New UW Press director plans creative approach to publishing

It’s snowing with joyous abandon on the marsh outside Robert Mandel’s new office. The marsh reeds shake, rattle and roll against a stiff northwest wind. It’s clear that winter is not only coming on, but is here, and with a vengeance.

However, Mandel has his mind on morels, which won’t be hiding in the woods until May. Mushrooms have been good to Mandel and to the Syracuse University Press, which he ran before coming to Madison to direct the University of Wisconsin Press.

“One of the great successes at the Syracuse Press was a field guide to mushrooms. It sold 3,000 copies the first year, and never has been out of print,” he says.

One secret to that success was canny marketing, Mandel says. “We contacted every mycology club in the northeastern United States and Canada.”

Mandel and the Graduate School, which oversees the press, hope for similar publishing coups here. Recent history has been troubled. A $1 million deficit in 1999 resulted in reorganization that cost the press four staff positions. It also concentrated remaining personnel into fewer target areas: regional titles, film studies, Latin American studies, gay and lesbian studies, art history, classics and Holocaust studies. One of Mandel’s first tasks will be to examine how close to the financial mark those targets have come in the last year.

“Everything is up for discussion,” he says. “I’m open to just about anything.”

The 63-year-old press publishes about 45 titles each year (Mandel hopes to raise the number to 60 or so), along with 13 journals. Key to success in this area will be expanding the press’s market niches, so critical to academic publishing houses. Finding financially viable crannies of the book-buying public has become an essential component of the strategy that he hopes to employ to improve the press’s ledger. Possible future niches might be found in field guides to Wisconsin wildflowers, reference books about the state’s native peoples or histories of the railroads.

Product form might prove another point of innovation. Mandel says he will explore the new technologies of publishing on demand, which prints a title only in response to an order for it; and Web publishing, whereby patrons subscribe to online journals or purchase access to an online book.

Academic publishers will need to do something to accommodate changes in the industry, and to reestablish their place in it. Usually charged with publishing titles with scholarly value that commercial houses refuse, academic publishers have seen their primary market, college and university libraries, plunge from 80 percent of their sales to 20 percent. “Once we could count on selling 1,000 copies of a book to libraries,” Mandel says. “Now we’re lucky if it’s 300 copies.”

Cuts in library budgets have driven academic publishers more and more to large commercial booksellers, which do business much differently than libraries. For example, bookstore chains usually order less-expensive paperbacks, but libraries traditionally purchase hardcovers.

Mandel brings solid business sense and background to the UW Press. Until 1993 he owned and operated his own A & M Publishing house, based in Michigan and specializing in general books on Midwest and Great Lakes subjects. Other highlights in his academic publishing career include positions at Prager Publishers in New York, State University of New York Press, Indiana University Press and Wayne State University Press. He also taught European history in Ontario, after receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and his M.A. and B.A. from UW–Madison, studying with the late George Mosse.

Mandel plans to strengthen the relationship between the university and the press to showcase UW–Madison faculty and programs. Mandel is committed to publishing important works of scholarship. To that end, the press, now located off Pflaum Road on Madison’s far east side, will move its offices much closer to campus next July or August.

“I want to be an activist director,” Mandel says. “I want to be involved in making things happen and getting things done. What the staff, university administration and I will be doing in the short term is looking at the most effective ways of doing that.”