The University of Michigan, one of the Big Ten universities, made news in 2003, when affirmative action cases involving both the undergraduate division and the law school were decided by the Supreme Court. Now the University of Michigan Press, which hasn't registered among the Big Ten of university press publishing, is looking to make its mark, taking a cue from its parent institution in hopes of expanding both the press's mission—and its sales.
Philip Pochoda, who took the press's helm in 2001, arrived with the idea that the press should strive for the "same outreach and involvement on public issues books" that the university does in its actions. To that end, Pochoda has been developing a trade list that "we think really contributes to public debate, public dialogue, especially as other media seem to have abandoned public debate of critical issues." Lead titles due out this spring include a scrappy young journalist's firsthand account of Baghdad during the recent war; a controversial proposal for a one-state solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict; and The Cedarville Conspiracy, a narrative of the sinking of a freighter and its crew on Lake Huron and corporate malfeasance by U.S. Steel—a book that nicely blends the press's traditional mission of publishing regional history with broader issues of corporate ethics and a fashionable waterborne disaster tale.
When Pochoda took over, the press was deeply in the red, a victim of the forces affecting a wide swath of university presses: dwindling library budgets and, consequently, dwindling sales of academic monographs. This paradigm was particularly hard on the University of Michigan, Pochoda said, since the press had "a very restricted diet of scholarly monographs." Pochoda's turnaround plan calls for 40% to 50% of the press's titles to be trade, and he expects to generate well more than 50% of sales from the trade line.
Turning the focus to trade books is a task Pochoda is well suited for: before he headed the University Press of New England from 1994 to 2001, he was v-p, publisher and editor-in-chief of Prentice Hall Press and, before that, held editorial spots at Doubleday. Pochoda's trade background also makes him good with a "handle": David Enders, the free-spirited and, the press believes, highly promotable author of Baghdad Bulletin, is being called "the Hunter Thompson of this war."
Pochoda expects the press to be in the black in two to three years, thanks to growing trade sales. Sheila O'Connor's novel Where No Gods Came, a winner of the Michigan Literary Fiction Award instituted by Pochoda with Michigan's MFA program, has a total of 13,000 copies in print in cloth and paper, while Jerusalem Besieged, Eric H. Cline's substantial history of war in the holy city released last fall, now has 6,000 copies in print. To support the move into the trade market, Pochoda has beefed up the marketing department with three new staffers (a 50% increase) and more appealing designs for the catalogue and for the books themselves.
The university is still funding the press, though "at a reduced level," and the administration expects the press to become largely self-sustaining over the next few years.
