How to publicize your first academic book (opinion)

Congratulations! You have published your first book.

What now?

Tiktok video? memes? Make friends with an influencer?

For many academics, opening an account on Twitter is daunting. Many of us are camera shy, reluctant to market ourselves and distrust media portrayals. We dream of long, interrupted hours of reading and writing and shudder at the thought of a live interview.

I’m with you. But I also know that queasy feeling of spending countless hours thinking, writing, and brooding over a book only to see it rank 581,000 on Amazon. This means that about eight copies of the book are sold per month.

Academic monographs, I’m told, typically sell 500 to 1,000 copies over their lifetime, mostly to libraries. The running gag in academia is that the royalties from your book will get you a few lattes—but they’ll also get you a job, which is enough for most of us.

We may not feel a lot of outside pressure to market our books, but we are intrinsically rewarded for doing so. We know so much about our subject; It is worth sharing this knowledge with other people. I’ve also found that different audiences make me think about my work in different ways. And it certainly makes my day to receive an email from someone who enjoyed reading my book.

Last summer I published my first book on “No Excursions” charter schools and discipline at Princeton University Press. It wasn’t a bestseller. But over time I’ve learned that there are a number of small things you can do to help get your book known and your story to a wider audience. Here are 10 of them.

1. Target your audience. Find out who you want to reach. Aside from faculty members and students in your field, would other audiences be interested in your book? I wanted my book to be read by teachers and principals. To reach these groups, I emailed school leaders, sent printed copies of the book—with a handwritten note—to school leaders and teacher organizations, and created a discussion guide for teachers and schools on my website. Similarly, Mira Debs, whose first book was about public Montessori schools, organized book talks at various Montessori schools and received funds to distribute free books to participating teachers. She also created school and community resources.
2. Organize a virtual book launch. This is a fun way to celebrate the release of your book. You can create a simple invitation with a Zoom link and email the invitation to friends, family, students, and co-workers. You can present material from your book, or it might be more lively to find someone to interview you about it. For my book launch, I invited Jennifer Berkshire, an education blogger and author, to interview me because she is knowledgeable in the field and a pro in the format. The recording of my book presentation was played back on C-SPAN 2 Book TV.
3. Work with your publisher and their marketing department. Academic publishers don’t have extensive resources to market your book, but they can still be helpful. They typically send an announcement about your book to a list of media and facilitate contact with prospects. Mine also sent a digital or printed copy of the book to a list of 20 to 30 academics that I recommended. They also mailed out copies of the book for book prizes, which can get expensive if you have to do it yourself. They made me a Twitter banner. You can also search the websites of various publishers for media toolkits for book promotion.
4. Say yes to almost everything. I’ve said yes to almost every media or podcast request about my book. I said yes to any invitation to speak about the book in college courses or university seminars. If your book is very popular you might have to be choosier, but I found I could manage these different events since they were spread out throughout the year. Once I did a few of these, I needed less preparation and felt more confident speaking off the cuff.
5. Don’t ignore small opportunities to spread the word. Have you sent out a book announcement to your affiliates/sections? Would a particular blog feature your book or publish an excerpt? How about emailing co-workers and friends and letting them know about your new book? I received one from an author I didn’t know personally and ended up teaching her book. Talk to colleagues you know from other departments and express your interest in speaking at a colloquium, book lecture series or seminar. Send a quick email to magazine editors—or a book review editor if listed on the magazine website—and ask if they would consider your new book for a review.
6. Use your academic affiliation. Does your university have a reading series? What about your doctoral institution? I was able to get my book included in my college’s Featured Book of the Month, and college magazine then pulled excerpts from that interview. Have you also contacted the press office of your current institution? In every tweet I post regarding my book, I tag my institution’s Twitter name and they will repost it to increase its reach.
7. read resumes. To identify potential news outlets, magazines, and awards, I searched the resumes of academics who had written successful books in my field. That’s how I came across the New Books Network, where I participated in a podcast. That’s also how I found two awards that I ended up winning: one from the Society of Professors of Education and the Independent Publishers Book Award.
8. Try a different way of writing. Opinion posts are a great way to get your message across succinctly and to a wide audience. Consider if there’s a recent news event or an anniversary that can serve as a hook for your story. In my case, I framed a piece around the 30th anniversary of Charter Schools. The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization that only publishes articles written by academics, is a great medium to try. My article based on my book was out in about a week, complete with catchy photos. The article was picked up by over 20 news websites and published in the print version of The Philadelphia investigator. It was clicked more than 57,000 times. You can also experiment with different genres, e.g. B. Write a piece of advice in a publication Within the Higher Ed for educators who may be struggling through the book writing process.
9. Start early. Media interest is highest around the date of your publication, so start writing opinion pieces and reaching out to potential outlets a few months beforehand. The OpEd project I participated in is a resource for educators who want to learn how to write for a public audience. listen to podcasts. Research bloggers and influencers in your area. Find out which reporters are writing on your topic and contact them. This is also the time to reach out to independent bookstores. I contacted my local bookstore a few months after my book came out and they said it was too late to host a book event.
10. Spread the wealth. Use opportunities to talk about your book to promote the work of other scholars/activists/stakeholders, especially early career scholars and those from underrepresented backgrounds. Handing out the wealth gets you into interesting dialogue and draws attention to the work of others. At Yale Education Studies, I gave a talk with Michael Martinez, a graduate of Yale University and a No Excuses charter school, where we discussed our research projects together.

To learn more about promoting your book, check out this media toolkit compiled by the American Sociological Association using scholarly advice and experiences. If you’re feeling particularly brave, you could even explore marketing strategies and seminars aimed at authors who publish books independently. Next time, consider working with an agent or publishing an academic textbook.

Marketing a book takes time, but these strategies are fairly easy to implement. And by following them, who knows? You might even get the attention of The New York Times or a well-known blogger. Taken together and with such endorsement, your book on game theory (OK, Jane Austen) might even temporarily surpass the #200 ranking on Amazon.