ORCID iDMy next book, tentatively titled Star Trek: Voyager: Critical and Historical Approaches to Ethics, Politics, and the End of the 1990s is now under contract at Lever Press (title definitely needs some work). This, for me, is very exciting. An open-access press with an innovative funding model – so there are no author-facing charges – I am really pleased to be working with Lever.
Ever since hearing of Lever’s innovative funding model for open access, I have wanted to publish with the Press. (All ten of my existing books are openly accessible and I have been strongly involved in the humanities open access discussion over the past decade, writing the book Open Access and the Humanities, founding the Open Library of Humanities, and working on the COPIM project.) I have also used Lever Press books in my previous scholarship, most recently citing Chown and Nascimento’s Meaningful Technologies: How Digital Metaphors Change the Way We Think and Live in my forthcoming Theses on the Metaphors of Digital-Textual History.
I believe this work, on Voyager, is particularly well suited to Lever, too, in that it has a potentially wide fan community who may be interested, but who would be priced out in the conventional model for scholarly book publication. While it can be easy to overestimate the popular appetite for scholarly works, the Star Trek fan community is almost uniquely obsessively engaged to the point where I think they genuinely would read an open-access book on this subject. The work also clearly fits with the ethos of liberal arts colleges, applying critical historical thinking to an important work of popular culture.
Ever since I first discussed Lever with Michael Roy and Charles Watkinson, a decade or so ago, I have been hoping to pitch a work to the press. Further, by the time I got round to it, SF expert Dr Sean Guynes had become the acquiring editor at the press, so I now also get to work on a science fiction project under just about the best editor I could hope for!
In any case, if you’ve never heard of Lever Press, you should go check them out. A relatively young press, but backed by the University of Michigan Publishing, they are building a great list and are ultra-engaged in work with their authors. I’ve also published with Open Book Publishers and punctum books and had a good experience with both of them.