University Press boosts revenue

Revenue for the Princeton University Press has risen by 19.4 percent as of last March, director Peter Dougherty said on Wednesday, putting the company on track for “the best year we have ever had financially.” Last February, revenue at the publisher was down 7–8 percent from the previous year.

“Fiscal year 2008 was our best year ever, but it looks as though we will equal, and perhaps even surpass, our revenues for fiscal year 2008,” Dougherty said.

The Press, which was founded in 1905 and is located on Williams Street, is a nonprofit independent publisher that maintains connections with the University. It publishes roughly 200 new hardcover books and 90 paperback reprints per year across 40 disciplines, according to the company’s website.

The Press had to carefully manage its finances to sustain itself in the 2009 fiscal year, when it lost revenue, Dougherty said.

“We were able to get through last year relatively unscathed,” he explained. “We’re a conservative organization from a financial standpoint, and we manage our financial resources very carefully.”

Dougherty attributed much of the company’s success during the 2010 fiscal year to the book “This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly,” written by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, professors at the University of Maryland and Harvard, respectively. Since its publication last September, the work has sold more than 75,000 copies worldwide “in around a dozen languages,” Dougherty said.

“It’s the book that all authors, all observers, all critics and all commentators on the general economic condition have to read,” he noted.

Several of the Press’s 2009 bestsellers have focused on economics, including “Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism,” “Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays” and “The Subprime Solution: How Today’s Global Financial Crisis Happened, and What to Do about It.”

“We live in a time when good books in economics matter a lot,” Dougherty explained. “We will continue to publish excellent books on the economy. These books will remain timely and popular over the next couple of years.”

On a national scale, the average increase in net sales for university presses this fiscal year is 3 percent, according to the American Association of University Presses, Dougherty added.

The Harvard University Press has also seen increases in sales, William Sisler, its director, said in an e-mail. Though he declined to provide any specific data, he attributed part of the publisher’s financial upswing to cost-cutting moves.

Dougherty also cited an increase in orders from wholesalers this year as a contributing factor. “That’s been helpful to publishers across the board,” he said.

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In addition to capitalizing on its impressive collection of economic texts, the Press hopes to broaden its international market, Dougherty said. The Press opened an office in Oxfordshire, England, in 2000.

“We are cultivating books that will have a powerful international audience,” Dougherty said. “We are expecting to see impressive growth of readership of our books all over the world.”

Despite recent successes at the Princeton and Harvard university presses, Dougherty and Sisler both emphasized the capricious nature of the publishing industry.

“It’s too soon to say that anyone has recovered from the economic recession,” Sisler said. “The way people of your generation read, what they read, if they read, the devices on which they will read — all these are factors that will affect the future of publishing.”

“In a volatile market, much can happen between now and ... when our fiscal year ends,” Dougherty said. “But we are optimistic nonetheless.”