All publishers should be looking seriously at the Internet as a means of marketing and distribution. Academic and scientific publishers not presently marketing on the Internet will need to explain why they are ignoring the most significant innovation in communication and dissemination since the Gutenberg press, particularly as it was the university community that was both mother and midwife to the Internet. Fortunately, it is now much easier to use the Internet as a means of both publishing and marketing than it is to explain why you are not doing so.
For those readers who managed to escape noticing the 3000 or more articles about the Internet that appeared in North American newspapers in 1993, here follows a quick review of the basic facts surrounding the 'Net,' as it is affectionately know among the rising wired generation of electronic literati. (Get to know them, they are your next greatest market.) The Internet is a collection of 50,000 networks in sixty-five countries and is home to roughly 25 million users. One million new e-mail addicts join every month. No one owns it, no one controls it, and there are no official rules for using it -- just cultural norms. An Internet user has access to over ten terabytes of freely available information (equivalent to 20,000 copies of the Oxford English Dictionary). The Internet is the fastest-growing form of communication in history -- faster than television, radio, fax, or telephone. It is also the largest uncensored medium of communication in history.
If this is not enough to impress the technoweary, the Internet also marks the beginning of a new form of human behaviour -- mass participation in bi-directional mass media. When you put it all together, it is not hard to see why the Internet is in a position to have an unparalleled impact on global society. It is certainly able to sell a few more books and journals.
The basic strategy to marketing a journal online can be as simple as posting a table of contents and ordering information to the appropriate forums (called newsgroups and mailing lists). You can move on from here to building a simple text-based Gopher archive or a complete multimedia catalogue and online publication using Mosaic, a hypertext viewer developed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the University of Illinois. The most efficient marketing strategy will involve disseminating information in low ASCII text (the lingua franca of the Net), providing a Gopher archive of value-added information, and eventually building multimedia online editions, sample copies, and magazines.
One effective marketing technique for books and journals is also the most uncomplicated: create an announcement that describes the journal issue or book and post it to appropriate forums (Net jargon for sending an electronic mail message to a group of people). Do not post the announcement directly to individuals, as this constitutes unsolicited e-mail and will only gain you the wrath of the Internet community. Do not make your announcement longer than 100 lines; most people on the Net receive hundreds of e-mail messages a week (if not daily), and long postings are annoying and ineffective. Keep you messages short and indicate an e-mail address that the reader may contact for further information. For details on how to market to online conferences while respecting Internet culture, send e-mail to mstrange@fonorola.net and request the file Internet Advertising Frequently Asked Questions.
Take the time to determine which online conferences are an appropriate audience for your contents announcement. This can be done with the help of the many Internet indexes and resource guides now available in print, such as The Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters, and Academic Discussion Lists. A free copy of the latest version of Diane Kovacs's (dkovacs@kentvm.kent.edu) Directory of Scholarly Electronic Discussion Lists can be retrieved by sending the mail message GET ACADLIST README to listserv@kentvm.kent.edu.
It is also possible to create your own online conference for disseminating contents lists and selected articles. A few years ago I created an experimental electronic journal for the dissemination of contents lists and book summaries in the field of religious studies. The journal immediately attracted one thousand readers from thirty countries, and a few dozen publishers regularly contributed content and ordering information. Readers appreciated the free service and publishers informed me that it did indeed generate sales.
If you want to create your own mailing list and are affiliated with a university, contact your computing and communication services and ask for the local Internet postmaster he or she will tell you what is possible at your own Internet site. Otherwise, the more than fifty Internet guides and manuals now available at the bookstore will launch you in the more technical aspects of starting a mailing list. A personal favourite of mine is The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Internet by Peter Kent (Alpha Books 1994).
The next step in marketing publications on the Internet involves creating an archive of contents lists, free sample articles, and ordering information. This is done through a shareware program called Gopher. Gopher allows Internet users to browse through hierarchical menus, read articles online, and even retrieve sample articles or chapters to their own e-mail box. There are now more than 20,000 Gopher archives on the Internet. They are accessible by the vast majority of Internet users and are extremely easy to create and maintain.
There are services that will maintain your journal title on a Gopher archive and charge you an annual fee. One such service, the Electronic Newsstand, provides an Internet presence for more than eighty magazines. Publishers pay as much as $5000 annually to be included (a ridiculous price given the low costs and greater flexibility of getting your own Internet site in-house). The main problem with such services is that they fail to alert online conference members adequately to the existence of the passive archive.
For those academic publishers who are working on a small budget, it is entirely possible to create an extensive Internet presence by taking advantage of the Internet's love of free information. Hundreds of universities maintain subject-oriented Gopher archives and are always looking for relevant information of quality to include in their collection. Part of your task of going online on a shoestring involves identifying Gopher archives that would be interested in housing your material and contacting the maintainer of the archive with a request to be included.
One such site that freely accepts journal contents lists and sample issues is the CICnet Archive of Electronic Journals and Newsletters (Gopher to gopher.cic.net) maintained by Paul Southworth (pauls@cic.net). This is the most comprehensive listing of journals available on the Internet, and it is a good place in which to get a feel for the scope of Internet-facilitated publishing. The number of titles in this archive is quickly approaching one thousand. When I started documenting the growth of Internet- facilitated journals and newsletters three years ago, there were only a few dozen titles on the Net.
An excellent place to start your hunting for other potential archives (and otherwise useful sources of information) is the University of Michigan's Clearinghouse for Subject Oriented Internet Resource Guides (gopher to gopher.lib.umich.edu). This archive lists more than 130 guides to information sources on the Internet, including a directory of online conferences of interest to publishers and editors maintained by Kara Robinson (krobinso@kentvm.kent.edu).
Once you have created a Gopher-accessible catalogue, the next step is to continue to send announcements to appropriate online conferences, informing members of new sample issues, articles, chapters, and table-of- content archives available on your Gopher. This follows the most basic principle of Internet-facilitated marketing -- the creation of an online presence by providing the Internet community with freely accessible information (your table of contents and samples archive) and informing Internet members of its availability in a non-obtrusive manner. One publisher, Bernie Pobiak, founder of The Internet Bookstore, hires experienced Internet members to promote his titles in various online conferences. They do this by tactfully posting messages about the bookstore's offerings whenever appropriate (usually in response to someone's query, 'Where can I find out about ...'). I am sure it will not be long before marketers hire people to ask leading questions, and other people to answer these questions with skilfully written plugs. Carelessness and greed will spell disaster here for many. This strategy will certainly be extended to include hiring a third party to write a balanced but overall positive review of a title and to post the review to appropriate conferences.
Creating an extensive Internet presence is of considerable value to academic and scientific publishers, as over half the Internet community belongs to academia (with the other half inhabited by the business community). If you are a publisher of library science titles, there are online conferences that contain more than 3000 librarians. If you have computer science titles and textbooks, there are newsgroups with 30,000 computer scientists and students talking shop. The Internet is ideally suited to marketing highly targeted publications as it naturally gathers people into tightly focused interest groups. Reaching these niche markets is as simple as identifying appropriate forums, determining what can be acceptably posted to each forum, and providing the community with a freely accessible, value- added informational archive.
If you have a large number of titles, another powerful marketing tool that will be of use is a free electronic newsletter. Hire a graduate student to write a regular electronic newsletter that reviews your books or journals and interviews authors. These free electronic loss leaders are very effective in leading potential customers to your commercial products.
One example of a free e-newsletter that promotes a hard-copy magazine is BooKBraG, created by Wendy Murray (BooKBraG-editor@scholastic.com). BooKBraG is a monthly newsletter 'about the best new children's books and the brightest ways to use them with children.' Its first issue features an interview with an author and, within each issue, the reviews are arranged by topic. The first issue features books 'about our nation's past by authors who don't idealize historical figures or gloss over past social injustices.' BooKBraG ends with a brief commercial for Instructor Magazine, 'the nation's leading magazine for elementary school teachers.' A 1-800 number is provided for the curious.
It is not hard to see how creating an informative newsletter and making it freely available over the Internet is a means for identifying an audience that will be interested in a commercial product or publication. This is without question the most effective form of Internet marketing, as it is non-obtrusive, adds value to the Internet community, and is easily implemented with a $30-a- month Internet account. One such free e-newsletter, HOTT, attracted 35,000 Internet subscribers in a matter of a few weeks.
This audience is remarkably easy to reach, even given the absolute restriction on using unsolicited e-mail. Those tempted to ignore the Internet's constraints against unsolicited e-mail will quickly end up in the company of the Phoenix-based lawyers who posted an unsolicted e-mail advertisement to 5000 newsgroups. The result was tens of thousands of e-mail hate letters, fax bombing, and even death threats and obscene phone calls. On the cyberspace frontier there are always eager lynch mobs ready to defend their community in a fashion reminiscent of the best Sergio Leone western.
Mosaic is the first truly successful multimedia Internet application. While at this early stage in the evolution of the Net only 2 to 5 per cent of the Internet community can access Mosaic owing to technical requirements, the NCSA Mosaic home page (starting point) is accessed by Internet users 1.3 million times a week. Every indication is that Mosiac and Mosaic-compatible browsers will be near universal in North America within three years. Mosaic allows publishes to create multimedia hypertext sample issues, catalogues, and storefronts.
If your target market is in the technical community, Mosaic is a natural vehichle for capturing an audience. Soon, it will be the best way of reaching the widest market. Already there are hundreds of Mosaic-accessible publications and Mosaic storefronts selling everything from homes to Carribean cruises. The key innovation with Mosaic is that it allows publishers to include full-colour advertisements in their online edition, with sound and video clips as well. This make it possible to generate income directly from advertisers while making sample copies or complete online editions freely available. Some titles currently producing Mosaic sample pages include Mother Jones, the Federal Communications Law Journal, and USA Today.
Mosaic allows publishers to produce richly formatted texts that overcome the limitations of Gopher and low ASCII. O'Reilly & Associates publishes one of the finest examples of Internet magazines, the Global Network Navigator (GNN) . GNN is an exellent example of how a free Internet publication can generate revenue through selling advertisments that appear in the online edition. A screen capture of an article within GNN has an advertisement icon for a book, SendMail.
O'Reilly & Associates also lead the way in using the Internet to market publications. They use the Internet to comunicate all aspects of their operations via e-mail. To contact O'Reilly & Associates via e-mail:
The basic design of the GNN Mosaic magazine is bound to be widely imitated by other publishers. To retrieve further information about Mosaic, including the software itself, FTP to ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu.
In December 1967 the Star Trek episode 'The Trouble with Tribbles' aired for the first time. That now classic episode opened with a scene that had Chief Engineer Scotty sitting at a computer terminal and looking at a full-colour image with text. Captain Kirk walked by and ask Scotty what he was doing. Scotty replied that he was 'just keeping up with the trade journals.' Gene Roddenberry's vision of the future included the networked dissemination of electronic publications. Twenty-five years later Constellation-class starships are nowhere in sight, but we do have the beginnings of the global dissemination of hypertext, hypermedia electronic journals, newsletters, and books. If you want to see the future of publishing, look to the Internet.
Recently I was waging a losing war against some crabgrass on my front lawn when Reinhard Pummer walked by on his way to his office at the University of Ottawa. Professer Pummer has been using the Internet for a few years now to facilitate his work in Judaism and Eastern Religions. I dragged him up to my study and brought him on a tour of a Mosaic publication by the Library of Congress, The Scrolls from the Dead Sea. Using Mosaic, we looked at full-colour image of text fragments, coins, pottery, and hundreds of other artifacts and descriptive texts. The effect on the professor left me little doubt as to where the next generation of scholars will go to keep up with the trade journals.
Addison-Wesley aw.com
American Chemical Society infx.infor.COM
Artech House world.std.com
Greyden Press gopher.zip.com
Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd cln.etc.bc.ca
Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation
hbscat.harvard.edu
Harvard University Press vine.harvard.edu
Johns Hopkins University Press jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu
Kluwer Academic Publishers world.std.com
Lehigh University Press ns3.cc.lehigh.edu
MIT Press gopher.mit.edu
O'Reilly & Associates ora.com
Prentice-Hall gopher.prenhall.com
Princeton University Press gopher.pupress.princeton.edu
Rutgers University Press info.rutgers.edu
SUNY Press uacsc2.albany.edu
TitleBank Internet Book Catalog infx.infor.com
University of Arizona Press lanka.ccit.arizona.edu
University of British Columbia Press gopher.ubc.ca
University of Chicago Press gopher.uchicago.edu
University of Minnesota Press joeboy.micro.umn.edu
University of Nebraska Press crcvms.unl.edu
Ventana Press gopher.internet.com
Peter Scott (scottp@herald.usask.ca) of the University of Manitoba maintains a collection of Gopher, Telnet, or WWW links to all the publishers' catalogues that he has found on the Internet. This collection is available at http://jester.usask.ca/~scottp/publish.htmll, but is unfortunately not accessible via Gopher (only by World Wide Web).
Adam Gaffin (adamg@world.std.com) maintains a list of journals, newspapers, magazines, radio and television, and other media sources that have an Internet presence. To retrieve a copy of the latest version of this list, send the mail message INFO MEDIALIST to majordomo@world.std.com.
Michael Strangelove is publisher of both The Internet Business Journal and the Internet Advertising Review and author of the book How to Advertise on the Internet: An Introduction to Internet-Facilitated Marketing. He can be found on the Internet at mstrange@fonorola.net.
The Internet as Catalyst for a Paradigm Shift -- File PARADIGM (Chapter 22 from the book, HOW TO ADVERTISE ON THE INTERNET)
Index of IBJ Volume 1:1-12 -- File INDEX
Advertising on the Internet FAQ -- File AD-FAQ
Directory of Internet Trainers and Consultants -- File TRAINERS
Directory of Internet Marketing and Advertising Agencies -- File MARKET
The Geography of Cyberspace -- File GEO (An essay on the new type of self that is emerging from cyberspace, originally published in French in the European magazine, WAVE, 1994 #4)
To receive these helpful documents, simply send your request to mstrange@fonorola.net and request the file name.
These files are also available via Gopher to fonorola.net VIP -- Gopher to gopher.fonorola.net for the official IBJ Gopher archive.
A collection of essays by Michael Strangelove
is available on the Web at
http://www.phoenix.ca/sie
Copyright (C) Strangelove Internet Enterprises Inc., 1995. All rights
reserved.