From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 24 Apr 2013 22:27:00 -0500

Mike Zeoli has reminded me of exchanges we had about this back in
2011. It may be helpful if I reproduce part of that communication
again now.  I might add that the field where I did the detailed study
of regular book sales vs. revised dissertation sales, showing a 20% to
25% lower sale on average for the latter over a ten-year period, was
Latin American studies. Overall, though, it's encouraging to know that
libraries buy revised dissertations at higher levels from university
presses than from commercial academic publishers (who are not really
functioning as "trade" publishers, however, when they are publishing
monographs).

Sandy Thatcher

At 4:47 PM -0500 4/18/11, Sandy Thatcher wrote:

> That's helpful to know, Mike, and I can take some encouragement from these data. However, my own snapshot of one field for Penn State over a much more extended period of time did bear out the statistic that Helmut had given me, showing a 20% to 25%  lower sale for revised dissertations than for other titles.  I hope YPB will make a habit of tracking these data over time so that we can better gauge how serious a problem this is. Meanwhile though, i can already tell you that fewer acquiring editors are considering fewer revised dissertations for publication, based on anecdotal evidence from conversations with editors at other presses.
>
> Sandy Thatcher
>
>
>> Who is and who is not holding up their end of the bargain by not
>> acquiring those skull-crushing dissertations? In calendar 2010,
>> YBP profiled approximately 1980 dissertations, about 3% of the
>> titles that passed through our approval plan system, and just
>> over 6% of the University Press titles we profiled. Of these,
>> 1250 were from Trade presses and 730 from university presses.
>> Most fell into the *Revised* Dissertation group. Of the 102
>> Unrevised dissertations, just 13 were from university presses (8
>> from Delft UP).
>>
>> On average UP titles of all types sold 89 copies. The UP Revised
>> Dissertations sold an average of 85 copies (Unrevised
>> Dissertations fared much less well selling just 21 copies on
>> average). Trade press Revised Dissertations averaged just 39
>> copies sold (and 9 copies for Unrevised Dissertations).
>>
>> Routledge and Palgrave Macmillan were the biggest Trade
>> publishers for Revised Dissertations with just over 100 titles
>> each (a fairly small percentage of their publishing). Brill,
>> Springer, De Gruyter, Ashgate, and Peter Lang were also strong
>> contributors (530 for the entire group in 2010). Oxford and
>> Cambridge were on par with the top Trade presses. Manchester
>> University Press (distributed by Palgrave Macmillan), Duke, and U
>> California also contributed 20-30 titles each to this category in
>> the course of the year. Nearly 700 of the UP titles were tagged
>> by YBP Profilers as 'Research Recommended', meaning that they
>> were high quality and not necessarily too narrow (other tags
>> would have been used more instead had this been the case).
>>
>> Judging from 2010 data at least, it appears that academic
>> libraries are supporting the publishing of revised dissertations
>> as much as any other UP titles. Of course, this is just a quick
>> view of one year, so doesn't capture a trend or trajectory.
>>
>> Mike