D2C Marketing Report Now Available | The Scholarly Kitchen

"The report on direct-to-consumer (D2C) marketing for university press books that I have been working on is now available. You can download the PDF here; you can also get a copy at the Web site of Rutgers University Press or at Scribd. The Scholarly Kitchen does not have an archiving policy, so the strategy of posting copies in multiple places seems like a prudent one. The report itself was made possible with the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The sponsor was Rutgers University Press, whose director, Marlie Wasserman, served as the principal investigator. The project was significantly enhanced by the efforts of the staff of RUP and the unstinting support of the AAUP. I especially wish to thank the many members of the university press community who filled out the online questionnaire and made themselves available for telephone interviews. The work was also supplemented by many other publishing professionals from outside the world of academic publishing. D2C marketing of books is a small part of academic publishing today (it runs about 1% of sales now, with some presses reporting figures as high as 3%), but it has the potential to become a more significant channel. It is highly improbable that it could become the primary channel, however, as the exposure other channels provide (Ingram, YBP, Amazon, etc.) is of great importance to publishers. The challenge for a press is how to make D2C work in the context of a multi-channel strategy ..."