commercial risk to publish rests entirely with CSP. Some titles succeed, some do not, but the business model is predicated on the portfolio succeeding in aggregate. From a publisher’s point of view (as opposed to an academic’s), ‘quality’ in a title is a proxy for likely commercial success. Publishers like to pick winners. That means two things: 1) They tend to navigate away from marginal interest, unheralded authors and second-tier institutions, and 2) Having spent a lot of time and money on commissioning and solicitation, they spend a lot more time and money on modeling whether a title is going to hit a target return on investment ratio.

Our approach reverses that because it isn’t predicated on a few big sellers carrying the portfolio but on enough titles selling enough copies to make the thing work as a whole. And in terms of a business decision, we don’t carry the quite large cost overhead based around figuring out what the big sellers might be and filtering out the rest. Our administrative overhead is very light. That allows us to assess whether a book fits the criteria of ‘should it be added to the published body of knowledge?’ and not worry about ‘will it sell enough to contribute to the cost overhead I am incurring on assessing whether it will sell enough? This is interesting, and quite liberating, in terms of publishing philosophy. To be frank, it’s better that we make a mistake by publishing a ‘not very good’ book, than we exclude someone who has made a valid contribution, on some elitist structural basis. The worst that happens is that the market decides that the book isn’t very good, and it doesn’t sell many. That’s better than excluding some decent, hardworking academic from access to being published.

So CSP’s business model is to run a lean, flat structure, which means administration and overhead costs are minimized. Their attention is focused on inclusion – inviting people to publish and getting books out into the market, and not on lengthy assessment on exclusion. Peer review is focused on proposals. An ‘author’s own voice’ is encouraged. Desk editors are instructed to help and improve, not to homogenize. CSP is a long way from a radical alternative publisher, but their business approach means they espouse some philosophies, particularly around inclusivity, marginalized voices and decolonization, that would not look out of place in some basement collective.

Think Global, Act Local

Aquote attributed to economist Dr. Hazel Henderson, ‘Think Global, Act Local’ has been a mantra in business school teaching and corporate sloganizing since the 1980s. But the CSP story makes one think of it again.

Many of the CSP team grew up in Newcastle, or settled there after University (Newcastle, Northumbria, Durham, and Sunderland Universities are all within a ten-mile radius). It’s an organization that takes location seriously. As mentioned above, Walker is a district with painful levels of social deprivation. Yet, here is an unlikely local employer offering both knowledge-intensive and manual jobs. No offshoring, no chasing low-cost/low-tax jurisdictions for print or typesetting; one which puts apprentice printers in the same location as proofreaders and commissioning editors. It’s a business that takes its library heritage seriously (and offers support to local libraries and community groups).

Yet it’s a business which very much ‘thinks global’. In 2019, CSP opened a representative office at the prestigious Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, and has satellite offices in Berlin and Barcelona. It’s a business that negotiated a direct supply line to Ebsco’s GOBI Library Services for hard copy titles, as well as maintaining a flourishing and growing no-shelf-required ebook presence. It’s a publisher where a random trawl of one day’s submitted book proposals takes in the UK and USA, but also Turkey, Germany, India, China, Romania and Sweden, and one which reckons to have authors, and customers, from 120 countries worldwide.

Author-centricity

‘We put our authors at the heart of everything we do.’ CSP website

As any publisher knows, an engaged author is the key to a good and successful book. Particularly with the advent of social media networks, authors are expected to be their own marketing and PR departments, and publishers provide some of the technical and supply-chain skills that authors cannot, such as proper metadata, and access to distribution systems.

CSP offices are full of author stories and often captured in the publisher’s newsletters, giving the backstory of how each book is written, what inspired the author’s research and how his or her previous academic contributions led to the creation of the book. These are not the kinds of blurbs usually encountered on back covers. Likewise, a room in the library building in Newcastle is dedicated to visiting authors, where they can meet the publishing team, browse previously published CSP titles, or just sit and take time out.

This author-centricity has created a highly effective commissioning referral and network effect structure. The academic community, though huge, is highly networked, and a fast, sympathetic, no-fuss publisher’s reputation ripples and grows. This network effect led to requests from outside CSP’s original Humanities and Social Sciences heartland to publish titles in some of the natural sciences and STEM subjects; to the point where, in 2018, Physical Sciences, Life Sciences and Health Sciences were formally added to CSP’s publishing portfolio.

Simple things

We sometimes hear people describe academic book publishing as ‘traveling up a down escalator.’ You have to run, just to stand still. You have to run to move forwards. Slip, or stop for a moment, and you are back where you started. Even the best and brightest, armed with one of the world’s strongest scholarly brand names at Stanford, find themselves pulled downwards.

So, what are the secrets behind CSP’s progression up the down escalator? Well, maybe not too surprisingly, these are not ‘secrets.’ They can be summarized as ‘doing simple things well.’ Having a flat structure, dominated by front-line publishing staff, and keeping administrative overhead to a minimum, (meaning that attention is focused on authors, and that book break-even levels are low). Trusting the research community to be generous and inclusive enough to buy and consume minority-interest research, even when it’s not always from first-tier authors and institutions. Being fiercely localized in your home community, while keeping a very broad, global approach. Bringing in management and process design expertise from diverse backgrounds, not just publishing.

Every publishing company has a story, of course, but it is always refreshing to find one in an unexpected place, with a clear and optimistic narrative, a few surprises, and some good management practices.

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THE STORY of the majestic library building in Newcastle upon Tyne is a poignant one, published below and extracted, with permission, from CSP’s 2019 newsletter:

William Stephenson and Eliza Bond

William Haswell Stephenson was born near Newcastle in 1836, into a family of wealthy industrialists, with interests in coal and manufacture. He and Eliza married near her family home in Lincolnshire in 1862. A prominent and well-known figure in the city, William was Mayor of Newcastle on four occasions, before and after the turn of the century, and was knighted by Queen Victoria for his services to the community in 1900.

William and Eliza both came from strongly Methodist families, and both were firm believers in social reform and philanthropy – those who were fortunate enough to have wealth and influence should try and change things for the better. Much of their philanthropic work was committed to establishing libraries in the city of Newcastle.

In the 19th and early 20th century, when TV, radio and the internet were many years away, libraries provided universal access to news, learning, and literature. The library was a place where absolutely anyone, regardless of circumstance, could read, study and self-improve – a virtue very highly regarded in 19th and early 20th Century society. In 1896, the Stephensons financed the Stephenson Library in Elswick, near to the couple’s home at Elswick House. In 1898, the Stephensons again financed the Victoria Library, named for Queen Victoria, in Heaton.

The Stephensons and the Dewey Decimal Classification System

In 1898, the librarian at the Victoria, Andrew Keogh, a working-class son of recent Irish immigrants, had followed this self-improvement path and learned about the recent innovation of Melvil Dewey’s Decimal Classification System in the USA, for organizing books in libraries. He persuaded the Trustees to introduce the Dewey System at the Stephensons’ two libraries – the first libraries in Europe to use Dewey. Keogh later moved to the US and eventually became Head Librarian at Yale, and President of the American Library Association.

The Lady Stephenson Library

In December 1901, at the age of 67, Eliza died, “somewhat suddenly and unexpectedly” according to her obituary. William and Eliza had been married for almost 40 years. She was survived by her two daughters, Charlotte and Kate, who continued their parents’ good works, endowing a children’s TB ward at the City Hospital, amongst other things.

In 1908, Sir William commissioned the Lady Stephenson Library in Walker, in honour of his late wife; the last of his library benefactions to the City. This ran as a public library until its closure by Newcastle Council in 2013. Cambridge Scholars Publishing acquired the then empty Library in 2014, and restored it.

“The world is not enough‘

In a carved stone panel above the Library front entrance is Eliza Bond’s family Coat of Arms, with the motto ‘Non Sufficit Orbis’ underneath – ‘The World is not Enough’. Those familiar with the James Bond films will recognise that as the title of the 19th movie in the Bond franchise, made in 1999. What is the story here?

In 1658, just before the restoration of the monarchy in England, King Charles II made his mother’s financial controller, Thomas Bond, a Baronet. Bond incorporated the motto of King Phillip II of Spain, Non Sufficit Orbis, in his new Coat of Arms. The Bond film producers decided to give their fictional star a family motto and a lineage from the real Sir Thomas Bond.

Eliza Bond’s well-to-do Lincolnshire Methodist family had a familial link to Sir Thomas Bond and had adopted his Coat of Arms and family motto. So those walking past the Library today down the busy Welbeck Road in Newcastle, see a tribute from a loving husband to his partner of nearly 40 years, in the form of the Library; a link to some library history in the introduction of the Dewey Decimal Classification system to the UK; and an ancestor of the world’s most famous fictional spy, James Bond, 007 – as well as the home of a thriving academic publisher.

William Stephenson also outlived his daughter Charlotte, and died at the age of 82, in 1918.