Alaska Sea Grant Publications and

Marketing

…or, the

long and

winding road

You've got to be very careful if you don’t know where

you’re going, because you might not

get there. Yogi Berra

Break the mold, then break it

again and again. Lady Gaga

Explore strange new worlds, seek out new

opportunities and new techniques, boldly go where no Sea Grant

communicator has gone before!

We raised eyebrows in the National Office when we published our 1992 wall calendar, then an “outside the box” project. The calendar was conceived as a tool to introduce Alaska retailers to our educational products. Calendar sales to retailers were successful and were key to establishing a retailer mailing list. This tactic launched our successful marketing effort aimed at promoting a marine literate public.

By your products

Ye Shall Be known And serve the needs of

Your Constituents

When we published the calendar, we had two books with retail appeal. But we had made a commitment to produce many more lay-oriented marine education books and videos to pursue the Sea Grant goal of a marine-literate public.

Signature Series

Field guides and Wake!eld !sheries

symposium proceedings are Alaska’s two

signature book series. They create an

Alaska Sea Grant brand image among

different user groups.

Success breeds success

Alaska’s track record in publishing and marketing spurs unsolicited requests by scientists to publish their manuscripts. The books above are examples.

Seek and ye shall find.

Make your own luck. Keep antennae tuned in to detect book publishing opportunities, and pursue them. The books above all resulted from seizing unforeseen publishing opportunities.

Design is not just what it looks like and

feels like. Design is how it works.

Steve Jobs

Form follows function. We publish field guides with

structures developed by

scientists for scientists...

…sometimes resulting in unintended practical uses.

The things I want ���to know are in books. ���My best friend is the ���

man who'll get me ���a book I ain’t read.���

Abraham Lincoln

Effective promotion and ef!cient order ful!llment are

essential.

Getting our books into the hands of users

Nobody pointed out !that the Web itself !is a miracle. !—Dr. Dorian, Charlotte’s Web

We installed our first online catalog in the mid 1990s, when the World Wide Web was only a few strands woven. Today our online catalog yields thousands of sales and freebie send-outs every year.

We place our books with Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and other online booksellers.

www.barnesandnobl

National and international promotion and distribution of specially selected books is carried out through a joint marketing agreement with the University of Alaska Press, which in turn has a joint marketing agreement with the University of Chicago Press.

Mass mailing of our full-color, illustrated catalog to retailers each winter when they stock up for the summer tourist season yields orders for hundreds of books and videos.

We use mail.it to promote publications

and videos. We target announcements like

this one to specific customers according

to customer codes we’ve assigned to them in our database. Codes are based on previous

purchases, or expressed or otherwise known customer interests.

However beautiful ���the strategy, you ���

should occasionally ���look at the results.���

Winston Churchill

Anything that won't sell, I don't

want to invent. Its sale is proof

of utility, and utility is success.

Thomas Edison

1990 book sales: ~$5,000 2011 book and video sales: $113,000 In 2011, 26,000 new and preexisting educational items distributed worldwide.

Shopping Cart, Database wed.

Recordkeeping, impact tracking, and promotional

bliss ensues.

Customer information and product sales data

collected via shopping cart orders are automatically

fed into our Filemaker database.

Filemaker database includes a module to hold key information on each book

•  Production cost •  Formats of the book (hard copy, PDF, etc.) •  Funding received •  Dimensions, page count, weight •  Retail cost •  Means used to promote •  Publication year •  ISBN number •  Author(s) •  Awards •  And more

Bargain Bundles

We offer “bundles” of books. Bundles may include a hard copy and PDF of the same title, and/or a new book at full price bundled with one or more related books at a discount. We’ve been pleasantly surprised at the number of people who opt to buy both a hard copy and a PDF of a given title.

Bundle order

People may buy a whole book, or specific chapters from our peer-reviewed conference proceedings.

Free and for-sale PDFs

boost distribution of educational

products.

Online PDFs

•  2009: A few PDFs, two downloads •  2010: More titles, 210 downloads •  2011: More titles, 1,362 downloads •  2012: 614 titles, 2,179 downloads

But are download numbers meaningful?

Beware of robots finding your PDFs and skewing your distribution statistics!

We distribute PDFs via a custom-built (in house) shopping cart which requires that a human being download the documents, thus subverting downloads by robots and other non-humans which skew distribution totals.

Don’t have in-house book publishing capacity?

Bring your publishing ideas to Alaska Sea Grant.

If you’ve got the

Money honey, we’ve

Got the time. (and talent)

Willie Nelson

Engage!