We recently welcomed Lily, a sixth-form student, to the office for some work experience with us. While she was here, she did a project for us about how she and her peer group consume books and explored the use of different formats through one of our titles, Spanish So White, which is available in hard copy, ebook and audiobook. In this post, she talks about the ways in which A-Level students consume and utilise reading material, particularly nonfiction.
A-Level students’ use of nonfiction
The majority of the consumption of nonfiction writing by sixth-form students is, undoubtedly, for studying rather than for entertainment. Most students seek out very little study-related reading material of their own volition, and there is limited access to academic material in the school.
Sixth-formers generally constrain themselves to the textbooks they are allotted by the school. Personally, I am in the minority in that I have received journals/magazines/academic writing in addition to my textbook for my Economics A-Level studies. I am also currently reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot – a nonfiction novel in paperback – to contextualise and better understand content in the A-Level biology curriculum.
Most of the required academic or nonfiction material is paperback textbooks, occasionally provided additionally as an ebook by a teacher. Typically, paperback textbooks are lighter and more accessible (such as in a classroom) than a hardback, as well as more memorable than an ebook.
Fiction for study purposes
Sixth-formers’ consumption of fiction for studying is still limited. In general, the majority of this reading is for arts or humanities such as history and English literature. For example, to further engage with required English literature A-Level texts, I have read a selection of poetry, 19th century European novels, and 20th century American literature. All of these I have read in paperback.
Personally, I am more inclined to purchase an ebook to read for entertainment (although my contemporaries tend to read borrowed paperbacks). This is because digital formats are more accessible and faster to read; I own almost double the number of ebooks than hardbacks or paperbacks, yet the majority of my nonfiction is in paperback.
Spanish So White
Within my sixth-form community, there is little exploration of life outside of individuals’ personal bubbles. This is partially due to a lack of motivation or inspiration, but also due to limited accessible academic writing about the wider world.
The book Spanish So White by Adam Schwartz has expanded my contextual and historical understanding of learning or speaking Spanish. As an aspiring Spanish learner, it has changed my perspective on how I have accessed or been taught the language.
While my preference for a paperback edition of a book still stands (especially for nonfiction, as it is more comprehensible to follow the intended layout and structure), the audiobook encouraged a more measured pace. Hearing the spoken Spanish which Schwartz had written about was a useful way to connect with the book.
The ebook of Spanish So White was still a useful resource, but it was more challenging to pace the reading and fully appreciate the ‘pause points’. To me, the physical book is more memorable, as I can associate photos with subheadings. The book has, thus, left a more lasting impression on me than it perhaps might have if I’d only accessed a digital format.
Towards the end of 2023 we announced our new Open Access Fund and following on from that we are delighted to tell you that we have made five of our backlist titles available as Open Access publications. All five are available under creative commons license CC BY-NC-ND.
We also continued with our online events, originally established in 2020 during the pandemic, when we weren’t able to attend conferences and wanted another way to promote our books. It’s been great to be able to include Q&As at the end of our events so that anyone watching can have the opportunity to ask an expert in their field a question.
This year we’ve had events with authors Gary Barkhuizen and Chika Takahashi about their books in our Psychology of Language Learning and Teaching series, JPB Gerald speaking about his book Antisocial Language Teaching and Adam Schwartz with his book Spanish So White. These events have been a valuable addition to our calendar and we appreciate everyone who has joined us and asked thoughtful questions of our speakers. We’ll be bringing you some more events with our authors in 2024, so watch this space…
2023 has felt like the first year where we’ve got back to a full conference schedule after tentatively dipping our toe back in the water last year. On the Channel View Publications side we’ve attended CAUTHE, ATLAS and the Surrey conference, while on the Multilingual Matters side we’ve been to AAAL, The Forum on Education Abroad, IATEFL, the Postgraduate Researcher Conference, Language Policy Forum, AILA, BAAL, InDialog, ALAPP, EuroSLA, Better Bilingual EAL Celebration Event and NALDIC. It’s been lovely to reconnect with our authors, friends and fellow publishers and we’re looking forward to another jampacked year in 2024!
Now that most of our staff don’t live in Bristol (we’re spread out from Dunblane in Scotland to Dawlish in Devon), we don’t get to see each other as much as we’d like. To go some way towards remedying this, we’ve established in-person meetings held every couple of months that we all attend in Bristol, with an obligatory lunch together, of course.
In October we announced the creation of the Channel View Publications / Multilingual Matters Open Access Fund. Each year we will fully fund at least one open access publication to support authors who wouldn’t otherwise be able to fund open access publication for their work. We’re really proud of this initiative and hope it will increase visibility, dissemination, use and impact of top-quality academic research, particularly for research originating in Low to Middle Income Countries and scholars working outside of traditional academic institutions.
Also in October, we had some very exciting news – Laura had a baby! Luckily we didn’t have to wait too long to meet Nicholas, as she brought him into the office to visit us when he was just a couple of weeks old!
It’s been a good year for Channel View Publications / Multilingual Matters and we’d like to thank you all for your support and wish you a very merry Christmas and happy new year!
We have recently added a Frequently Asked Questions page to our website and below are a few of the answers to common questions you can find there.
I’ve sent in my book proposal. When will I hear back from you?
You should receive an acknowledgement (and perhaps some initial feedback) from a commissioning editor within days. The length of time it takes to make a final decision on a proposal depends on lots of factors, but 6-8 weeks is about average.
How long does the editorial process take?
We’re able to allow a good deal of flexibility, as we recognise that our authors have other commitments besides writing. Most people take between 18 months and 2 years to deliver a manuscript ready for peer review. The peer review process takes 3-4 months, and then authors have time to make the revisions suggested by the reviewers: generally this takes 2-3 months.
Will my manuscript be copy-edited and proofread?
Yes, we ensure that every manuscript we publish is copy-edited. We will ask authors to proofread their typeset proofs but Sarah and Stanzi will also be checking them throughout the production process.
Do I need to adhere to a specific style/layout in my manuscript?
We provide guidelines for authors on our website but we are flexible in terms of manuscript layout and font. We can provide a stylesheet for book editors to send to their chapter authors. If you would like to have more guidance, we do have further specifications that we can give you, but usually this level of work is done by our typesetters. For further queries please contact Sarah Williams (sarah@channelviewpublications.com).
I am going to/speaking at a conference, please can I have a flyer for my book?
Yes of course. We are very happy to supply flyers for your book for you to take to an event. Please give us as much notice as possible as it can sometimes take a while for flyers to be sent if the event is overseas.
Can I add my chapter (from an edited collection) to my institution’s repository?
We are happy for you to upload your chapter to your repository providing that:
– Your pre-press version is used (e.g. your word document, not our PDF proofs)
– That it is accompanied by a full bibliographic reference to our publication in which the chapter appears
– That it is accompanied by a link to the book’s listing on our website
– That you wait until after publication before posting it
You can see the full list of FAQs on our website. If you have any questions that aren’t answered on our website, you can email us at info@channelviewpublications.com and one of us will get back to you as soon as possible.
We are pleased to announce the creation of the Channel View Publications / Multilingual Matters Open Access Fund. We will fully fund at least one open access publication each year to support authors who wouldn’t otherwise be able to fund open access publication for their work. These books will be published online in an open access format with no access restrictions or paywalls under creative commons license CC BY-NC-ND.
This new fund aims to increase visibility, dissemination, use and impact of top-quality academic research, particularly for research originating in Low to Middle Income Countries and scholars working outside of traditional academic institutions. Open access publications can be shared freely around the world with no restrictions and remain permanently available in digital format. We hope that by removing the barriers from publications, authors can benefit from achieving increased impact across the world and greater engagement with their research.
All our open access publications are subject to the same rigorous peer review process and high publishing standards as our regular publications.
Alongside these funded publications, we will continue to publish open access titles on a Book Processing Charge (BPC) and Chapter Processing Charge (CPC) basis. We published our first open access title, Second Language Pronunciation Assessment, edited by Talia Isaacs and Pavel Trofimovich, in 2016 and since then have continued to offer the option of open access publication to those with funding. This new fund will enable us to offer the open access option to those who have no funding available to them.
For details of all our existing open access books please see our website.
How you can contribute to the fund
We are offering our authors the opportunity to donate their royalties to this fund, with a commitment to a matching contribution of 100%, up to a maximum of £10,000 per year. These author donations will go towards additional open access publications over and above the ones we are funding ourselves.
Blanca Yaneth González Pinzón: Memory and New Ways of Knowing: Weaving Narratives from the Armed Conflict in Colombia
The 2025 Open Access Fund
If your book is already under contract and you’d like it to be considered for the 2025/2026 Open Access Fund please get in touch with Anna Roderick (anna@channelviewpublications.com) and she will let you know how to submit your book to be considered for the fund.
One of the jobs I enjoy most each year is paying our author royalties. Since I’ve stepped back from being more directly involved with the editorial side of the business, I’ve had less contact with authors, many of whom are old friends from many years of conference travel. Whether I have an opportunity to write and say hi or not, I do enjoy seeing familiar names go past and sending a royalty payment – no matter how large or small – gives me the sense that we are still in contact.
We now offer our authors the chance to donate their royalties to UNICEF and we’ve had a large number of authors very generously donate a total of £2319, which we then topped up to make a grand total of £2500. The following authors have given us permission to share their names – there were others who preferred to make their donation anonymously:
In 2020, when conference travel was put on hold due to the pandemic, we began to think of other ways we could promote our newly published titles. We started a series on our YouTube channel called Behind the Books, in which we gave our authors the opportunity to speak about their new books and the research behind them. Three years later it’s still going strong, with over 50 videos on books published across a whole range of topics. You can watch the entire series here, but in this post we’ve rounded up the most recent ones in a series that we hope will continue to grow.
In this post two of our authors, Chika Takahashi and Daniel O. Jackson, reflect on their experience of having their first books published and offer advice to those hoping to do the same.
Less than a decade ago, we finished our dissertations and started new lives as professors, which eventually led us to write our first single-authored books. For the benefit of colleagues on similar journeys, we wanted to share our reflections on the experience, and also note the exciting, new directions in which this process has taken us.
Our paths have converged and diverged along the way to this career milestone. Both of us graduated from the same department at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (we had different advisors), we teach at universities in Japan (one public, the other private), and we specialize in the psychology of language learning and teaching (PLLT). Our books in Multilingual Matters’ PLLT series extend our doctoral experiences in unique ways.
Chika: As for my volume, it is a direct extension of my dissertation study that ended up lasting nine years in total. Of course, at the time of working on my dissertation, my main goal was to finish the study and earn the degree. However, the interviews in my study were so interesting that I simply wanted to find out what happened to my interviewees after the dissertation study ended. Furthermore, my advisor, JD Brown, once said when discussing my proposal, “it’s only your dissertation.” At the time I didn’t really get what he meant, but now I understand it very well in that the dissertation is only the beginning of a career as a researcher. The topics covered in my book developed to include those that were not in the original design, which is mainly thanks to my interviewees’ contrasting and wonderful multiple language learning experiences, but the original big question of how language learning motivation changes has remained the same.
Daniel: The topic of my book, language teacher noticing, was not mentioned in my dissertation on individual differences in language learning, although the book clearly shows the influence of my earlier research. Much of my writing displays a passion for defining and measuring psychological constructs and all of it concerns language learning and teaching. The book, however, grew directly out of my work educating preservice teachers in Japan, which started with my current position. It is more grounded in this context and clearer in its practical implications. That said, in writing my book, I drew inspiration from my doctoral studies and my advisor, Dick Schmidt, who had extensively researched noticing by learners. My book builds on his contribution, and that of others, to make a case for teacher noticing. Given its overarching goal of offering an integrative perspective on noticing, I think it fits well within the PLLT series.
As noted, dissertations are only a beginning. They are a foundation for one’s academic identity, but they do not determine the future. As we moved forward, we both asked and sought answers to big picture questions (as in our dissertations) within particular contexts of language learning and teaching. It was our choice to follow our scholarship to new places and an exciting challenge to situate our work among recent views in applied linguistics. From our perspective, the emergence of the PLLT field marks a shift toward holistically and humanistically examining “what goes right” in language learning and teaching, rather than “what goes wrong”. This is a refreshing and much-needed change amid the uncertainty and distress that have prevailed in recent years.
Though the writing process differs for everyone, we’d like to conclude with some tips we both found useful:
Build a network of close colleagues and family or friends who will support you.
Check the materials available online, including the Multilingual Matters editors’ discussions with book series editors on their excellent YouTube channel.
Understand your proposed book’s unique appeal and its audience.
Don’t be afraid even if you’re a first-time author. If you believe in the value of your book, go for it!
If your proposal is accepted, set a realistic delivery date to submit the manuscript.
Be aware of the author guidelines as you prepare your work for submission.
After the external review, make necessary changes and prepare a response file to send with your revised manuscript.
Know that the publisher and series editors want you to succeed!
You can find Chika’s book, Motivation to Learn Multiple Languages in Japan, here and Daniel’s book, Language Teacher Noticing in Tasks, here.
You can learn more about how to put a book together in this discussion with our series editors and authors here.
If you would like to submit a book proposal, you can do so here. We look forward to hearing from you!
In this post Tommi explains our collaboration with DeGruyter and their Publisher Partner Program.
Independence
Anyone who knows Channel View Publications and Multilingual Matters will know how fiercely proud we are of our independence. We are not owned by a corporation, neither are we controlled by a university. We do not even owe significant sums of money to banks or financial institutions. This gives us the freedom to publish the books we believe in, and to pursue projects and ideas that we think are good and bring value to the community.
So why, when you search for our books on Google, do you often see books published by us on our rival publisher DeGruyter’s website?
Don’t worry – we have not been bought or taken over by DeGruyter! We remain the same, proudly independent business that we have always been, with total control over our publishing and our finances.
Publisher Partner Program
The DeGruyter Publisher Partner Program started in 2012 with Harvard University Press, and has since expanded to include 34 presses of various sizes, some of which are independent, others are university presses.
At Channel View Publications and Multilingual Matters we have been including our books in the Publisher Partner Program since 2018, and it has allowed us to reach institutional markets that we would never be able to reach on our own. The team at DeGruyter have good contacts with libraries and library consortia worldwide, and act on our behalf to promote relevant titles and collections of titles to these groups. When combining with other quality presses, we are able to put together strong collections of monographs in key subject areas, which are large enough to draw the attention of library collection development teams – and yet retain the highest editorial qualities and diverse publishing lists typical of strong independent publishers and the university presses alike.
We have seen very strong take up of our titles through the DeGruyter program, and we have worked closely together with DeGruyter, with librarians and with authors to raise awareness of our linguistics collection and of our tourism studies books, increasing accessibility of our materials in a number of campuses worldwide. Watch this space for details of future webinars to further promote these collections!
Open Access
As well as working with us to sell books, the DeGruyter partner program allows us to publish our Open Access materials – whether these are full titles or just single chapters within edited titles on their platform – helping to further the availability of these titles along with our traditionally published volumes.
Competition?
But are we not worried about DeGruyter as a competitor? One of our fears when joining the partner program was that we would lose quality manuscripts and proposals to DeGruyter. We are now four years into our partnership and we have yet to see any evidence that this would be the case. Many of our authors have also published books with DeGruyter, and we have the greatest respect for their editorial team – if they did not have a strong linguistics list it would not have made sense for us to partner with them. But our individual lists are different as we have strengths in slightly different areas. We see that many authors will choose the appropriate publisher depending on the focus of their project, just as they always have done.
We look forward to a continued strong working relationship with DeGruyter in years to come, as much as we look forward to many more years of proud independence!
Tommi recently attended a publishing conference where he reflected on the changes in the business over the past few years as a result of the pandemic. In this post, he summarises our experiences and what the future holds.
It is now two years since I wrote the post What The Pandemic Has Meant For Us, which was an early look at the events of 2020, and so this seems the ideal time for an update!
Changes in 2021
With 2020 behind us, 2021 started with a new strict lockdown in the UK. It soon became clear that our usual spring conferences would not happen in person and that they would instead be online. Our experience of online conferences was definitely a mixed bag. It was great to be able to attend a conference and not have to worry that you’d picked the wrong concurrent session and with no travel required, the conferences were more accessible to attendees from all over the world. On the other hand, online exhibiting was clearly a suboptimal experience for delegate and exhibitor alike. I spent an entire weekend exhibiting at the AAAL conference, only to meet my fellow exhibitors and the occasional friend who popped by just to say hello. I was aware of the occasional delegate coming into my exhibit space and then leaving without saying a word – I can only imagine that they were put off by finding a middle-aged man reading a book and stroking his cat staring back at them! We nevertheless felt that supporting our community was important and so we continued to sponsor the major events as we normally would.
Online events
A Multilingual Matters live online event with authors
Our marketing department quickly reacted to this experience by setting up our own online forums – whether this was to promote new books and book series, or to conduct editorial outreach to early career researchers – we felt that it was important to find a way of fulfilling the functions that an in-person conference exhibit would provide. These were met with a good deal of success and this may be something that we wish to repeat in the future, once the current levels of fatigue around online events have subsided.
As the year went on, we saw that we were not alone in our fatigue – many of our authors were busy adapting courses for hybrid learning, thinking about a return to campus, or just burnt out and exhausted. Finding appropriate reviewers for manuscripts was harder and our supply of manuscripts ready for publication slowed up. But our income was steady and costs were still low.
Christmas 2021
Some of the team managed to get together for Christmas 2021
By the end of 2021 we had all been vaccinated and were even able to socialise together more often. We planned to have a return of the company Christmas meal and we were all very much looking forward to celebrating together. We had not counted on Omicron. Just as we entered the Christmas season, a new variant of COVID started to spread and it was not clear whether vaccines would be affected. With very different levels of nervousness around the new variant, we decided to hold our Christmas meal, but with several people not comfortable with the risk of being together indoors we pared down the celebrations and agreed that we would have a second Christmas later in 2022.
Back to the office
2022 has for us been a year of returns – in so many ways! We’ve slowly started returning to the office – although most of us still work from home for part of the week, many of us go into the office at least once a week. We are actively looking at ways in which we can approach this new hybrid working pattern without losing the sense of camaraderie that we had when we were all working at home. This is particularly important as we have some members of staff who work remotely and will not be able to commute to the office on a weekly basis.
Conferences and bookfairs
Sarah at the ATLAS conference in Cork
We have started to return to in-person bookfairs and conferences and have attended both the London and Frankfurt bookfairs, as well as Sociolinguistics Symposium in Ghent, EuroSLA in Switzerland and ATLAS in Cork this year. We’ve had to learn new ways of working at conferences as Brexit has meant it’s much more expensive for us to send large exhibits to the EU, and with uncertain numbers of attendees and an increased focus on our carbon footprint, we’ve taken the decision that conferences would be for displaying key titles and making new contacts, while we offer an extended discount to delegates for online ordering of our books.
Returns
On a more difficult note, we’ve also seen very high numbers of returns of unsold books. During the worst years of the pandemic some larger internet bookstores ordered suspiciously high quantities of our books – and we are now seeing some of these returned to us for credit. It’s a peculiarity of the books business that a retailer can return stock to us several years after they have bought it, and expect a full credit against that sale. This has meant that it isn’t easy for us to completely understand what sales of our titles have been like. We suspect that this has probably been worse this year as staff shortages throughout the book trade have meant that warehouses have focused on selling new stock and are only now getting to processing the returns backlog that has built up.
What next?
So where do we see the future? What opportunities and challenges lie over the horizon? And how do we learn from the unique experience that these years have presented?
A large proportion of our institutional sales have switched to ebooks over the past few years. This has been positive for our financial situation, but we’ve always held the view that we want our customers to buy the version of our books that works for them. If we settle to a level somewhere around 50/50 print/ebooks, then we’ll be happy.
Potential difficulties
Increased inflation and higher prices will definitely cause some headaches. It is likely that printed books will have to increase in price and we are very aware that library budgets may come under pressure in the coming years. It will be important that we get pricing right so we do not cause difficulties for our library partners.
We hope that in-person conferences will continue – it’s been so wonderful to see each other and be together, but it’s important that we remember that online conferences did have their own positives. With an increased focus both on global inclusion and on travelling less we would like to encourage our friends in large associations not to abandon online conferences altogether. Some associations have suggested an alternate year model – we would certainly strongly support such initiatives.
Open Access
We’ve noticed that there is an increased interest in publishing Open Access titles with us and this is definitely something that we will encourage. We will be looking at how we support OA publishing in the future and how we might better support authors who wish to publish OA but for one reason or another do not have ready access to funding for Book Processing Charges.
A positive future
Overall, I think the most important lesson from all of this is that none of us can work alone in a vacuum. The partnerships and mutual support that have sustained us through the pandemic are perhaps things that we took for granted or did not recognise in 2019. Working together we have managed to overcome the problems that have confronted us and it’s by continuing to work together that we’ll be able to build a positive future for all of us.
The majority of the consumption of nonfiction writing by sixth-form students is, undoubtedly, for studying rather than for entertainment. Most students seek out very little study-related reading material of their own volition, and there is limited access to academic material in the school. 
Within my sixth-form community, there is little exploration of life outside of individuals’ personal bubbles. This is partially due to a lack of motivation or inspiration, but also due to limited accessible academic writing about the wider world. 
Channel View Publications and Multilingual Matters 