Every day, university presses worldwide step up to educate and enlighten, motivate and inspire, support and act.
During University Press Week 2024, we explore the myriad ways our community’s publications and platforms give context to current issues and events, offer solutions to global challenges, and present diverse voices in a broad range of disciplines. It’s not hard to see how the work of these mission-driven publishers helps all to stride forward with purpose.
This week, the University of Illinois Press (UIP) is highlighting exciting content, projects, and initiatives from our journals and books departments that allow our us and our authors to #StepUP. Make sure to check out blog posts from other university presses in the Association of University Presses’ (AUP) UP Week blog tour and browse the #StepUP gallery and reading list here.
We are so excited to introduce a new blog series from acquisitions editor Alison Syring!
Why This Blog
Since I began working at the University of Illinois Press just over seven years ago, and especially since I became an acquiring editor four years ago, I talk to a lot of people. I give presentations about publishing and I talk to many people one-on-one about the publishing process—at conferences, on campus, and on Zoom. Many people have the same questions, and while I don’t anticipate I will ever stop these meetings, I wanted to provide a place where potential authors and those interested in working in scholarly publishing, can go to learn a bit about the process, especially at Illinois. In this blog series, my goal is to reveal parts of the process that scholars may have questions about, as well as parts they might not even know about.
This series will focus on my experience at UIP, because that is where I work now and where I have experience acquiring books. I come from a writing background and am drawn to the quotation from Jacqueline Woodson, who says, “The more specific we are, the more universal something can become.” My hope is that, by reading about what publishing is like specifically at Illinois, scholars will be able to articulate their goals and questions regardless of the press they reach out to.
When possible, I will also incorporate perspectives from my colleagues at Illinois and throughout scholarly publishing. There are also numerous other resources that might be helpful to those interested in these topics, including Rebecca Colesworthy’s column on The Chronicle of Higher Education, Laura Portwood-Stacer’s newsletter at Manuscript Works, and a newsletter and podcast at Ideas on Fire. There are also great Substacks on publishing, including Derek Krissoff at Book Work and Katherine Carroll at The Editorial Ally.
About Me
I am an acquisitions editor at the University of Illinois Press. I have degrees in English literature and history, and an MA and MFA in creative writing. I started in publishing as a production editor and worked for several years as a technical writer. I began at Illinois in Spring 2017 as an intern through the graduate English department, and I was hired as a full-time assistant editor in Summer 2017. I was promoted to editor in Fall 2020.
A Sneak Peek At The First Entry In Alison’s Forthcoming Blog Series
Volume I: What is an acquisitions editor?
Acquisitions (or acquiring) editors live in a liminal space. We are employed by a press, but we spend a lot of time in academia proper, attending conferences, talking to scholars, reading journals, and so on. I probably spend the better part of each week talking to people outside the press, rather than my colleagues inside it. And this is by necessity. A large part of an editor’s role is to translate: we translate each book project to our colleagues at the press, and we translate the book publishing process to each author. We are the in-house advocate for disciplines and book projects, and we are the experts in publishing outside of it.
Acquiring editors specialize in list areas, which loosely map over academic disciplines. For example, I acquire books in history and religion. Within these two areas, I have focused lists in labor, radical studies, migration history, disability history, Illinois and Midwestern history, Mormon studies, and American religious history more broadly, especially new religious movements. For several of these lists, I also have series, which are usually a further concentration of the list area. For example, the Working Class in American History series focuses on labor history in the United States. Some editors may have PhDs, either in their list areas or others, but we are not primarily content editors regardless of our scholarly background.
To best understand what I do as an acquisitions editor, it might be helpful to walk through the acquisitions process from the point at which I encounter a potential book project until I hand over a project to my colleagues in production.
Stay tuned for more from Alison’s blog series!