A quick publishing question: is it becoming the norm for publishers to invoice authors/editors for the costs of indexing? My previous experience had been that these costs are deducted against your (sometimes hypothetical) royalties

At the time of signing a contract with @routledgebooks we were given documentation suggesting this could be deducted against royalties. At the time of submission, we& #39;re presented with either a bill for $500+ or a demand to do a week& #39;s intensive work in an extremely narrow window.

The obvious conclusion I& #39;ve drawn from this is to avoid ever publishing anything with @routledgebooks again. Their profits are soaring ( https://www.thebookseller.com/news/taylor-francis-reports-5-revenue-boost-1195347)">https://www.thebookseller.com/news/tayl... presumably because they& #39;re so shamelessly and aggressively passing costs onto academic authors.

But is this practice spreading? At what point do we need to start cutting out commercial publishers who slap enormous price tags on volumes, aggressively restrict their circulation and pass production costs back to authors/editors in increasingly brazen and offensive ways? https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="😡" title="Schmollendes Gesicht" aria-label="Emoji: Schmollendes Gesicht">

TLDR - What& #39;s the point in (effectively) paying a publisher to slap a £100+ price tag on a hard back collection of essays when we could just release them ourselves to everyone for free?

(this thread from Mark Carrigan btw... I forgot our policy of naming personal tweets when posting from this shared account)