Innovative Academic and General Publishing

The University Press

Common Ground’s Academic Publishing Imprints

University Press Books

The Learner: Fresh Perspectives on Learning
The Humanities: New Ideas and Critical Concerns
Design Principles and Practices - An International Journal
Global Studies Journal
International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities and Nations
International Journal of Environmental, Cultural, Economic and Social Sustainability
International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences
International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management
International Journal of Learning
International Journal of Technology, Knowledge and Society
International Journal of the Arts in Society
International Journal of the Book
International Journal of the Humanities
International Journal of the Inclusive Museum
Journal of the World Universities Forum

Standard Books

Common Ground’s General Publishing Imprints

Books on Writing: ‘How To’ Guides for Authors
World Writing: Fiction and Creative Non-fiction

Common Ground has an impressive track record as a publisher of trade, literary and academic material. Publishing under the broad banners of theUniversityPress .com and StandardBooks.com, we have various imprints aimed at specific interest groups and communities.

It is our aim to provide a forum for writers and works that do not easily find a voice in the mainstream publishing market, yet who have an audience following—small or large. We aim to build a market profile and audience in collaboration with authors and their networks, in order to facilitate the best commercial return possible. Trade distribution channels are combined with the author’s own promotional work to guarantee exposure of new titles and backlist titles to booksellers.

Common Ground’s trade expertise provides credibility to publications as well as increasing a manuscript’s chances of success. This is a key element in our model for providing publishing services that provide authors and self-publishing communities with new as well as conventional publishing options.

Common Ground is a mixed medium publisher, simultaneously producing each title as a printed and an electronic book. These are available through the online bookstore for each Common Ground imprint, as well as through traditional retail bookstores.

Using Common Ground’s pathbreaking CGPublisher technology, every author is provided their own website which they can keep updated through an easy-to-use, password protected online interface. Each author site has a unique internet address, through which they can promote the works they have published.

Publishing Services Provider

Bringing New Technologies to the Traditional Craft of Publishing

Common Ground: Publishing Services Provider

Once, publishing was about a number of distinct crafts working at different locations and in different types of business: writing, editing, publishing, typesetting, printing, distributing, retailing. Today, emerging technologies and business processes are blurring these traditional boundaries.

A Publishing Service Provider is a new breed of enterprise which ties together and transforms the variety of traditional crafts and processes along the publishing supply chain. The Internet and digital technologies are the key tools of today’s Publishing Service Provider, alongside new ways of relating to people and the written word.

What is a Publishing Services Provider?

If you are a publisher, or an organisation which publishes as part of its business, Common Ground has a unique mix of services which mean you can focus on your core business—finding or creating content.

Common Ground’s services include:

Internet Service Provider: Internet hosting services designed specifically for online publishing.
Online Bookstore: We can provide a low cost, easy to maintain, secure e–commerce enabled online bookstore selling printed and electronic books, using Common Ground’s pathbreaking CGPublisher web–based publishing technology.
Publishing Workflow Management: CGPublisher is the world’s first fully online publishing environment, which manages publishing proposals, contracts, version control for drafts/editions, and automatically places completed books (print and electronic) in an easily self–managed publisher site as well as personal creator sites for each of your authors.
Website Development: Customised web publishing solutions.
Print Management: All kinds of publication, including digital print and offset print.
Distribution Management: Direct to customers through the CGPublisher community and author portals, direct to the retail trade through the business–to–business e–commerce channel, as well as through traditional trade distribution channels.
Book Design: covers and internals.
Editorial: all aspects of manuscript development and preparation.
Consultancy: Common Ground, in association with RMIT University, has developed a unique body of expertise in present and future publishing markets as well as new publishing technologies. For full details, visit www.C-2-CProject.com.

Who Needs a Publishing Services Provider?

Small book publishers: who, using Common Ground’s technologies and publishing services, will now be able to produce electronic and printed books with very little investment other than in what they do best: the time and effort required to select and refine excellent content.
Large book publishers: who want to focus on their core business, or who wish to enter new markets for short–run reprints of out–of–print titles, and ‘pre–prints’ of less certain titles, reducing the risk by testing the market first.
Self–publishing authors: who require an easy and inexpensive way to produce books for themselves, including family histories, poetry, fiction and non–fiction works.
Communities of common interest: hobby associations, historical societies, ethnic or indigenous organisations or environmental groups who wish to share specialist knowledge with the wider world.
Libraries and local or specialist bookstores: wanting to take a leadership role in local, community or specialist publishing.
Educators: schools, universities or professional educational bodies who need to publish curriculum material tailored to local conditions or specialist areas of knowledge.
Research institutes and academic associations: wishing to publish their work for a wider audience.
Large organisations with publishing needs: public information books, technical information, internal business documentation.
Capacity building programs: developing countries or disadvantaged regions easily and cheaply creating and publishing locally relevant information, such as literature or curriculum materials.

More Publishing Philosophy

About Today’s Book Publishers

The conventional book publishing industry is becoming less satisfactory as a medium for the production and distribution of many of today’s most important ideas and culture.

Conventional publishers offer too little return to authors/creators as a proportion of the total purchase price of books. All too often, they seem to be located in an industrial age when the material thing (the book) was seen to be the item of value rather than the cultural capital which is the reason for the book.
Publishers work according to the logic of the economics of mass production, and have not adjusted to the era of niche markets, the sub-specialisation of knowledge, and the creation of ever more finely differentiated communities of interest, affinity and identity. Nor have they yet adopted on a large scale direct digital print or the Internet as commercially viable print-production and distribution media. The economic logic of traditional offset print presupposes a reading public of 4,000 plus, whose interests are more or less uniform. It is also based on heavy investment in large inventories and high levels of waste in the form of discounting and remaindering. This is why the range of books produced is being reduced to fewer and fewer ‘popular’ areas.
Publishers are too slow to get into the market the cultural capital they sell. Despite the instantaneousness of the Internet, television and the printed news media, book publishers can still take three to eighteen months to bring a completed book to the market.

These are some of the reasons why the sale of books is barely keeping pace with growth in the markets for cultural goods generally. These are the reasons why book publishing is losing its edge as a medium for cultural innovation.

The Internet and new variable print technologies also make this kind of business, and this kind of cultural focus, obsolete. The world has changed in ways which mean that mass-production publishing is more likely to be mindlessly predictable than a place of cultural vibrancy and innovation.

Yet other media — the Internet, or video — have not proved themselves to be substitutes for what books do. They are not easily ‘readable’ in the way that printed matter is readable. When the new media are successful, it is by doing things that are different to the traditional printed word.

Paradoxically, as much as the world of the printed word is changing, it is unlikely that either development will stray far from the sensuousness and sensibility of the culture created by Gutenberg. Only the delivery mechanisms will be transformed.

And as much as we are innovators, Common Ground Publishing stands firm for the maintenance of the values and culture of print through mixed media publishing — on the Internet in the form of beautifully designed pages that can be printed out to be read — and as high quality hardback and paperback books printed on demand from digitally stored masters.

New Times, New Content, New Concept

New Times

Mainstream publishing is still based on the logic of mass production and mass consumption, with publishing factories measuring success by number of sales-per-title, reliant on cumbersome warehouses, servicing (and serviced by) capital-heavy bookshops, fuelled by the unhealthy octane of superprofits on mass-production “successes” plus below-cost junking of what is deemed only half-successful, or even a failure, though it was “picked” by the very same publisher not that long ago. In short, today’s mass-publishers show an aversion to anything less than the mass-marketable.

Book publishing has not kept up with our new times.

The Internet and new variable print technologies make this kind of business, and this kind of cultural focus, obsolete. The world has changed in ways that mean that mass production publishing is more likely to be mindlessly predictable than a place of cultural vibrancy and innovation.

Hence Common Ground Publishing…

New Content

Common Ground’s aim to provide a forum for writers (and works) that do not necessarily fit the usual commercial profile. We are keen to publish works in an appropriate format for their particular market — be that as traditional books, short run specials or for delivery as electronic books.

We are interested in working with writers to publish works that create community, and this may well be small and focused community. We are also interested in creating dialogue and debate on issues of common interest across and between communities, be they within the world of academe or for a general readership.

We aim for a cooperative effort with our writers where we can use our joint experience and skills to produce their work in its most accessible format, placing it into its most appropriate markets. We are after partnerships not dictatorships.

We are also keen to publish works that can be distributed in a variety of ways. We will publish under imprints linked to websites for on-line delivery and sales. Our imprints include: WorldWriting.com, BooksOnWriting.com , theHumanities.com and theLearner.com — and more imprints are planned.

It is our belief that new print and delivery technologies will enable us to return to a time when authors and editors worked collaboratively on a variety of topics, in a variety of writing styles. This is what we aspire to at Common Ground Publishing.

New Concept

Publishing is a low margin, high-risk enterprise. That is why Common Ground Publishing is a mixed-medium publisher. Appropriate works will be published in print or as Internet accessible text or simultaneously as both.

Common Ground Publishing focuses its energies upon creators and audiences, before products and markets. We aim to assist our authors to share a larger proportion of the financial cake, making it easier for writers to make a living from their work. Thus creators will be paid more generous royalties than the usual, and on a monthly basis.

New technologies mean that turnaround times from acceptance to publication can be dramatically reduced.

Common Ground Publishing seeks to connect authors with their particular audience. While we cannot pretend to be all-competent in a world of niches and differences, we are connected.

There are bound to be questions about what we do; it is, after all, very new. Please contact us with any further inquiries or to talk about your work.

The Common Ground Idea

The words ‘common ground’ attempt to capture the essence of a new moment in the world of culture and knowledge.

In an era that seems only yesterday, the sites of public participation in knowledge and culture — the institutions of democracy, learning, the media, the national culture, as well as the market for consumer products — were places where we had to make ourselves more or less the same in order to belong. This was the era of mass production and mass culture. ‘Any colour you like, so long as it’s black,’ said the revolutionary Henry Ford, who perfected the modern economics of large scale and long run production. This was the essence of the era of mass production and mass consumption. In business of culture and ideas, economies of scale meant long print runs and investment-intensive mass media. And to consume this cultural capital, to be a part of the culture, to be social, we had to be happy with becoming roughly the same, a member of the mass society. This was the era when all the cultural pressures and social tendencies were towards homogeneity.

Today, diversity rather than sameness has become the key. Communities of knowledge, interest, affinity and identity are becoming more distinctive and ever more finely, yet more significantly, differentiated from each other. So we have niche markets for culture instead of mass markets, narrowcasting instead of broadcasting, and the genuinely multimedia of the Internet instead of the old mass media. There is no longer the same pressure to join the monolithic bulk of the mass market and mass culture. Today, our public meeting points — the points of common ground at which we communicate our understandings of the world — are more and more multifarious. Every meeting point is special for the way in which it touches our needs for knowledge (technical, scientific or practical) and meaning (identity, enthusiasm, interest, locality). The new era is one of social and cultural difference. This is also the reason why mass production and mass consumption logics are unlikely to continue to sustain cutting edge organisations working to bring to publication new ideas and forms of cultural expression.

Common Ground Publishing creates innovative media for the printed word, through which community is strengthened by honouring diversity.

Today our smaller communities of knowledge and meaning are becoming more manageable, more comfortable, more human in their scale and more true to our individuality and our selves. They are also becoming more extensive and, insofar as each of us belongs to many different kinds of community (work, interest, ethnic, sexuality, fashion, style … ), more and more part of a widely overlapping social matrix. And thanks to the new information technologies these communities are often more dispersed, more global, than those of the recent past.

Every point of common ground is a place where the world of diversity is brought together, where community is affirmed and our sociability strengthened. Places of common ground are meeting points. They are also border crossings, places where it is possible to learn about new realms, have new experiences and join new communities.

Small communities formed on common ground are the new wellsprings of cultural life and human innovation. Some ideas, some cultural creations will settle into a comfortable self-sustaining life cycle and stay within the communities from which they arose. Every now and then, one idea or cultural vision may become big — unpredictably perhaps, it may move well beyond the community for which it was originally created. But it can only do this because it was originally given a life in the small community from which it sprang.

And we know that the wellsprings of cultural creation and intellectual originality are not always to be found in the heart of ‘the mainstream’. Like the African roots of popular music; or the roots of Western religiosity that are perennially to be found in the East …

To break this new ground, we know we cannot focus on the immediately mass marketable. Great new ideas and great new works of culture are rarely mass marketable — not at least in the first instance. They may only remain great within the subcultures from which they were generated. But every now and then they will touch the mainstream, take hold in the mainstream, influence and transform the mainstream. Then they will become great in another sense. But this will never happen without risk taking.

This is why Common Ground Publishing is founded on economies of small scale, in which a good financial return is provided to creator/author as well as the publisher on sales far lower than possible in conventional publishing. It also means that our focus is on publishing a lot of material, and that our viability depends on small returns on many cultural products.

The Common Ground Approach

Common Ground Publishing is a mixed-medium publisher, pushing the frontiers of the book publishing medium—creative, technological and commercial frontiers.

Creative Frontiers

As a publisher, we are interested in creativity and generativity, in the new and the renewed. We are not so interested in the dependable and the predictable, but on new works of culture and ideas that break cultural frontiers. We are set up to find the things that the large commercial publishers will miss, the works and the ideas that might become big, but which are at first tentative or risky.

Technological Frontiers

Two technological revolutions are about to transform Gutenberg's culture of the book, and Common Ground Publishing is at the frontier of both these transformations: the Internet and variable print technologies. The Internet allows instant access to cultural contents; and variable print technologies make redundant the old economies of long run production of the printed word. Neither technology has quite arrived yet as a substitute for conventional book printing, but both seem destined to spring to dominance some day soon. Alongside a conventional book printing program, we’re actively working with both technologies now.

Commercial Frontiers

Common Ground Publishing sets out to change the commercial relationships that dominate publishing. Commercial — for better or for worse — we must be. But we do want to give more to authors, in the form of higher royalties and monthly royalty payments. And, we want to move away from the factory-bureaucracies of modern publishing, and towards a distributed network of self publishing communities, who live or work in the cultural action (professional, political, ethnic, gender/sexual orientation, subcultural, hobbyist, technical, academic …).

The creative, technological and commercial frontiers we are imagining and exploring sit nicely together. That’s what we believe, and that’s why we’re investing time, energy and resources into this endeavour.

And above all, our purpose in pushing these three frontiers is to make life somewhat easier for you, the author — to make it easier and more rewarding for you to create, and to extend the frontiers of your own possibility.

New Ways With Words

Creator To Consumer in a Digital Age

Common Ground is at the forefront of research into the future of the written word in general, and books in particular, in a world of extraordinary cultural and technological change. The Cpossibilityndash;2possibilityndash;C series is written and edited by authors and researchers from Common Ground and RMIT University, Melbourne possibilitymdash; the outcomes of a research project funded by the Australian Department of Industry, Science and Resources. For further details, visit www.C-2-CProject.com

The Way We Work

Common Ground publishes in areas that are as yet marginal, or highly specialist, or merely promising. We aim to make material available by producing it in short print runs, with significant income returned to the author/creator and publisher when publications achieve conventional publishing results or better.

Common Ground Publishing is built upon the following ten ideas, some of which we have already put into practice, and others in development:

Mixed medium publishing: with availability both via the Internet and as bound books. In both cases, this involves a revaluation of the aesthetics and design values of the traditional world of print. HTML has not proved itself to be an adequate substitute in terms of readerly values. Common Ground Publishing makes print-like digital masters available online for purchase and download as PDF files, to be browsed on screen but read as a printout; and also for the production of printed books.
Just-in-time production: in which books are only produced and dispatched after online purchase. Text is printed to a standard design and page size, according to the principles of mass customisation and using the new variable print technologies. There is no inventory, no credit, no discounting and no remaindering of stock.
Rapid turnaround: for each of the light-edit, design and print production/online publication services provided as a part of the standard Common Ground Publishing services.
Higher than conventional payments and more regular payments to authors/creators.
Economies of small scale: with break-even point for the publisher at as low a level as developments in print and Internet technologies allow.
Reduction in the number of layers in the process of cultural production and distribution: the publisher is the distributor, is the bookseller. Printed books are still distributed through bookshops, but with lower distribution and retailing margins.
Pricing based on standardised, honest prices: e.g. $20 for a book of 200 pages, and nothing for $19.95.
A distributed or networked organisation: moving away from large publishing factories to networked, self-publishing communities and publishing editors who work out of their own homes or offices, close to specialist knowledge or localised cultural action.
Increased editorial and marketing onus placed on authors: light edit only provided on the basis of manuscripts that are already of a very high standard due to the combined efforts of authors and commissioning editors. Authors and commissioning editors are provided with heavy discounts to encourage them to sell the book themselves, plus a marketing kit including printed advertising matter, self-sales strategies, and an author-marketing strategy.
Online, paperless relationships with authors and readers: including contractual arrangements; text production in supplied templates that easily translate into designed pages; book purchases.

Above all, we are not interested in books as things to be sold and raw margins to be made. We are interested in cultural creation. And out of this many things can come, particularly in this era of digital media convergence and multimedia divergence.

Common Ground Style Guide

…or to be more truthful…

The Common Ground Publishing Anti-Style Guide

Publishers have traditionally had a fetish for spelling and semi-colons, or referencing and indexing, as if standards meant standardising. “To be published by us”, they seemed to be saying, “you have to look and sound like us.” Publishers carried the standards of official forms of the national language. Language conventions were a matter of being right or being wrong.

This no longer makes sense. Just as surely as English has become a world language, so its richness and revelatory power is in its many divergent paths, in the increasing distinctiveness of multiple and daily multiplying Englishes — distinguished by national origins, or technical focus, or subcultural proclivity. Each of these Englishes defines the character of the culture from which it springs, and the very particular meanings which are conveyed. So much for homogenising standards — they are part of the world of mass society that is thankfully fast disappearing.

So, at Common Ground Publishing, we expect that our texts will be different. Oftentimes, they will be not-so-intelligible outside the community to which they speak. But that‘s the way it has to be if they are true to themselves and their readers, and if they are themselves to push the boundaries of style and identity within the communities from which they have grown.

Four Principles of Anti-style:

A text doesn‘t have to work for a “general readership”, but it does need to work really well for your audience, otherwise you are talking to yourself. You have to convince us that your audience exists and that your use of language will make sense to them. Most importantly, your text should be recognised as good style by and for that audience.
Be consistent — write your own style guide if you like, and if you do, it would be helpful if you were to pass it on to our publishing editors. Or use one of the conventional guides, for example: The Chicago Manual of Style, The Oxford Guide to Style for Writers and Editors, the AusInfo Style Manual for Authors and Editors, or any of the myriad other titles available, for your reference.
Despite what we said in point 1, it is still wise to err on the side of appealing to a broader audience than a narrower one, so long as this does not compromise your ideas and content. This will mean you have a better chance of appealing to newcomers to the culture or community, not to mention selling more copies of your work.
Observe consistent, rigorous and recognisable protocols for using and referring to other people‘s work and ideas — quotations, referencing and so on — and tell us which protocols you are using. It‘s a matter of what‘s expected as polite recognition in your community or profession, plus bottom lines about breach of copyright.

…but we are very serious about another kind of Style

We do need you to use our Microsoft Word Writing Template for the submission of your work. Unfortunately, we cannot offer any latitude here — the template tells us in ways we can understand exactly what kind of text we are dealing with: titles, chapter headings, subheadings, indented quotes etc.

Publishing