As part of celebrating #OAWeek, I was invited to take part in a panel discussion about book marketing for authors at the LSE Press event: What's in store for social sciences publishing?
What a wonderful event.
Thought-provoking discussion, industry experts and thoroughly well-organised. Huge congratulations to the LSE Press team and the Library team.
The authors' love for LSE Press was something else. Commercial publishers were really not favoured in the room - it took me somewhat by surprise. The personal service they receive from a university press is so valued, and it really made me consider how much of this personal touch can get lost when scaling up.
Sometimes when I travel my Mum comes with me. We live about five hours from each other and so even though we don't see much of each other, the little snippets we get are lovely. It's become a bit of an industry joke when I am on the conference circuit: 'Is your mother here?' - sometimes it's a yes, and sometimes it's a no! Well, this time was a yes; it was the first time she saw me presenting. I think I was more nervous she was there than anyone else! As a retired solicitor, this was right up her street, and she left feeling inspired.
Later on that week, I had the privilege of helping Scottish Universities Press with their first-ever book launch - make sure you check out their fireside chat with Tim Ingold and the co-authors of Conversations with Tim Ingold: Anthropology, education and life. Join Tim Ingold, Robert Gibb, Philip Tonner, and Diego Maria Malara with Hannah Whaley and Gillian Daly to learn more.
My LSE Press presentation
I promised to share my insights from my presentation, so here we are.
Publishers have resources to only do so much for your publication, and it depends on whether they are a university press, small specialist publisher or large commercial entity on how many resources they have. The great thing is that there's more you can do for something newly released, and even work that you published some time ago that is still relevant now.
Firstly, let's discuss what your publisher might do for your book.
You may wonder why there is a fridge on the slide. That's because we're moving into a world where B2AI is becoming more critical. I wrote about this recently if you want to learn more about B2C and B2B and how this will be replaced by B2AI. A fridge that orders milk when it knows you are running low and the weekend is coming will order it from somewhere. Thinking about how technology is so embedded in our lives, how do you ensure your book is discoverable to AI looking for recommendations or purchasing options? You need to have good data. Publishers are connected with DOI repositories, indexes and databases to help improve discoverability.
Your publisher will manage the process of publishing your book, sharing metadata, and disseminating the message to their network through cross-promotion activities, conferences, trade shows, and events. They will provide reporting on downloads, visits, and impact-like alternative metrics (AKA altmetrics), which will help you demonstrate the impact of your published work and which you can use when submitting your impact to your institution. They will also promote your book at an international level and through partnerships.
Time to increase your own impact
Over and above what your publisher is doing, make sure you:
reach out to your internal comms to share your book, speak with your library about ensuring it is catalogued and dependent on copyright and availability, add a copy to your repository
create a book hashtag, take up opportunities to share your work like a poster abstract and speaking opportunities
start giving constructive and thoughtful feedback to improve your online visibility through comments on posts and articles on LinkedIn, ResearchGate, Academia.edu, the Conversation and Reddit
measure and increase your impact with alternative metrics - there are several services that monitor online visibility and impact, like PlumX Metrics (was Plum Analytics), Impact Story and Altmetric. Use these as a way of demonstrating your impact to your library and institution
create short text to share with your network - keep it short and sweet with a link back to your book online to continue generating traffic. Have a sentence on all your profiles with a link to the book; make sure it is part of your ORCID profile and your institutional profile, and have a sentence as part of your email signature
Use your short text on social media, share across the relevant fields and communities and use specific hashtags to help share more widely. Use hashtags to get inspiration, e.g. #BookTok on TikTok.
10 Top takeaway tips
Improve your usage, and include your book link in your email signature and on your institutional profile.
Tag your publisher, book reviewers, member bodies, and organisations on your social media and ‘pin’ your post to the top of your feed.
Update your profile and include your book (e.g. ORCID).
Write up to 180 characters (X count), including the link to your book and use it across all your online channels.
Use your publisher link to help drive usage and get reporting from one place to demonstrate impact to your institution.
Use free AI tools and be specific. Make text more active – great examples are Simon Sinek and Apple.
Find groups on LinkedIn, Facebook and Reddit and add comments to start building your profile.
85% of videos watched on social media are without sound. Use captions in any video content you include and upload the videos to social media. Social media channel algorithms don't like you sending people away from their platforms to another place, but they do like you uploading content into the post and keeping people on their platform.
Improve accessibility – formats, online videos and create a hashtag with capital letters for each word. Screen readers will read #openaccess as # -o-p-e-n-a-c-c-e-s-s and #OpenAccess as #-Open-Access.
Remarketing – repurpose existing content like bitesized videos for social and infographics. Use free tools like Canva and their templates to create marketing resources.
Any questions, please get in touch and we will happily help.
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