September, 2023 Research Update

Amici!  It is now October!

I am sorry this is coming out a bit late! As seemingly happens every year, I underestimate the impact that job season will have on my writing time and then act surprised when my schedules fall apart in September.  Every year.

In any event, I have good news, so I won't bury the good news: the book project has been approved for a contract by the editorial board at Oxford University Press.

Drawing up the final legal documents and getting them signs and such may take another week or two (apparently something of a backlog at OUP for this), but the editorial board was the last real hurdle and we may now say the book is under contract.  The final delivery date for the manuscript is January 1, 2025.  This process is slow, so don't expect the book to come out any time before late 2025 or even 2026.

Of course in a sense this means my work has only just begun.  The remaining chapters need to be written and the existing chapters revised to meet the changes I said I'd make in my response to the reviewers.  Still, getting to this point means we've effectively locked in a press (assuming I can get everything done on time) and in this case it is probably the most prestigious possible press we could have gotten (on par with Cambridge University Press and perhaps Harvard University Press, though HUP is less prominent than OUP and CUP in Classics).

And it arrives just in time, as I am sending applications for this season's jobs out now and so can include the fact that the book is under contract in those applications.  My hope of course is that this sort of thing will draw fresh attention to my applications.  In theory, after all, what hiring committees at research-oriented universities (like the large public R1s) are supposed to be doing is sniffing out the sort of scholars who might write important books published in prestigious presses.  History is a 'book field,' which is to say that professional prestige and advancement are more dependent on writing books (particularly single-author 'monographs') than articles, though articles matter; this is in contrast to many STEM fields which are 'article fields' where peer-reviewed articles presenting research are more important and one may never be expected to write at book length at all.

Consequently, one would think that actually demonstrating the ability to do the thing that committees are supposed to be looking for the potential and promise of ought to attract some positive attention, though at this point I am so fiercely jaded about the decisions hiring committees sometimes make and the dismal odds of the history job market generally that I am keeping any optimism firmly in check.  I do, after all, know a colleague who was only hired after his book - with Cambridge University Press - was actually in print.  Given that this is generally the chief hurdle for achieving tenure (5-ish years into an appointment), it strikes me as absurd that some candidates evidently have to get the book under contract or even out in the world in order to even get proper consideration in these searches.

In any case, the terms of the contract are going to be broadly typical.  Contrary to the popular assumption, academics almost never make money off of their books and I suspect this to be no exception.  While I get an 'advance,' it is honestly unlikely to cover the cost of acquiring photo licenses and commissioning the maps, costs which fall to the author for academic books.  Fortunately, I have a source of research funding to cover these costs: you guys.  So thank you all for that.  Alas, I don't get anywhere near enough 'author copies' (free copies of the final book authors get to give to family, friends, etc.) to hand those out to all of you, but assuming the final book is priced for mortals, I might try to talk OUP marketing into a patron discount as a kind of promotion, when we get to that point (which will be a while yet!).

Book advances, in turn, are advances, that is they are subtracted from any subsequent royalties on the book and authors often earn just a few pennies for every dollar you might spend on the book.  So once again I want to offer a hearty thank you to all of you for making it financially possible for me to do this kind of work.  I really could not do any of this without you all.

(And yes, I am going to put a recognition of all of your support in the acknowledgements.  I doubt the publisher will let me put in a full patron list, but there will be something.)

In terms of upcoming work, my hope on the blog is to finish out our series on the Roman Republic this month and then at last get to the ancient colonization ACOUP Senate topic, which I will freely admit has been terribly long overdo.  I also plan to do at least one refer ad senatum post soonish and will probably throw up an open thread to solicit questions from the Senate in the next week or two (along with the ones I already have jotted down).

Finally, I want to note some of my plans for actually getting the book done and how they fit with the blog and such.  My current plan is to try to get everything done with no interruptions to the blog's flow, but I recognize that might be hard to do and the manuscript delivery date for the final book is quite firm.  Consequently, I plan to take stock at the start of summer and if necessary put the blog on a temporary hiatus while I catch up if I must.  This would become very likely if I was offered a job that required me to move (which is all but one of them this cycle), since I would need to move house while still keeping to my schedule.

If I do have to hiatus the blog, my plan is to pause the Patreon.  This is a feature I've not used yet, but apparently lets me pause everyone's payments while retaining you all at your current levels, so that when the blog resumes, I can unpause and we're all still right where we were.  I may also try to post snippets of the project again like I did last time (I think I can still do that while paused), but obviously that will depend on the publisher's permission, since from this point forward it is legally their book as much as mine.  Naturally if it looks like that's going to happen, I'll communicate more as to exactly what I am going to do.

I want to close out with a question: I've used this space in the past to write brief explainers on various aspects of history, classics and academic.  Do y'all have any burning questions about how this or that element of academic life works that you want answered?