In a recently published article on Cambridge Scholars Publishing (CSP), NSR focused on the beginnings of the UK-based press, its fascinating history, as well as its productive present. The second part of the feature on CSP hears directly from CSP’s Chief Executive and co-owner, Graeme Nicol, an engineer, publisher, cyclist, and coffee enthusiast. In this interview with NSR, Nicol explains one of the unexpected strategies that CSP uses: an in-house print and fulfillment operation called ‘Print on Time.’

What’s your background, and how did you come to CSP?

I’m neither a career academic nor a career publisher. I’m an engineer and businessperson. We met the founder of Cambridge Scholars in 2011; he was looking to move away from the UK, and to sell the business; we were looking for a business to buy and run. And as an engineer, I saw a lot of interesting and familiar things – a process flow, inventory management, hundreds of different stock lines. And some interesting and unfamiliar things – competition for supply, for example, and the phenomenon of a supplier (an author) also being an influencer or director of consumption (as a teacher or researcher, recommending a book to students). So, it’s not a conventional, linear supply chain; it has a circularity to it. And you don’t just market down the chain, to customers – you market up the chain, to suppliers. I found that fascinating.

Someone with no publishing experience leading a publishing business? That’s quite unusual.

I’m a fast learner. And because I am not an industry insider, I am able to observe and question some of the norms of the industry, maybe more easily than people who have been schooled within publishing and academia. For example, one of the things I have observed, and learned, is that academic publishing seems to champion rejection rates, and exclusivity. This seemed odd, and a bit archaic. I know that is particularly true for journal publishers, but it’s there in the book industry too. And I have a few problems with it, as an approach.

Firstly, although CSP has the same origin city as Cambridge University Press, we are not and never will be Cambridge University Press! They have nearly 500 years of history behind them – they were founded in the reign of Henry VIII, for goodness sake! Same with OUP, same with Elsevier, same with Routledge (although they are ‘only’ a couple of hundred years old). So if you are someone who wants to publish with a high-prestige publisher out of a medieval university or backed by a vast multinational corporation…a small North of England book publisher founded in 2001 is not going to be able to persuade you. So, there is no point in trying to compete in the exclusivity field. That would just be bad business.

Our aim is to publish as many decent titles as we can. And we publish a lot, for our size – more than 700 books in 2018 and 2019. And, importantly, we do that without subsidy, without advertising, and without getting authors to pay to publish.

Also, competing on rejection rates strikes me as a bad philosophy, as well as a bad strategy. If my policy is to reject 50% of proposals submitted, and I get one from Harvard and a second from Hyderabad, which one are we going to reject? And what if they are both ok to publish? Well, if we are looking to keep rejections high, that doesn’t really matter – we just publish the higher-prestige one.

I don’t think that is ok. You get an inbuilt systemic bias which excludes people for who they are. 100 years ago, that might have excluded women, or non-white people. Today, it still excludes people who are decent scholars, with something to say, just because of their origin. But, despite any moral issues, I have a business to run, and wages to pay. So, the question becomes – yes, that’s all well and good, but can you make a profit from the title from Hyderabad? And will it make as much as the title from Harvard?

Because we run a pretty efficient operation – that’s the engineer in me again – we will, normally, at least cover the costs of publishing a book. Will one title earn more than the other? I don’t know. But also, I don’t really care. If a book proposal looks like it is saying something worthwhile and interesting, it’s up to us to figure out how to sell enough to cover its costs. We don’t have a profit target for our books. We know that, when you put the whole portfolio together, we earn more than we spend. If a title makes a marginal contribution to that, great.

That’s all a long way of saying – measuring yourself by how many you reject, and trying to build prestige and reputation that way, makes no sense for us. We are never going to be Cambridge University Press. Our aim is to publish as many decent titles as we can. And we publish a lot, for our size – more than 700 books in 2018 and 2019. And, importantly, we do that without subsidy, without advertising, and without getting authors to pay to publish.

How do you go about commissioning for new titles?

We have a backlist of about 7000 titles, and because many of those are multi-author, or are edited collections, that’s an author database of more than 30,000. We try hard to make publishing with us a good experience, and that gives us referrals. I had a very well-known British author in business and management come to me in the last month, saying – “I was referred to you by X, I have been told you look after authors, and I am in much need of advice.” That is incredibly gratifying. It shows you are doing something right.

We have had a bit of negative publicity on blogs and suchlike in the past, but it is rarely from our actual authors. In fact, a negative comment often gets answered by one of our authors, who says – hang on, I have published with these guys, they are pretty good!

New publishers are assessed for potential ‘predatory’ qualities. How can they retain the trust of scholars who want their books properly reviewed and published?

This is a genuinely difficult issue. In a way, publishing has a very low barrier to entry nowadays. I could write something this morning, post it on Amazon Self-Publishing this afternoon, and I’m a publisher. But how does what I publish get discovered? How does it make its way into the market? And that’s why many new entrant publishers have tried to side-step market discoverability and credibility by saying to authors – we may not be able to make money out of selling your book, so why don’t you pay us to publish your book?

Now, I know there is a whole complex debate running about Open Access (OA), mostly journals, but it’s coming to academic books. So, it’s not as simple as saying if a publisher asks you for money as an author, they are to be avoided. So let me say instead: if a publisher asks you for money to publish your book, take a careful look.

At the moment, ‘Gold’ OA – authors pay to make their books OA online – is not on our radar. If OA continues to gather strength in the academic market, it may be something we will look at. But if we do, it will be an option – publish conventionally, or publish OA, and find a way to cover our costs. And I think if you have an option as an author – I can choose to pay for one service, or I can publish for free with a different service – that should reassure people about predatory behavior.

If you are a small or new-entrant publisher operating a compulsory Publishing Charge, you are going to have your motives questioned. My advice would be: don’t do it! Find a way to make it pay, as we do, without publishing charges, or go do something else. If you are an author, look very carefully at any compulsory Publishing Charge.

On your point about ‘properly published’ – well, again, that’s an interesting one. I said before that we aim to include, not exclude. We stay in the realms of academia, and scholarly discourse, which means our reviewers look out for personal reminiscence, political polemic, new scientific or medical theories which are ‘so advanced, no journal will publish them’ (we get a few!), and similar. But, if we get a well-researched book about yak-herding in Siberia or early 20th-century literature set in Dublin that isn’t James Joyce….it will make the cut, even if it looks very minority interest.

And being inclusive means also trying to preserve an author’s voice, as far as we can. We are an English-language publisher, so our books need to be in intelligible English. That’s a given, and if an author really can’t get there after several resubmissions, we insist that he or she retain an approved external proofreader/language editor, and we subsidize the cost of doing that. But we are not looking for a ‘CSP voice’ in our books. The ‘CSP voice’ is the voice, or the many and varied voices, of our authors.

As one of my colleagues often says, ‘high quality’ is a proxy for ‘will sell well’ in a commercial publisher. In that way, we are a bit more like a University Press, where you may indeed get your book on yak herding published, even though it probably won’t sell terribly well. I love that about our business – our portfolio has some wonderfully odd minority-interest research in it, that I think would not have been published elsewhere, without the author having to pay.

Describe your digital strategy. Do you publish e-versions in PDF/epub on a title-by-title basis or are there also plans to develop CSP’s own digital platform?

In 2019 we saw a noticeable shift in demand towards ebooks, really for the first time for us. Our dominant publishing medium was and is our ‘handsome hardback’. But after hovering around 15 percent of revenues for a few years, ebook sales jumped to more than 20 percent. We are seeing an ecosystem develop in trade fiction, with hardback, paperback, Kindle, tablet, audio, all running, plus other models such as ‘social reading’ online book club developments. I suspect the ecosystem might be less varied in academic book publishing, but not necessarily so. I would still confidently expect, if we were talking in ten years’ time, to have a decent proportion of sales in academic hardback.

To date, we have only published in PDF format. We tend to be guided by our friends in the eBook platform business, particularly EBSCO and ProQuest, on license arrangements and formats. We will start to publish in epub form for our eBooks this year. At present, we don’t have any plans to run our own online platform.

Explain the key benefits of the Print on Time system. What inspired its creation and design?

One of my old bosses used to say – if it seems cheaper and more efficient, it doesn’t mean it is cheaper and more efficient. Our internal integration of production, print, and fulfillment is probably the thing that surprises others in the industry the most.

Let me try and give you a short answer. I like to control my processes, and my overhead. One of the things which kills businesses is management overhead. So it seems cheaper and more efficient if someone says – oh, move this part to India, or that part to Bulgaria, labor is much cheaper, you will save a fortune. Then you need someone managing the contract. Then the contract manager needs admin support. Then the top team ends up in meetings half the day to discuss why a service level has not been met, or how to handle an unhappy author.

Print on Time works by doing short-run digital print which makes sure we hold a small stockholding, based on our calculations of how many titles are likely to sell. We direct-supply our US distributors, quicker and much more cost-effectively than an on-the-ground US warehouse could supply. That’s not supposition – we tried it, and we disintermediated it, and it worked. We don’t get stock-outs, or pulped stock, or returns, because we fulfill an order the same day, and get it to the distributor faster than a local warehouse can. That means we don’t have to worry about the intersections in the supply chain – which is where things always go wrong – or have a manager managing those intersections, reporting on them, and having meetings about them. Nothing is ever ‘out of print’. If someone buys a book we haven’t sold a copy of since 2013, we will very likely have one or two on the shelf, and if we don’t, we will print and ship it the next day. We don’t have boxes and boxes of books gathering dust on a shelf that we will never sell. If it’s older or slower-moving, we hold them in ones and twos. If it’s newer and quicker-moving, we measure their movement in weeks, not years. We keep the margins that printers and warehousers take. We don’t tie up cash in stock and watch it sit and depreciate every day.

I said before that I am not tied into the notion that ‘this is publishing, this is how we do things.’ Car manufacture works on just-in-time and has done for years. Supermarkets work on just-in-time. Most of the world does. Publishing tends not to. And, yes, that means we keep jobs here in Newcastle, and it means we can bring a kid in every so often as an apprentice to work in print and fulfillment, and it means we are not printing a truckload of books one day and throwing them away the next.

Would I recommend it? Well, we do provide services to a couple of smaller publishers, and we have spoken about it to some larger ones. I appreciate there are scale issues, and expertise issues. Not everyone could pull it off. So, no, I’m not sure I would recommend that publishers do what we do, but I would be happy to talk to people about how we could help them.

Would you consider CSP’s approaches disruptive to the publishing industry?

No, not really. ‘Disruption’ sounds a bit self-important. One of my former colleagues described what we do as ‘friction-free’, and I like that term. It’s a good engineering term, of course – friction creates inefficiency, and wear and tear. If we can reduce friction, we get a better experience for our authors, our customers, our partners and our staff.

What makes CSP stand out in the crowded and highly competitive academic publishing market?

We are genuinely focused on our authors. We are confident enough about our cost structures and business models that we can give a home to academic authors who might not find one elsewhere, without having to make a ‘business case’. We try to be easy to deal with. We have a small management team and a flat structure, which means we hear feedback quickly and efficiently, and we learn quickly. None of that is rocket science. We aim to avoid complexity and strive for simplicity, and to do our simple things, well.

And what do you do when not working and running CSP?

I have four fabulous kids, who keep my wife and I busy and very happy. I am a keen cyclist and am lucky enough to live in a mountainous region, where I spend a lot of my spare time exploring on my bike – it’s a perfect way to switch off from thoughts, worries, and stresses – allowing me to be completely focused and in the moment.