Marketing
AUP's marketing strategy is designed to reach scholars, specialists, and readers effectively through cultivated distribution of information.
Reaching the Readers
Our sales and marketing strategy is international, collaborative and creative. To serve the needs of our authors and the wider research community, we offer a flexible approach that is nonetheless grounded in the global dissemination of rich metadata for all our paper and electronic books. This information is designed to reach the largest possible readership and ensures that AUP publications are visible, discoverable and accessible worldwide.
Visibility
Online Catalogues and Retailers
Our books and journals are visible on our website, developed with the user in mind. Our English-language books are on the Baker and Taylor Publisher Services website for North America based customers. AUP journals are visible and accessible on our state-of-the-art platform aup-online.
Our online catalogue has a dynamic design with advanced search functionality. Content also features in curated lists across the website, on our homepages and in the discipline hubs. Our web pages are Search Engine Optimised. Whether you are an author, researcher or customer, finding your way to and through our website and online catalogue is created with you in mind.
AUP books are also visible on all major online retailers and bibliographic search engines such as Bol.com, Amazon, Google Books, Google Scholar, The Book Depository, Adlibris, Barnes and Noble, and on the many other ever-expanding online options.
Global and Local
As well as worldwide availability, we work with dedicated representatives for our English-language books in all key markets: North America and Canada, South America, China, Japan, Southeast Asia, South Korea, India, Spain, Portugal and Gibraltar, Eastern Europe, and the Netherlands and Belgium. We have print-on-demand facilities in the UK, the US and Singapore, ensuring our books are always available.
Our Dutch-language books are distributed in the Netherlands and Belgium, with international orders possible, by logistics experts CB.
eBook Platforms
Our eBooks are catalogued and available to access from several major platforms, including Cambridge Core, De Gruyter, EBSCO, Ebrary/Proquest and JSTOR.
Online Communication and Social Media
We send marketing email campaigns to a carefully curated audience, making sure we promote the right books to the right people. We love to connect online with our authors, book and series editors, and editorial boards via social media, as well as with institutions, societies, journals, press and other publishers. It creates a network of relevant interests, helping us to connect with audiences to share content, ideas and make our publications more visible. We are on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.
Discoverability
For all our publications, we disseminate metadata that enable the discoverability of our content through repositories, research databases, discovery services and eBook platforms. Our publications are discoverable on the most prominent discovery services. These online tools are frequently used by libraries, allowing them to search for content to enrich their catalogue. The most common services used are ProQuest-ExLibris Primo and -ExLibris Summon, EBSCO, WorldCat, Proquest-360 Link and -Search, Proquest-OASIS Technical Services and Proquest-Syndetic Solutions.
Our books are discoverable not only on a book level but by chapters too. We are partnered with the interactive discovery platform ScienceOpen who provide enriched, machine-readable metadata and assign and deposit Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to Crossref; they also provide unique landing pages for all book chapters that link back to the full book version on the AUP website to make chapter-level DOIs.
Accessibility
Our mission is to make our academic content accessible to as many researchers, teachers and students as possible. We achieve this through close relationships with our partner platforms that work directly with institutions to make our content accessible for their users. Researchers affiliated with an institutional library that works with any of the leading providers of academic content will be able to access our books in physical or digital format.
Open Access
AUP hold longstanding values on open access. As one of the founding partners of OAPEN, we now provide many options for publishing books and journals in open access. For details about our open access options, please click here.
We support green open access initiatives, encouraging authors to upload their version of their book chapters and monographs to institutional repositories, their personal website, and on Mendeley, ResearchGate or Academia.edu. We work in partnership with Figshare, a web-based repository software that allows AUP and authors to efficiently make manuscripts and supplementary data publicly available in the AUP portal, aup.figshare.com.
Creativity in Author Marketing
We consider book marketing to be a creative, collaborative process. Our impactful author marketing strategy results from years of working with authors, recognising their unique books and individual needs. We actively approach our authors, including editors of essay collections, contributors and series editors, to prepare for the release of their book and offer support in the month's following. We provide tailored marketing toolkits with promotional materials and tips to our authors to help them spread the word about their book. This toolkit includes advice for optimal promotion through emails, blogs, social media and the author's network.
Academic Community
Events and Conferences
As an academic and educational publisher, we recognise we have a role to play in upholding the academic community. Championing our authors and editorial boards at events and conferences is something we take pride in; we strive to attend, virtually or in-person, relevant subject conferences and industry events. We often create and host our own events, from book launches, workshops and roundtables on open access or the publishing process for Early Career Researchers to welcoming students from publishing courses to our office or other presses for lively discussions on developments in the academic publishing world.
Discounts for Individuals
We offer our authors a 40% discount on their book or any other AUP publications, as well as a 20% discount upon the book's publication to share with friends and colleagues. For conferences, we offer up to 40% discount on selected books and regularly have subject-related promotions.
Book Awards
Over the years, AUP books have won several internationally renowned book awards. We encourage authors to self-nominate or share details of any prizes they are eligible for so that we can nominate their book. AUP always provide the complimentary copies needed for the prize committee. Book awards won in the last five years:
- Academic Excellence Award from Chinese Historians in the United States (CHUS)
- Best Historical Materials of the Reference and User Services Association, an affiliate of the American Library Association (ALA)
- Eighteenth-Century Russian Studies Association (ECRSA) Marc Raeff Book Prize
- European Association for Southeast Asian Studies (EuroSEAS) Humanities Book Prize
- International Convention of Asian Scholars (ICAS) Social Sciences Book Prize
- Sixteenth Century Society & Conference (SCSC) Gerald Strauss Book Prize
- Sixteenth Century Society & Conference (SCSC) Roland H. Bainton Book Prize
- Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award
- Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award
- Society for French Studies (SFS) R. Gapper Book Prize
- Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender (SSEMWG) Collaborative Project Award
Timeline of Marketing an Academic Book
