Taking Our eBook to its Audience

Now that my students' chapters for Writing About Literature in the Digital Age are completed and submitted to our editing team, we are concentrating on making our project anything but an academic exercise; I've asked students to identify specific people who might find our eBook of value. That's right, this isn't going to be a launch into the void; we're going to take our eBook to its audience.

I'd like to formalize this audience discovery process into an assignment for my students, and then give them a number of starting points. As I tried to convey to them yesterday in class -- this is where things can really become a lot of fun. Why? Because when you connect people and content -- meaningfully, not spammily, that's when the sparks start to fly. (Did I, an English professor, just turn spam into an adverb? I think I did!)

Assignment:
Using this "Potential Readers" page in our eBook/course wiki, record the names and contact info for 20 people. Important note: names will not be used if you do not provide a legit rationale for why that potential reader might find value in this eBook. We are not spamming the Interent with our intellectual work; we are targeting people who could truly find this of value. I think some of my students will choke at the idea of finding 20 people, but I hope they will think differently after reading through my many suggestions for finding appropriate potential readers:

Assignment: Annotated Blog Posts for Conventional Literary Research

Yesterday my students received some research training at our library. In an effort not to have them overwhelmed, I set forth a short, selected list of literary research resources on our course wiki that I want them to be sure to explore.

So I am giving them an assignment to blog about their use of three of the listed resources and to report on sources found within them. However, only two of these sources should be relevant to their own research subject; one must relate to the research of one of their peers (I require this in order to promote social learning and engagement with fellow students). The three posts should be completed by Friday, May 27, 2011 at 2:00pm.

This assignment is much like an annotated bibliography assignment, except that I am urging as much attention to their process as to the result of their search; to the tool used to find a good source, as much as that end source itself.