From: <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2019 13:22:32 +0000

Over the years, I have frequently been struck by how ill-equipped authors
are in the basics of audience-building.  Too often, I have found that
authors ‘launch and leave’:  they’ll make a small effort to launch a new
paper or book, but then they’ll leave the scene and hope that a combination
of Google, library-systems and word of mouth will bring readers to their
works.  Sadly, the results of this approach are usually disappointing –
something that will be of concern to funders and employers who are
increasingly interested in getting value-for-money from the grants they
award.



So, when I turned by hand at being an author, I followed the advice of the
OECD’s Secretary-General and spent the ‘other half of my time’ trying to
not only build a readership but also to try and engage in a discussion over
the ideas I put forward.  I wanted to discover for myself how easy or hard
it would be to build an audience using little more than today’s social
media tools and a bit of time.  Since Liblicense readers were part of my
audience, you may be interested in reading about my audience-building
efforts in a case study entitled Maximizing dissemination and engaging
readers:  The other 50% of an author's day
<https://link.growkudos.com/1ktbfei2ubk> that I’ve just published in *Learned
Publishing*.



At a time when funders and employers increasingly want evidence that their
research dollars generated impact, I hope that this case study might be of
help to authors who want to design their own audience-building efforts.



As ever, feedback and comment very welcome as this paper, together with any
comment and feedback, will be used as input for an STM ‘Ideas Factory on
Dissemination and Impact-Building’ to be held in London in early December.



Toby Green

OECD Publishing