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.