Good at making books, bad at business
We are writing to call out some major failures and problems within Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
(We have written, twice, to CEO Graeme Nicol about these matters, and we even offered to travel to UK for direct discussion, but have never received a response. Lack of a response is one of the ways we came to realize that CSP’s claim that authors “are at the center of everything we do” is very far from the reality.)
In 2023 through 2025 we worked with CSP to publish "How Transfusion Medicine Moved from the Margins to the Mainstream of Medicine, from World War II to the Pandemic". In managing the text and creating the book itself, CSP did a good and professional job. It’s only after the book was finished, and handed off to the business and marketing side of CSP, that major problems developed.
We won’t go into a lot of detail here, though, on request, we would provide any prospective author with our more detailed letters to Mr. Nicol. The major difficulty was in marketing support – not only did CSP fail to provide almost any of the support promised when developing our contract at the front end, what marketing they did do actually detracted from our ability to sell the book. Specifically, they priced the book much higher than their early estimate, and much higher than their own titles similar to ours. In spite of our questioning, they gave no explanation for their pricing decisions, in fact they almost never even replied to our inquiries. (One of us has expertise in marketing, and pricing in particular, so our questions were well-informed.)
Another marketing failure, or near-failure, was lack of support of our presence at the world’s largest convention of professionals in fields that made up most of our book’s target audience. Even with five months’ notice of this conference, only at the last minute did we get any support beyond an offer to send a few posters.
A more general concern was CSP’s persistent lack of responsiveness to us on pretty much anything. The person assigned as marketing lead at one point went eight months without responding to any of our emails. Other business-side people also responded only occasionally and even then usually after many days or weeks. (Yet, ironically, they only allowed communication via email.) Even buying copies of our own book was made much more difficult than it should have been. At many points along the way we wondered if CSP even wanted our book to sell.
We should add that both of us know more than a little about writing and publishing. One of us (Dr. McCullough) has published more than 350 articles in the medical and scientific literature, including his own textbook, Transfusion Medicine, with the 6th edition currently in development. In addition, Dr. McCullough served as editor of the scientific journal Transfusion for 15 years. Mr. Therkelsen has about 20 articles in peer-reviewed journals, and served as a full-time faculty member at a leading journalism school. He also served as the senior marketing executive in a biomedical enterprise (several times larger than CSP) where, among other things, he was in charge of pricing.
CSP can’t be this bad all the time, or they would have gone out of business long ago. But at their worst, they are bad beyond belief. If you are considering publishing with them, tread carefully. We have two pieces of advice. First, get everything in writing. Second, insist on the right to talk to them by telephone, especially when there are difficult issues. They can ignore emails, but it’s harder to ignore a phone call.
David J. Therkelsen, MBA, on behalf of self and Jeff McCullough, MD
21 December 2025
Unprompted review
