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 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