Today I’ve been at UNC Press, learning what exactly goes into publishing works of academia and scholarly writing.

Academia is very different from what goes on at Algonquin or other fiction presses: UNC Press publishes about 100 books a year, as opposed to Algonquin’s 20. It also spends less time on what they call “developmental editing”, which is where an author and an editor have a dialogue over what will go into the book. It’s much more a process of receiving the manuscript, approving it, copy editing, and then typesetting rather than the back-and-forth which happens with fiction.

UNC Press is also undergoing renovations next week, which means that they have a lot of free books they’re trying to get rid of!!! I’m taking home quite a pile of academic summer reading. 🙂