About OER Development in Pressbooks
Promoting Your Open Textbook
Nikki Andersen; Deborah King; Adrian Stagg; and Emilia Bell
Once your OER is published, there are several ways to share information about your publication to increase its impact. Some of these steps are handled by the ISU Digital Press, while authors can handle others themselves.
Digital Press Services
As part of the publication process, the ISU Digital Press offers the following services to authors:
- DOI registration, metadata management, and search engine optimization for published works
- Marketing and indexing of your new book in online databases to increase its impact
- Tracking and reporting download statistics and reuse information
Additionally, Abbey Elder, open access & scholarly communication librarian, promotes newly published open textbooks across several national mailing lists to encourage their adoption and use at external institutions.
How You can Help
Promote your work internally
Your colleagues are a ready-made community that can help promote a new open text. Here are some ways you can make use of your institutional networks:
- Use email and mailing lists to inform colleagues, as well as the Dean and/or department chairs or relevant committees.
- Contact relevant departments and ask if your text can be featured in their newsletters (e.g. CELT Teaching Tip newsletter).
- Ask the communications and marketing team to write a press release or help promote your text.
- Ask your subject librarian to share your text with their contacts.
- Promote your text in high schools and community groups.
- Promote your text at institutional events such as Open Access Week at the University library.
- Contact peer reviewers and others involved in the book and ask them to promote the text.
Underlying Principles
- Every open text project is different: and so is the marketing. Our suggestions are guidelines, not a standard. Formulate your marketing ideas based on what happens in your project.
- Connection-making is at the heart of communications. Create and tell a story about your project, connect with those who listen and respond to their feedback.
Promote your work externally
Here are some ways you can promote your text to external audiences:
- blog posts (with clear links to more content that is useful to your audience)
- milestone announcements (providing information on what someone can do next, like contribute, review or adopt)
- social media (either from your accounts or a dedicated project account, sharing updates and other relevant content)
- listserv discussions (so you can become an engaged participant in a community, naturally directing people to your resource)
- conferences (as opportunities to present, be challenged, make connections, and reconsider your text and how to make it better in a future release)
- professional bodies and organizations
For the publication of the second edition of Oral Communication for Non-Native Speakers of English, the authors printed business cards for their book, with the cover art on the front of the card and a short blurb and a QR code and university-generated shortlink to access the ebook on the back:
“An essential resource for developing oral communication skills in academic settings for international scholars.”
Using a QR code and a short link through the university specifically has its perks, since the authors can track how many users used that link to access their book. This way, they can track the impact of their business cards strategy on gaining new readers or instructors adopting their text.
Word of mouth and grassroots efforts are easily the most effective tactics for marketing your open text. The team working on your open text is one community, but you and everyone else in it have ties to many other communities and can help the word get out! To that end:
- Share content updates, success stories, and key milestones.
- Use every step as a communications opportunity and keep content flowing outward.
- Showcase the team members behind the work – make it personal!
- Provide accessible feedback tools, so that communication can be two-way.
- Repetition is good: get the word out early and often, using different channels: blog posts, social media (with links to useful content), listservs (in your discipline and across communities), conferences, and webinars.
This chapter has been adapted in parts from:
“Promoting your open text” in the Open Publishing Guide for Authors from the University of Southern Queensland, available under a CC BY NC 4.0 license. Content has been adapted to fit the context of Iowa State University’s publishing services.
- The Rebus Guide to Publishing Open Textbooks (So Far) by Apurva Ashok and Zoe Wake Hyde is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 license.
- Self-Publishing Guide by BC campus is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 license.
