Wanted: Editors who can acquire mainstream books, and people with the technological skills to help presses adapt to the changing publishing landscape.
That's the word from several university-press directors who talked recently about hiring trends in their field.
As financial subsidies and sales of scholarly books have declined, university presses are increasingly looking to new technologies and sales of trade books to generate revenue so they can continue to publish monographs.
"It used to be that at university presses people came up through the academic side," says James Clark, director of the University of California Press. "We still have that kind of person, but we also hire from trade publishers. There's more exchange between university and trade publishers these days because we both function more similarly than we did in the past."
Editors with commercial-publishing backgrounds are in great demand, agrees Kate Wittenberg, editor in chief at Columbia University Press.
Not only do university presses want editors with commercial experience, she says, "many of them are deliberately looking for marketing and publicity people with trade-publishing backgrounds, with an understanding that they're going to need this type of background in order to promote books in these types of markets."
Smaller presses, like the University Press of Mississippi, are also getting into the trade-publishing game, and they're raising the stakes.
Seetha Srinivasan, who heads the Mississippi press, says she wants her staff to be more aggressive when it comes to acquiring manuscripts. "We need developmental editors who can take an idea that would be appropriate for publication in trade form and work with an author to fully conceptualize and create a work," she says.
It's a different kind of acquisitions strategy, she says, more like what you'd find in trade publishing. "You're identifying an area, finding people to do it, and then working with them," she explains. "We've always done a little of that, but we have to do more of that kind of nurturing if we're going to have larger trade lists, which we have to do."
Rapid advances in technology, meanwhile, are also shaping the hiring scene. Once viewed by presses mainly as a tool for publishing, technology today is used in diverse ways -- from automating offices and streamlining daily operations to digitizing books, from creating Web pages and data bases to promoting books.
"Everyone is struggling to incorporate technology," says Peter Givler, executive director of the Association of American University Presses. "So there's a need for people, like technology managers, who might not have found jobs in presses before."
Presses that might have had only one or two computer people in the past now have entire computing departments. "It's increasingly common for university presses to have several people in this area, including information-systems managers, Webmasters, and in-house communication people to work on things like data bases," says Kate Douglas Torrey, director of University of North Carolina Press.
Computer specialists aren't the only ones who stand to benefit from the technology explosion at university presses.
The growth of on-line book sellers has created a demand for technologically savvy marketers. "If John Doe has a book that's been published and is on Amazon.com, you need someone not only to run ads about the book in other places and to promote it, but to send the book cover, a chapter, and table of contents to post on the Web," says Marlie Wasserman, director of Rutgers University Press.
There's also a greater need for people with good editorial and technical skills, says Ms. Wittenberg, because technology is breaking down the lines between jobs. "I've found that I have to keep rewriting job descriptions, and, even then, people have to be flexible," she says.
Her press, for example, hired two people -- one editorial and one technical -- to work on Columbia International Affairs Online, an experimental on-line project that brings together books, journals, working papers, and curricular materials on international affairs. The lines between the two jobs have blurred so much that it's now difficult to tell which is the editorial person and which is the technical person, she says.
Ironically, the hardest jobs to fill at university presses are the marketing and technology jobs that are most needed. "It's a great time to get into publishing, especially marketing," says Ms. Wasserman, "but it's hard to find these people because our salaries are not competitive and because the pool outside urban areas is smaller."
Ms. Torrey attributes the shortage of marketers to a different cause. "Everybody in history and English programs thinks they can be an editor, so there's no shortage of applications for editorial positions, but that's not the case in marketing," she says.
Presses outside of urban areas may have trouble recruiting marketers, but they may have the upper hand when it comes to retaining technical people. Ms. Wittenberg says it's harder to keep technical people "if you're in New York or in any major computer hotbed, like California." Her press lost a technical project manager, who went to work for a start-up company in downtown Manhattan after working at the press for a year.
Despite the explosion of technology, university presses aren't cutting their staffs in traditional areas. "Presses have to develop the old as well as the new," says Ms. Wittenberg. "We can't let print staffs dwindle because we're developing on-line products."
