This is the story of how I spent five years fighting to get my own book back from a publisher who technically did nothing wrong.
Let me set the stage: I had spent years doing research: reading, surveying, interviewing, analyzing, reading more, etc… to get a clear picture of the experiences that South Asian Americans had in schools in the United States.
And I got a clear picture.
Then I started looking for a publisher as I turned my findings into a book.
And I FOUND one! A GOOD one.
And about two years later, the book, South Asian American Experiences in Schools: Brown Voices from the Classroom, was out…
And it looked beautiful. It felt wonderful to hold.
And the hardcover was also priced above $100. And the paperback (which only became available years after initial release) was priced around $50. Priced like a textbook.
I knew, the day I learned the pricing (which was after release btw), that no teacher, no parent, no principal was going to read it. Because nobody was about to pay $100 or even $50 for a book they didn’t have to read.
The book was being purchased, mostly by university libraries using pre-allocated funds, or theoretically by students in courses that assigned or recommended the book, since that’s how it goes with books done by academic presses.
But it wasn’t being read by the people I’d written it for.
And I knew:
I had to get the rights reverted.
…and it took five years. This is the story.
When I finished my doctorate at Johns Hopkins in 2017, I had a few options for what to do with the research.
I could let it sit as a dissertation, which is what most doctoral research becomes (a beautiful, and very expensive copy sits in my home, and on a university shelf, and while it is occasionally cited in others’ research, it’s mostly invisible).
I wanted to get the findings of said research out to the world. So I shared my findings, everywhere I could:
…And then, I started writing a book based on my dissertation.
The work was out there in pieces, but the book itself would be the comprehensive version. It would be a way to get all the KEY findings out in a neat package, to the wider world. This was how I would reach all the people who needed to know about the findings:
So while I was writing, I started looking for a publisher who would believe in the project.
Here’s where I’d love to tell you I did weeks of careful due diligence on contract terms, rights retention, marketing support, royalty structures… But I didn’t. Like most people, I thought traditional publishing is what real authors do, that academic publishing is what real academics do, and that being picked up by an academic press is a credential.
So I did what most first-time academic authors do: I called friends for advice, I read everything I could find online, I looked at the academic presses that had published books in my field, I sent inquiries…
And then, one of the good ones was interested.
The publisher, Rowman & Littlefield, was an established academic press with a great reputation, and beautiful books.
When they sent me the offer, I was thrilled.
I read the contract as carefully as I could. I even showed it to a lawyer and a literary agent of a friend.
I signed.
The contract I signed gave them a lot. Rights to the book pretty much without an end date, with reversion clauses that were vague enough to be effectively at their discretion. Royalties on net (not list) at percentages I now know were standard but unfortunate. No real marketing budget or marketing plan (that was on me). And most egregiously: Pricing entirely at their discretion.
…All part of a standard academic press contract, by the way, which I now understand is structured around the PUBLISHER’S economics and not the author’s.
The book came out in 2019. I was proud.
The book got published. It got into university libraries. It received some scholarly attention. It was cited in a few peer-reviewed articles. By the standards of an academic monograph, it did fine.
But that’s not what I wrote it for.
The way academic publishing works is something I didn’t really understand until I was inside it: academic books are priced for institutional buyers, not for individuals. Universities have library budgets specifically allocated for buying books in their faculty’s areas of study. A press can price a book at $95 hardcover because a university library will buy it anyway; that’s the customer.
The press makes its money on a smaller number of higher-priced units sold to institutions.
They’re not trying to reach the parent who wants to understand her daughter’s classroom experience.
Regular teachers and parents and random South Asian Americans are NOT their customer.
But that was the audience *I* wanted to reach.
The teacher in a random Maryland elementary school. The parent of a South Asian American kid trying to make sense of their own kid’s experience. The principal trying to figure out why his school’s South Asian American kids were all anxious or depressed. The South Asian American adult who finally wanted to read a book about her own kind of childhood.
None of those readers are going to pay $50 for a paperback or $100 for a textbook.
I asked the publisher about lowering the price. They explained, politely and firmly, that academic press pricing was non-negotiable, and that paperback pricing reflected production costs and market expectations for academic monographs. I asked about a trade edition. There wasn’t going to be one.
That’s when I started thinking about getting my rights back.
I sent the publisher an email asking about reverting the rights. I wrote it carefully and professionally.
I explained my concerns about price, and how I wanted to bring it to a wider audience, and that I hoped we could discuss reversion.
The response was equally polite and equally firm. The publisher needed to earn back as much from the book as they could to justify the printing and editorial costs they’d invested. They couldn’t revert rights while the book was still selling. Could I check back in a year?
This is, I now know, the standard response to a reversion request from a publisher who isn’t quite ready to let go. The book was still selling, in some sense. It might keep selling for years to come. The publisher has discretion, and the contract was written in their favor. They weren’t being evil.
They are a business, and they are protecting their investment.
The next year, they told me they were planning a discount on the book, and a paperback format. They expected a spike in sales, and could I reach back out later?
The year after that, there had been a small spike, and now sales had stabilized at a low baseline. Could I check back next year?
Every year, a polite version of “not yet” with a slightly different reason. The bottom line was that the book was still selling, just enough for them to not want to cancel our contract.
I kept emailing. I’d send a follow-up every few months. I tried different tones but was always polite. And their responses were always polite too, and always essentially the same answer: not yet.
I think this is how it generally goes with rights reversion stories, but they tend to end with authors giving up somewhere along the line. But mama didn’t raise a quitter. So I kept asking.
And then they finally agreed because I was sooo convincing!
No not really.
What eventually got my rights back was a corporate restructuring on their end.
In 2024, Rowman & Littlefield went through a series of changes and through a handful of mergers and acquisitions and reconfigurations, which led to some of its imprints being absorbed by other companies (its academic and professional publishing business to Bloomsbury Publishing, including Lexington Books, the imprint that published my book).
During the transition, some of their catalog got reassessed, and books that weren’t actively driving massive revenue became candidates for rights reversion in a way they hadn’t been when the press was stable.
So this time when I reached out, the answer was different.
They said yes.
I WISH I could tell you that I only felt triumph and excitement.
But I really just felt… I don’t know, relieved. Maybe even a little indignant, and tired, and even a little sad..
The book had spent five years priced out of the audience I’d written it for. The people it was supposed to serve never got a chance to read it. The years between 2019 and 2025 aren’t coming back. The teachers and parents and administrators who would have read it in 2020 or 2021—and maybe even supported students differently having read it (during the COVID virtual years no less) missed the window for those kids. Some of those students are out of school. Some of those teachers have moved on.
BUT. I do know that now is better than never, and there are still people who want to read it now.
I’m republishing Brown Voices this fall, under my own imprint (Delville Press) this Fall (make sure you get my newsletter so you know when it’s out).
The new edition will be priced for the audience I actually wrote it for—paperback at a normal trade price, ebook at something affordable, hardcover available for libraries and institutional buyers who want it, but not at a tier that prices everyone else out. The cover will be redesigned, and the writing has been completely revised and edited and reorganized over the last year.
The book will be findable and buyable on Amazon, in independent bookstores, in libraries, and through every regular place a book is sold.
Which means, I hope, it will reach the readers it was always meant to reach.
I can’t pretend the rerelease will recoup the years lost in terms of lost reach, lost impact, or even lost royalties, because it obviously won’t. But it does mean that going forward, people who want to read it, can.
Teachers can read it, parents can read it, regular Brown people can read it. A South Asian American adult who Googles “South Asian American school experiences” and finds my book can actually afford to read it, which is what I wanted in the first place.
I ran the contract by both a lawyer, and an actual literary agent.
And they both told me the contract seemed fine and looked standard. And that’s the thing, they were both right. The contract was standard—which is the problem.
Standard contracts are written by publishers’ lawyers for publishers‘ interests.
And so, I’d probably actually tell myself to “JUST PUBLISH THE DAMN THING YOURSELF.“
Here’s what standard contracts don’t advertise (and what even a lawyer and literary agent didn’t flag!):
I’ve written more about why I think most writers should self-publish in a separate post, so I won’t relitigate the whole argument here. But the short version: traditional publishing is a business, not a vocation. It’s set up to serve the publisher’s economics, not the writer’s. For most writers — especially writers whose audience is outside the academy or outside the bestseller lists — self-publishing produces a better book, a better reach, a better royalty, and a better long-term outcome.
If you’re an academic considering publishing your dissertation as a book, read the contract, and get someone (an agent, a lawyer, an experienced author friend) to read the contract too. And then negotiate as hard as possible. Ask hard questions about pricing, ask about reversion, and if the answer to most of your questions is “this is standard,” GO DO MORE RESEARCH.
And don’t be surprised if your research leads you to…
I’m also sharing this story because you should seriously consider if you you really need to go the trad-pub route at all. Consider your career; consider your GOALS with your book.
And then, consider self-publishing. Author-owned writing, for MANY writers, will produce a better outcome than the traditional path.
If you have a book that’s currently locked in a contract you regret, I want you to know that you’re not alone, and reversion is not impossible.
It’s hard and slow and can often take years. But it can happen.
So keep asking. Be persistent. Anything could happen.
The book is mine again!! And I want you, the reader, to know that it’s rereleasing this fall, priced accessibly for the people it was always written for: the teachers, the parents, Brown adults who want to hear their stories reflected back to them.
It’ll release as “Brown Voices,” and you can sign up for my newsletter to be the first to know when the preorder is live.
UPDATE: Preorders are now LIVE!
Preorder Brown Voices Paperback ($19.99) | Preorder Brown Voices Hardcover ($29.99) | Preorder the Kindle Edition ($9.99)
– Punita
