Self-published books are on the rise, to the dismay of onlookers who wonder what to expect from a sector where E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey—originally published as online fan fiction by a tiny Australian e-book company—appears to be the best of the lot. More than 391,000 self-published titles appeared in 2012, according to Bowker, the official ISBN-issuing agency for the United States.
Academics, meanwhile, inhabit a parallel publishing ecosystem: a constellation of university presses and journals that publish slowly, offer few economic returns, and subject all work to painstaking peer review. Scholars and publishing experts in the United States and Britain say self-publishing by academics remains a rarity.
Roger Whitson, an assistant professor of English at WSU, said he thought self-publishing books was an undertaking only tenured professors could afford. “Part of the reason why academics publish pre-tenure is that they want to receive credit for becoming a specialist in the field, and one of the main ways they see that happening is through peer review,” Whitson said. “For pre-tenure people who haven’t established a name in the field, academic publishing is really important.”
After receiving tenure, more academics are in a position “to experiment and demand more from different publishing models,” he said.
Whitson has self-published a book of his own: a collection of writing from his postdoctoral program at Georgia Tech. “I would never consider it a major publication of mine,” he said. “It was just something that was fun.” Whitson does not list the book on his CV.