Scott McLemee on publicity in the digital age
Last month at the Association of American University Presses annual meeting, Scott McLemee participated in a session on “Publicity in the Digital Age.” He has posted a version of his remarks on Inside Higher Ed where he writes the Intellectual Affairs column.
Says McLemee: “There may now be more opportunities than ever to connect up readers with the books that will interest them.…The bad news is that, for the most part, it isn’t happening.” The problem, as he sees it, is that “very few people at university presses have made the transition to full engagement with the developing digital public sphere.”
By and large, McLamee believes, university presses are missing the potential publicity available via academic bloggers. Academic bloggers do not receive appropriate review copies of university press books. “It would also help if more publishers were inclined to make extracts from their new books available online,” says McLemee. And “signing up for e-mail notifications of new books from university presses rarely pays off.”
Read the whole piece—it’s worth the time. And, here at Chicago, we’ll try harder.