Brenna McLaughlin
Electronic and Strategic Initiatives Director, AAUP
Much like e-catalogs, electronic galleys and review copies have been one of the great promises of electronic publishing. Printing and shipping review and exam copies can represent a large cost in a small marketing budget—even more when reaching an international market. But like most e-promises, digital galleys have taken a hard road to fulfillment, caught between the tricky questions of file security and the stubborn reality of reviewers’ habits.
In 2008, NetGalley, a subsidiary of Firebrand Technologies, was launched to help smooth this road, providing a digital galley platform that would serve the interests of both professional readers and publishers. NetGalley offers speedy transmission of secure, searchable, full-color digital galleys and multi-media press kits as well as options to read galleys on desktops or e-readers such as Kindle and Nook. Publishers can also view real-time reporting on who is reading a title. The applicability of such a service beyond pre-publication review was quickly obvious, particularly in the areas of course adoption and international rights sales.
This June, AAUP was pleased to announce a new discount program for our members, offered in partnership with NetGalley, for their innovative e-galley service. All AAUP members are now eligible for a 10% discount off of the monthly subscription rate, regardless of their level of participation. NetGalley allows publishers to share galleys and digital press kits with their own reader contacts, as well as with new communities of professional readers through the NetGalley reader membership. Professional readers can register and use the site for free.
AAUP member Island Press has been using the NetGalley services since early 2009, attracted by both the economic and environmental savings that might be realized through e-galleys. Jaime Jennings, publicity manager at Island, shared some insight into their experiences. The Press never has more than 20 new trade (or trade-crossover with professional and academic markets) titles offered in NetGalley. If a title has significant course adoption potential, they will keep it in the system for a longer time.
For course adoption, as with traditional reviewers, Jennings reports that there are some hurdles to surmount with readers. Some professors balk at downloading the Adobe Digital Editions software, and many readers simply still prefer the hard copy. Island is using a number of strategies to work through this reluctance, primarily by pushing the digital galley as an initial step in the review decision. A professor might be pleased to view a pre-publication digital galley and make a more informed request for a print exam copy down the line. For review outlets, Island has found that more are now willing to use the digital galley to the point of deciding whether to assign the title for review and only at that stage requesting a hard copy be sent. Online reviewers, Jennings notes, have been naturally more accepting of the files.
Jennings stresses that the Press has needed to be open to experimenting with the platform and NetGalley features to make the most of the service. Island has found the widget feature—the widget can be copied directly into emails for publishers to invite their contacts to view a title—to be easy to use and of increasing value. They have recently worked closely with the NetGalley team on a title with a complicated 4-color layout and a significant international market—where a print galley would have been ruinously expensive to produce and ship.
There have been unexpected rewards as well. Jennings has listed all Island titles in the “public” NetGalley catalog, so they are discoverable by all readers who have registered with the service. (All requests for digital galleys are sent to the Press for approval.) For a small press, Jennings says, this has been a boon in reaching new audiences, particularly booksellers and small academic and public library buyers who might not have been on the Press’s sales radar before this. Jennings is always looking at which file restrictions, additional marketing material, or title profile will make the most of the service—tweaking and experimenting along the way.
AAUP-NetGalley Discount Program: http://www.aaupnet.org/programs/epub/netgalley.html
Meredith Benjamin
Communications Coordinator, AAUP
University press marketing and advertising staff are expanding their ventures into the realm of online advertising. With an ever-expanding variety of options, from Facebook ads for dollars a day to leaderboards on the websites of renowned print publications, it can be overwhelming to know where to begin. AAUP spoke with staff at three member presses to get an idea of how member presses of various sizes are evaluating and investing in these new opportunities.
While presses are experimenting with different approaches, one common theme was their initial reason for moving into online advertising: following their customers. Dafina Blacksher Diabate, Advertising Manager at Duke University Press, described Duke’s use of online advertising as “a matter of meeting the readers where they are.” Figuring out exactly where those readers are online, however, is a less obvious matter. One of the biggest challenges for presses just entering the online realm is the seemingly infinite venues well beyond online versions of the print publications they have traditionally advertised in.
Particularly when advertising scholarly titles, Diabate has found that a good amount of research time is required to evaluate the various options, although she has found it worth it in the end. Duke has advertised in a variety of online formats, but one that Diabate feels is particularly effective is the e-newsletter. As such newsletters are opt-in forms of communication, readers have chosen to receive it and have a confirmed interest in whatever the targeted subject matter might be. She especially prefers ad placement at the top of these newsletters, which ensures that the ad is seen even by those who do not scroll down to read the whole message.
Baylor University Press, which Associate Director and Product and Sales Manager Nicole Smith Murphy says began to think more strategically about online advertising in the summer of 2009, has found success with small, targeted campaigns. Baylor focuses particularly on “pay-per-click ads within Facebook, Google AdWords, Twitter promotions and announcements, and blocks of advertising within [their] own e-newsletters.”
Murphy described a shift away from their original tendency to view books with wider general reader appeal as the best candidates for online advertising. She has found that as scholarly societies, institutions, and publications have become more web savvy, targeting specific groups has become more feasible and beneficial. The press recently ran a Facebook ad for Liberalism without Illusions: Renewing an American Christian Tradition by Christopher Evans, targeting “users who identified a likeness for or an affiliation with several key liberal to progressive divinity schools and seminaries.” Spending under $400, the press has received 742,986 impressions of the book’s cover with brief copy and received 865 click-throughs – results Murphy classifies as “hard to match in print publications.”
Florida has pursued online advertising since 2006, and has used a variety of formats including web sites, newsletters, Facebook ads, and Google AdWords (which they found to not be adequately targeted for their purposes). This year, they will also be trying a regional take on web advertising, participating in the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance’s “Circle of Sites” promotion, which will place their ad on the sites of “approximately 45 independent bookstores for a week.”
The possibility of targeting advertising to ever more granular groups of readers is an aspect of online advertising where presses have taken different approaches. Florida “consistently seek[s] the most targeted media and placement for our advertising,” only opting for generalized placement when dictated “by the media itself.” Diabate however, is sometimes wary of targeting that can be too narrow, in the cases of niche sites, which might have fewer general visitors.
On the design side, production of online ads brings its own challenges, particularly when ad design is done, or brought, in-house. Amy Harris, Advertising and Direct Mail Manager at the University Press of Florida, explained that when the press moved to designing web ads in-house last year, some challenges became evident, as “most of the process—from image management to layout to proof—is slightly different from print design and may require knowledge of a separate suite of design programs.” When Duke added an in-house ad designer, they made sure to include banner ad design as part of the hiring criteria.
The increased restrictions on design for the web in comparison to print are a concern that can add to the work of creating an online ad, as designers must use web-safe colors, fonts, and formats, and ensure that the ad will display correctly in an array of browsers. At Duke, size limits on some banner ads have caused the press to alter their approach.
Diabate noted that she found the shorter lifetime of online ads to be a drawback, in contrast to print ads, which she finds more “researchable,” as readers are able to refer back to a publication long after its initial release.
Among the presses interviewed, there seems to be a consensus that while online advertising is inevitably becoming a larger portion of the overall advertising budget, they do not see print advertising disappearing in the near future. At Florida, Harris has found that directly attributable sales were “roughly the same” for print and web ads when tracked through discount codes. The challenge at the moment, Duke’s Diabate says, is “finding a happy medium.” Harris explains that she sees “the butter being spread ever thinner on the bread…the truth is, we reach our customers through both formats. The key will be to judiciously choose our outlets.” This is, in a sense, a balancing act that advertising departments have been dealing with for years, but the pool of possible venues continues to grow.
While the data-gathering potential of online advertising, such as tracking views and click-throughs, has its appeal, presses say it is not generally a driving choice behind their advertising choices. Harris explained that the most important reason for moving to web ads is “following our customers,” but metrics like click-throughs do offer a “measure of the audience’s engagement with advertising, so they should be taken into account in any well-run promotion.”
Murphy believes that online advertising can work for even the smallest of presses, and advises those considering testing the waters to “just set aside a little money and start doing it.” The small scale of some options allows for close monitoring and tweaking when necessary – she found that two of the most important components were having a “good landing page” for links (your website or another retailer) and ensuring that those links are functional. Baylor typically “set[s] an initial limit of $20 per day” for their campaigns, and after a few days either refines the message or ups the per diem, a process that Murphy describes as “quite helpful on-the-job education.”
The field of online advertising is still very much in development, and for this reason Diabate sees an opportunity for publishers to play an important role in the way it develops. Saying, “we’re forging into uncharted territory,” she feels that marketing instincts still play an important role, and that for university presses, it is “worth being in on the conversation,” helping publications to understand where scholarly publishers are coming from.
Harris advises presses: “Don’t be (too) afraid. With careful planning, the right tools, and a little training you’ll find that online advertising is manageable and worthwhile.” As Murphy emphasized, “With online ads, your potential readers are only one click away from being able to make a purchase.”
A number of publications within the AAUP Cooperative Advertising Program have begun offering discounted rates on their online advertising rates to AAUP members. Learn more here: http://www.aaupnet.org/members/advertising/index.html
Brenna McLaughlin
Electronic and Strategic Initiatives Director, AAUP
In recent years, the idea of e-catalogs has taken hold in the publishing industry. The reasons for this are many, and start from the observation that more book communications— involving buyers, readers, reviewers, authors—are in the digital space, and catalogs should be, too. Moreover, digital technology should be able to provide the most accurate and up-to-date sales metadata to all users. As marketing and sales managers face tightening budgets, cutting down on the expense and waste of printed and mailed seasonal catalogs is also a major goal.
But print catalogs are a universal ‘technology,’ and independent bookstores were particularly concerned that e-catalog formats and features would proliferate, spreading more confusion than convenience. Then Ann Arbor-based Above the Treeline launched Edelweiss, an open, multi-publisher standard e-catalog service, in May 2009, with the endorsement of the American Booksellers Association. Major trade publishers such as HarperCollins and Random House were quick to add their catalogs to the system. Several university presses, beginning with Cambridge and Columbia, and followed by NYU, Fordham, and Georgetown, also signed up.
In January 2010, AAUP was pleased to announce an agreement with Above the Treeline to offer the Edelweiss service to AAUP members at a significant discount. Along with a special first-year incentive to upload backlist titles for free, the new benefit program has already attracted more than 40 member publishers to Treeline-hosted web demonstrations of the Edelweiss service.
Many of the initial Edelweiss tools were designed with independent booksellers in mind. Bookstores who use Above the Treeline’s POS (point of sale) and inventory data streams can incorporate that information into the catalogs they view on Edelweiss, examining sales of comparable titles, and streamlining their ordering. Sales reps can mark-up publisher e-catalogs with notes for particular booksellers, and highlight specific titles and local connections.
As the service grows, Treeline is constantly developing new tools for other book industry communities. With the AAUP program attracting more scholarly publisher users, Treeline is looking to develop features specific to academic book marketing, particularly course adoption tools. The existing ability to create customized subject catalogs for particular contacts has great appeal for academic and regional publishers, and the possibility of handling exam-copy requests through the service was a matter for discussion at a September 2009 meeting between Treeline and AAUP members. To serve publicity needs, Edelweiss will launch a partnership with NetGalley in the spring. Being able to provide e-galleys for reviewers complements the existing “Buzz” feature, which tracks the appearance of book titles and authors’ names in blog and Twitter feeds.
Two AAUP members, Fordham University Press and Georgetown University Press, shared some of their early experience with using Edelweiss. While cutting the print catalog was a major goal for both presses, neither Georgetown Marketing & Sales Director Gina Lindquist or Fordham Director Fredric Nachbaur foresee a time when they will not also produce a print seasonal catalog. Nachbaur points out that the print catalog is used as more than simply a sales tool for a list of titles, but is also a key promotional piece for the press on campus and at academic meetings.
Fordham and Georgetown publish similarly sized lists, averaging approximately 20-30 titles per season. While larger colleagues such as Cambridge have been selective in loading titles with specific trade potential into Edelweiss and leaving out more specialized monographs, Fordham and Georgetown have both chosen to upload the entire catalog for the Fall 2009 and Spring 2010 seasons. Fordham is considering creating a regional catalog on the platform with both front and backlist titles.
A motivating factor for Fordham in using the service is that the press is part of the Columbia University Press Sales group, along with NYU Press. As Columbia was an Edelweiss early adopter, Fordham’s sales representatives were already in the field using the system. In contrast, Lindquist reports that Georgetown’s main goal right now is to convince the press’s regional commissioned sales reps of the value and capabilities of the e-catalogs.
She is pleased with the possibilities of the Edelweiss platform and the extra tools it offers reps, such as customizing catalogs for individual accounts. “You’re never selling the whole list” at an independent book store, Lindquist notes, so the “tailoring is really great.” She admires the support and training that Treeline offers reps and buyers getting used to the system, but believes that success will ultimately rely on the system reaching a critical mass of publishers, rep groups, and buyers using it. The new AAUP program gives her optimism that the moment of reaching that mass may be closer than ever.
Readers can check out all the catalogs on Edelweiss for free, registering here: http://edelweiss.abovethetreeline.com/
AAUP members can learn more about the discount benefit program here: http://aaupnet.org/programs/epub/edelweiss.html or contact Brenna McLaughlin at bmclaughlin@aaupnet.org to inquire about future web demos.
Meredith Benjamin
Communications Coordinator, AAUP
The Modern Language Association’s 125th Annual Convention was held December 27-30 in Philadelphia, PA. The convention attracted just over 7,300 registrants this year. MLA officials also noted that a record number of visitors purchased one-day passes to the exhibit hall.
The 2009 MLA Exhibit was held in Franklin Hall at the Philadelphia Marriot Downtown, and included displays from 114 publishers and related vendors exhibiting a wide variety of scholarly publications and tools. The exhibit hall’s location on the same floor as some of the conference sessions provided easy access for attendees, and ensured those after-session bursts of traffic in the aisles.
The AAUP cooperative booth featured titles from 19 member presses, with more than 140 books and 13 journals on display. For the first time this year, all presses participating in the cooperative exhibit were listed individually in the program, making navigation much easier for exhibit-goers looking for works from a specific press.
The AAUP cooperative booth was surrounded by fellow university presses, who made up some of the 34 member presses exhibiting individually at MLA.
The next MLA Convention will be held January 6-9, 2011, in Los Angeles (due to the adjusted time frame, there will be no convention held in 2010). For more information on the convention, please visit MLA’s web site.
Colleen Lanick
Publicity Manager, MIT Press
We live in a time where we ask a new acquaintance to “friend” us rather than exchanging phone numbers. National news programs routinely receive tweets containing questions from viewers during news segments and baseball mascots hold up signs that say “Follow me” and list a Twitter handle. Social networking sites have become a powerful source for virtually all of our news and entertainment needs. Recently, I noticed a tweet from a colleague that simply said, “Princeton University Press is now on Facebook. Twitter, Facebook—next the world! muahahaah.” Amusing and perhaps a little diabolical, but it is evidence that the university presses, from Cambridge to British Columbia, have embraced and started to harness the power of social media.
A quick and unscientific survey of several university presses confirmed that most are using some form of social networking, and that the majority are using Facebook and Twitter. A few have pages on MySpace, Good Reads, and other smaller sites, although presses are not generally as active on these sites. Social networking pages are easy to set up, but once the account has been registered and images uploaded, the challenge becomes how to use these incredibly popular and influential sites in a way that fits into current publicity and promotion for specific titles and the press as a whole.
When we first launched Facebook and Twitter pages at MIT Press, we were very aware that we were The MIT Press, not an individual, and had to be careful about how we presented ourselves. The goal is to become part of the community, not alienate it with hard sales or elaborate marketing pitches. Our pages started as an experiment to try to connect with readers who might be using social media, but we never expected them to be as successful as they are—we currently have about 5,000 fans on Facebook and over 2,600 followers on Twitter.
Our primary goal is to put a face on the press and allow our personality to shine through. We try to respond to all comments and questions and encourage interaction with our readers. For a special Facebook feature, we interviewed our acquisitions editors about how they got started in publishing and what kind of books they were interested in. Recently, we asked our fans on Facebook to comment on their memories of the Atari video game. We had a new book on the topic and offered free copies to the first five people to wax nostalgic in our comments section. More than a dozen comments were posted in just a matter of hours. We have a handful of fans and followers who consistently comment on a particular subject area. Of MIT’s list, technology, environment, and art titles generally see the most activity.
The University of Arizona Press, like many presses, joined Facebook first, and opened a Twitter account more recently. Kathryn Conrad, Arizona’s Interim Director, says they use Facebook, where they have around 170 fans, for spreading news about press events (including photos) and about media coverage for their titles. They use Twitter very differently. Their thousand-strong Twitter community “does not like marketing or self-promotion,” she says. “So, what we are doing here is trying to actively engage in the communities that are relevant to us.” They use Twitter to “engage not only in talk about books and publishing but about our state and local community, environmental concerns, indigenous rights issues—anything that relates to what we publish.”
Brian Bowen, Publishing and Marketing Coordinator at Yale University Press, views their Twitter following, currently at 3,500 and growing steadily, as a vital part of their promotion. He has been able to track which posts attract the most clicks, and has found that “the 140-character format allows would-be book buyers to stumble upon our content in the process of their normal web browsing.”
Most staff at member presses believe social networking sites should primarily be used to communicate with media and consumers, and not for direct sales, though I was pleased when on a recent post linking to a Q&A with the author of a recent book, one of our fans commented: “ I have been seduced by social marketing and have ordered the book.”
Rebecca Ford, blog editor and voice of Oxford University Press tweets, uses Twitter to build relationships and communicate with journalists about Oxford titles. They currently have around 1,300 followers. “It’s important to be accepted by the community,” she said. “You have to participate in the community, not just provide information. It is worth it if you want to invest the time to get into the community.” She has experimented with give-aways, promoting the original content on their incredibly successful blog, and linking to openly available content from Twitter. She also promotes author participation on Twitter, encouraging authors to talk with each other and collaborate.
The key to keeping people interested in your content is involving them in the discussion and paying attention to their issues and concerns. “Twitter allows us to communicate both directly and indirectly with readers and tweeters who do or might enjoy Yale books,” says Bowen. “I’ve used the @reply feature to respond to readers’ questions related to our books. Both help to expand our readership and create an online personality for the press.”
While they routinely receive comments on their posts such as “great article,” and “I really want to buy that book,” the most gratifying response Arizona received on their Facebook page centered on a post they did about the press celebrating its 50th anniversary. A local journalist saw the post and emailed Conrad saying she would like to do a story for a local weekly. “It turned into a cover story including interviews with multiple staffers and authors,” Conrad said. “We got great coverage without ever making the pitch.”
Arizona has had many fruitful interactions on Twitter as well. “We discovered a local blog that then publicized a promotion we had going on. I helped a customer find one of our books she thought was out of print. We discovered a specialty account we’d never heard of and donated some hurt books for a fundraising effort they had going on. In general, I would say it’s a lot like being at BEA or a book festival: you never know what good thing will come of it.” Conrad added that they have, “been exposed to more publishing news than you could ever find in the mainstream media.”
It is doubtful that social media will replace traditional publicity and marketing efforts. Rather, they enhance what we are already doing and afford us more direct communication with our audience, a crucial aspect that is occasionally lacking in more traditional efforts. So many of us get our news via social media that it is only logical that university presses want to participate in this rapidly growing phenomenon.
Most university presses use social media to discuss what is happening in their community and the publishing world as well as what is going on with particular books and authors. At MIT, we have found it very useful to follow others, including colleagues at peer presses and trade houses, journalists, authors, and other organizations and individuals that are relevant to our list. Editors are using social networking to attract authors. Publicists can quickly scan Twitter for alerts when book review editors resign or contribute to the buzz about a particular topic or title, and authors can keep the press and their followers interested in what they are doing to promote their new book. The possibilities are endless.
Brenna McLaughlin
Electronic and Strategic Initiatives Director, AAUP
Half a million. That is the number of additional records per year major book wholesalers Baker & Taylor and Ingram estimate they are processing in these days of digitization format proliferation: half a million records on top of the approximately 200,000 new books each year1. That is a lot of metadata, and it is more important than ever at every step of the book supply chain. Book metadata often needs to contain much more than title, author, ISBN, and price to make the leap from warehouse to reader—or database to device. Tables of contents, cover images, detailed subject headings, reading level, available formats, and reviews: all help consumers, retailers, and librarians discover and procure new (and old but relevant) books. The trick, for everyone in the book world, is creating and sharing accurate metadata for all of those millions of records.
The burgeoning challenge of book metadata was the subject of a recent symposium and white paper sponsored by OCLC Online Computer Library Center. In March 2009, they gathered experts and interested parties from the publishing, library, and standards worlds in Dublin, OH, to discuss common problems and potential solutions. Judy Luther was at that time completing research for the paper “Streamlining Book Metadata Workflow,” commissioned by OCLC and the National information Standards Organization (NISO).
While clearly an “interested party” rather than an expert, I was invited to speak to the group about the general experience of university presses dealing with metadata. Of course, in a community that ranges from presses publishing less than 20 to more than 2000 titles per year, and where the term “metadata” has not yet been fully adopted to describe bibliographic and marketing information, a general picture is not so easily taken. Before trotting off to Dublin, I spoke with several members, including Johns Hopkins University Press, a member with large book and journal publishing programs, and two presses who fall near the AAUP average: Cornell University Press, producing up to 140 new titles per year, and the University of Georgia Press, publisher of about 80 new titles per year. Not unexpectedly, the processes of metadata creation and management differed considerably. Johns Hopkins’ in-house database has an ONIX component and pushes data to both the press web site and trading partners (via either ONIX or spreadsheet). Both Cornell and Georgia were at the time researching ONIX solutions, including off-the-shelf software and service providers such as NetRead or Firebrand, and were providing data via spreadsheets or online interfaces to key sales channels.
Despite their differences, all three presses mentioned the same difficulty with providing ONIX. “The standard just isn’t standard enough,” I said to the OCLC audience. That choice of phrasing raised some eyebrows (and maybe a few hackles), but we cleared up the vocabulary. There are so many flavors of ONIX being requested from publishers—almost every channel has its own requirements as to which ONIX elements and tag variations are preferred (if they even accept ONIX). For example, while the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) recommends best practices, and will certify the quality of publishers’ ONIX feeds on 30 core elements, Barnes & Noble requires tailored compliance on half-again as many data elements to be classified as a top-grade ONIX supplier2.
But these retail-chain ONIX issues were only one small part of what was discussed in Dublin. The real crux of the symposium was the misalignment between the standards that have grown up separately in the library and publishing communities. MARC records (Machine Readable Cataloging) serve libraries’ needs from ordering to online catalogs. In many cases, librarians require at least basic MARC records in advance of purchase, and more and more expect MARC records to be provided with purchased titles (particularly with e-book collections). Even subject classification schemes differ between these two sides of our community. From the publishers’ end, BISAC codes are heavily weighted to trade books and were designed to help with store placement rather than broad consumer discoverability. Library of Congress (LC) subject headings are highly detailed, but provide much greater authority control.
Though these classifications and standards were designed to serve different needs, each side of the market has an even greater need for the metadata created on the other. The authority-controlled subject and author data from LC and MARC records can only help digital discovery and sales of publishers’ works. The book marketing information provided through ONIX to the retail supply chain is now just as important for library patrons, and in the growing adoption of purchase-on-request policies, library collections specialists. Crosswalks between MARC and ONIX for Books will be needed to combine this data into effective and sharable information flows. OCLC is particularly interested in that concept, and recently undertook a pilot project to experiment with ingesting publishers’ ONIX records, matching and enhancing the data with existing WorldCat records, and feeding back optimized metadata. That project has led to a new suite of metadata services for publishers. A second symposium, to move not just the conversation, but also the possible, forward, is planned for next year. Broadening representation, and easing metadata reuse and collaboration will be goals for the next meeting.
In the meantime, standards continue to change and evolve to serve the book communities’ needs. In April of 2009, ONIX for Books 3.0 was released, and is not backwards compatible with previous versions. The ISTC or International Standard Text Code, is being promulgated as “a global identification system for textual works”—that is, to identify a text rather than a product or format, as the ISBN is used. Progress is being made on the International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) to help in the correct identification of authors, a task that is required not just for better discovery but also in royalties and rights systems (such as the proposed Book Rights Registry from the Google settlement). In July 2009, CrossRef announced it had registered 1.7 million DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) for book chapters and references. While the complexity of metadata standards is growing, so too are the support systems for producing and sharing accurate metadata. In the coming months, AAUP is planning to survey its membership about shared problems and needs in this area.
Resources:
OCLC Publisher and Librarian Symposium Reports
Metadata White Paper: Streamlining Book Metadata Workflow
BISG Product Metadata Information and Best Practices
ONIX
Meredith Benjamin
Communications Coordinator, AAUP
The Book Industry Study Group (BISG) presented its sixth annual Making Information Pay conference on May 7, at the McGraw-Hill Auditorium in New York. The conference‘s focus this year was “Shifting Sales Channels: and what publishers are doing about them” and featured presentations by eight industry leaders, in addition to remarks by BISG Executive Director Michael Healy.
As Healy made his opening remarks, hash tags for those intending to twitter the conference were displayed. And twitter they did: read tweets on the program by searching #mip or #BISG.
The first half of the program, entitled “State of the Markets,” focused on the question “What’s really going on today?” which Healy described as the genesis of the program.
Leigh Watson Healy, chief analyst for the advisory firm Outsell, Inc., gave the keynote speech and emphasized that the current recession will fundamentally change the market: “we have seen the last vestiges of the industrial age, [and are] now moving truly to the knowledge age.” Hackneyed as it may be, she said the catchphrase “flat is the new up” was confirmed by BISG data. On an encouraging note for university presses, the companies she sees thriving are “market share/brand leaders, and innovators/boutiques.” The increasing importance of specialization and niche markets was addressed several times throughout the morning.
Jim King of Nielsen BookScan US and Kelly Gallagher of R.R. Bowker gave presentations on the strategic use of data, on retailers and book buyers, respectively. King encouraged publishers to look closely at data on BISAC categories—in particular the very specific subcategories—to determine trends. He also noted that BookScan just began tracking book sales in non-traditional outlets (i.e., supermarkets) in 2008, and there are other venues, including digital downloads and comic book stores, that they have yet to begin tracking. Gallagher suggested that publishers do not always know their customers well enough, and need to look more closely at the data on book buyers. He also emphasized that the majority of “book awareness” (where a customer first learned of a book) is now coming from online sources.
A particularly engaging presentation kicking off the “Publishing Innovations” portion of the program came from Dominique Raccah, publisher and CEO of Sourcebooks. She said her focus has been on what the next iteration of a publishing company looks like. Like Healy, she emphasized the benefits of category leadership, and predicted a “real return to the value of niche publishing.” Sourcebooks has created a toolkit for their authors to engage in their own digital marketing, and is focusing on creating new approaches to content by exploring options such as enhanced digital books and iPhone applications. Raccah asked publishers whether we can “create a zero inventory model” and if not, “how low can we go?”
Marcus Leaver, president of Sterling Publishing, speaking on “The New Marketing Budget,” began with a slide reading: “Question everything.” He emphasized that doing things just because that’s the way they’ve always been done has to end, and that we must only do things we can measure. He described various measures taken at Sterling, which include drastic reductions in their trade show budget (“I’m not going to Frankfurt…the trade show is over”), and cutting their list by 25%, but increasing title-by-title marketing by 33%.
The move to electronic catalogs has been a hot topic of discussion for university presses, as well as the larger publishing community. Josh Marwell, president of sales for HarperCollins, explained the various advantages of e-catalogs that pushed his company to make the move (easier to update, more immediate, increased shareability), and how they’ve confronted the challenges inherent in the switch (creating a new workflow, outreach to reps and customers). He mentioned that HarperCollins will be supporting Edelweiss as well, an e-catalog system that some university presses have begun to work with.
The morning’s final presenter, Dave Thompson, vice president of sales analysis for Random House, ended the program on an optimistic note, pointing out that, “even in the worst economy in our lifetimes, book sales are only down 1.2 percent.” He advocated using the data available from sources like Bowker and Nielsen BookScan in innovative ways and focused in particular on indicators of “book awareness,” and where particular demographics of buyers are purchasing their books, echoing Gallagher’s points about the need to know more about book buyers.
The program’s sentiment seemed to be best encapsulated in Raccah’s paraphrase of a quote from Simon and Schuster CEO Carolyn Reidy, when she said that most publishing executives are currently running two companies: “the one that is, and the one that will be.”
Presentations from the conference may be viewed here: http://www.slideshare.net/event/making-information-pay-2009
Meredith Benjamin
Communications Coordinator, AAUP
The Modern Language Association’s 124th Annual Convention was held December 27-30 in San Francisco, CA. The Convention is billed as the largest gathering of teachers and scholars in the humanities and attracted 8,544 registrants this year.
The 2008 MLA Exhibit was held in the Grand Ballroom of the Hilton San Francisco, and included displays from approximately 100 publishers and other vendors exhibiting a wide variety of scholarly publications and tools.
The AAUP Cooperative Booth featured submissions from 17 member presses, with approximately 120 books on display. Traffic in the exhibit hall was bustling; despite the state of the economy, many visitors to the exhibit were carrying piles of books under their arms or in that conference staple, the logo-emblazoned tote bag.
Professors and scholars were eager to peruse the wide selection of scholarly books and journals on display, many describing the exhibit hall as a welcome break from the often-stressful conference sessions and job interviews that comprise the rest of the convention.
Many university press authors stopped by the booth to introduce themselves and check out their books in the display. One author even brought his family along for a photo opportunity. Seeing her dad’s book on the display rack, his young daughter remarked, “Dad, you’re famous!”
AAUP member presses had a strong presence at the exhibit, with 38 AAUP member presses exhibiting in their own booth spaces, in addition to those sharing the AAUP Cooperative Booth.
The 2009 MLA Convention is scheduled for December 27-30 in Philadelphia, PA. For more information on the convention, please visit MLA’s web site.
Brenna McLaughlin
Electronic & Strategic Initiatives Director, AAUP
On June 26, a mid-sized conference room in Montreal was home to a standing room only crowd. At least one too many invitations (perhaps my own!) had been cadged to a private presentation and discussion of a new e-publishing service. Tizra Publisher is a new publisher-branded online sales and distribution platform for electronic books and other document-based content. Perhaps that doesn’t sound terribly unique these days, but the Tizra software makes it very simple for non-technical staff to create online content collections, to set pricing, and to control the look and feel of the site itself. A Tizra-hosted publisher site needs only searchable, bookmarked PDFs, which many publishers create now as a part of the regular production process, to produce a secure and smooth reader experience. The interest in what Tizra demonstrated was palpable.
Of course, resources are always at stake when trying out a new e-publishing platform or sales model—not just money, but time and staff resources. University presses and their fellow not-for-profit scholarly publishers in the AAUP membership are particularly sensitive to return on investment (or, at least, return OF investment) in these days of experiment and hope. One of the most appealing aspects of Tizra’s pitch has been their own sensitivity to these concerns.
Since June, the company has worked in various ways to minimize the risks to such publishers in using Tizra Publisher. Their tiered pricing structure focuses on providing a pricing plan that fits the needs of presses from small to large. Even better, AAUP has been able to negotiate a 20% discount off of the monthly fees for our members. (Tizra’s terms entail a basic monthly service fee, as well as a modest transaction fee on sales through their hosted sites.) The Association will receive a percentage of the transaction fees earned by Tizra through sites signed-up through this AAUP discount program.
In addition to the direct financial benefit of the AAUP discount, the Tizra administrative control panel is both self-service and fairly intuitive, in hopes of decreasing the amount of time needed for learning and managing the site’s functions. Importantly, the site doesn’t require IT set-up or file conversion. One of the most interesting aspects of the product, however, is the flexibility of the sales model. Publishers can sell access to discrete book titles, individual chapters, or whole collections of content. Pricing can be set for individuals, institutions, or specific customer groups. And if a price point or collection offer isn’t succeeding, a publisher can try out a new one in a matter of minutes.
The system works by breaking each PDF up into individual pages that will be embedded in the HTML web page though which users access content. This increases security of content online, and decreases the download lag of high-quality PDF material, while appearing seamless to the end user. Searchable PDFs are indexed for both the internal Tizra search-engine and for sites such as Google. More than half of current traffic to Tizra-hosted content comes from Google searches, so findability is key. Currently Tizra’s product supports the sale of online access to content, with the ability to include links back to the press site to purchase print books, or to integrate with a publisher’s own shopping cart to sell print-and-online packages. Making the sales of downloadable PDFs possible is part of the company’s near-term plans, and they have discussed the possibility of partnering with a POD vendor to make that an option for publisher clients as well.
The MIT Press was already working with Tizra at the time of the June meeting. Their Tizra-hosted site, CISnet, was officially launched in early September. MIT chose to make available a specific collection, their computer and information sciences titles. Access to the complete collection can be purchased for a 5-day trial, a one-month or a one-year subscription. The site now includes more than 150 books, with more being added. The press cited the minimized upfront costs and delays as the largest benefit of working with Tizra. Throughout October, AAUP and Tizra have held weekly webinars to introduce a wider range of AAUP member presses to the capabilities of Tizra Publisher. As of the last week in October, the company began offering free online sign-up for publishers wishing to try out Tizra Publisher. While the free sites include Google Ads and have limited content allowances and branding and design tools, they are an excellent opportunity for risk-free experimenting and training. Throughout November, the webinar schedule will be split to accommodate the publishers who have begun to use the free sites and who have hands-on questions, and those who did not attend the initial October webinar introduction.
AAUP members who are interested in more information about Tizra Publisher, AAUP pricing, or the webinars should contact Brenna McLaughlin.
By Colleen Lanick, Publicity Manager, MIT Press
The news that the Los Angeles Times Book Review, after more than thirty years, would cease publication in its freestanding format and merge with the opinion section of the newspaper made headlines from Galley Cat to an interview with former book review editor, Steve Wasserman, on the NewsHour. This is not shocking news to anyone who has been following trends with book review sections lately. It just seems like the latest in a growing list of newspapers shrinking coverage for books. In recent years, the Boston Globe’s book section was cut in half and folded into the “Ideas” section; the San Francisco Chronicle’s book section was cut, but after public outcry from their readers, restored, though in a slight four-page edition; and the Chicago Tribune’s book section was moved from Sunday to Saturday, the day of the week with the lowest circulation.
Now just a year after the highly publicized and protested news that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution had eliminated its book review editor, Theresa Weaver, the Hartford Courant has laid off its book editor, Carole Goldberg, and major cuts were made at both the Raleigh News & Oberver and Newark Star-Ledger. Chris Watson was abruptly let go from the Santa Cruz Sentinel (but was then given the opportunity to continue writing two weekly columns on books, with less column space and only on a contract basis). And Marie Arana, long-time book editor at the Washington Post Book World, one of the last freestanding book sections in the country, will take a buy-out at the end of the year. The future of that section also seems unstable.
It’s clear that this recent list of cuts and restructuring is not going to end soon. Because space is so limited, it’s become more difficult for publicists to count on securing coverage for university press titles in many of the traditional venues we counted on for so many years. Reporters I talk to and the editors I meet with who still have book sections remain very interested in MIT’s titles and are always looking for interesting and timely books and authors to feature on their pages. But vying for space on these pages has become very competitive and editors simply cannot cover all of the titles they would like to cover given their space restrictions. We now have the challenge of looking for alternative places for getting attention for our titles. “While it is true the review sections in many print media have either evaporated or shrunk, the internet provides a vast wealth of opportunity to publicize our authors’ ideas,” Christian Purdy, Publicity Director at Oxford University Press, commented on the situation. “Also, many traditional print publications are becoming much savvier with their online presence and with a growing readership for many loyal readers. This too can be new fertile ground for review attention.” The Boston Globe has a wonderful blog (Brainiac), as do the New York Times Book Review (Paper Cuts) and the Los Angeles Times Book Review (Jacket Copy)—just to name a few. All of these blogs seem to be thriving and even growing with interesting content and large readerships.
To make up for the decreasing review coverage, more and more publicists and authors are looking to online sources and broadening the focus of pitches to newspapers and magazines beyond just contacting the book review editor. Ranjit Arab, Publicity Manager at the University Press of Kansas, says they’ve seen the writing on the wall for some time now. “We’ve really made a concerted effort over the last few years to find ways of offsetting dwindling review space,” he said. “That has meant getting more coverage off the book pages, encouraging authors to contribute op-ed pieces, and targeting any number of high-profile blogs and Web sites—all of which can impact a book’s success just as much as a review in a mid-major newspaper.” At Princeton, this dip in both major and second-tier newspaper coverage has also sent their publicists and authors to the internet as well and is allowing them to be even more creative on with their pitches, according to Andrew DeSio, Princeton’s Publicity Director. “Places such as TruthDig and Bookslut are great for general book coverage, but also more targeted blogs such as Marginal Revolution, Brad DeLong, Dani Rodrik, and Econlog are great for our economics books and Kaus Files, Bloggingheads.tv, Daily Kos, and Instapundit” for political authors, DeSio said. “Finding targeted, renowned, and influential blogs/websites is indeed the way of the future. Also, we’ve been pitching for more off-the-book page coverage at the newspapers, as book reviews aren’t the only places that feature books. Op-eds have also been very effective at creating awareness of an author or book.”
One could argue that it is the newspapers themselves that are in such peril and it’s not the death of the book business. It is also important to notice that some book sections are actually expanding their sections. The Wall Street Journal has expanded its daily book coverage and given it more prominent placement in the paper, and the Austin American Statesman has a new-ish regular feature dedicated to university press books. Online, NPR has also just launched a regular book review feature on its website. Cleary this is not the norm, but it’s important to note that there are still some thriving book sections—both online and off.
Some still view a review in the print version of a newspaper as more authoritative than a blog post or online only review, but I think this perception is slowly changing as websites are becoming more relevant and exciting content is being posted online. I doubt that the thrill of a call confirming a pending review in the New York Times Book Review will cause publicists to simply shrug rather than do run down the hall screaming with delight, but it’s time to stop complaining and to look in a new direction, while continuing to engage with the reporters and editors we’ve been working with in the past. “Personally, I find this media proliferation exciting,” says Arab. “It is shaking up the old model, taking away influence from a few traditional sources and putting it in the hands of some new players, so it’s not a matter of publicity outlets disappearing—they’re simply reemerging in other forms. As long as we continue to publish timely and interesting books, we shouldn’t have any trouble attracting the outlets that reach our intended audiences.”
Shaun Manning
Communications Coordinator, AAUP
In an effort to push back against dwindling book coverage in American newspapers, Penn State University Press Director Sanford Thatcher has initiated a program to have university press books reviewed in the Centre Daily Times by the local and college community. After launching the program with his own examination of The Great Risk Shift (Oxford University Press) by Joseph Hacker, Thatcher has selected thirty titles by presses other than Penn State and solicited reviewers from among Penn State’s faculty.
“It seems to me that there is likely to be no better market for the general-interest titles that we all publish from time to time than the college towns in which many of our presses are located,” he said in an email to press directors. Thatcher, who had served as AAUP President for the 2007-08 year, noted that some books relevant to local topics had instead been reviewed by writers well outside the community, and suggested that the reviews would be more relevant and persuasive if written by someone from the area.
“My book review program is a natural extension of a general project of civic engagement,” Thatcher said in a speech at the AAUP Annual Meeting in Montréal, “which has the further advantage of helping break down the walls between town and gown in our community.”
To recruit local writers who are not members of Penn State’s faculty, each Centre Daily Times review carries a sidebar with the headline “Be a Reviewer,” instructing interested critics to contact Thatcher. For the purposes of the Centre Daily Times reviews content, the definition of “local” includes faculty at any of Penn State’s campuses and anyone who has roots in the community even if he or she does not reside there at present. Also, reviewers other than those assigned by Thatcher will not be limited to non-fiction or university press books—which nevertheless benefit AAUP members by furthering the goal of expanded book coverage in local newspapers.
Thatcher has engaged the Penn State Bookstore in the effort by working with them to set up a display with the local reviews and stock additional copies of featured books. The store, which is managed by Barnes & Noble, will thus provide exposure for the books while hopefully netting itself a few additional sales from the promotion.
With the Centre Daily Times review project gaining steam, Thatcher hopes other university presses will establish their own working relationships with local papers. Much of his encouragement comes simply from a desire to see a good idea expanded, though there is also a bit of self interest—as reviews editor, he does not feel that it is appropriate to publish articles on Penn State books. But he is happy to send review copies of his press’s titles to similar initiatives, should any arise.
By Linda McCall
Administrative Manager, AAUP
The 123rd Modern Language Association Annual Convention, which is the largest gathering of teachers and scholars in the humanities, took place December 27-30, 2007, in Chicago. Most of the 8,888 registered attendees at MLA 2007 visited the Exhibits Hall in the Hyatt Regency Chicago where the AAUP Presses Section was bustling with college-level educators and others eager to review the latest language and literature publications. Thirty-five member presses exhibited independently in spaces ranging from one-half of a booth to three continuous booths.
In addition to the 35 independent exhibitors, 22 member presses participated in the AAUP Cooperative Booth, where approximately 175 books and journals were on display. Best selling books included Other South: Faulkner, Coloniality, and the Mariategui Tradition (University of Pittsburgh Press), Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (University of Hawaii Press), and Reframing Latin America (University of Texas Press). Several authors with books on display in the cooperative exhibit stopped by, including Wenying Xu, author of Eating Identities: Reading Food in Asian American Literature (University of Hawaii Press), and John T. Shawcross, co-editor of Paradise Lost: A Poem Written in Ten Books: An Authoritative Text of the 1667 First Edition and Paradise Lost: A Poem Written in Ten Books: Essays on the 1667 First Edition (Duquesne University Press).
In order to give recognition to each participating press in the AAUP cooperative exhibit, all of the books and journals were grouped together by press. A special display was setup on behalf of Temple University Press, which was a participant in the cooperative exhibit as well as being one of the collaborators in The American Literatures Initiative (see Mellon article) with New York University Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers University Press, and University of Virginia Press. Visitors to the AAUP cooperative exhibit who were interested in learning more about this collaboration were referred to the booths of the other four collaborating presses, which were exhibiting independently.
The MLA 2008 Convention and Exhibit is scheduled for December 27-30 in San Francisco. For more information on the 2008 Convention, visit the MLA web site.
In light of Kosovo’s recent declaration of independence and the ongoing controversies surrounding its separation from Serbia, Books for Understanding has added a list of titles from member presses covering the countries of the former Yugoslavia: http://aaupnet.org/news/bfu/yugoslavia/list.html
Books for Understanding is a free, easy-to-use resource to help readers find books on current events. New bibliographies are compiled when a major news story breaks or public debate heats up.
The program highlights one of the highest values of university presses: to publish top research and scholarship in all fields regardless of immediate commercial potential. Often the most complete and illuminating background research and knowledge for a breaking news story is only available in scholarly books from presses committed to the public interest.
For the full range of Books for Understanding titles, please visit: http://www.booksforunderstanding.org
By Ann Wendland
Marketing and Sales Manager, University Press of Colorado
Why I chose not to go to AAUP 2007 (and got to go anyway)
Chances are, if you’re in sales and marketing, no-one from your department went to the AAUP meeting in 2007—less than half of the presses represented sent sales and marketing staff. Perhaps you felt that you just couldn’t allocate the time and money. That’s why I chose not to go.
Like yours, my schedule is maxed. A department of one, I’m responsible for every aspect of sales and marketing for the University Press of Colorado. A hundred good causes vie for every minute, and, worse, they tear apart every dollar. AAUP 2007 appeared in my draft budgets, but in the end I felt that I had to reallocate the money.
Questia, which awards three full-ride fellowships to the meeting for employees of small to midsize presses, gave me a grant, so I went after all.
To my surprise, I found that attendance would have paid for itself in directly related net sales within a month. The meeting also helped me free up time and will have long-term sales benefits. Colleagues offered information that contextualized my decisions and lent experience that helped me shape efforts in quickly changing parts of the field and areas in which I’m less knowledgeable.
Free time
Just before the meeting, I’d made a time-dictated change to advertising and exhibit planning that I wasn’t certain would benefit sales. I had been planning ads and exhibits on a book-by-book basis that required extensive research and laborious scheduling. This year, I dedicated 90% of ad and exhibit budgets to recurring venues—journals in which we would advertise regularly and exhibits in our niche subjects. Long-term agreements with ad reps, recurring deadlines, and templates for journal and program ads saved a lot of time, but I felt concerned about narrowing our focus.
]At AAUP 2007, speakers emphasized that in the current climate for university presses, publishing in niches and regularly touching base with target audiences in those niches is the best route to strong sales. The venues I’d chosen for ads and exhibits matched the lists that the director would highlight in the next strategic plan, so I set my concerns aside. Had I not attended, I might have continued to doubt my choice. Now, I can spin it as a shrewd marketing decision to brand the press through repetitive exposure and visual consistency. Really!
Other panelists also freed up time. I cheered (internally) when publicity panelists mentioned that we should just tuck materials into books because press kits get tossed. When colleagues shared their runs of review copies and galleys, which I’d assumed were higher than mine, it turned out that I could stand to trim. Time and money saved.
Free money
Ideas and information from AAUP 2007 gave a quick boost to our sales through bookstores and online vendors, helped me market the press back to member institutions (Colorado is a consortial press), and gave me key information that will support long-term projects.
The quickest boost came from conversations emphasizing the importance of promoting backlist. On returning home, I reviewed our sales with Barnes & Noble, alerting buyers to perennial sellers that B&N had dropped or sold an abnormally low percentage of. They immediately bought hundreds of books for a net sales boost of several thousand dollars. (It’s not much, but it would cover a conference and it took one day.) I worked with sales representatives to develop a backlist promotion offer for independent booksellers.
Several sessions reinforced the value of robust book pages online, especially at Amazon.com. At home, I confirmed that Amazon.com sales have grown since we improved our pages recently. I stepped up efforts, incorporating uploads of reviews and blurbs into regular routines and initiating participation in Amazon’s “Search Inside the Book.” I gave Dial-a-Book the OK to post excerpts on prominent sales sites and ensured that our books turn up in Google BookSearch. These projects might have languished if AAUP 2007 sessions hadn’t reinforced their importance.
For an easy basket, I adopted a speaker’s suggestion to include names of supporting institutions in ads, promoting our member universities to thousands of people. Board members can use that information when they advocate for increased subsidies. Time required: three minutes.
Two long-term priorities for the press—increasing foreign sales and gaining course adoptions through direct mail—require me to build certain knowledge and skills. Related sessions offered the expertise of some of the most successful presses in each area, allowing me to take advantage of what they’d learned over years.
Profitable Conversations
Sales results of serendipitous conversations at AAUP 2007 would be hard to quantify, except to say that the meeting crowds were studded with the very wholesalers and review editors that we allocate significant time and money to meet.
Writers from six book reviews attended. I enjoyed broader conversations with a couple of them than typically occur in publicity meetings. The sessions helped me make more of their reviews, too. Now, I’m quickly posting them online and using them in e-marketing. As suggested by Blackwell’s AAUP delegate, I emailed new Choice and Library Journal reviews to Blackwell and received an immediate response.
A spirit of collaboration drove the meeting: people shared detailed, useful information both in and out of sessions. At every turn, I found a happy chance to meet or reconnect with colleagues from other presses, wholesaler honchos, industry associates, AAUP staff, sales representatives, and consultants with coveted expertise.
In the hotel bar, consultant and former Oxford University Press U.S.A. director Laura Brown sat beside me and we chatted about library sales (a conversation with the co-author of the Ithaka Report on university presses and libraries that I certainly couldn’t have budgeted). Here’s my favorite of her suggestions: take a librarian out to lunch. She had lamented how few publishers talk one-on-one with librarians. The head acquisitions librarians of our public and university libraries were delighted to meet with me and each offered valuable information about recent and upcoming changes in buying methods.
See you next year?
Quick corrections and opportunities that came up at AAUP 2007 saved our press enough and earned enough to pay for the meeting. Long-term benefits of streamlined work and increases in sales will come from key information that people shared in sessions and casual conversations. If, like me, you chose not to go to the 2007 meeting (and if no-one handed you a free pass that made it impossible to resist), I hope I’ll see you in Montréal this June.
Up-to-date information on the 2008 AAUP Meeting can be found at http://aaupnet.org/programs/annualmeeting/
By Brenna McLaughlin
Electronic & Strategic Initiatives Director, AAUP
Long lauded for bringing librarian and publisher partners together to work through common “Issues in Book and Serials Acquisition,” as the subtitle goes, the Charleston Conference has grown in its 27 years from an intimate group of 24 colleagues to a sprawling gathering of more than 1000. Librarians, publishers, and vendors crowded the historic city of Charleston, South Carolina, making their ways to more than 140 sessions in 5 locations. Session topics ranged from presentations of case studies of approval plans to conceptual discussions of “structured serendipity” in content management and everything in between.
E-books were a hot topic at the 2007 conference. It seems as though the matter of e-books is finally coming to a boil; which sales models work for libraries and publishers, how patrons use e-books, and how expanding e-book collections affect print book acquisition are now all matters that can be discussed from experience. Andrew Albanese, reporting for Library Journal Academic Newswire, wrote an interesting summary of this side of Charleston: http://www.libraryjournal.com/info/CA6501604.html?nid=2673#news4
While e-books are now plainly a technology of today, a fascinating look at tomorrow came up in sessions about the problems of authority in online and networked scholarly communications. Michael Jensen’s concept of “Authority 3.0” , how the measure of scholarly authority may be computed in the future, was at the base of sessions titled “Authoritative? What’s That? And Who Says?” and “Who Shall Review the Reviewer?” In the former, Laura Cohen, Web Support Librarian at the University at Albany, and Leigh Dodds, Chief Technology Officer for Ingenta, took a close look at how traditional processes of peer review and new forms of user-generated content and approval might be adapted to each other. (See http://del.icio.us/ldodds/charleston-2007-11 for background reading to Dodds’ talk, and http://www.slideshare.net/lcohen/the-promise-of-authority-in-social-scholarship/ for Cohen’s presentation slides.)
Dodds was joined by Geoffrey Bilder, Director of Strategic Initiatives at CrossRef, for the latter session, where they proposed several ideas for laying the foundations of an “Authority 3.0” version of scholarly communications. Bilder labeled one such idea an “author DOI.” Like the DOI (digital object identifiers) that can permanently track a chunk of content (be it book, article, chapter, graph, etc.), a similar author ID would trace an individual scholar across all of his or her work—be it as a primary author of a text, a peer reviewer, or an authoritative commenter. Dodds presented the concept of an overlay “kitemark” to track “Versions of Record” in a world where digital pre-print, post-print, revised, copied, and re-published versions abound. The kitemark (named for the UK’s British Standards Institution certification schemes for indicating quality and adherence to standards) could contain metadata ranging from what type of peer review an article underwent, to whether any citations in the article have been retracted or revised. (For more information of the Author ID project, see http://www.crossref.org/CrossTech/2007/02/crossref_author_id_meeting.html.)
A striking aspect of the Charleston Conference was the relatively small number of university press representatives attending and presenting. While university presses, particularly those with journals programs, were a noticeable and successful presence at the pre-conference vendors showcase, the majority of presenting (and thus conversation-defining) publishers came from the commercial sector. There is plainly room for more active non-profit and university press participation—issues that the AAUP community deals with on a daily basis are of central interest to the many other librarian and vendor attendees.
While the Charleston Conference may be losing its identity as an intimate gathering of colleagues, it remains one of the best magnets for knowledgeable people who care about working through the problems facing scholarly communications. The 2008 Conference will be held November 5-8, so there is plenty of time for the AAUP community to plan to attend and even get involved. Despite Charleston’s growth, the conference directors maintain an open welcome for suggestions for session topics and panelists. Go to http://www.katina.info/conference/ for more information about contacting the conference organizers and complete 2007 program details
By Brenna McLaughlin
Electronic & Strategic Initiatives Director, AAUP
A delegation of AAUP representatives attended the 2007 Guadalajara International Book Fair for the fourth year in a row. The fair, known as FIL (Feria Internacional del Libro), is the largest book industry event in Latin America. FIL brings more than 17,000 book professionals from 40 countries, and more than half a million visitors, to the Expo Guadalajara each November.
AAUP again had a booth presence, shared with three member presses (the University of California Press, University of Chicago Press, and Temple University Press), where we distributed directories and other informational materials about AAUP’s publishers. AAUP attends at the invitation of the University of Guadalajara Press (Editorial Universitaria) and Red Nacional Altexto, the new association of Mexican university presses formed at the 2006 FIL.
Red Altexto’s first year has been very productive. The group has organized a number of hands-on publishing workshops on such issues as marketing and rights, and, with the Editorial Universitaria, overseen the publication of Gerardo Kloss Fernández del Castillo’s Entre el oficio y el beneficio: el papel del editor, a master’s guide to the business of being an editor and publisher.
FIL 2008 will also be host to the third International Forum of University Presses, a conference held every two years. AAUP representatives have spoken at both previous forums, and are expected to be invited speakers in 2008. Continued exchange with the university press associations of Latin America and Spain broadens AAUP’s international role, as individual press contacts heighten the global profile of university publishing. We hope to see some of our Latin American colleagues at the June 2008 AAUP Annual Meeting in Montréal.
For the first time, an AAUP Pavilion was home to more than ten AAUP member presses at the London Book Fair, held April 16-18. Representatives from seven presses attended in person, ensuring that the meeting tables were almost constantly in use. Foot traffic was steady, but the tables in the well-laid-out booth made it feel more like a mini-rights center than a static display area. After positive reviews from Pavilion attendees, AAUP and Reed Exhibitions are planning to continue the AAUP Pavilion exhibiting option for LBF 2008.
Contact Reed’s Marco Labbate for more information: mlabbate AT reedexpo.com
A New Form of Good, Old-Fashioned, Word-of-Mouth Publicity
by Colleen Lanick
Publicity Manager, MIT Press
Since September 2001, the focus of the media and public on matters of lifestyle, personal finance, and entertainment has clearly broadened to include more substantive questions of war, peace, culture, religion, security, and the role of the United States on the world stage. It has been widely recognized that in such an environment, scholarly books are more welcome than ever. This message has not been lost on trade publishers, who in the years since 9/11 have strikingly beefed up their lists. One consequence of this otherwise positive change of focus is that it has once again become difficult for scholarly presses to compete for their share of media attention. Yet the books we publish remain highly relevant, offering depth and perspective on matters of both topical and transcendent interest.
The challenge for marketing departments, many with shrinking budgets, is to figure out how to get the word out about our titles and authors. As more and more people are getting their news and information on the internet and as the blogosphere is taking on an increasingly important role as a setting for public discourse, the most logical (and economical) way to do this might just be through the blog. At MIT, we’ve long been tracking the hits of our titles on some of a wide variety of blogs, finding that they are really paying attention to our titles and engaging in lively discussions about our books. It just seemed logical to for us to start our own blog. Over the past few months, Oxford University Press, the MIT Press, Yale University Press, and the University of Chicago Press have all launched blogs as a way to post information about authors and titles and place university press books, journals, and authors in the context of the news of the day.
Blogs are relatively easy to set up. Oxford, Yale, and MIT are currently using Typepad, a blog service that provides hosting and pre-designed templates for a nominal fee, allowing a blogger to get up and running in minutes. Presses with more IT infrastructure can design their own sites by running blogging software on their own server, as Chicago is doing. They are using software called Movable Type and hosting the blog on their own server. “We have a server that is just running blogs. We wanted to have the capability to run multiple blogs, to track traffic, and we wanted to keep our content secure,” said Dean Blobaum, Electronic Marketing Manager, Books Division, University of Chicago Press.
And the content really seems to come naturally—it’s often surprisingly easy to find links to books and authors to post comments on every day (or thereabouts). “From a promotions and publicity standpoint, we couldn’t have started a blog soon enough.” said Daniel Lee, Internet Marketing Manager at Yale. “It allows us to reinforce frontlist titles that we’re really trying to push as well as shed some much wanted light on backlist items that ordinarily wouldn’t get any attention.” At MIT, we are experimenting with all sorts of content on our blog. We are using the blog to increase the momentum of media and review coverage we receive for our titles, to highlight upcoming events and exhibits relevant to our titles, to feature excerpts from our titles, and to post interviews with and original content by our authors about current issues. We’re also experimenting with a podcasting feature, which will allow us to post readings by our authors and Q&As and debates about our titles. Instead of waiting for reporters to find our titles or discover our authors as experts on a particular topic, we can help them along by providing the groundwork for a discussion of how what MIT Press publishes relates to the world around us. Our hope is that this will increase the visibility of our titles and promote discussion of the important topics and issues we publish.
A Boston-area political blog praised the MIT PressLog as a “wonderful nerdy-arty mix… there’s one part art and design; one part technology and techno-cultural theoretical work; and one part politics.” The post went on to discuss a post we had done about one of our backlist titles. This is exactly what we are hoping our blog will do. “It’s a chance for us to make connections between MIT Press books and stories in the news,” according to MIT Press Marketing Director Gita Manaktala. “These connections are real and illuminating, but in the past, we would have had to wait for reporters, reviewers, or editorial writers to make them.” Matthew Sollars, Product Manager at Oxford University Press, sees their blog as a unique opportunity to provide content that isn’t out there already. “It’s what will really differentiate us from the other content that’s available on the web,” he said. Oxford has been posting original content by their authors about hot news topics, conducting Q&As with their authors, and will be hosting live chats and debates surrounding their titles. Sollars said he plans to host a debate on the blog this summer with Saul Cornell about his forthcoming book about gun control. He hopes to get a dialogue going with both pro- and anti-gun-control writers and bloggers.
Chicago is doing something a bit different with their blog. Previously, they had been creating electronic press releases and pulling quotes from reviews for their titles on their web site but now will be posting both on their blog According to Blobaum, some of this is just handling content more effectively as the blog categorizes and archives itself, which will hopefully garner more search engine hits. “But of course we also want to create some original and interesting posts that tie the news to our book, that highlight what our authors are doing, and probably we’ll have the occasional author essay/op-ed piece,” Blobaum says of The Chicago Blog. “We hope that bloggers (and maybe some print journalists) will visit our blog or subscribe to the RSS or Atom Feed and find something useful or interesting from time to time.”
Overall, there seems to be enthusiasm throughout each press for the blog—in marketing, sales, and editorial. In addition to traditional publicity and marketing related news posts, editors can comment on trends in their specific fields and we’ve found that many of our authors are more than happy to jump on board to provide original content for their books. The blog can help to keep everyone at the press involved in the books long after their publication and it is the perfect solution for authors who want to actively participate in the marketing of their book. One of the challenges is that our lists are so diverse—many readers are only interested in just one portion of our list. Sollars mentioned that RSS feeds should be able to help readers focus on information they are most interested in and weed out what they’re not. (For a more detailed discussion of RSS feeds, please see “RSS: The Next Big Thing?” in the Fall 2005 Exchange)
“It only takes one good link to drive sales up markedly. It’s hard not to take advantage of a tool like this. It’s free promotion on the fly. Just having our book titles pop up more in search engines, other people’s blogs, news articles, etc., generates a lot more excitement about what we are doing,” Lee said of the Yale blog. Of course, the blog does not replace other marketing and publicity efforts, but it really is an exciting and versatile new tool that can allow us to reinforce what we are already doing, think about our titles in a creative way, provide original and innovative content to drive readers to our books, and introduce people to titles—that they might not normally have had exposure to—in a lively and engaging way.
This article originally appeared in the Winter 2006 Exchange.
Or, Using Publisher Alley and Neilsen BookScan Every Day Soon after joining NYU Press, I subscribed to the sales databases Publisher Alley and Neilsen BookScan as a way to help me better perform my job. The information that both these systems provide has helped me on various levels—from analyzing proposals for weekly acquisitions meetings, to projecting sales for forthcoming books, to determining reprint decisions. I find these services extremely useful and will briefly go though the different functions they provide.
by Fredric Nachbaur
Marketing & Sales Director, NYU Press
As the marketing and sales director, I am responsible for reading and reviewing the packet of proposals before our weekly acquisitions meeting. In preparation for the discussion, I look at the books previously written by the authors and editors to get a sense of how well their books have sold. I know that different subjects sell at different levels but having an author with a solid track record certainly helps when you are pitching a book to a buyer. It’s also good to know when a book hasn’t sold well. I look at Pub Alley for a picture of the library market and at BookScan to see the bookstore market.
After reviewing the authors’ and editors’ own books, I look at the comparable titles that the editors have listed on the proposals.. Although it is important to recognize other factors that go into a particular book’s sales background such as author, publisher, price and discount, it is really useful to know how a competitive book has performed. A big-name author publishing with a big trade house can’t be compared to a first-time author at a university press, so I try to make comparisons with like titles published at similar houses. I know that NYU often competes with Duke or Minnesota in certain subjects, so looking at sales figures from books by these presses is valuable.
I bring all of this information into the acquisitions meeting and it becomes a good source for setting price ranges and print runs, allowing us to make informed decisions rather than basing them solely on guess work. Before the days of sales databases, we had to rely on our friends at other houses to look up sales—it’s nice to type in a password and get the information in seconds. Though I’ve told colleagues that I can show them how to look up information too, they haven’t taken me up on the offer, and I secretly enjoy being the only one who can access the information.
When the press is low on stock on a new release, usually a general interest title, we don’t want to lose momentum and be left without stock. Before we push the button for a reprint, though, I review stock levels at the chains and wholesalers to determine if there is too much stock in the marketplace that might be returned. PubAlley and BookScan, particularly the B&N BookScan feed, are invaluable resources for this information. Without these numbers, we could make disastrous decisions. Of course, due to demands from other channels, I sometimes need to reprint even though B&N and Borders may have a ton of books. However, I may not reprint as much knowing that I’ll get 50% or more back from them months later, just enough to supply other key channels such as Amazon and core independents.
Before presenting to my buyer at Baker & Taylor, I need to do a comparison sales report. In the past, I would do a lot of research beforehand and go to my appointment an hour or more early to look up sales data for books related to the frontlist being presented that day. Needless to say, this was not a fun exercise. Pub Alley has made this task quite easy and streamlined and I am thrilled that I can run these reports with so much less stress. I recently got a refresher training lesson and was still amazed at how easy it is.
Additional data that Pub Alley provides is pricing and models for comparable books. For instance if I want to look at how other presses publish cloth religion monographs, I can do so with little hassle by logging onto Pub Alley. This is great data to have for analyzing a subject and determining print runs.
These are brief summaries of how I use Pub Alley and BookScan. I must emphasize that both systems have become part of my daily work routine. In addition to logging into the NYU Press sales and marketing databases, I log onto Pub Alley and BookScan every morning. While I feel a bit like the Wizard of Oz voluntarily lifting the curtain to share the source of my all-seeing book-market knowledge, I would certainly encourage others to take advantage of the information resources that these services make available to us. Not simply marketing and sales departments, but the whole press may benefit from the increased certainty and efficiency this information contributes to publishing decisions.