A team from Ashgate’s Vermont office valiantly participated in Green Up Day (a statewide clean-up) earlier this month. Green Up Day takes place every year on the first Saturday in May, and is organised by Green Up Vermont.
In the photos here they can be seen ‘greening-up’ Burlington bikepath, which is a recreational path for biking and running that goes along Lake Champlain.
Posted by Brenda Sharp, Assistant Editor
The London School of Economics (LSE) Review of Books was launched in April 2012 in a move to reduce the time delay in getting social science books reviewed, with free access for all being of note. The key feature of the LSE Review of Books is the publishing of daily reviews of academic books across the social sciences. Patrick Dunleavy, the General Editor of the LSE Review of Books, is clear that this ‘real time review’ of books provides numerous benefits to publishers, authors, and universities in facilitating the ability to engage with a wider audience, not only within academia but in all areas of civil society. Patrick’s ultimate aim is for publishers to provide a digital version of the text in advance of publication in order for the review to be published on the same day as the book.
Following on from the success of the initiative the LSE Review of Books Awards event was held on Thursday 16th May in the Shaw Library situated in the Old Building at the LSE. The Awards were a thank you to the many reviewers who have written for the Review of Books, and also provided an arena for the many people present to talk about books and publishing and to enjoy the delicious lunch provided by the University. There were around fifty people in attendance including publishers, academics, and reviewers and, after a short speech by criminal law expert Professor Nicola Lacey from the University of Oxford, the Awards Ceremony was underway.
Each award was sponsored by a publisher and included Princeton University Press, Palgrave MacMillan, Routledge, and Polity Press. The Ashgate Prize for Most-Read Review in Architecture and Urban Studies was won by Ben Campkin for his review of ‘City, Street and Citizen’ by Suzanne Hall published by Routledge. Speaking to Suzanne, she was immensely pleased to have a review of her book published so quickly in an accessible and free format. As we are very aware reviews of academic books are often sited within journals which, in most cases, require payment and may be published many months after publication. The future for academic publishing in this digital age is certainly a challenge but it may just be that real time reviews support academic publishers to exchange knowledge and scholarship for the twenty first century.
Posted by Richard Dowling, Sales Director
Ashgate attended the Kuala Lumpur Book Fair this year for the 9th year in a row. The Fair runs for nine days, and it’s an opportunity for us to meet with our library customers and showcase our new books. The sales reps from the library suppliers we work with bring librarians to our stand to look at the books we have on display and at our catalogues, and to place orders.
We took around 390 books this year which is on a par with previous years. Gower Business & Management titles proved the most popular overall, with Politics coming in second and then Islamic Studies third. Catalogues are still important and around 10% of the total orders were for titles that were not on display.
Popular titles at the Fair:
The Ashgate Research Companion to International Trade Policy (Edited by Kenneth Heydon and Stephen Woolcock)
Energy Access, Poverty, and Development (Benjamin K. Sovacool and Ira Martina Drupady)
Entrepreneurship and Sustainability (Edited by Daphne Halkias and Paul W. Thurman)
Islam and Sustainable Development (Odeh Rashed Al Jayyousi)
Personalising Library Services in Higher Education (Edited by Andy Priestner and Elizabeth Tilley)
Qualitative Research Skills for Social Work (Malcolm Carey)
University Libraries and Space in the Digital World (Edited by Graham Matthews and Graham Walton)
We have been experimenting with our online catalogues and looking forward to 2013 by adding some extra interactive features.
Do you currently use our online catalogues?
Do you find them user-friendly?
How can we improve them?
Would you be willing to kindly spare a few minutes of your time to look at our latest Modern History catalogue and then answer some quick survey questions?
The survey (with 8 short questions) is here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/96FN5DZ.
Thank you!
How to Work with a Scholarly Press: Submitting a Proposal
Posted by Whitney Feininger, Assistant Editor, Literary Studies
Think of a proposal as a formal introduction of you and your scholarly work to Ashgate.
Most proposals are delivered to us by email and are evaluated by the relevant commissioning editor. After reviewing it, the commissioning editor will make a decision about whether or not your project is suitable for Ashgate and about sending out materials for review. Our proposal guidelines and commissioning editors’ email addresses are listed on our website.
As commissioning editors receive quite a bit of correspondence from authors, the more well-organized and thorough a proposal you submit, the more attention and serious consideration it is likely to receive. Here are some qualities of a good proposal, contributed by our commissioning staff, to help you craft the best possible submission.
-If you are submitting your proposal by email, it is a good idea to put your name, the book’s title, and ‘proposal’ in the subject line. This will help your proposal stand out from the myriad of emails commissioning editors receive.
-Include a table of contents as well as a contents list that includes a short abstract of each chapter.
-Submit the proposal as a Word document and not as a .pdf. Commissioning editors need to transfer information from the proposal into our internal database and this is difficult when working with a .pdf.
-Include a copy of your CV and full contact details (email, mailing address, and phone #).
-If you are proposing an edited collection, provide contributor biographies.
-Don’t forget the nuts and bolts: the proposed number of illustrations or tables and the estimated word count.
-Provide a brief abstract or “elevator pitch” for your book – be able to convey what your book is about, its originality, and its place within existing literature in well under 500 words.
This is the first post in a new occasional series on our blog: “How to Work with a Scholarly Press”
These posts will feature different aspects of the publishing process and advice from our commissioning, desk editorial, and marketing staff. Our hope is to educate authors about practical issues on an every day basis as well as empower authors to deliver a better and more complete manuscript and book proposal and ensure an effective and smooth process.
We provide information on newly published titles in a number of different ways, so that you can receive the information you need in the form that you prefer. Here are the options:
Email updates: You can sign up to receive email updates from us in the subject area of your choice. Email updates are sent out once a month (we don’t want to overload your email inbox!) and they include information about every new title we publish in your chosen subject, as well as news about forthcoming conferences, new series and prizes won by Ashgate authors and books. To sign up go to www.ashgate.com/updates.
Follow our subject twitter feeds: we run twitter feeds for each of the main subject areas that we publish in:
Leaflets and catalogues: if you would like to receive printed leaflets and catalogues, go to the catalogue sign up page on our website.
We now send out a monthly new titles email update covering all the different subject areas we publish in. This has been introduced for librarians, but anyone who would like to receive it can subscribe!
If you would like to receive this new update, please visit the librarians page on our website and click on the button.
Don’t forget that we also have monthly email updates for individual subjects areas, which are a good way of keeping up to date with new titles in your field of interest, as well as information on conferences we are attending (where you will be able to browse a selection of books).
Why not sign up? It’s free… and you can unsubscribe at any time.
Ashgate’s Sales Director Richard Dowling visited India last month, for the New Delhi Book Fair. The fair is spread over 12 exhibition halls, with 1300 publishers in attendance (up 400 from the previous fair).
Ashgate is represented in India by Surit Mitra of Maya Publishers, and the Maya stand had around 200 Ashgate books on display at the fair, as well as a wide range of our catalogues.
The fair is a popular event for librarians. A large number attend, and the fair gives them an opportunity to look at the books on display, and make lists of titles to order later on. Having a presence at the fair is a good way for us to sell good numbers of books into the Indian market.
Surit Mitra (Maya), Sanjog Kapoor (Segment books) and Richard Dowling (Ashgate)
As Ashgate’s agent in India, Surit works closely with Indian library suppliers, helping us to sell our books into a wide range of academic and specialist libraries.
Sales of Ashgate books in India are growing (along with the Indian economy), with the demand for titles in social science subject areas in particular becoming stronger.
Posted by Claire Percy, Senior Marketing Executive
The Halloween activities of pumpkin carving, trick-or-treating and fancy dress parties are well-known to most of us in Europe, North America and Canada, as well as parts of Asia. In Europe in particular, Halloween is the perfect excuse for some light relief before the onset of Winter, but how many of us know the origins of Halloween?
It’s debatable, but many historians believe it dates back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, when the Celts celebrated their new year on 1st November. They believed that on the night before new year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead merged, so on 31st October they celebrated Samhain when the ghosts of the dead were able to return.
The superstitious Celts, reliant on nature’s mercy to enable them to feed their families, were understandably superstitious, believing that ghosts allowed the Celtic Priests or Druids to predict the future, which if favourable would have comforted them through the dark Winter months. As we prepare to enjoy Halloween, considering whether to dress as witch or zombie (and will anyone notice the difference from a normal day), we know that the Celts dressed up for real and for completely different reasons, wearing animal masks and costumes to ward off evil spirits, sacrificing their crops and animals to the Pagan Gods in the hope their families would live to see the Spring.
Apart from a shared date, it’s difficult to imagine today’s Halloween has anything in common with Samhain. I’m sure there are other similarities, but I could find just one common thread. It was pagan tradition to leave food and drink outside to appease spirits and discourage them from coming in for food. This lead to the Christian tradition of beggars going to doors to ask for ‘All-Souls Cakes’ in return for which the beggar promised to pray for the household’s dead. As with Trick-or-Treating, if cakes weren’t forthcoming, vandalism was often the result.
For historians and theologians, the origins of Halloween are fascinating and sometimes emotive. There’s much more to know about the history of Halloween and its traditions that almost certainly originated with the Celts, possibly with the Romans and later, its part in Catholic tradition; about how it was taken by immigrants to North America and the fact that it’s still revered or even banned in some parts of the world; and also how we went from All Hallows Day to Halloween. Historians of science may be interested to know that it was at some point believed that the laws of space and time were temporarily suspended, allowing the spirit world to intermingle with the living!
To coincide with 31st October, Ashgate has published a new Death Studies catalogue covering all aspects of death, dying, immortality and commemoration. The books featured cover History, Literature, Religion, Law, Social Science and Philosophy. We hope that you find this compelling collection of books to be of interest.
We were sorry to hear about the death of Robin Alston, who founded Scolar Press in 1966.
Scolar Press is an important part of the Ashgate Publishing Group’s history, as it became one of our imprints back in 1986. At that time the list still had a handful of the original reprint series established by Robin Alston. These included the English Recusant Literature volumes and Caxton’s Chaucer; and we subsequently revived one or two of the original facsimile series, notably the Poems of Alexander Pope for the Pope Tercentenary in 1988.
Books from the Scolar Press list were part of the foundations of our current humanities publishing programme and, as many of our authors will remember, our Book History, Literary Studies, History, Music Studies and Art History books were published under the Scolar imprint up until 1996, when we combined our various academic imprints under the single Ashgate name.
