This is our third mailbag column! Folks ask us questions about the wherefores and what-have-yous of history, we try to answer them. This time, it’s a question that undergraduate students often ask (because they’re the only ones brave enough), but it’s an important one that’s central to our mission here at Contingent.
How much money do historians make from all the writing they do?
Unless you’re talking about David McCullough, Doris Kearns Goodwin, or Michael Beschloss, most of the time the answer is “zilch.”
That’s a bit of a simplification, but not too much. There are kinds of historical writing that can and do earn money for the authors, and kinds that don’t. The professional writing that most historians do falls in the latter category.
When it comes to what kind of writing pays, the biggest factor is form. Historians write in a number of different forms, and communicate in even more (think podcasts, documentaries, interviews), but I’m going to focus on the two big ones: books and articles.
Historians write books. That may seem like an obvious point, but it’s an important one. Historians are, perhaps more than any other academic field, a “book-based discipline.” Books are often considered the best (and most prestigious) way for a historian to communicate. The history books you are most likely to encounter in a library or bookstore are what we call “trade books.” These are published for a general audience by a commercial publisher. The historian generally receives both an advance against royalties and future royalty payments for this kind of book, but most historians publishing these books are not selling as many copies and earning as much money as the best-selling historians listed at the beginning, and it’s very difficult to make a living doing this. Historian Megan Kate Nelson has written a bit about the financial realities of this writing, and her Twitter thread is worth reading.
Most of the books written by historians, especially those working in colleges and universities, are published by academic presses, not commercial presses. They’re usually affiliated with universities (Yale University Press, for example, or the University of North Carolina Press) and the books they publish are written for other historians and specialists in related fields. Historians do earn royalties for these books, but at a much lower rate than they would with a trade book. Advances are not unheard of, but they’re rare, and much smaller than the advance you’d get from a commercial press. Since the primary markets for these books are individual scholars and university libraries, the number of copies printed is much smaller than with a trade book—in the hundreds to low thousands—and they usually cost much more.
One historian told me the most money he’d ever made off of a book was $1500 in royalties; none of his other books had come close. Another told me she’d received a $2000 advance, but had never received any royalties. Academic publishers are always on the look for so-called “crossover” books that could sell well with the general public, and some even have trade divisions. But for the most part, academic books sell to a small audience, and given the time and cost of doing the research required to publish one of these books, they don’t make any money for their authors. They don’t make a lot of money for their presses either, though the people who work for a university press are paid.
Articles are another form, but there’s an even greater difference here between the versions for specialists and for the general public. Articles like the ones we publish here at Contingent, or the ones you see in mainstream newspapers and magazines, are meant for a general audience. These can be things like short articles, features, editorials, and book reviews. These kinds of articles pay, but they don’t pay that much, and even some really big outlets don’t pay anything for some of the history articles they publish. Much like writing books for the general public, writing history articles and reviews for the public is not a way most historians could make a living.
Academic journal articles are published in (big surprise) academic journals. Other than a few journals that will publish in any area, these journals are usually focused on a time, a place, or a theme, e.g. the Journal of Economic History, Nineteenth-Century Studies, Western Historical Quarterly. Depending on the journal, academic articles can be between 3,000 and 15,000 words, with most falling between 6,000 and 11,000 unless they are book reviews, which are much shorter. For reference, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations,” a monumentally long feature, is around 16,000 words. Historians are not paid for academic journal articles at all.1
You may be wondering why historians don’t just publish in the forms that pay. Why bother with academic publishers and journal articles? It really comes down to one major difference between commercial and academic publishing, a difference that is central to why historians write what they write and publish where they publish. It’s something called peer review.
Peer review is a system in which other scholars in your field read and evaluate your work before a journal or press accepts it for publication. Often it’s what we call “double blind” review, meaning that the reviewers don’t know who the author is, and the author doesn’t know who reviewed their work. These reviewers aren’t just fact-checking, and they’re not assessing whether the piece will sell; they’re determining whether your grasp of the existing research in the field is complete, whether your own research is good, whether your argument is valid, whether your writing is clear, and whether your book or article contributes something new to the field.
This isn’t to say that commercial presses and magazines don’t have people review manuscripts, but the truth is it’s not like what happens in academic writing. There are lots of best-selling works of history that are great, but there are lots that wouldn’t pass peer review. There are even plenty that an academic editor wouldn’t have bothered to send out for peer review.
One way you can see the difference between history written for a general audience and history that’s been through peer review is in the citations. All history books published by academic presses and all history articles published by academic journals will have full citations, usually endnotes at the back of the book. Some commercial history books, especially crossovers, will have citations, but it’s not common, and they’re often simplified or in a different format. History articles published in magazines and newspapers never have citations.2
Just as you don’t get paid for writing articles, the peers who review articles don’t get paid either. Even the journal editors don’t usually get paid; in most cases, they’re a tenured or tenure-track faculty member at a university where the journal “lives,” and the journal effectively buys out some of the faculty member’s courses each semester to give them time to do the work.
If you’ve ever wanted to read an academic journal article, though, you may have noticed that it costs money to download it—anywhere between $5 and $90. The article’s author isn’t getting that money. The journal itself isn’t getting that money. Instead, it goes to the company that has the rights to store that article, along with thousands of others, and charge for access. Universities can buy access to every journal a company sells, but only the richest universities can afford access to all of these companies, and people who don’t have access through a university are excluded unless they want to pay directly.
So why do historians do all of this academic writing? Because publishing is part of their job. It’s one of the things tenure-track professors have to do to keep their jobs (get tenure) and earn any raises or promotions after tenure, and only peer-reviewed books and articles count. Tenure-track faculty do have periodic semester- or year-long sabbaticals to help them spend focused time on research and writing, but it’s not easy. For a historian, the time from initial research to publication is measured in years, not months, but productivity expectations continue to rise.
Grad students and contingent faculty are often writing academic books and articles in the hopes this will help them get tenure-track jobs, but it should be noted that research and publishing are explicitly not part of the job description for most contingent faculty, even if they’re full-time. Historians working for museums, archives, and historic sites also publish academic books and articles, but their employment doesn’t usually depend on it. Historians who aren’t affiliated with a college or university can publish in academic journals and with academic presses, since the peer-review system evaluates the work itself, regardless of the scholar’s background, but it’s impossible to make a living this way.
This matters because it’s not just that most academic writing doesn’t earn you anything—most of the time, it costs you. Doing historical research and writing is time-consuming and expensive. It requires traveling to archives, which means paying for transportation and living expenses. These expenses are much greater if you’re traveling overseas, but they’re significant even if you’re traveling one state over. Contingent faculty, even those who are full-time, aren’t usually given access to institutional research funding to defray the costs of their research; but if they’re still on the academic job market, they have to keep researching and writing if they hope to get a tenure-track job. Even if you’re explicitly not on the tenure-track market, hiring committees still ask about your current and future research, so it’s implied that you should still be doing this even if you’re not receiving any institutional support.
But beyond the need to publish these kinds of things because they’re what your boss is looking for, there are reasons scholars want to publish. Even though I think it’s important to communicate historical research to the general public, I think there is still a place for this other kind of historical writing. For instance, I have an article coming out soon in the journal Religion & American Culture. I’m really proud of it and I think it’s good, but it’s really written for a specialist audience. This doesn’t mean I think it’s “above” a general audience, just that it’s contributing to a conversation among a very specific community of practitioners.
Still, if there are ways that historians can write for the public, why do we need Contingent? To answer that, I’d simply ask you to look at the history writing you see in most magazines, and glance at the best-sellers in history on Amazon, many of which don’t really seem like history books anyway. When you’re an editor or a commercial press deciding whether to publish a work of history, you may be concerned that it’s well-researched and important, but you also want to make sure that it sells.
There are ideas in the book trade about what kind of history sells because there are ideas about what kind of people are into history. This means that a lot of topics aren’t considered marketable, and therefore aren’t worth the risk of the time, money, and column or booklist space they’d consume. Hot-takes (“10 ways Trump is like James Buchanan”) and new books on familiar topics (the Founders, wars, presidents, colonialism exploration) are safer. Some of those books do present really new and interesting interpretations of the past, and that is really important, but the overall effect of this trend is to reinforce the perception that history is about great (white) men, their politics, their money, and their wars. It doesn’t mean that other kinds of history can’t find their way through to a general audience in this form, but it just doesn’t happen much.
For historians working as contingent faculty, or working outside of higher ed altogether, this means the only option left for publishing their work is through academic presses and journals, but doing it without access to university research funding, or even a steady income, only to be pay-walled out of accessing your work when it’s published.
This is why we are committed to paying contributors to Contingent. We think they’ve got great stories to tell, but we don’t think they should have to write for free just to share their work with a broad audience. It’s why we depend on reader contributions to keep going.
Contingent pays all of its writers. Like what you read? Donate to keep the magazine going. Learn more about our mission.
- I’m not getting into open-access here both because it’s another kettle of fish altogether and because it’s not very common for journals in this field.
- This is one of the ways Contingent is different.
