Why Authors Publish with Lever Press

Lever Press was formed in 2015 as a response to the lack of diamond/platinum OA publishing options among non-profit academic presses. Lever Press was driven by the vision of OA-supporting librarians at liberal arts colleges across the U.S. who, individually, could not financially support a press—but, together, they could fund a press as a consortium. 

Enter Lever Press’s c. 50 supporters from the U.S. and U.K. who, over the past 8 years, have pooled money and given their time (through elected service on the Oversight Committee) to run a groundbreaking, fully operational diamond OA publisher, with production, marketing, and editorial work carried out in partnership with Amherst College Press and Michigan Publishing. 

Between 2015–2021, editorial duties were initially carried out by Amherst College Press under Mark Edington and then Beth Bouloukos and Hannah Brooks-Motl. In January 2022, Editorial duties were taken up by Michigan Publishing under Sean Guynes.

As of August 2024, Lever Press has published 33 books. Our first book, Promissory Notes: On the Literary Conditions of Debt by Robin Truth Goodman, was released in October 2018. Lever Press published 3 books in 2019, 8 books in 2020, 2 books in 2021, 3 books in 2022, and 10 books in 2023. To date, we have published 5 books in 2024 and are on track to publish 8 total this year. Lever Press’s goal is to consistently publish 10-12 books per year—a goal we are very near to reaching. 

How are we reaching our goal of publishing 10-12 books per year?

By expanding our acquisition of books to increase the number of projects at every stage of book preparation (author drafting, peer review, author revision, editorial board consideration, and production). Since 2022, to date, Lever Press has acquired 56 projects at various stages of completion, in addition to 2 new book series (with several more under development).

How have we accomplished an increase in acquisitions? 

Since moving editorial work to Michigan Publishing, Lever Press has had a dedicated acquisitions editor working nearly full-time (80%) on acquisitions (a shift from the 50% effort previously provided by Amherst College Press). The editor at Michigan Publishing has expanded on Lever Press’s successes prior to 2022 by focusing on:

• building subject expertise,
• creating new relationships with authors and new series editors
• developing existing relationships with series editors to enhance their work
• working both online and in person to create awareness of what Lever Press offers to authors and how Lever Press is different from other (especially for-profit) publishers
• working with marketing professionals at Michigan Publishing to rethink how we get our books noticed, resulting in an increase in book reviews, award nominations, and even an award win

So why do authors decide to publish with Lever Press?

A number of factors distinguish Lever Press and help authors make the decision to publish with us, including:

• diamond open access publication
• subject expertise
• pedagogical ethos
• media-rich publication
• author honorarium

Diamond Open Access Publication

When Lever Press was founded, the idea of an open access publisher that would make books available for free to everyone without charging authors (or their institutions) for publication was relatively novel. There was increasing pressure both from OA activists and institutions, such as the European Union, to make more scholarly work freely available to the public, but in 2016 very few academic publishers had embraced the idea or figured out how to make it work financially. The landscape in 2024 is radically different, with many academic publishers (both for- and non-profits) offering OA publishing options. Some of these offer diamond OA publishing, but most of them remain gold—that is, authors are required to pay a subvention for the right to publish OA. In fact, through “corporate capture” (largely of gold OA), OA publishing has ironically become a major source of revenue for publishers like Wiley, Springer Nature, and De Gruyter Brill.

So while the landscape has become increasingly open to OA, few publishers are still offering diamond OA publishing. Moreover, while OA options have expanded, the increased number of gold options remain out of reach for many authors, since gold OA requires funding (usually several thousand dollars). At a time when academic institutions are increasingly subject to funding restrictions, and when an increasing number of scholars are not tenure-track but contingent faculty, fewer and fewer scholars have access to the funds that support the gold OA industry.

Lever Press’s ethical commitment to diamond OA offers an important solution: we publish authors’ work at no cost to them and no cost to readers. Free for everyone with internet access. Moreover, we price our print copies at the most affordable prices we can sustain, so that those who prefer a print copy are more likely to be able to afford to do so. Our authors value the opportunity to publish OA without the worry of being able to financially access the opportunity. In nearly every proposal we receive, the ability to publish OA is central to an author’s decision to work with Lever Press.

In short, authors want their books read and they shouldn’t have to pay for it. Lever Press makes that possible.

Subject Expertise

Authors also choose Lever Press because of our growing areas of subject expertise—or what publishers call their “lists.” Every academic publisher’s reputation is fundamentally based on the reputation of their lists, that is, how scholarly communities assess the value of a publisher’s contribution to their fields of study. With 33 books to our name, Lever Press is just getting started, but already key lists have emerged from our publications:

• media studies, especially film and television
• cultural studies, especially American cultural studies
• Asian studies
• education and pedagogy studies
• literary studies
• musicology
• women’s, gender, and sexuality studies

Behind the scenes, Lever Press’s acquisitions emphasize these areas of scholarship, with authors regularly citing previous publications as reasons they were interested in publishing with us. This is a reflection of (1) our editorial work, (2) our success in developing the best peer-reviewed publications that go through competitive peer review by accomplished scholars in each field (we pay competitive honoraria to our reviewers), (3) our vetting of each project by the Lever Press Editorial Board, composed of professors from funding institutions, and (4) the outreach work of our marketing professionals and our authors themselves, who advocate their books and Lever Press as a publisher.

Pedagogical Ethos

Lever Press’s publications and ethos as a publisher are decidedly interested in books that have classroom and public educational value—an ethos inherited from our founders: liberal arts colleges.

Our commitment to pedagogy and publication education—to books that have value far beyond academic arguments—in this regard is multiple:

• books about the undergraduate classroom, such as 

  • Culture and Content in French: Frameworks for Innovative Curricula
  • Transforming the Authority of the Archive: Undergraduate Pedagogy and Critical Digital Archives

• books about the academy and how to change it, such as:

  • Academic Pipeline Programs: Diversifying Pathways from the Bachelor's to the Professoriate
  • Faculty as Global Learners: Off-Campus Study at Liberal Arts Colleges

• books that can be used in college courses, such as:

  • La Princesse de Clèves by Lafayette: A New Translation and Bilingual Pedagogical Edition for the Digital Age
  • The Politics of India under Modi: An Introduction to India’s Democracy, Economy, and Foreign Policy
  • Sophokles’s Women of Trachis

• books that are both scholarly and appropriate for a general audience, such as:

  • An Asian American Theology of Liberation
  • Casa Pueblo: A Puerto Rican Model of Self-Governance
  • Meaningful Technologies: How Digital Metaphors Change the Way We Think and Live

Authors who propose projects to Lever Press are excited by the ability to publish books that will have an impact beyond their scholar-colleagues, whether in classrooms or among general readers. Lever Press considers the impact of our publications to be both academic and social, and we look to acquire projects that can do both.

Media-Rich Publication

Lever Press books are published on the Fulcrum platform, a digital books platform created by Michigan Publishing that allows our books to be read both in browser (on computers, tablets, phones) and downloaded. Most of our books are available in both EPUB and PDF formats. Digital publication allows Lever Press books to include not only the typical images, but also audiovisual material as well.

Authors are therefore able to create more media-rich projects that use video and audio materials to advance their arguments. Some books, like our edition of the 17th century French novel La Princesse de Clèves, offer even more complex media incorporation, such as an interactive map, the ability to toggle both French and English versions, and an interactive keyword feature. Other books, such as those in our Videographic Books series, rely heavily on audiovisual media.

The Fulcrum platform allows authors to include additional, appendix material on their book’s webpage that does not appear in the book itself. For example, Women Making History: The Revolutionary Feminist Postcard Art of Helaine Victoria Press, creates a digital archive of hundreds of postcards published by Helaine Victoria Press, while other books, such as Culture and Content in French: Frameworks for Innovative Curricula, include non-audiovisual materials in formats like DOC and PDF, such as course syllabi and assignment worksheets.

Authors value the opportunity to include more and richer media content in their publications, as well as to include additional online materials that enhance the value of the project. Authors also value the accessibility options Lever Press and the Fulcrum platform offer, since we require alt-text for images and transcripts for audiovisual material, while also offering authors the option to include additional valuable metadata that can help readers better understand the resources offered by each book.

Author Honorarium

As part of our larger commitment to ethical publishing, Lever Press also offers authors an honorarium for each project published. This is to recognize that writing or editing an academic book is both difficult work and rarely ever financially rewarded. While many presses traditionally offer small royalties on book sales, those royalties rarely amount to much. Royalties also cannot necessarily be guaranteed when a book is OA, since sales might be lower than if published as a non-OA book. There has also been a push among for-profit academic publishers, such as Palgrave Macmillan, to pay honoraria instead of royalties, thus simplifying accounting.

For all of these reasons, Lever Press offers an honorarium of $1000 for each book. This number is higher than the industry standard and well beyond what most academic book authors ever receive in royalties.