A Lowdown Look at Higher Ed. ESL

When it comes to college level ESL some publishers are more effective than others, says Andy Martin.

Okay. Close your books. Pop quiz… What were the first American ESL textbooks and who published them?
This is not the official answer, but based on my knowledge, I’d say Mastering American English and Mastering American English. Weird, huh? These two books were published in 1955 and ‘56, one by Prentice Hall and the other by McGraw Hill. The Prentice authors were Danielson and Hayden and the McGraw author was Grant Taylor. I blush to admit that I used both of them… in the 70s. And I believe both books are still in print, though no longer publicized. These two titles were remarkably similar, not only in title but in content and pedagogy too. They are your basic "drill and kill" exercise books which was the thing in those days and has never really gone away.

Those were the easy days of ESL publishing. One size fits all. There were many drill and kill texts and a lot of audio lingual ones too. Dixon and Lado come readily to mind. As long as the students were "young adult/adult" and lived in the U.S. or somewhere else on the planet, they qualified for using the book. Our British cousins, were, I’m sure, well ahead of the U.S. in this area. If someone can write in and tell me what the first Oxford or Longman ELT titles were, that would be cool.

What’s interesting, though not at all surprising, is that these texts were published by college publishers. College ESL has always been in the forefront of our profession. In fact, TESOL, Inc. began life as ATESL (the Association of Teachers of English as a Second Language) an interest group within NAFSA, the National Assoc-iation of Foreign Student Affairs (née Advisors). Most of the early active membership came from college ESL instructors. Also in publishing, most ESL departments ended up in college divisions, rather than school or international.
Enrollment-wise, colleges have maybe one-tenth or even one-fifteenth the enrollments of schools. This is true of the general population as well as in ESL. Nevertheless the college market is much easier to publish for and brings in almost as much revenue. How come?

Well, schools are funded by our taxes and we (through the schools) buy the books for the students. Once funding is set for the year, it cannot be changed, so if the price of a book goes up, the school district is forced to buy fewer books. At colleges, students buy their own books, as many as they are required to. If the price of a book goes up (and does it ever, sometimes two or three times a year), the student has no recourse but to shell out, or ask the parents for more bucks.

This system spawned the decades-old used college textbook market. Most students who have forked over $80 for a hard cover engineering text, turn right around and sell it once the semester is over.

Here in the high-tech millennium, this whole process is being streamlined by internet college booksellers and most recently by the advent of DVD disks, which are already replacing not just one or two books but entire four-year curricula. Witness the experiment where eight dental schools and three publishers have teamed up to put four years worth of Dentistry texts on one DVD, fully searchable, and updatable disk, which costs a paltry $3,000 (less than four years’ worth of books). This hasn’t happened yet with ESL books, though some online instructional providers are trying to enlist college intensive English programs to subscribe via the web and get instruction delivered or supplemented that way.

Back to college ESL: I’ve explained how college ESL publishing brings in more than enough revenue to stoke the financial furnaces, but how is it easier to publish for the college market in general and college ESL specifically? Two words: color and development. Most school texts are full color, well-designed and follow a specific syllabus. Publishing costs run into the hundreds of thousands, sometime the millions for a full blown series. College texts, including academic ESL books, by comparison, are cheap to produce and generate much higher profit margins as a consequence. Most college texts are black and white with a few illustrations, charts, and photos sprinkled here and there. They are written and reviewed by college professors and receive little, if any, development. By development I mean careful organization of the pedagogy, activities, exercise types, and so on. When I arrived at one publisher, we ESL-types instituted a novel approach to college publishing, using highly-paid, well-educated, ESL-experienced development editors. Before, there was a pool of poorly-paid development editors, who were assigned texts by lot, without any regard to the subject matter. Their task was to make sure the language was consistent and the pictures were okay.

So how does a college publisher succeed in the ESL market place? They do it by realizing that ESL is different and not following the regular college publishing patterns in editorial, in marketing and in sales. It is usually a painful process. Some of the big guys eventually figured it out, others remained clueless, while for a few the jury is still out.
Editorially, the shotgun approach has been the rule in general college and ESL publishing. In this method, you flood the market each year with 20-30 new, barely developed titles and hope that there will be a few best sellers to carry the list. The music industry does the same thing with new songs. On the sales side, the approach is similar: Unleash a flock of young, inexperienced recent college grads, with no particular specialties and send them to campuses to sell whatever is on your list. Each year, sales, editorial and marketing identify a few "AAA" books with blockbuster potential and the reps are instructed to push these titles the most. We’re talking $80 Psych. or $100 Comp. Sci. Books and intro. enrollments of 800-2000 at the biggest schools. Do the math. That could be adoptions worth over $100,000 at one school.

On average, ESL books cost between $15 and $20 and individual class enrollments usually are a lot lower. So where is the incentive for managers or reps to sell a book they know nothing about anyway? Add to this the fact that a typical large university or college may have as many as three or four different ESL programs on campus, with some of them not even ordering from the college bookstore, and you can end up with a confused and reluctant sales force.

Virtually every college publisher that has employed this model to sell ESL has been singularly unsuccessful. So what’s the key? A dedicated ESL sales force: A group of individuals, preferably with a teaching and/or language background, who can go out there and call on a whole variety of college and other ESL programs in the marketplace. Instead of spending all day at one college knocking on every door, they go around making appointments in select departments with key people, at several schools, in larger territories. That’s all there really is to it.

Why has this been such a hard lesson for some publishers to learn? Chalk it up to the human proclivity to assume that one’s own background is the same as everyone else’s. Most editorial, marketing and sales directors seem to think that what they’ve done all their lives is perfectly applicable to any subject, including ESL.
And, now, back to the future. We all know everything is cyclical, so just because a few college ESL publishers have figured out how the marketplace works, doesn't mean that when they’re all fired and the next crew comes in, they’ll continue to get it.

Publish or Perish is Andy Martin’s regular column on the world of ESL publishing.