Publishing Independent Research and Course Materials

Academic publishing assumes you have an institution behind you. If you don’t, most of the doors are simply shut, not with a rejection, but with a submission form that asks for your affiliation and won’t proceed without one.

Meanwhile the work exists. A framework you’ve spent four years developing. A study nobody funded. A course you’ve taught eleven times and refined into something better than the textbook you were told to use.

This is about getting that work into the world as a properly published book, citable, orderable, on a library shelf, rather than a PDF on a personal site that dies when the domain lapses.

Why the ISBN is the whole point

For fiction an ISBN is administrative. For research it’s the difference between a document and a publication.

Every title we produce carries a US-registered ISBN through our Bowker registration and a listing in the international trade directory. Practically, that means the work:

• Can be cited in a form that resolves. A book with an ISBN has a stable, findable identity; a PDF on a personal site does not

• Can be catalogued by libraries, which will generally accept a registered publication and decline a self-printed document

• Can be ordered by anyone, anywhere, through normal trade channels

• Can be deposited with archives and national collections

• Exists independently of you. It doesn’t disappear when a domain lapses or a platform closes

None of that requires an institution’s permission. It requires a publisher of record, which is what we are.

Before you publish course material, check who owns it

This is the part nobody warns people about, and it’s the answer to “is there a law against selling books to my own students.”

There isn’t. Selling a book you wrote to people you teach is entirely lawful. The problem is different: the material may not be yours to sell.

Article 7 of the Dutch Copyright Act provides that where work performed in another’s employment consists of producing works, then unless the parties have agreed otherwise, the person in whose employment the works were produced is deemed the author.

Not “gets a licence to use it.” Is deemed the author. The employer becomes the maker in law.

For teaching materials that is directly on point. Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences puts it plainly in its own guidance to staff: copyright in teaching material you make for your lessons belongs to the institution as your employer, and if you write a textbook or handbook for your subject area, you can make separate arrangements with the institution about it.

The test is whether producing the work fits your job. For copyright to pass to the employer, making the work must fall within the job description. So, roughly:

• Slides, handouts, worksheets and exercises made for your own courses, on institutional time, almost certainly your employer’s

• A textbook written largely in your own evenings and weekends, outside your teaching duties, arguable, and precisely the case institutions negotiate

• Work you did before the post, or entirely outside its scope, yours

The good news is that this is default law. Article 7 can be varied by agreement, parties are free to arrange things differently. A short written confirmation from your institution that it makes no claim is enough to work from, and asking costs you nothing.

If you’re ZZP rather than employed, Article 7 doesn’t reach you at all. It applies to work produced in dienstverband. A freelance trainer, tutor or consultant keeps copyright in what they make unless they’ve signed it away in a client contract, worth checking your contracts rather than assuming.

You keep your moral rights either way. Attribution and protection against alterations damaging your reputation stay with you as the original maker even where the economic rights sit elsewhere.

We won’t publish material where ownership is unresolved. Not out of caution for our own sake, an unresolved claim damages you considerably more than us, and it surfaces at the worst possible moment, which is after the book is selling.

Selling to your own students

Lawful, and often the most sensible route: you already know the audience, the need and the number.

Three things worth thinking through.

Institutional policy is not the same as law. Many institutions have rules or conventions about staff requiring students to buy their own works, usually about disclosure or about not making it compulsory rather than outright prohibition. Check yours.

Optional beats required. A book students choose to buy because it’s genuinely better than the alternative is a stronger position than one they’re obliged to buy. It’s also a better book, because it has to earn the sale.

In Dutch secondary education the buyer isn’t the student. School books are provided to pupils at no cost and the school purchases them, so the sale is institutional. Higher education is different, students buy their own.

Price fixing, and why language matters here too

The Netherlands fixes book prices by law under the wet op de vaste boekenprijs, and

Germany does the same under Buchpreisbindung. Where those apply, a retail price is set and nobody may deviate from it.

Language decides it. Books containing Dutch or Frisian text are bound. A work written entirely in another language is not, and the law is explicit that where the book was published makes no difference, as does the fact that a book with no ISBN at all is still caught if it’s in Dutch.

We publish in English. That is what keeps our titles free to be priced and repriced.

For research that matters twice over. English is where the readership is, and it’s where citation happens. A Dutch-language monograph reaches the Netherlands and Flanders; an

English one reaches everyone working in the field.

If your work is in Dutch, we translate: €100 per 20,000 words or part thereof, €65 for each further 20,000. A 60,000-word study comes to €230. Some authors publish both, Dutch for a local professional audience, English for the field.

What it costs

Print-ready file: ISBN, trade registry, proof copy	€30–90
Monograph or handbook to 50,000 words, needing print preparation	€600
Each additional 18,000 words	+€60
Translation into English, per 20,000 words or part	€100
Each further 20,000 words of translation	+€65

A 90,000-word study needing full preparation comes to €780. If your manuscript is already print-ready, and academic authors are more likely than most to have wrestled LaTeX or a decent template into shape, bring it and pay €30.

Figures, tables, diagrams and reference apparatus affect the work involved, so tell us what’s in it and we’ll be specific rather than approximate.

What you earn

80% of the margin, retail price minus unit cost, on every copy we sell. Tinge World keeps 20% and that doesn’t change by channel or volume.

Where a shop or independent seller makes the sale they take 40% and your share is 40%.

Where you sell copies yourself, at a conference, a seminar, to a cohort, you buy at unit cost plus our 20% and keep everything above it. For a researcher with a professional audience that is usually the best-paying route by a distance, because you know exactly who wants it.

Paid monthly, on the 15th of the second month following the sale.

What this looks like in practice

Our own LoveLogic framework is published this way, an independent research title with no institutional backer, a registered ISBN, and a trade listing. It exists as a citable publication because someone decided it should, not because a committee approved it.

That’s the whole proposition. We are not peer review and we don’t pretend to be. What we provide is the apparatus that turns finished work into a published book: ISBN, registry, print specification, production and a route to readers.

If your work needs peer review to do its job, get it reviewed first, we’ll publish the reviewed version and you’ll have a stronger book. If it doesn’t, there is no reason to wait for permission that isn’t coming.

Who this suits

Independent researchers without a current affiliation, or working outside a discipline’s institutional structures.

Practitioners, clinicians, therapists, engineers, teachers, with expertise that never gets written down because there’s no academic route for it.

Lecturers and tutors who’ve built something better than the assigned textbook, and who have sorted out the ownership question first.

Trainers and consultants with a methodology worth putting in print, where a book does more for credibility than any brochure.

Retired academics with unfinished work and no institution left to publish through.

Getting started

Send us the word count, the format, whether it’s print-ready, and what’s in it besides prose, figures, tables, references, index.

And if it’s teaching material made while employed, tell us where the ownership question stands. If you haven’t asked yet, ask before you commission anything. It’s one email and it prevents the only genuinely serious problem on this page.

Got work that should be a book? Tell us what it is and where it stands. We’ll come back with production cost, the retail it supports, and what you’d earn per copy.

[Talk to us about publishing your research]

Also worth reading: publishing a novel or novella and what coloring book artists earn.