Getting Your Book Noticed Online

Senior Commissioning Editor Katy Crossan offers practical tips for online promotion of your publications.

Building a professional online profile and using social media is an excellent way of making your research and publications more discoverable and increasing the chance of citations and the impact of your work. Below are some practical tips to consider when thinking about how to make the most of your online presence to promote your publications:

Department or Personal Website
Keep your list of publications updated on your profile page of your university website and your own personal website if you have one. Include links to your Elgar book, chapter or article on our website and on our digital platform Elgaronline.

Blogging
By writing about your research and publications, either on your own blog or as a guest post – for example here on the Elgar blog – you are creating content that can be shared through social media and picked up by search engines which increases the discoverability of your research online. Search engines prioritise webpages that have multiple links from university sites and social media or contain rich content such as video so if you can arrange it, include video or audio files such as a talk you have given about your research. We would be delighted to embed a video or audio clip of a short interview or talk you have given about your book on our website or blog.

Social Media
Social media such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and academic social networking sites such as Academia.edu, MyNetResearch and ResearchGate are increasingly being used by researchers to promote their work and to find out about new developments in their field, so share details of your work with your connections. Writing a post or tweet about your research and including links through these channels means it can be picked up and shared by other researchers in your field.
Live-tweeting from conferences you are attending can be a great way to engage your core audience. Be sure to include the conference hashtag if there is one and @ElgarPublishing or the appropriate Elgar subject handle and we will retweet to our followers.

ORCID
ORCID is an open, non-profit, community-based effort to create and maintain a registry of unique digital identifiers for individual researchers that can be linked to research activities, publications and grant applications. Using an ORCID number means your work is correctly attributed and your research activities are more easily discoverable. Setting up an ORCID account is free.

Email
Mentioning your book or book chapter in your email signature and including a weblink to the publisher’s site takes seconds but is a very useful way of telling people without having to shamelessly self-promote! Many of our authors have seen positive feedback from linking to free downloadable chapters from their book on Elgaronline.

Katy Crossan is Senior Commissioning Editor at Edward Elgar Publishing covering Geography, Planning, Tourism and Heritage Studies.