How We Promote Your Book at De Gruyter

When it comes to promoting your book online, we use a number of digital tools to help market your work.

Booksellers, both online and offline, are a key part of book promotion. De Gruyter has an extensive global network that we closely work with to ensure your book reaches customers all over the world. Whether it’s Japanese companies such as Maruzen and Kinokuniya, American organisations like GOBI, or global online platforms like Amazon, we ensure your book is able to reach the widest international audience possible.

If you’re a German author, don’t worry about being left out. De Gruyter has large, highly established local networks in the DACH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) region that operate in both the traditional and digital bookseller spaces. These large local networks include many smaller local online and offline retailers to further maximise your reach in local markets.

Libraries, and more crucially, librarians, are an important channel for ensuring your books reach readers. Our global teams are connected to experts who work at libraries around the world, from public libraries to the most important and highly ranked university libraries. This ensures your book has the best chance to reach a wider, general market, and allows librarians to put them in the hands of academic communities.

We connect with librarians in a variety of ways, such as in-person conferences, major and minor library meetings as well as digital events, including online presentations and seminars. Our email communications are an important tool for staying in touch with our global community of librarians to ensure they know about and are encouraged to purchase your book for their libraries.

Librarians also use our Evidence Based Acquisition (EBA) and Publisher Partner programmes. The EBA programme gives librarians full access to ebook versions of your books for 12 months. After this period, they can decide which books they want to purchase and make permanent additions to their virtual shelves. This is a great tool for promotion as it grants librarians access to books they may not otherwise know about. The Publisher Partner programme governs the formal relationships we have with various smaller and university publishers and is an important channel De Gruyter uses to help your books reach a wider audience.

We also work closely with central providers for ebooks, including ebook aggregators, distributors and partners, in countries that prefer to work with these distributors rather than deal directly with publishers.

Many other publishers have moved away from giving out review copies of authors’ books, but at De Gruyter we still believe that book reviews are an essential tool for marketing an academic author’s book, especially in the social sciences and humanities. We submit many titles for review with publications that still write book reviews, including The New York Times, National Geographic and Der Spiegel.

De Gruyter publishes annual digital and print catalogues for various subject areas to ensure our partners know when your book is available. Each of these catalogues is often released at the same time as a major in-person event, such as a conference in a specific field.

Our staff understand how important networking in both traditional and digital spaces is for promoting new academic work. This is why we attend subject meetings, industry and library conferences and book fairs. We also view many smaller-scale events, such as presentations, debates and fireside chats, and De Gruyter Conversations, our dedicated blog as key to helping our author’s work reach their intended audience. These communities are a vital part of promoting your book and it’s important that we nurture these relationships and connections for our authors to achieve success.

The promotion of open-access books leans more heavily on digital channels, including ensuring they have unique book pages on our website and that search engine optimisation has been implemented. We also provide A&I services and engage social media, research sharing and collation sites to further boost the discoverability and visibility of your book.

If you’d like to know more about how we promote authors’ books at De Gruyter, contact our team.