The idea of creating a publishing imprint for Free University Brighton occurred while I was writing The Questioning of Intelligence. My earlier experience of publishing a textbook with Pearson Education made me question whether I again wanted to use a mainstream publisher. For, in order to get published, I first had to sign over my intellectual property rights, despite being responsible for nearly all the work that went into creating the book. Pearson’s initial editorial and marketing input had been minimal – after which they took over printing and supplying the book to my students (and anyone else who was interested). For Pearson this was a no risk enterprise, as there was a captive readership of students who needed the material in order to complete the course it supported. At that time I was only too pleased with this arrangement. Not only did Pearson pay me 10% royalties, they took over all the logistical and financial responsibilities, and they gave me the status of having publishing with one of the major players in the industry – a status I traded on in climbing the promotional ladder to associate professorship. And now sales of the book have dwindled (due to my no longer teaching the course it supports) Pearson have unproblematically handed the copyright of the work back to me. So, to be clear, I have no problem with the way things went with Pearson.

But there are also significant drawbacks in publishing with a mainstream publisher, especially of you are not a ‘big player’. The first is the inflated price that is likely to be charged for your work. In the case of my Pearson book, most copies were sold through the local campus bookshop, at a price approaching $80 (Australian). Bearing in mind the book probably cost around $10 to print, you can see the kind of game that was being played out here: my students had to have this book in order to complete the course, and Pearson had a monopoly over its supply – hence they could set the price at the very limit of what an average student could afford. I had the kudos and the royalties, Pearson had their monopoly profits, and, in an often repeated story, it was the ones at the bottom of the pyramid who picked up the bill.

The second problem with a mainstream publisher is the question of profitability. Only a book that is going to sell in large enough numbers at a high enough price is going to be acceptable. That means your book is not going to be judged for what it has to say but in terms of its perceived marketability. This may be acceptable if you are writing primarily as a way to make money. But what if you have something to say about the situation in which we find ourselves, something new, something of value, that only a few people are going to understand and appreciate, perhaps just those few people in your immediate circle, in your local community?

Well, things have moved on since my experience with Pearson. It is now much easier and cheaper to publish using one of the many print-on-demand services that are available to everyone. And that means an author can now keep control of their work, and also of the prices that readers must pay to access that work. Of course, self-publishing also means that your work is likely to disappear in a sea of all the other unreviewed, self-regarding, self-published works that appear each day on Amazon. But clearly there is also an opportunity here, an opportunity to develop a model of publication that is not based on profit margins and perceived marketability. For print-on-demand technology means each book costs the same whether you print one or one thousand. And that allows for the creation of not-for-profit publishing houses that are primarily interested in the quality of the work they produce and not purely on the quantity.

At the moment, my book, The Questioning of Intelligence is FUBText’s first experimental publication to see how things work out in practice. To this end we have created a Free University Brighton Philosophy Series, with Matt Lee and Charlie Blake as series editors, and with a growing collection of consulting editors and student reviewers. The book is still under review, as is the final structure of how we shall run FUBText, so all that has been said on this page is still somewhat provisional. Nevertheless, and one way or another, I expect to print the book using IngramSpark and have copies ready for sale on or before September 2021.