Authors and university administrators frequently ask us, “What percentage of book proposals do you accept?”Our answer is 20 percent.
That is, in 2006 when we last ran the numbers, The Edwin Mellen Press considered 1983 proposals for publication, and we published 396 new titles. This is just a hair’s width under 20 percent. This ratio has remained about the same for the past ten years.
What does a publication rate of 20 percent mean?
Well, nothing really, unless you understand what it is measuring. Some German scholarly presses report that they publish over 65 percent of the manuscripts proposed to them. In contrast, some American university presses report that they accept only 10 percent–a few only 5 percent.
The wide range of acceptance ratios suggests that, by themselves, they prove nothing at all about the quality of a publisher’s program. To understand what any publisher’s “acceptance ratio” means, you would need first to understand what kind of proposals that publisher is receiving and how they are being evaluated.
Picture a prestigious university, say, Harvard. The admissions office receives a great pile of proposals or applications for admission. And, because this university is selective, it selects only 5 percent of the applications and rejects 95 percent. Selectivity in this scene is correlated with a high rejection rate.
Now picture this same campus four years later. The small group of selected students is about to receive bachelor degrees. The honors committee reviews the students and discovers that 80 percent of them, because of their high grade averages, qualify to graduate with honors.
When people hear this, some complain, “Eighty percent with honors? The university has lowered its standards.” Others reply, “No, if 80 percent of our students are graduating with honors, then this proves our faculty is doing an outstanding job.”
So with admissions, lower percentages are thought to signal higher standards. Yet, with graduation honors, higher percentages are thought to signal higher standards.
So, what do Mellen’s 20 percent acceptance mean? I want to take the next few blog posts to explain our process so that you can see how are acceptance rate is a measure of success.
–Arthur Scholar
