A Tiered Content Model for Academic Writing and Publishing

I offer a tiered content model for academic writing and publishing (based on a concept I've piloted with my online writing and literature courses). It consists of three levels:

1. Teaser Content (micro-content for a sounding phase)
2. Trailer Content (mini-presentation for a development phase)
3. Formal Content (macro-content for a publication phase) 

These should not be understood as three different ways of disseminating the same completed content (as though the teaser and the trailer were merely advertisements for the "real," more formal content). The tiers are a sequential process -- like the drafting process in writing, but absent the isolation of traditional writing.

The essence of this is that content is circulated through social media at each phase; one relies upon feedback from prospective audiences and obtains social proof before moving to more advanced research or formal publishing. In other words, one does not commit to researching or developing ideas for which there is not manifest interest by others, and one cultivates an audience as one cultivates one's ideas.

Here is the model in greater detail:

Marketing our Writing eBook

Today went great. We are now getting lined up to launch into the marketing of the eBook, which is only hours away from getting published.

My students did a crowdsourced editing of the galley proofs for Writing About Literature in the Digital Age today. We actually used paper for the first time all term, with two copies for each piece getting read by the author's and by fresh eyes. The design team entered the edits as fast as the papers were handed to them. It took just over an hour.

Meanwhile, our publishing team (Bri Zabriskie and Derrick Clements) pinned down the details on how and where we can post our eBook for distribution. To our disappointment, it appears our free, creative commons-licensed eBook is not welcome on the Kindle store at Amazon (though it can still be downloaded and read on Kindle devices). Should we have really expected a commercial enterprise to allow us free distribution of a free book? Bri gives details about each of the outlets she and Derrick researched on her blog. Importantly, Derrick got instructions from librarian Elizabeth Smart about how to archive our eBook in BYU's institutional repository, ScholarsArchive.

On to marketing...

I have long stated to my students how critical it is that we not simply complete our eBook, but that we make a good faith effort to get it into the hands of those who would find it valuable. So, in the last few days of our term, marketing is our focus. This has two components: 1) advertising the eBook through an email campaign; and 2) showcasing our eBook in a free webinar.

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:

Beyond Just Content: Making our Literary eBook Matter

One of the problems of a traditional literary education is that it puts such a high value on private, introspective reading and enjoyment that the idea of actually communicating one's thoughts about a book seem very secondary. This is reinforced within traditional academic settings, ironically, when students of literature think and write critically about a text, but do not think as critically about their current context. In short, one is taught to analyze and make claims about literature, but one is not taught to connect this analyzing or persuading to real audiences.

"Literature is equipment for living," said Kenneth Burke, a dictum I often repeat to my students, and which I believe is all the moer applicable in the digital age. The works of literature my students are reading truly are vehicles for understanding and coping with their present world, and not simply escapes from that world into a place of fantasy or academic philosophizing.

But old habits are hard to break. What I realize now is that we should have been marketing our eBook even before we hatched it. That may sound backwards, but I now think we should have done more market research to really know who it is that cares about our topics. But we will do the best we can now, with one week to go before our launch date.