4 Things That Surprised me About Self-Publishing an Academic Book

Joshua Gans:

Last year, I wrote a book about scholarly publishing that I knew would not fit well into traditional publishing models. It wasn’t one of those books that claimed the whole traditional publishing system was broken and advocated dumping publishers altogether. Instead, my book was motivated by a distinct, albeit related, concern: that in the scholarly world, journal publishers had too much market power and that academics, despite the best of their intentions, had been mostly unable to do anything about it. Academics had tried boycotts, forming their own journals, and lobbying governments, but the power and profits of the big publishers were undaunted.

The traditional publishing path has worked for me