A safe and supportive forum for philosophers.
Owned & Moderated by Marcus Arvan (University of Tampa)
Contact: marvan@ut.edu
Blog mission & moderation policy
A reader writes in by email: “Do you know of presses that publish SHORT philosophy books (e.g., 40k-60k words)?”
I know Routledge publishes books in that range (in their Focus series), but I don’t know about other presses. Do any readers have helpful insights to share?
Cambridge Elements are closer to 20k words, but they don’t have a series for each of the major areas in philosophy, so you may be out of luck if your series doesn’t exist yet. I haven’t been able to find anyone to contact about establishing a new one.
I’ll jump in and ask: what’s not short? What’s the standard length? Are there hard boundaries?
Cambridge University Press has a series, Cambridge Elements, that are books of approximately 30,000 words (compared to a typical monograph of 90,000 words). I do not know for sure, but you may have to be invited to write one. I have (i) read a few of them, and (ii) refereed one. I find them a bit frustrating. The ones I have read generally don’t have a clear audience. They are too short to be a real substantive contribution to a debate, but too long to deal with a single narrow topic (as a paper does).
So, ask yourself, what is the point is trying to write a short book, rather than a series of articles, or a long monograph? Who is your audience? (indeed, if you try to publish a monograph with a good press, you have to answer that question anyway).
I’m the senior acquiring editor for Lever Press (https://www.leverpress.org/), an open access publisher funded by a consortium of c. 50 universities across the US, UK, and EU (we’re diamond OA, meaning no charge to authors or readers), and I’m always open to shorter books, including philosophy. I actually just put a philosophy book on theories of apprehension under contract, also a short book under 60k.
Springer Briefs may be another option.
Leave a Reply