Problems with authors who publish books but not articles

Do you ever get annoyed when reading book-length studies and the author feels justified in ignoring the scholarly literature on the topic? I have found this to be the case with a number of authors. If they would publish in journals, they would be forced to cite other studies on the topic and contextualize their work within the scholarly literature. But because they are publishing a book (and the editors/press don't seem to care), they feel free to write what they like, and other studies of the topic be damned. I think this practice is harmful to scholarship.

Here is a portion of a book review I published a number of years ago. I've anonymized it, since my goal here is not to dump on Dr. X. But it does express my frustrations with this particular book, something I have seen in other book-authors who do not publish journal articles:

I am in agreement with X’s overall goals and approach. This type of revisionist history, in which political explanations are applied to phenomena previously interpreted in particularistic and ideological terms, is welcome. Nevertheless, I am uncomfortable with many of X’ specific arguments, largely because I am unable to assess their strengths and weaknesses. In part this is owing to his style of scholarship. X identifies an important and unresolved issue, summarizes what the primary historical sources say, discusses the pros and cons of alternative interpretations of the data, and then states his preference. His exposition sounds logical and convincing but because he does not cite the relevant secondary literature, one would never know that a given topic is the subject of considerable published scholarship and debate among specialists, many of whom draw on data and methods not presented by X.  Scholars Y and Z, for example, have made fundamental contributions to the topics covered by X, but he does not cite the relevant publications  This failure does not make X’s arguments wrong, but the reader is prevented from evaluating them within the context of contemporary scholarship.

 I am also disappointed by X’s treatment of archaeological data. He presents incorrect dates (which support his interpretations) for several key buildings, including the New Fire temple on Mount Huixachtecatl and the twin-temple pyramids of Tenayuca and Teopanzolco. Contrary to X’s assertions, these latter temples are dated quite firmly to the Early Aztec period (several centuries before the Aztec empire) and thus cannot possibly have had the imperial significance attributed to them by his model. X’s book is an intriguing study with a fresh theoretical approach and many promising interpretations of Aztec history, time and calendars. However, to be assessed properly, X’s interpretations must be debated within the community of scholars working on these issues so that the strength of his arguments can be evaluated. 

Give me a series of journal articles any day. Or, if you write a book, please be scholarly and complete about it, even if it is not subject to peer review.

What books influenced my latest book?

When my book At Home with the Aztecs was published last spring, I had an invitation from an organization called "Connect-A-Book" to contribute to their website. The idea was for authors to list several books that were influential in the writing of their book. It sounded interesting, so I prepared some text. Then the company evidently bombed, and the website is gone (but the Twitter account still exists...). It was fun to identify the influences in my thinking, so I decided to put them here. Most of these show the development of my ideas on households and communities, with less attention to the Mesoamerican archaeological context that of course influences most of what I write about in the book.

First, the book blurb:

The lives of the Aztec people lay buried for five centuries until my excavations in Mexico brought them to light. My wife and I uncovered a remarkable series of prosperous communities composed of families with a high quality of life. At Home with the Aztecs tells three stories: (1) How archaeological fieldwork is conducted in Mexico; (2) What it was like raising our daughters on our digs; and, (3) How I pieced together the information from artifact fragments in ancient trash heaps to create a picture of successful ancient communities that have lessons for us today. In the process, I redefine success, prosperity and resilience in ancient societies, making this book suitable not only for those interested in the Aztecs but in the examination of resilient households and communities across space and time.

My influences:

Berdan, Frances F. and Patricia R. Anawalt (editors)  (1992)  The Codex Mendoza. 4 vols. University of California Press, Berkeley.

My quest to uncover the lives of Aztec commoners began with dissatisfaction with the written sources on the Aztecs. The Codex Mendoza, painted by an Aztec scribe shortly after the Spanish conquest, is one of the very few sources that actually shows commoners. The wedding scene on the cover of my book is from this source. While I got lots of ideas from the Codex Mendoza over the years, it also shows the limitations of the historical record of the Aztecs.

Flannery, Kent V. (editor)  (1976)  The Early Mesoamerican Village. Academic Press, New York.

As one of the founding texts of the “household archaeology” approach, this book first showed me the methods and concepts for using archaeology to uncover the lives and conditions of the common people of the distant past. I got excited when I read this as a new graduate student. But then I had to wait until I finished a boring Ph.D. dissertation before I could put the new ideas into practice. This classic work is a stand-in here for the many other articles and books on household archaeology that soon followed.

Netting, Robert McC.  (1993)  Smallholders, Householders: Farm Families and the Ecology of Intensive, Sustainable Agriculture. Stanford University Press, Stanford.

Understanding past households and communities requires more than excavations, houses, and artifacts. Ecological anthropologist Netting supplies the main conceptual foundation for interpreting Aztec households. These were not serfs or slaves, toiling away on the plantations of nobles. Instead, the residents of the houses I excavated were smallholder farmers who engaged in intensive agricultural practices. Netting’s model of smallholders fit my Aztec villages exactly, and I got lots of insights from this book, especially for my chapter 4 on the quality of life of Aztec households.

Ostrom, Elinor  (1990)  Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press, New York.

Nobel economics laureate (and former ASU colleague) Lin Ostrom showed how local villages can manage resources and survive as successful, resilient communities. This generalizes Netting’s household model to the community level, and it helped me see the connections between ancient Aztec communities and those of the modern world. Papers by Sam Bowles and Herbert Gintis also helped me make this connection. These ideas helped me write chapter 7, on resilient Aztec communities.

Sampson, Robert J.  (2012)  Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Sampson’s study of Chicago neighborhoods reinforced the insights of Netting and Ostrom. Whether or not inner-city neighborhoods were communities in a social sense, Sampson’s approach to analyzing neighborhoods as important social units cemented my views that past and present societies can be compared. Rigorous methods and concepts can move social-science research forward, whether in today’s cities or yesterday’s cities and villages. This book helped convince me that human settlements share key processes across history and the globe. Thus my archaeological study of Aztec communities ties in with research on neighborhoods, communities, and cities today.

Check out the book's website: smithaztecbook.wikispaces.asu.edu/ 

Tweeting my book: At Home with the Aztecs

My popular book, At Home with the Aztecs: An Archaeologist Uncovers their Daily Life, will be released (Routledge) March 3, 2016. This is my first explicitly popular book. That is, it is non-technical, written in a narrative fashion, full of personal stories, and such. I tried to find a commercial trade publisher, but ended up with Routledge when none of the big New York publishers thought it had enough commercial potential. I talk about some of my experiences HERE.

I am floundering a bit on the marketing of the book. I've gotten advice that I need to use social media. So the book has a Facebook page (which I haven't started tinkering with yet...). I need to set up a separate website for the book, though. And now I have jumped into the waters of Twitter. The book has a hashtag (#AtHomeWithAztecs), and I have decided to post at least one tweet a day with something interesting from the book until it is released in March. Check it out. My

Twitter has been somewhat of a disappointment so far. I've dumped on Twitter in this blog before, but I have decided to give it a second chance. I found that my scholarly interests are rather poorly represented in Twitter. Talking to my new colleague, Katie Hinde (a social media star: check out: @Mammals_Suck), it turns out that natural scientists are far more active on Twitter than social scientists. Go figure. In looking for like-minded people on Twitter, I found out that Ancient Cities is a rock band, but not a relevant topic on Twitter. Aztecs on Twitter is mainly about the sports teams from San Diego State. Households and communities are mainly about contemporary community development. Kris Hirst posts a ton of Tweets on current archaeological finds in the news. These are great, but they aren't the kind of targeted scientific topics I was hoping for. The cultural evolution people are pretty active, including Peter Turchin's SESHAT project. This is fine, but it it not really central to my interests (although I am reading Turchin's new book, UltraSociety, right now).

Ups and downs in publishing

This summer has had its ups and downs in my various efforts to publish books and articles. I did get one book sent off to the press, an artifact report from excavations done long ago. But my agent is having trouble finding a commercial publisher for my popular book manuscript. I just received an acceptance on a paper co-authored with my student, Angela Huster, but not too long ago I got my second recent rejection from American Anthropologist ("This is a definitive rejection, without the possibility of revision and resubmission." Wow.). So, what have I learned? Here are a few things.

• If a disciplinary journal is edited by a scholar whose publications have involved policing the boundaries of his or her discipline, then perhaps that is not the best place to send an in-the-face interdisciplinary paper. Both of my rejections from American Anthropologist this year were interdisciplinary papers, each with an explicit message of "anthropology has something to learn from this other body of research." Well, according to some reviewers and the editor, maybe anthropology doesn't have anything to learn from other fields. Chalk up one more personal beef with the American Anthropological Association and the attitudes of many anthropologists (read why I resigned from the American Anthropological Association). My chair recently suggested I apply for the AA editorship, and I almost fell down laughing.
• Latin American Antiquity is off to a great start under the new editorship of Geoff Braswell and María Gutiérrez. My praise is not based on the fact that they accepted our paper, but on two aspects of the review process. First, the reviews were done in under three months. For a "fast" journal these days, that isn't great, but for an archaeology journal, that is a very good turnaround time. Second, the editors didn't let a single cranky and negative review interfere with their decision. Sometimes journal editors play it "safe" and offer a rejection, or a "revise-and-resubmit" on the basis of a single very negative review. But in this case Geoff and María made the right call and accepted the paper. Around 90% of the criticism of the cranky reviewer was based on one procedure we followed, which supposedly invalidated all of our conclusions. But the critique ignored material presented in another section of the paper that obviated the negative implications of that one procedure. So kudos to the editors for not getting hung up with the one cranky review.
• Commercial publishers are looking for the next Jared Diamond. Most of the replies by editors at the big commercial presses (Norton, Random House, Simon & Schuster, etc.) said that my book manuscript looked interesting, but the projected sales figures from the marketing department were not high enough to justify an offer. Aztec households and communities just aren't sexy enough. They'd love a manuscript that shows how archaeology can solve a major social problem today (as in Jared Diamond), or even some straight archaeology about flashy things like tombs and kings, if written with flair, in first-person terms. But household archaeology? Not ready for prime time. But we haven't given up yet.......
• It is disappointing when you gear up for a big fight, which then doesn't happen. Jason Ur, Gary Feinman and I just published a critique of Jane Jacobs's screwey notion that cities preceded domestication and agriculture in prehistory:

Smith, Michael E., Jason Ur and Gary M. Feinman  (2014)  Jane Jacobs’s 'Cities-First' Model and Archaeological Reality. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38(4):1525-1535.

I tell the story of why it was necessary to respond to a crazy model elsewhere (an old blog post, and then a recent post on Wide Urban World). But our paper was written as a critique of an article in the same journal by geographer Peter Taylor, who champions Jacobs's model. Taylor believes in the primacy of theory over evidence. Archaeologists don't REALLY know what happened in the past, and thus, "In such situations of knowledge uncertainty, it is the plausibility of theoretical positions [rather than evidence] that matter’ (p. 425 of Taylor, Peter J.  (2012)  Extraordinary Cities: Early "City-ness" and the Origins of Agriculture and States. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 36(3):415-447.). So we expected to get a reply to our critique from Taylor. The journal editor was looking forward to this, and planned to use the debate to generate publicity, but evidently Taylor never submitted anything. Oh well.

Can a blog be used for serious academic writing?

I'm giving a paper at the SAA in 2011 on this topic. One reason I got into blogs, wikis, and, earlier, construction of my own website, was to explore the Internet as a medium for serious academic scholarship. But although our scholarly lives have been transformed by emails, by online journals, research websites, etc., it seemed to me that blogs had not yet led to serious advances in archaeological scholarship. So when I submitted my SAA abstract my intention was to explore reasons why this was so. I was pretty down on the scholarly potential of the blogosphere (I've wanted to use that word for some time now).

But now I have found a case where a blog has contributed to scholarship in a major way. This isn't in archaeology, but in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of history. Daniel Little is a philosopher of science who has written extensively on the structure of research and explanation in the social sciences. I found his work very helpful in my exploration of mechanism-based explanations in sociology (which provide a model for archaeology). Little has a website called "Understanding Society", and a blog of the same name.

I was reading Little's blog and learning a lot. I started thinking that I might want to cite some of this, but I generally wouldn't want to cite a blog in serious academic writing. I found some of Little's books and papers, and then I found the following description of his latest book, which was published a couple of weeks ago

(the book is: Little, Daniel  (2010)  New Contributions to the Philosophy of History. Springer, New York):

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One aspect of New Contributions is especially novel: the effort I've made to combine an intellectual process of traditional academic research and writing with the work I've been doing for the past three years on this blog, UnderstandingSociety.  I announced in 2007 that "The blog is an experiment in thinking, one idea at a time," and New Contributions is my first effort to test out the viability of that idea.  Most of the chapters in the book began as conference presentations designed to contribute eventually to this new approach to the philosophy of history.  I had a book plan in mind as I wrote these papers and chapters over a ten-year period.  After the book was accepted by the excellent editors of the Springer Methodos series, Daniel Courgeau and Robert Franck, I undertook a major rewriting of the full manuscript; and I realized that I was also writing quite a few posts on various aspects of the philosophy of history in the blog.  So I undertook to integrate a lot of the new material into the manuscript.  In the end, roughly 40 postings have been integrated into New Contributions, which amounts to more than a third of the book. So this is a fairly extended test run to evaluate the notion that it is possible to make significant intellectual progress on a subject through a series of separate blog postings.

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This quote is from a post on Little's blog

So it seems that in this case, serious scholarly blogging has fed into a serious academic book in a significant fashion. I urge you to check out Daniel Little's work, both because it is good scholarship (very relevant to archaeology), and because of his innovative approach to writing and publishing.

Why would publishers reprint outdated textbooks??

I may have been too hasty when I praised Left Coast Press for reprinting some out-of-print archaeology books from Academic Press. While some of these books are still valuable today, I can't see why whey would reprint an out-of-date textbook in Mesoamerican archaeology. Muriel Porter Weaver's The Aztecs, Maya, and their Predecessors went through three editions up through 1993, and it was the standard textbook during its time. But since 1993 the field has expanded greatly, there is an explosion of new materials and interpretations, and our understanding of ancient Mesoamerican has shifted in many ways.

In 2004, Susan Evans published Ancient Mexico and Central America, an authoritative, up-t0-date, and VERY well illstrated textbook (Thames and Hudson). This immediately became the basic textbook in the field, and it has remained so. A second edition appeared in 2008. So who would want to read Weaver's 1993 textbook today? No responsible instructor would assign this book (especially given its price tag, $70).

Well, I guess this isn't as bad as Dover reprinting Spinden's 1922 textbook (Ancient Civilizations of Mexico and Central America) in 1999. You would think that someone at Dover would realize that the field had changed in 77 years. The historical value of Spinden's text is not particularly high, either.

Basically, I have no idea why publishers would reprint outdated textbooks. But then if some publishers will take Wikipedia articles about ancient Egypt, put them into book format, and sell it on Amazon.com, I guess republishing an outdated textbook doesn't sound quite so bad.

How to find a publisher for your book manuscript

It seems that I have had a bunch of requests lately for advice on finding a publisher for academic books in archaeology. In most cases these are young scholars, recent PhDs, and in many cases the book in question is or will be based on a dissertation.

My main advice is to buy and read Beth Luey’s book, Handbook for Academic Authors, Cambridge University Press. The 5^th edition just came out this year (2009), although I still have the 3^rd edition (oops, time to upgrade). This book is essential for academic authors, with all sorts of useful advice. Is your publisher offering a fair deal on royalties? Should I think about writing a textbook? How should I handle nasty reviews from a journal on my brilliant manuscript? What are the pitfalls of trying to publish my dissertation as a book?

My second piece of advice is to talk to your colleagues and mentors about your situation. They will know your work and have a good idea about publishing formats and venues.

Here are some suggestions, based on my own experiences and on Luey’s book.

(1) Think hard about whether your dissertation really needs to be published as a book. Maybe you are better off publishing several good journal articles (that’s what I did).

(2) Spend some time investigating publishers. Luey divides publishers into several groups. Of these, the most relevant for young scholars and rewritten dissertations are:

• University presses (generally the best bet for dissertations)
• Commercial scholarly publishers (there is wide variation here)
• Technical monograph series
• Vanity presses and other rip-off commercial presses. See Nova Publishers here, or perhaps VDM Verlag Dr. Mueller (thanks to Anastasia Tsaliki for this example). For a really, really bad rip-off publisher, see this post.
• 
  

(3) It is often a good idea to talk to an editor from one of the relevant presses, perhaps at a professional meeting or by email. This can give you an idea of what they might be looking for.

(4) Prepare a good prospectus for submission. Each press has slightly different requirements for a prospectus, but most have these components:

• A description of the book, including a table of contents
• Information on the target audience
• A list or discussion of possible competing titles
• Information on the current status of the manuscript and a projected timetable.
• A copy of your CV
• A writing sample
• 
  

If you want to see a less formal description of a book prospectus, see the “Series Description Document” on my web page for the book series, “Ancient Cities of the New World.” Prepare the prospectus in correct format for each relevant publisher, and send it off to as many publishers as you want. In our case, authors communicate with one of the series editors (me, Marilyn Masson, and John Janusek) and submit the prospectus to us. We often suggest some revisions to the author, and then if we think the proposed book is appropriate, we forward it, with our evaluation and recommendation to the press. In most cases, however, you will be submitting the prospectus directly to an acquisitions editor at the press.