Academics like to think that their work speaks for itself. They don’t want to sully themselves (or take the time) to engage in promoting their own work. In the past, this was possible. Publishing was endorsement enough for what one had written. These days, when publishing is available to all as a commodity (at least insofar as publishing on the web is concerned), the real endorsement is attention. In order to garner more attention, one needs to be engaged with extensions of the scholarship, and this often means websites or outgrowths of the publication. However these take a lot of time to maintain and even longer to build an audience if one is not already engaged in social media. My recommendation then is that faculty get involved with social media as early as possible, as it can (should?) help move their scholarship during the writing process and so they can start to develop an audience. One might make a bigger effort for a book publication.

Over the summer, we’re going to be talking with as many academic presses as possible to get a feeling from them about where they see these trends moving.