Zed Books launches academic division Zed Scholar

Zed Books today (Wednesday 24th September) launches a new division targeting the scholarly market, Zed Scholar.

The initiative is the first major step for the indie following a restructure at the publisher last year which saw five of 10 company directors depart. Under the remaining five directors, Zed Books is now embracing a strategy which makes a clearer division between trade and scholarly publishing, puts business development focus on embedding the Zed brand within the academic market, and has a greater focus on digital, including digital marketing and digital sales.

In the past Zed has generally published in simultaneous hardback and paperback editions, aiming its books towards what could be described as a specialist general reader. Zed Scholar will now produce specifically academic series with more in-depth social science research in hardback-first library editions. Three academic series will kick this off, all published in association with the International Africa Institute: African Popular Culture; Politics and Development in Contemporary Africa; and Politics and Society in Urban Africa.

The division will also formalise its Open Access offering, following Plan S recommendations, with a mix of OA approaches being offered. 

Zed Scholar is also curating its first digital collections, in international politics and development, including Gender and Development Digital Collections, Conflict and Development Digital Collections and African Arguments Digital Collection (published in association with the Royal African Society, the International Africa Institute and the World Peace Foundation).

The division is being supported by platform scholar.zetbooks.net, which offers resources for academics, social science institutions and university librarians, including content on using Zed books for teaching, an area devoted to academics looking to become authors and a librarian area where the digital collections are presented. The platform will offer Zed Books a way to speak directly to its publishing partners, institutions and librarians. There are also two roles at the publisher now focused on academic marketing.    

Kika Sroka-Miller, co-owner and director of Zed Books, and creator of Zed Scholar, said: “For independent or crossover critical academic publishers like Zed Books, as well as for smaller university presses, there is sometimes a perception issue: crossover publishing is seen as some kind of ‘grey area’, where the trade publishing devalues the academic publishing and vice versa. That’s what we’re explicitly tackling with the launch of Zed Scholar. Zed Scholar is a space for our academic expertise to shine, and for that to happen in a way that underpins the business, the brand and both the trade and academic lists, because it’s the values the Zed brand is known for – diversity, internationalism, giving a platform to marginalised voices – that unifies all our product lines, regardless of market, territory or channel.”

Sroka-Miller worked with external creative teams, including the Burgess & Beech Studio, to create the fully optimised and responsive scholar.zedbooks.net platform.