BY RYAN PORTER
WHEN DAN WAGSTAFF, marketing and publicity manager at Publishers Group Canada and founder of the bookdesign blog The Casual Optimist, was invited to judge the Association of University Presses’s 2018 Book, Jacket, and Journal Show, he expected to see a certain style of academic book among the contest’s 650 entries. “You think that it’s going to be very informational, very typographic,” he says.
Yet academic presses are increasingly going headto- head against trade publishers. “They are also very much aware that they need to sell books and that they want to appeal to the widest possible audience,” Wagstaff says. “That is something that has changed in the last few years.”