Self-promotion

As the author, you are the best advocate for your work, and we encourage you to partner with us to promote your publication. Whether you are publishing a book, reference work, or journal article, promoting your work can make a real difference to both your readership and your academic career.

How you choose to promote your work could be informed by your priorities and your time. We have listed some common goals of promotion below, and you can skip to the section that best aligns with what you’re hoping to achieve. If you only have a certain amount of time you can dedicate to promote your work, we also have some time-based tips.

Raising your professional profile

One of the most effective ways to promote your work is to focus on your professional networks.

Nurture your existing network

This involves telling your friends and colleagues about your publication. Here are some ideas:

Include a link to your publication in your email signature.
Share some information about your research on your institutional and/or professional websites.
Announce your new publication to friends and colleagues on your preferred social network – including academic ones like ResearchGate, Academia.edu, ORCID, and ResearcherID.

Build your network

Contact your university communications team and ask them to include information about your publication on their website or email newsletter.
If the institution you attended as an undergraduate has an alumni magazine, ask them to include a brief listing about you and your new publication.
Join an academic network related to your field. This could include regional networks, a discipline or interdisciplinary association, a professional society, or a mentorship network.

You can also expand your network, connecting with academics in your field, at conferences and events. Check out our tips to make the most of these opportunities.

Growing your readership and achieving impact

The impact of your work can be assessed by a variety of metrics, including views, citations, and mentions in online spaces such as social media. (You can always find this information displayed on your article or book homepage here on Oxford Academic.)

Your advocacy for your work can make a difference. You can increase the potential impact of your work by leveraging your professional networks to ensure that the right readership communities are aware of your work.

Get people in your field reading your work by sharing a free chapter from the digital version of your book or the toll-free link to your journal article. (Please follow the instructions given with the toll-free link.)
Recommend that your institutional library acquires your book or subscribes to the journal where you published your article.
Pitch an article to The Conversation or another publication covering the academic community.
Sign up for an ORCID author identifier to create an online profile showcasing your research to increase the visibility of your work.
Create a public Google Scholar profile. This is a popular search engine for finding scholarly literature, so adding your articles and publications can help drive the readership of your work.
Create a Scopus profile to get credit for your work and explore article metrics to quantify your impact. Author profiles on Scopus are linked to all publications through ORCID. By maintaining an up-to-date author profile, you can make sure you’re showcasing your research and inviting future career opportunities.
Reach out to book reviews editor contacts if you have them. A personal note calling attention to your book can enhance our reviews process. If you are interested in doing this but unsure where to start, we have a short guide available.

Boosting book sales

There are a few simple activities that we would recommend to book authors interested in boosting their book sales.

Encourage your networks to recommend your book to their institutional librarian. Institutional libraries are our primary customer for print sales of most academic books.
Create an Amazon Author Central account to raise visibility of your work within Amazon.
Request a discount code with a supporting flyer and social media image that you can share with your networks. (Keep in mind that this is available to all authors, but will be most effective for titles priced at or under £25 GBP or $30 USD.)

A note from our team on book sales: As digital discovery and online reading have grown, we no longer focus on sales as the sole measure of our books’ performance. This is particularly so for academic monograph titles, which are typically priced higher and aimed at the institutional market. This is why we encourage you (and your networks) to recommend your title to your librarian.