Authors

Our primary concern when publishing a work is its quality. Other considerations include the publication’s potential audience, our own expertise, the availability of comparable works, and its relation to our existing series and publications. We strongly believe that institutional funding and personal wealth are poor guides to academic rigour. We do not rely on charging authors to publish their own work, and only ask for open access publication or subvention grants (often called APCs or BPCs) when, and only when, the author has access to institutionally supported funding. If we collect such a fee then the author’s work, in addition to being free online, is also free to download in all electronic formats. Whether an author has access to such funding is not a factor when deciding whether we accept a submission.

Most of our publications are included in one of our series, and we are especially interested in proposals for works which seek to explore the themes and issues encompassed by them. However, if you have a manuscript that doesn’t seem to fit one of our existing series we are also happy to publish stand-alone titles. See our series page for more details.

You can find our book proposal form here or simply contact us directly here.

All of Kısmet’s titles are published online using Creative Commons (CC) licences, using either:

• Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
• Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Both licences allow others to copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work. However, they ensure that you must be given full credit. Your work will be freely available to anyone with internet access from the day it is published.

We also ensure that print copies of your work are available to purchase for at least ten years. In return, we ask our authors to grant us the exclusive right to publish their work. We do not, however, ask you to sign over the copyright to your work.

In principle, so long as the length is justified by the content we’re happy to publish works of any length – from short booklets of 20,000 to 30,000 words to multi-volume studies.

Author royalties still remain a murky and ill-defined aspect of the publishing world. We pay our authors a fair, transparent, and fixed percentage of sales profits from every sale of their work. All royalties are paid as such:

• 15% of the sales profit from all book (and e-book) sales (e.g. sales revenue – printing/retail costs) go the author(s)/editor(s)/translator(s).

All royalties are paid annually and the author will also receive a detailed report about document views, downloads, and book sales, assuming that more than £5 is owed.

Authors may instead opt to waive their royalties to allow all downloadable versions of the work to be freely available on our website. This approach may be especially appropriate to edited volumes and other multi-author works. As a social enterprise, authors can rest assured that any profits from physical book sales will either be re-invested in the Press or donated to charity.

Ethos

Kısmet Press is, fundamentally, an open access press. We believe that both academia and wider society benefit from making high quality research freely available to all. We therefore welcome the general shift towards open access publishing. However, we are extremely wary of the emerging tendency to front-load expenses by collecting author processing charges (APCs) as a means of financing these changes. While APCs remove many of the limitations placed on readers by existing publishing models, they replace these with new limitations imposed on authors and institutions; previously it was difficult for readers to gain access to academic works, it is now becoming difficult for authors to publish them at all. Academic publishers are increasingly adopting a model whereby only authors with institutional funding or significant personal wealth will be able to publish their work. This places severe restrictions upon who and what can be published. For this reason, we do not require that our authors pay APCs. Instead we have elected to adopt a tiered access model, whereby all of our publications are made freely available online but those publications supported by APCs are also freely available to download and available in print copies at a reduced retail price.

Our Tiered Access Charges

We recognise the increasing ubiquity of APCs. Individual scholars, research projects, and academic departments are frequently required to publish in open access publications by a growing number of funding bodies, and are provided with the funds to do so. Access to these funds, however, is extremely competitive and this greatly limits the publication of research, especially by early career academics and by people who are employed by less affluent institutions. We strongly believe that institutional funding and personal wealth are poor guides to academic rigour. With that in mind, we will only charge our tiered access fee where an author has access to funding specifically allocated to cover the costs of open access publication. The decision to publish is strictly an editorial decision and has no bearing on the whether or not a fee has been collected.

Our fees include all our usual services – editing, proofreading, cover design, global distribution, and marketing, etc. – but we are also able to offer some additional services, as required. Downloadable electronic versions are freely available to download from our site; usually a work can only be accessed directly on website, with readers paying to download electronic formats such as .mobi and .pdf. We can also provide discounts on print copies of the work – either universally or for a limited number of individuals – and provide free copies of the books to the author(s) and associated individuals and institutions.

If you are interested in funding your publication through a tiered access fee (APC), please contact us.

Every author is assigned a commissioning editor who is responsible for their work throughout the entire publication process; they oversee the submission of the manuscript, the peer-review process, editing, proofreading, layout, typesetting, and cover design; everything you would expect from an academic press. This relationship is one of our key strengths, allowing our authors a single point of contact throughout the entire process.

Most of our publications go through the same basic stages of publication, which are outlined below. But we understand that every publication is different, and we work with our authors to find the best way to write, publish, and share their work, for example by using collaborative writing tools or embedding hyperlinks, videos, music, images and interactive elements into the electronic edition of the work.

Timescales and processes

• Submit your book proposal: Either by using our submission form or by email.
• Be assigned a commissioning editor: Once you’ve submitted your book proposal you will be assigned a commissioning editor who will manage the entire publication process. They will be your primary point of contact throughout the entire process. In some circumstances we may assign an author two commissioning editors.

• Initial response: You can expect to hear from your commissioning editor within a week of submitting your book proposal or manuscript. At this point they will merely acknowledge your submission and, where necessary, clarify aspects of your proposal or request additional information.

• Preliminary decision: We aim to let you know whether your proposal has been accepted as soon as possible, but this can take three/four months or more. The commissioning editor is ultimately responsible for making this decision, but works closely with the series editor, advisory board, and other partners. In most cases we ask two specialists to review your proposal. Our primary concern when publishing a work is its quality. But we must also consider the publication’s potential audience, our own expertise, the availability of comparable works, and how well it fits with our existing series, publications, and long term vision for the press.

• Letter of Intent agreement: If we accept your proposal, we’ll put together Letter of Intent. This is a moral, rather than a legal agreement. It simply expresses the intention of both parties to publish your work, details what you would like to publish and the expected publication schedule. Once the Letter of Intent is signed, we’ll usually begin advertising it and begin the preparatory work for the volume (cover design, creating a webpage, etc.)

• Manuscript submission and License to Publish: Once we’ve received the final draft of your manuscript the commissioning editor will review the work, judging it against the original description included with the Letter of Intent. We request academic peer-reviews at this stage. This can take two to three months, sometimes more depending on the length of the work and the reviewers’ circumstances. Assuming that the commissioning editor is satisfied that the work is suitable for publication, we’ll offer you a contract (License to Publish) summarising your work, the publication process and schedule, and explaining both parties’ obligations and the author’s remuneration. At this point your commissioning editor will begin finalising the details of how you would like to publish your work, although this is something we ask you to think about from the outset. This includes details such as cover design and layout as well as indexing terms. However, authors are encouraged to think outside the box and beyond the constraints of current publishing practices. Would you like to share the datasets you used for your analysis through our website? Would you be interested in opening up your work for discussion online, perhaps even before you have completed the final draft?

• Copy-editing: Every work is professionally copy-edited, with a primary and secondary copy editor. The time required varies according the length and nature of the work, but please allow a minimum of three to four weeks for copy-editing – some works will take significantly longer and it is not unusual for the copy editor and author to exchange the manuscript multiple times during the copy-editing process. Authors will always be given the opportunity to review the changes to their work and make any final changes of their own after the main copy-edit is complete. The commissioning editor then forwards the manuscript to the graphic designer and typesetter, who prepare it for publication online and in print. This will usually be completed within four weeks. The proofs will then be proofread by the author and a proofreader, until all are satisfied that the work is ready for publication.

• • Finalising the volume: The graphic designer finalises the work, incorporating any digital features into the electronic versions. The digital version is uploaded to our website along with any supplementary material and the print version is forwarded to the printers.

• Publication and marketing: Please bear in mind that there is likely to be a delay between the volume being finalised and being formally published.