In this concise monologue, economist Tyler Cowen outlines how authors should think about publishing academic work. He begins by analyzing the incentives of editors and referees, noting that their primary material motive is to process submissions quickly, which makes early presentation crucial. Cowen advises authors to make their papers look professional, with clear abstracts and strong opening pages, to avoid a quick dismissal. He argues that poor referee reports usually reflect the author's own shortcomings rather than referee bias, and stresses the importance of a well‑crafted cover‑letter when resubmitting, as editors rely on it to gauge whether revisions were adequately addressed. Cowen discusses journal selection, suggesting that not knowing the appropriate venue signals a weak paper and that authors must understand their field to target the right outlets. He describes journal publishing as highly competitive, with low acceptance rates, and acknowledges that while the system can seem unfair, it generally rewards good work. The talk then shifts to books: academic presses evaluate proposals mainly on breadth and relevance, with editors acting as gatekeepers before formal refereeing; trade publishers focus on marketability and seek informal opinions from trusted academics. Throughout, Cowen emphasizes networking with editors, maintaining professionalism, and being courteous to peers, as reputation influences publishing outcomes.
Chapters
This is Tyler Cowen with some brief remarks on how to think about publishing. When I think about publishing academic articles, I start with the idea of incentives, being of course an economist. And you ask yourself a very simple question: what are the incentives of the editors and what are the incentives of the referees? Well, generally the editors and referees are smart people, they're very busy people, they're busy not only editing and refereeing, but they're busy with their careers and they're busy, of course, with their lives. They may be paid something for what they do, but they're not paid more for doing more at the margin. They're not paid more necessarily for doing a better job. So their immediate material incentive regarding you as an author is to dispose of you as quickly as possible. It doesn't mean this is how they always treat you. They care about scholarly research. They care about your content. They have motives other than direct material gain. But nonetheless, most articles submitted are not in fact very good, and referees and editors know this, and they're looking to find those and root them out as quickly as possible and send them to their much-deserved doom. So people approach articles basically first looking to see what's wrong with this and how quickly can I dismiss it. It doesn't mean they'll dismiss good work. It does mean that if early on there's something wrong with your piece, even if it's just in terms of appearance or the abstract isn't clear enough, or the first few pages aren't very good, your chance of being able to publish has gone down very seriously. So the first thing to do, quite simply, is not to give referees and editors a chance to dismiss your work. There are many such reasons they will find to dismiss your work, because indeed there is something wrong with every paper. But you want yours in terms of presentation and generally how it is conceived and put forward to look and feel as professional as possible. Most of all, first of all, your paper is given some kind of sniff test. Now after that, there's the question of referee reports, and I find that authors very commonly are unhappy with their referee reports. I have a maybe somewhat cynical attitude about this. I think that authors in general get the referee reports they deserve. So if you send in a piece that's not good enough or not well thought through enough or has something else wrong with it, First, they'll send it to inferior referees to begin with, and second, those referees will put less time and care in. So if you as an author find you're systematically getting bad referee reports, I would say don't blame the referee. Most of all, you should be blaming yourself. There are always exceptions to this rule, but if it's a systematic pattern, it's very unlikely that you were one of those exceptions. Probably you were doing something wrong. If you are someone sending in serious work which is obviously serious, it will be sent to better referees, and the odds are you will get better reports, and it will be treated better, and you will see that in the quality of the reports you get. The next point I would stress when you are resubmitting work is just how much that letter to the editor matters. So people focus on getting the revisions right in their paper, which of course is important, but I would also say the editor gets the package back reads the letter you write to the editor, which summarizes what you've done, and quite possibly sends that same letter to the referees. So that letter should not say the referees were idiots. That letter needs to sum up also what the criticisms were. Don't assume the editor remembers much about your paper. Don't assume the editor remembers much about the other reports. You're living in this much more thickly than the editor or the referees are. So sum up everything that's happened, be totally transparent, be clear, and then explain how you solved the problems that were pointed out or met the requests for further work or made the cuts you were told to make. Just come out and say it. What typically happens is the editor reads that letter and at least has a ballpark sense of whether you're in the neighborhood of having done what you were supposed to do. If the editor approaches your paper with the feeling that you've probably done it, your chance is much better than if the editor approaches your paper with the feeling that you probably haven't done it. And they can tell that from reading the letter. So if you do great revisions but send back in a vague, cursory, poorly explained letter, you're hurting your chances when you don't need to. So that letter really is, uh, important. Another question people often ask me is, to which journals should I send my work? Of course, there's no stock answer to that, but I would say as a good rule of thumb, if you don't already know which journals your work belongs in, probably the work isn't very good. So you should know your field quite well, and then you will know where this stands relative to the rest of the field, and you'll have a pretty good sense of where to send it. And if you don't, treat that as a danger signal, not to be remedied by just learning more about journals, although you should do that, but one which needs to be remedied by also learning more about the field on which your paper was written. Overall, journal publishing is a pretty brutal competition. At top journals, they might accept, you know, as little as 5%, or even at a promiscuous journal, they might accept only 10%. Editors really are hungry for good material, and except at the top few journals, they find it hard to get. So even the very good journals that would like to be better than they are, the main thing that constrains them is actually finding good enough pieces to improve the quality of the journal. If you send in something that's a candidate, there really is a good chance they'll put in the time and trouble to improve your work. But again, precisely because they want to focus on the better pieces that will improve the quality of the journal, they're looking to dismiss the ones which don't belong. And sadly, those are a majority of what is written and what is submitted. So it's a very competitive process. In very many particular cases, it appears unfair. But overall, I think it is more or less an aristocracy. That is, most of the best pieces actually are in the best journals. There are some exceptions, like Gordon Tullock's famous rent-seeking piece. But there are no undiscovered geniuses out there who have great ideas and cannot publish them in good places that I've ever seen. Insofar as there's any criticism of the journal publishing process, my opinion would tend to be It encourages pieces which are perhaps over-specialized and in some ways less relevant to the overall profession or to the so-called real world. But for the most part, good work is rewarded and better schools hire better people, and people who are doing good work make their wages fine. Let's now turn to books. I'll start with academic books. These are run on a very different basis than our journals. Something like Harvard University Press, it has an editor. That editor is not a professor, and that editor receives a large number of proposals. The editor tries to judge, is this going to be a successful proposal? Most of the rejection is done at the point of not even refereeing. The editor will just turn things down. And the university press Breadth and relevance matters more. It should be a book topic that people care about at top presses. There are some regional presses which take purely regional or smaller topics. But basically it's expected that a book should matter to people who are those other than just the specialists in that area. The test is different. The refereeing process is also different. The book is much longer. So in most cases, the book does not get the same level of refereeing care per page as does a journal article. This maybe has its strengths and minuses, but it means someone publishing a book in an area, that's a less reliable indicator of quality, but it also gives the book freedom to be interesting in ways that a journal article cannot be. You as an author need to know that. If an editor is deciding to go ahead and referee a proposal or a book or a manuscript, it really means the editor is somewhat hopeful. Not uncritically so, they don't want to publish something that's bad, but the editor is in a sense saying, "I am hopeful that this can work. I want to make sure it doesn't fall down, but I'm sending it out because I suspect it has a good chance." So if you get to the refereeing stage, you've already passed a lot of the most important levels of gatekeeping. So it's very important, I think, to have an incredible name with editors, to meet editors and talk with them, It's not that editors go around doing favors to their friends. I think it is also a meritocratic process. But by knowing and meeting editors, you're basically certifying that you're smart, you can speak coherently about your area, you're an active part of the field, you go to conferences, you're not insane. And the editor takes that information seriously when judging your proposal, as they should. And it's important just to, you know, get out there. And have your work be known and be circulated to editors and recommended to university press editors and the like. A trade book— some academic material comes out in the form of trade books. Those are done differently yet. A trade book, the manuscript is sent in to a commercial trade house editor, and first and foremost it's evaluated for whether or not it can make money. It may or may not pass those tests,. But even if it does, most trade-oriented academic material, in part it makes money by not being devastated in reviews. So trade houses don't want to publish semi-academic, semi-popular books which will get devastated in the reviews. So they will take what you send to them and send it around to maybe one or two people they know, very often academic authors who have published with the same trade house, and just send it to them. Not even ask for a referee report, just ask for an opinion. Call you up and say, "Well, did you read the manuscript I sent you? What did you think of this? Is this review-proof or not? Is this good enough or not? Can this make its way in the commercial marketplace without getting blasted by serious reviewers at TLS, New York Times, New York Review of Books, smart bloggers, whatever?" And some kind of opinion is given, and that is combined with the opinion about the commercial marketability of the work. And then the trade house reaches some kind of decision. Again, it's a very different process. Know how it works. Always be nice to your colleagues and your peers and the people you meet because they're judging you and talking about you all the time. They're not always nice to you, and that means you should always pretty much be nice to them. At the very least, be tolerant. There's a lot more to say about publishing, but those are just some of the basics. And with that, I'll close these remarks. Thank you.
