The Society for American Archaeology annual meeting is coming next month. Like thousands of others, I will make the pilgrimage (to Memphis this year) and present a paper (in a session on history of collecting) and discuss a session (on household archaeology, one where Liz Brumfiel was supposed to be the other discussant).
I will spend some time in committee meetings, and I will talk to a lot of former students, close colleagues, and friends.
What I probably won’t do is buy books.
That used to be one of my major goals at any meeting. I would pick up the 20% off lists, go home, and send in orders, and then have weeks of new books to review. I would walk through the exhibit hall looking at a selection of targeted presses.
I don’t do that routinely anymore.
Partly, it’s because I tend to have a lot of scheduled time now; partly it’s because of online book ordering which means I get books differently now. But I alsojust don’t buy as many books. I have very little space to add them, for one thing: even though I had bookshelves installed in my office on campus in library style to vastly increase the capacity, I am actually at a point of considering getting rid of professional books, because there is no more room. And don’t let’s think about my office at home: I am pretty sure books were never intended as flooring, or furniture.
What inspired my thinking about this was a note about Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives (the book) from the press that published it, Thames and Hudson.
I will cruise by the Thames and Hudson booth at SAA, I guess, but the last time I did that I didn’t actually see the book noticeably visible.
Published with the hope that it would be useful in teaching, the book has not met the expectations of the press in terms of sales.
I am not sure where those expectations came from, or even how high they were. I have been thinking that maybe I was right when I originally turned down an invitation to write a book on archaeology of gender– I said we didn’t need another one, so at least I can claim a level of prescience. I got caught up in the challenge of writing a book on the archaeology of gender that wouldn’t just be for archaeologists– but then, where’s the interest going to come from?
I don’t want to give the impression that the book has no audience: just take a look at some of the reviews, this one. Or try this.
On Amazon, the book got characterized as
really amazing work, going outside its field of archaeology and showing why this field is important for research and society at large. Agree or disagree, the author lifts the whole sex/gender argument to a new level.
And how about this, also from Amazon:
Archaeology is not my field, but from the first page on, that did not seem to matter. Rosemary Joyce writes with both scholarly depth and engaging accessibility; I could hardly put the book down.
So the book seems to me to be doing quite well in reception, both with professional reviewers and general readers, inside archaeology and outside.
While there is a circle of people who think things like sex and gender in the past are important, maybe there are just too few of us to sustain publishing books like this.
Certainly, that is what Thames and Hudson presumably thinks it found out by publishing this book: and that is unfortunate, because the next person who wants to publish a book on a difficult aspect of life in the past will find less welcome there.
Due, among other things, to this blog, I know there is interest in the archaeology of sex and gender (and in my writing about the topic). The blog routinely gets more hits in a day than some of my books got sales in a year. But then, the blog is connected via links to lots of other things; with the book you get my voice and end notes.
The book, though, has one big advantage: artwork. I don’t follow the loose practice of many bloggers in borrowing images to post here– not comfortable with the rights terrain involved– and Thames and Hudson provided a relatively generous provision of images.
So maybe there is a lot of interest in the topic, and the lower than expected sales of my book can actually be attributed to a shift in book buying tendencies.
If so, I have to ask: how are longer more complex arguments going to be sustained in the future? Where is the support going to come from for creating book-length websites that are densely linked internally, amply provided with artwork, fully cited, and clearly authored by a reliable and identifiable source?
I have some experience with this. With hypertext fiction pioneers Michael Joyce and Carolyn Guyer, I wrote Sister Stories, published online by NYU Press (no longer available there, apparently, alas– books, it seems, go “out of print” even when not printed– but thanks to the Wayback machine you can see it here). An experimental work that I write about in The Languages of Archaeology, this collaboration was a hypertext rooted in Mexica (Aztec) texts, and it literally contained as much text as a standard monograph. While it was posted, it received a lot of visitors. Of course, it wasn’t for sale– and that is the rub.
Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives missing sales expectations does no damage to me. It probably means Thames and Hudson won’t take a risk on another book by me, but that hardly matters. It may, however, be part of a pattern of events leading to a disinclination on the part of presses to take risks with new ideas and more edgy topics.
And that would be a tragedy. In the ecology of academic research, journal articles are where you go to find work that has been so well demonstrated that it basically is accepted throughout most of the research world by the time it is published– anonymous peer review by up to six reviewers takes care of riskier, less established, and dare I say, more creative ideas.
Book publication is where you find credible, vetted, but more original work. What happens if book publishers decide not to take risks anymore?
Which is where we all come in. Buying books needs to be part of our habit until someone actually works out the next platform. It isn’t a blog, either. I love my blogs– but they are not going to be the place for me to develop longer more complicated arguments.
So consider buying a book. It doesn’t have to be this one. Just do it soon– and buy a new copy; presses don’t count resales.
If the book you want isn’t on kindle, and you want to read it on your iPad, bug the publisher.
I will be doing the same. And then let’s all get together somewhere like this and talk about the books we have found and should all be reading.
Sally Wilde
March 22, 2012
Interesting stuff; I think that academic publishing as we used to know it is dead. After a false start with CUP that fell over during the global financial crisis, I published my last academic book online, for free [available at thehistoryofsurgery.com]; Ashgate is still doing valiant work in my field (the history of medicine) and has just published ‘The Body Divided.’ How well it will sell remains to be seen. Meanwhile, in my retirement I have discovered the joys of blogs like this one and Heavenfield, but you are right that they do not lend themselves to extended expositions of ideas. I think epublishing is the only answer, however much I still love to hold a real book in my hand and turn the pages. My Kindle is just not the same!
Erin
March 22, 2012
I am getting ready to teach an archaeology of gender course for the first time and I was hunting for an appropriate textbook. I actually contemplated using Ancient Bodies, but when I searched around the Thames and Hudson site, I couldn’t find any way to request a review copy. I have no time just now – I am swamped. So, got review copies of other texts from other companies and ended up going with one of those this time.
Last week though, I bit the bullet and decided to order a copy of yours for myself and placed an Amazon order. I may use the textbook next time I teach this course, if it looks workable.
Just thought you might like to know what the barrier was for at least one person teaching the topic.
Rosemary Joyce
March 25, 2012
Erin, thanks for letting me know this. I will mention it to the editor when I see him at SAA. I have been frustrated by the website; at first, I couldn’t find the book at all, because when it was first published it was not linked to archaeology.
The weird thing, though, is that I hear from people using it in teaching all the time. Which is why I wonder about what expectations the press had that I did not share. I feel like the book is doing precisely what I hoped– and while like everyone I would love to see it moving out widely in the world, I cannot help but come back to a conviction that maybe scholars and presses are moving in radically different directions. I get invitations nearly monthly to contribute to projects that are compendia of short pieces by dozens of authors, handbooks, encyclopedias, dictionaries… these seem to be what are becoming the publishable works. And yet they are way too expensive to ever ask students to buy.
I hope you do use the book and that it works for you. I intended it for women’s and gender studies– where ideas about women’s past and past sexualities are most removed from archaeological research. So the book is organized around major concepts in gender studies. I thought that most archaeologists would keep using one of the existing books already in use. But I am very happy that archaeologists are using it as well.
Erin
May 14, 2012
Hi Rosemary,
I thought I’d let you know that in the future I very likely will use this book. I teach classes that are open to non-majors and usually find that up to 50% of my students have no archaeology. Your book puts the archaeology into clear English that the non-majors will understand while also connecting it to the gender topics in ways that will be useful to the majors.
As you say, there are other books, but I find that either the prices are prohibitive (e.g. the Handbook of Gender in Archaeology) or the contents are dated (e.g. Reader in Gender Archaeology). Your book, alongside a series of published academic articles would provide me with an excellent reading list, I think. Ah well. Next year! It came to me too late for this year.
Cheers,
Erin
Rosemary Joyce
May 14, 2012
Dear Erin,
Thanks for the note! it is cheering to hear the positive feedback about the actual writing, which of course is the one thing I actually could control.
I also wanted to say that I conveyed your experience in not being able to find out how to get an examination copy to my editor. No way to tell if that will affect the people who do web design, but the message was moved on…
Rosemary
Michelle Ziegler
March 22, 2012
This is exactly the problem I worry about with my history and science of the plague project. Who will be its audience? Will it bridge the gap between science and humanities folks or fall flat in between?
Rosemary Joyce
March 25, 2012
Jay David Bolter, a classicist who developed approaches to hypertext, wrote about the challenge of writing a book that contains within its covers materials that readers do not expect to go together. On the one hand, with the internet, we have much easier access across disciplinary lines; but then there are experiences like the one Erin reports above, where the website does not imagine your needs.
Interesting and original work may well have to be crafted in new ways, with small communities of supporters enlisted first through things like blogs…