Author Questionnaire
The Marketing team asks all authors to complete an Author Questionnaire in the months leading up to publication. Author input on this questionnaire is vital to our collaborations and an opportunity for your expertise and ambitions to inform our marketing and sales plans for your book. The Press will consider all author suggestions as we create and implement what we believe to be the optimal marketing plans for your book, including publicity, advertising, social media, awards, specialty sales (organizations, businesses, museums, specialty retailers, and other affinity groups), and direct marketing campaigns.
Marketing
Conferences
PUP exhibits with our own display at several dozen conferences in North America and Europe each year. As titles are launched, we develop a marketing plan to send books to relevant conferences, as well as include them in meeting-related social media posts and email campaigns.
Additionally, PUP sends a smaller selection of books to approximately 100 conferences every year where we do not have staff in attendance. Sometimes we participate in combined book exhibits with other publishers; many are handled via our contract with The Scholar’s Choice.
If you’re participating on a panel about your book or if you would like for your book to be sent to a particular conference, please reach out as early as possible. Most meetings require considerable advance planning to prepare and ship materials. The more notice we receive, the more likely we will be able to arrange for display.
If we are unable to display at a conference, we are happy to provide promotional flyers to distribute to colleagues and attendees.
Catalogs
Your book will be announced in our seasonal catalog, which is distributed to bookstores, wholesalers, libraries, specialist dealers, and media contacts around the world.
It will also be announced in the relevant subject catalog and included in targeted direct marketing to the membership of professional organizations.
Awards
We are pleased to take suggestions for up to five awards and send review copies of your book to the relevant juries. We will use our experience and discretion to focus on the awards that give your book the best chance of winning and being recognized. If you have a list longer than five, please review the list carefully, as some nominations must be made by the publisher, while others may be submitted by you or a colleague. A great deal of awards deadlines are in the year following the publication of your book. To ensure submission, please request nominations on your Author Questionnaire. If you have not yet requested awards or would like suggestions, please contact Steve_Stillman@press.princeton.edu.
Content Marketing
The PUP website features a beautifully integrated online magazine, Ideas. It features short essays that showcase author expertise, promote their books around pub date, tie to current events, and contribute to public discourse. It includes a variety of formats, including discussions between authors, op-eds, Q&As, chapter excerpts, and videos that serve as explainers for authors’ arguments and research.
The Ideas Podcast features interviews from our podcasting partnership with The New Books Network. Using our digital marketing initiatives, we promote this site as a reading destination by boosting and distributing all posts across multiple social media platforms and email marketing.
We welcome contributions from all our authors. The Ideas pieces are routinely featured by Google Spotlight and Google Discover and contribute to your book’s strong SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Social Media
We reach our global readers with Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, TikTok, Bluesky, Threads, and YouTube organic book announcement posts. Our social media campaigns include the timely promotion of your social posts, author speaking events, media hits, and connections with the book and current events.
Based on relevant topics and themes, we also employ influencer campaigns for select books. Influencer campaigns expand a book’s presence on social media, where the authentic and varied voices of influencers both complement and deepen the impact of our ongoing promotional efforts.
Global Advertising
Our global advertising plans are designed to reach the book’s target demographic and psychographic. We explore print and digital advertising in carefully selected weekly magazines, newsletters, journals, digital programmatic advertising, search advertising and/or social media platforms. Our ads are also timed to create early awareness and organic buzz.
Email Marketing
Our email subscribers and purchased email lists remain a cornerstone of our digital communication strategies due to the unparalleled ability to directly connect with a targeted and highly engaged audience, allowing the PUP team to tailor messages based on recipient preferences and behaviors. With careful segmentation and automation, our email campaigns deliver relevant content, promotions, and updates, fostering customer engagement and loyalty.
Publicity
Our publicity team has staff in the US and UK overseeing outreach to North American, British, and European media. Books may also receive publicity support in additional markets, through the Press’s partnerships with NewSouth Books, Penguin Random, and Jonathan Ball publishers.
PUP publicists will pitch relevant forthcoming books to our media contacts and coordinate print and digital publicity mailings to media and journals ahead of publication. Outreach for a book may include sending materials to review editors at journals and/or national or subject-focused media, pitching interviews, working with the author to pitch news cycle-timed op-eds, or placing excerpts adapted from the book.
Increasingly, as many magazines and newspapers devote less space to book reviews, book publicity takes the form of “off the book page” pieces. It is not uncommon for a book to get strong publicity, without any reviews.
Please note that many journals and media outlets ask that publishers do not send unsolicited books and some journals prefer PDF-only submissions.
PUP publicists have a wide network of contacts across digital/print and broadcast media and meet with journalists, editors, and producers regularly to present seasonal lists.
If you have contacts in the media or know a colleague who is involved with a relevant journal, please let them know your book is coming out, and ask whether they might be willing to review it. If any requests for review copies come back to you, please pass them on to us.
Please alert the marketing or publicity contact for your book—or your editor, if you’ve not yet been introduced to a marketing contact—if a media outlet or journal expresses interest in running an adapted excerpt from your book. The Press must prepare licensing contracts for any serializations before they can run.
Publicity Events
PUP publicists meet regularly with public-facing event venues, including lecture series, book festivals, museums, and select bookstores. Depending on a book’s topic and target audience, publicists may work with authors to coordinate readings or in conversation events timed to publication.
When planning events, publicists will work to find the best fit between a book/author and a venue. At times, a bookstore event might be a good fit, but for other books, a lecture series, festival panel, or even a pub quiz might offer a more direct connection to target readers.
Publicists will ask authors about where their personal and professional networks are the strongest and focus their event outreach in these locations. Author involvement in promoting their events is critical, as venues expect authors to be active partners in event promotion.
Publicists are typically not involved in planning university events such as seminars or book presentations, or conference key notes, but the Press will actively promote these on our website and social media, if they are open to the public; can provide promotional materials; and will coordinate with host venues on book sales or discount codes for event attendees.
The publicity team also does not plan private book parties and cannot sell books at author events, but publicists can advise authors on how to buy copies for party attendees at the discount.
If you set up any book events independent of the Press, please notify your marketing or publicity contact—to whom you will be introduced 2-6 months prior to publication—no fewer than 4 weeks in advance, as this advance notice is needed to ensure we can get sales copies delivered in time.
Rights & Intellectual Property
Our International Rights team works to ensure your book can travel as widely as possible through translation into other languages and may be in touch to discuss if we feel your book has potential for translation, where we handle the rights.
If you have established connections with international publishers in any particular market, and speak a second language, we would ask that you let us know at: InternationalRights@press.princeton.edu.
If a translator or publisher reaches out to you directly to enquire about the rights to a translation, please do ask them to contact us at the same address.
Where translations are licensed, international publishers may look to arrange interviews, events, travel to conferences, social media promotional content with your involvement to aid in the promotion of the book in their markets. We will be in touch with these opportunities as they arise, but if you have any international travel planned to countries where you have a translated edition lined up, please do let us know!
Learn more about Rights & Intellectual Property, including digital products and audiobooks, here.
Sales
North America
We are distributed by Ingram Publishers Services which allows for direct sales relationships and a backstop of consumer direct fulfillment to Amazon, Bookshop.org, and more.
We maintain direct relationships with major retail chains, online vendors, and wholesalers, including Barnes & Noble, Barnes & Noble College Division, and Amazon.com.
We have our own sales consortium that includes three full-time sales representatives dedicated solely to selling PUP books in the US. In Canada and the southern US, PUP shares sales representation with other publishers by independent booksellers.
PUP books and other marketing materials are featured on Edelweiss and in our seasonal catalog which is made available to thousands of bookstores, wholesalers, libraries, and specialist dealers globally.
International
In the UK/Europe, our own in-house sales team serves booksellers in the UK and across the Continent. We hold accounts with all major European booksellers, from university bookstores to library suppliers, major book chains and online vendors.
We have representation and sales agents in the Middle East, Africa, and South America.
In India we partner with Penguin Random House to stock and sell our books in the region, allowing for the production of local PUP editions when suitable for the Indian market, as well as publicity support for author events.
Our stock-holding distributor in Australia sells to booksellers and library suppliers throughout Australia and New Zealand. Through this arrangement we are also able to create local editions of our books for the ANZ market.
A full range of titles is stocked in the UK at our distribution hub, run by John Wiley, from where we distribute into Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.
In East Asia, the Press has a stock-holding agent in Singapore, as well as sales representatives covering accounts in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and throughout Southeast Asia.
In China, PUP has its own office in Beijing to manage sales relationships directly with major Chinese importers, and to build relationships within the Chinese academic community.
Help From Your University
Leverage the power of your university. Be in touch with your communications office to see what resources or plans they may have to promote your book. Some will share special features on social media, put out a press release on your book, post interviews with you on their own website, or even be willing to produce a video interview or book trailer. Make sure your institution’s library knows about your book for display purposes or for arranging a talk.
Keep your book publicist in the loop about any plans; this will avoid duplication of effort and offer both your university and your publisher opportunities to cross-post.
How You Can Help
Be a proactive promoter! Authors can play an integral role in promoting their books by encouraging friends, family, and colleagues to place pre-orders. Please share news about your book with your networks by circulating a link to the book’s PUP page with relevant listservs, over email, or on social media. The Press is glad to share digital assets for use with this promotion and can advise on optimal timelines.
A Few Quick Tips
- If you write op-eds or articles or give interviews, please be sure to note the book in your bio.
- Make sure to add information about your book on your faculty staff page, website, blog, newsletter and social media profiles.
- Alert your university, library, and department communications team that you have a book coming out.
- If you are a member of academic associations, alert them about your book so they can include information on their website or add information to their newsletter to members.
- If you’re emailing your contacts, people in the field, or scholars you referenced in your work, please let us know. We can provide you with a discount code offer so they may purchase the book directly from PUP.
- If you know of an appropriate podcast, you can reach out to them and let them know you’re available to discuss your work.
- If you are attending an event or conference where it would be appropriate to promote your book, please let us know. Please provide the name and email of whoever is coordinating the event. The Press can arrange to send venues a promotional flyer with an order discount code. Please note we need this information a minimum of four weeks before the scheduled talk and, ideally, earlier. For some events it makes more sense for you to take flyers yourself. We can provide you with those. Contact us at: publicity@press.princeton.edu
Promote Your Book on Social Media
Among the most simple and effective methods for promoting your book is through social media. More than half of the world’s population are on social media. The key to social media success is building your community, creating value for your followers, and being consistent. The Marketing team is committed to keeping readers aware of your book’s publication, media hits, events, and we seek opportunities to connect current events to your book across all social platforms.
Below are several suggestions on how to use social media to increase awareness for your book and connect with readers if you choose to do so.
First, we invite you to follow Princeton University Press on social media: Facebook (Main & Princeton Nature accounts) Instagram (Main & Princeton Nature accounts), X (Main & Princeton Nature accounts), LinkedIn, TikTok, Bluesky, Threads, and YouTube
In advance of your book’s publication, begin by searching and following friends, scholars, influencers, leaders, organizations, and news sources on all social media platforms that interest you. There is no limit to the number you may follow and often, if you follow them, they will follow you back.
Spend a few minutes each day demonstrating your support for your friends and colleagues. Contribute to their ideas by simply clicking like icons or adding a relevant comment to their posts.
Announce the publication of your own book by either sharing announcements from PUP’s accounts or by creating your own posts. If you create your own posts, please tag the Press in your post and include the URL for the book detail page on PUP’s website.
Together, your posts and ours will generate awareness of and interest in your new book across our collective social media followings.
Join Amazon Author Central & Bookshop.org Affiliate Program
The Amazon Author Central portal gives authors the ability to add information to their Amazon Author Pages. Author Pages pull together all of an author’s titles, regardless of publisher. We cannot populate this page and so would appreciate you adding your PUP book or creating a new page. Traffic is pushed to the page based on the amount and quality of content there and how often you populate. You can learn more here.
Bookshop.org is an online bookshop with a mission to financially support local, independent bookshops. The affiliate program allows authors to promote their books while supporting independent bookstores. If you have not already done so, we recommend that you join Bookshop.org’s affiliate program, which you can do here.
Publication Dates Demystified
Important to remember is that the arrival of your advance copy does not mean the book is actually “published” or available for friends and colleagues to buy. We need time to get your book from our warehouse to booksellers around the world. Our promotion team also needs time to get it into the hands of the media. For these reasons we set the official publication date a few weeks after the arrival of advance copies.
Further Reading
For another perspective and more ideas on how you can get creative with book publicity, check out this article by Michael Chwe, whose exuberant, hands-on efforts helped his book, Jane Austen, Game Theorist, to garner widespread attention. This is a man who said he’d stop at nothing—not even Jane Austen kitten memes—to get his scholarly book out there.
In this interview, Laura Portwood-Stacer, author of The Book Proposal Book and an experienced developmental editor, speaks with PUP’s Assistant Promotions Director Maria Whelan about the ins and outs of book promotion and how authors can best collaborate with their publishers on marketing and publicity.
Copyright & Excerpts
Please be aware of the copyright situation for your book. It is not a good idea to send your manuscript to a media outlet or to allow someone to print an extract without first discussing it with us.
Also, please do not send a PDF of your book to potential reviewers/media outlets. It is best if this is always channeled through the promotions department so that we know who has a copy of the book, what plans are being made, and that the correct information has been passed on.
If, having discussed it with us, you do send out a PDF of your book, please make sure that it is a secured PDF.