Post-Publication
18 Post-Release Marketing & Communication
LynleyShimat Renée Lys; Open Textbook Network; Melissa Faldin; Karen Lauritsen; BCcampus Open Education; Lauri Aesoph; Apurva Ashok; and Zoe Wake Hyde
Introduction: Post-Release Marketing & Communication
This section offers guidelines and best practices for sharing, marketing, and communicating with educators, students, and institutions about your open textbook. Selected materials are provided from the Open Textbook Network, BCcampus Self-Publishing Guide, and the Rebus Guide to Publishing Open Textbooks.
A short list of avenues for sharing your book might include:
- Social Media
- Open & Online Repositories & Clearinghouses
- Working Groups
- Workshops & Conferences
- Libraries
Another best practice is encouraging and tracking reuse of your book and the materials included in it. More details about all of these strategies and more are included below.
Table of Contents: Post-Release Marketing & Communication
- Where to Share
- Communications
- Marketing and Communications Summary
- Marketing & Communications Overview
- Release Summary
- Release Overview
Learning Objectives: Post-Release Marketing & Communication
In this chapter, learners will gain skills to:
- Plan and implement distribution of an OER Textbook
- Consider communications and marketing strategies for sharing an OER Textbook
- Strategize for community engagement and community building around an OER Textbook
- Explain key considerations for releasing an OER Textbook
Where to Share — Open Textbook Network, Melissa Falldin & Karen Lauritsen
I recommend that authors check with their campus bookstore to see if it’s possible to create a printed copy for students. Our campus bookstore is able to print out course packs for students, which are often lab manuals or supplemental readings, and so for my class, I had them create printed copies of my textbook. It cost students around $15 and almost everyone bought a hard copy even though the book is also free online. — Caitie Finlayson, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, University of Mary Washington. Author of World Regional Geography (CC BY NC SA).
Where will students be able to get the textbook you’re writing? Consider where you want to distribute your completed open textbook before you start. That way you can familiarize yourself with your preferred distribution channel’s requirements, including file types.
In addition, sharing certain file types allow for easier editing down the line. For more information, see Modifying an Open Textbook: What You Need to Know.
In addition, depending on your subject and students, your main audience may prefer a print copy, online option or both. Their preferences can impact how your book is ultimately designed. In the K-12 context especially, there may be a one-to-one initiative or a classroom set of devices to consider, too.
Here are some places you can distribute your textbook:
- Open Textbook Library
- Institutional repository
- Learning Registry
- Learning management system (LMS)
- OER Commons
- Personal website
- Campus bookstore
- District website
One thing to keep in mind as you decide where to share your textbook: Whenever you make updates, you’ll want to update all distribution channels.
Open Textbook Library
The Open Textbook Library is a growing resource for higher education open textbooks. Many textbooks are reviewed by faculty to assess their quality. All textbooks in the Open Textbook Library are either used at multiple higher education institutions or affiliated with an institution, scholarly society or professional organization. By including a textbook in the library, authors make it easier for other faculty to discover, use and review the textbook.
Open Textbook Library up-to-date guidelines and criteria: open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/ourbooks.aspx
Quiz: Where to Share
Communications — BCcampus, Lauri M. Aesoph
Once you’ve completed your textbook, it’s time to let everyone know. Here are some ideas about how and where to spread the word. As you do this, remember to keep track of where your textbook is posted as you’ll want to keep all contacts and collections informed when changes or corrections are made to the book.
Home institution and colleagues
Authors who are faculty members or instructors at a college, institute, or university have a ready-made community that can help promote a new textbook. Here are someways you can make use of your institutional networks:
- Use email and mailing lists to inform colleagues, as well as the dean and/or department chair of your faculty
- Contact the communications and marketing department of your home institution and ask if they will write an article about your book in their next newsletter
- Ask librarians at your institution if your book can be added to the library catalogue. These steps might help:
- provide a link to the web version of your book
- point out all available file formats such as PDF, EPUB, and MOBI
- donate one or more print copies to the library’s collection for faculty and students who prefer a hard copy
- show librarians where editable files can be downloaded for faculty who want to revise your book for their course
- Inform your institution’s bookstore manager. Many bookstores appreciate knowing about newly available open textbooks, particularly those that will be used in the classroom, so they can inform students.
- Notify your professional association and related organizations.
Projects and organizations
Ask open textbook projects and OER organizations to spread the word about your book. It is common practice for these groups to monitor communication channels for new open textbooks so they can let their networks know. Below are a number of OER organizations in Canada in the United States. In addition, you can reach out to open-education organizations in English-speaking countries outside of North America, such as the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.
Canada
- BCcampus Open Education [New Tab]
- Campus Manitoba [New Tab] (OpenEd Manitoba)
- ecampus Ontario [New Tab]
- Canadian Open Education Initiatives [New Table]
United States
- Open Washington [New Tab]
- Open Oregon Educational Resources [New Tab]
- Open SUNY OER Services [New Tab]
- CCCOER [New Tab]
- Affordable Learning Georgia [New Tab]
- Open Textbook Library [New Tab] (part of the Open Textbook Network)
Repository applications
Many open textbook collections allow authors to submit requests for their book to be included. Some repositories require that a new textbook meet certain criteria, such as an evaluation by a subject-matter expert. Here are a few examples of where you can apply:
- BCcampus Open Education: Suggestion for the Collection [New Tab]
- MERLOT: Add to Collection [New Tab]. (You will need to create an account to submit.)
- OER Commons: Submit a Resource [New Tab]. (You will need to create an account to submit.)
- Open Textbook Library: Submit an Open Textbook [New Tab]
Quiz: Communications
Marketing and Communications Summary — Rebus Guide 2.0, Apurva Ashok & Zoe Wake Hyde
When the “product” is an open textbook, “marketing” takes on new meaning. The promotion and communications tools you use may parallel those in conventional marketing, but the underlying principles of openness, collaboration, and inclusion give it them a less sales-driven flavor. In what follows, we share some of the whys of ‘open marketing’, as well as the hows of getting it done.
Marketing starts at day one, or better yet, day zero. Well before content is written, even before a project officially ‘starts’, the story of the textbook has begun, including the reasons for creating it, the subject it covers, your team approach, and people who make up that team. Get in the mindset of telling that story early and often.
Every open textbook project is different: so is the marketing. Our suggestions are a guideline, not a standard. Formulate your own suggestions, based on what happens in your project, and share them with the larger community in the forum!
Collaboration in marketing is as important as it is in content creation. The more voices and perspectives that are brought in, the greater the diversity, which also leads to greater potential for adoption, use, and re-use.
Connection-making is at the heart of communications. Create and tell a story about your project, connect with those who listen, and respond to their feedback.
Marketing and communications can be done by anyone on the team, but not everyone thinks of themselves as a “marketing person.” That is why it’s best to provide a clear outline of the promotional plan, along with the resources your team members will need to communicate with a consistent message. Some of the roles are:
- Project leaders: who create the plan and decide on the strategies to deploy
- Communications lead: who assembles the promotional material, writes a project summary, composes tweets and other blurbs
- Contributors: who can provide (or solicit) reviewer blurbs, endorsements, and recommendations for communications channels
Word of mouth and grassroots efforts are easily the most effective tactics for marketing your open textbook. The team working on your textbook is one community, but you and everyone else in it has ties to many other communities and can help the word get out! To that end:
- Share content updates, success stories, and key milestones.
- Use every step as a communications opportunity and keep content flowing outward.
- Showcase the team members behind the work –make it personal!
- Share aspects of inclusivity, accessibility, and diversity in your concept, content, and design.
- Engage with new ideas and opinions to connect with relevant, current discourse.
- Tell your stories honestly and transparently.
- Provide accessible feedback tools, so that communication can be two-way.
- Repetition is good: get the word out early and often, using different channels:
- blog posts
- social media (with links to useful content)
- listservs (in your discipline and across communities)
- email signatures
- conferences
- webinars
Like all the processes in publishing openly, marketing and communications may happen in non-chronological order, and/or in unexpected ways. Make everyone on the team a part of it, and nurture their involvement as ambassadors for the book. If you all think about marketing as producing value in the world by sharing your resource’s content, this will allow it to find its market – those readers, adopters, and adapters who need it.
Read on to explore the whens and hows of marketing and communicating your open textbook project.
Marketing & Communications Overview — Rebus Guide 2.0, Apurva Ashok & Zoe Wake Hyde
This part of The Rebus Guide to Publishing Open Textbooks (So Far) is designed to help you think through the process of getting your textbook in front of the people who want it, whether for adoption or adaptation, reading or research. It is about using the tools and strategies of marketing and communications to reach those users, but also about the ways in which publicity, promotion, messaging, and outreach tend to differ when the “product” is an open textbook. Like everything related to publishing open textbooks, these processes often happen on variable schedules, and collaboration is always key to make them successful. In many ways, the marketing and communications of Rebus-supported projects start right at the conception of the work, running through to release as well as far beyond!
In what follows, we take you through what you need to know when telling your project’s story and helping it find its audiences. Read through the sections below, and consider our perspectives as suggestions that you can adapt to suit your own unique needs. As you start scoping out your project, and at every other phase along the way, keep marketing and communications in mind. If they run in parallel to the writing, editing, and production phases of creating your resource, everything should go more smoothly when it comes to the big release.
Remember that this part of the Guide, like the others, is a summary of what we have learned in working with you. What makes your open textbook project unique, however, also makes it distinctive when it comes to marketing. That means that queries will arise and clarifications will be needed, and we eagerly welcome them! Post your responses to this material in the Rebus Community project home, including questions and concerns that have come up for you. This document will continue to evolve, based on our experience managing open textbook projects and your feedback.
Special thanks to Elizabeth Mays, (former) marketing manager for Rebus; current director of sales and marketing for Pressbooks and adjunct faculty at Arizona State University; and author and editor of two open textbooks (Media Innovation and Entrepreneurship and A Guide to Making Open Textbooks With Students) for contributing to this overview!
The Rebus marketing philosophy
Before diving into tips and suggestions for handling marketing and communications on your open textbook project, we want to explain our philosophy and approach. Rebus’ version of marketing differs from the structured, sales-oriented processes that most people might think of. It’s not about driving consumer behavior, leveraging certain needs, notifying prospective customers about product rebates, or increasing purchase rates. Our approach is to start certain processes right at the beginning of the work, always with the goal of reaching potential adopters. Starting this early means you have a head start once your book is released, so marketing should be as much a part of the creation process as project scoping and building your team. If you limit your marketing and communications efforts to the time immediately surrounding the release and launch, you may not be as successful in gathering the widest group of readers and adopters around your textbook.
We subscribe to the idea that marketing is a series of connections. In most cases, these connections are between people and projects, where Rebus’ target audiences are collaborators and communities. We see marketing as a way of creating and telling a story about your project and the resource you (and others) are working to build. Then, by forming connections with those who listen and respond to this story, you can help people find the textbook and help the textbook find its people.
The principles underlying our approach
Our goal with open textbook projects has always been to create a valuable resource for others to use, and to build a vibrant community around it. Over time, we have landed on a set of principles that are at the core of our overall approach, shared below.
For us, marketing starts at day one, or better yet, day zero. Even before the content is scoped out and written, the story of that textbook has begun. The story includes not only the reasons for creating the resource, but also the people who you hope will read, adopt, and adapt it. That means thinking about how your team is formed, who those people are, and what they bring to the project. Simultaneously, as you scope out the chapters and sections and subsections, bring in the story of what the book will include – and what it won’t (and why). Keep the communications flowing. Document your decisions and share them with the team, so that they become not just part of the story, but the storytellers themselves. Get the word out early and often, about what you’re doing and why, as well as who is helping you do it. It can be through word of mouth, social media, association listservs, a blog site, or other channels (we’ll dive in to this in more detail later).
Every stage of the open textbook publishing process can be leveraged to help the book reach its potential adopters, and there are ways to ensure that marketing is smoothly built in to what you do. For instance, collaborative authorship creates opportunities for buy-in and allows for a native network of ambassadors for the book to form. Project updates (through the channels noted above) keep the creation process on the radar of your colleagues and community, including those who aren’t directly involved or interested (yet!) The beta-testing and peer-review phases not only provide invaluable feedback on the book’s content, they also help establish groups of future users and readers around the book. Think of these people as a community of interest and practice, that naturally forms (and belongs) around the book. In fact, an underlying goal for every stage of open textbook development should be community building and engagement. As long as you are open about your processes and communicate them directly, you can always consider marketing as part of any phase of publishing.
In our experience so far, providing “value” to a community of potential users or collaborators is one way to help make a book meaningful and visible to them. For instance, one easy way to create value is to turn parts of the textbook’s story into useable, engaging, and even teachable chunks. You could do this by providing content updates as your team members write and edit their chapters. You can also share success stories of things that go well in the process, which not only communicates how open publishing works, but also gives others the incentive to try it out themselves.
When sharing your stories, try to showcase the team members behind the work. People like to hear about the personal aspects of publishing, not just the facts and figures. Putting a human face or voice to the project helps make it more compelling, and more relatable for those who aren’t involved. Besides, the people who are mentioned will naturally help promote those stories themselves! One way to showcase individual voices is by soliciting and sharing quotes from the team. Ask people both from within and outside the project leadership to talk about their experiences. Beyond the insights you gather on what works (or doesn’t) about a given chapter or section, it keeps the process open and adds energy to the community around the book. At the end of the day, the project is made up of you and the team involved, so don’t hide behind the scenes!
Another approach to telling the story of your project is to share how your handling or presentation of a particular subject or topic makes your book unique. This might be in the tone of the text, the pedagogical approach, what areas you choose to cover (or not cover!), etc. Another great way in which your text might be unique is that it demonstrates greater inclusivity and a wider variety of perspectives and participation, both in the content itself and the teams creating the content. One of the most important principles of publishing openly is that it creates opportunities for more inclusive approaches to content creation, so if you commit to and enact these principles in your project, be clear about the choices you’re making and why you’re making them. Keep up the messaging about your work as related to accessibility, diversity, and equity, from the project scoping phase through content creation, peer review, and release.
As your project rolls along and you reach different milestones, keep asking yourself whether you’ve remembered to spread the word lately. With marketing and communications, it’s important to maintain momentum as you are building interest. While your major goal is to complete your book, resource, or ancillary material, the people around you might be focused on other things. So even as you work to build up community around the project, they need to keep being engaged with new ideas, updates, and stories. Be honest and visible, upfront about your decisions, and attentive to the comments and suggestions you receive in response.
Finally, marketing and communications are just as much about listening as they are about broadcasting. Make sure to give your community accessible pathways to get back to you and stay on top of those communications channels. Respond quickly and enthusiastically, and it will reinforce that you are listening and care about what they have to say. If you note any eagerness that seems to go beyond standard interest, you might have a potential team member on your hands! Give them individualized attention and the chance to learn more about your project or participate in it. Especially once there is more than the initial team talking about the project, make sure that there are places to engage people in conversation and then give them opportunities to do more than just talk (see our engagement guide for more ideas). Provide avenues to participate and, as always, be inviting and welcoming!
What types of TACTICS can you employ?
When you begin thinking about marketing and communications within this framework, there’s no limit to the types of tactics you can employ. Below is a short list of ways to promote your project, all along the road to release. Some of these are likely familiar, and some might be new, but either way, think about how they can be undertaken within a philosophy of openness and collaboration. Remember to keep providing value, so that these processes always offer a way for someone to get involved and do more. If people have something they can use (e.g.: investigate further, teach about, tweet), it will resonate with them more deeply, and inspire them to become part of the process.
- blog posts (with clear links to more content that is useful to your audience)
- milestone announcements (providing information on what someone can do next, like contribute, review, or adopt)
- social media (either from your accounts or a dedicated project account, sharing updates and other relevant content)
- discoverability (so readers, adopters, and adapters can get their hands on the textbook when they want it), meaning:
- maintaining a public listing for project
- submitting completed content to repositories
- ensuring metadata is comprehensive and accurate
- listserv discussions (so you can become an engaged participant in a community, naturally directing people to your resource)
- email signatures (which can keep the project front of mind as you interact with people)
- community calls (to share updates, gather feedback, and reinforce community building)
- conferences (as opportunities to present, be challenged, make connections, and reconsider what you think you “know” about your project and how to make it better in a future release)
- promotional materials (that not only reinforce the value that your resource brings, but do so in quick and friendly formats), including:
- slide decks
- blurbs or review quotes
- pamphlets
- print copies of the book, for potential adopters (to put a physical presence on their desk – front of view, front of mind!)
- project mailing list (for more frequent and detailed updates, and from which you also allow people to opt-out!)
As we’ve indicated above, each of the tactics might help to serve a specific goal on your project, such as helping give your book a physical presence, or providing more information on how contributors can get involved in the project. Later in this section, we’ll go into more detail about these strategies, including how you can leverage them, what content to send out, which channels to use, and more. Stay tuned!
Ultimately, it’s all about the people
As we’ve said earlier, for us, marketing and communication are mainly ways to connect communities and collaborators with your book. At Rebus, what drives our work is the idea that we’re building books to build communities, and building communities to build books. We strongly believe in the power of groups of people to come together around a particular project, and doing so in ways that help everybody benefit.
It’s with this goal in mind that we’ve outlined the principles and strategies above, and we want to remind you to keep tapping into your biggest resource as you go about marketing your book – you and your team’s network of contacts! Reach out to these people, whether they are in your professional or personal circles, and remember to listen to their insights about your book.
Positive recommendations about the book from people in the community around it are the most valuable pieces of communications you can ‘create.’ Word of mouth is immensely powerful in the OER space, so be sure to leverage any endorsements about your book – even traditional publishers will tell you that there’s no paid tactic that has the same impact as someone vouching for the quality of your resource. This type of handselling can only happen if you engage with the community right from the very beginning of your project, so that they are as invested in the resource as you are, even if they were not directly involved in the production. Collaborate and create, and you’ll see the community grow along the way. For us, that’s what open textbook publishing is all about!
Need further assistance?
We hope these suggestions will help you market and communicate your project, all throughout its various phases and incarnations. We’ll continue to add to this section of the Guide as we work with more projects. So whether or not we ask you directly, we always welcome your ideas on what else we could added, based on your first-hand experiences and the stories you’ve heard in passing. We’re also very interested to know your feedback about how these approaches have worked (or not!) for you.
Keep coming back to the Rebus Community project home and help the community learn and grow!
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Release Summary — Rebus Guide 2.0, Apurva Ashok & Zoe Wake Hyde
The “Big Release” is one of the most gratifying phases of the OER creation process. To make the most of it, a coordinated effort allows the word to get out and the resource to get into people’s hands. However large your audience, it’s important to take your time with these final steps, to make sure the book is in the best possible shape for release.
Estimate targets, but stay flexible. Plan to have your book released one to three months before the academic term in which you’d like to use it. Set a date during the scoping or content creation phase, but remember to revisit and adjust your timeline if and when things change.
Revisit your initial goals and measures of success. Make sure that the resource meets the objectives you set out early on, in terms of both content and formats.
Preparation and planning makes everything easier. Working to build a community of potential adopters and meet accessibility standards at every stage of the process means you will not be rushing to do so during the final weeks before release.
Have fun along the way. Release isn’t all checklists and spreadsheets—it also includes elements like designing an attractive cover, writing stories about your experience making the book, and highlighting the impact the book can have, all with a great group of collaborators!
Savor the moment. Build in time for you and your team to celebrate the moment, and pat yourselves on the back for this incredible achievement. Creating an open textbook is no easy feat, but you’ve done it!
Almost everyone on the team will have a part to play leading up to the book’s release:
- Project manager: keeps everything on schedule, coordinates with the team, conducts final checks on the book, creates adoption forms and tracking sheets, notifies the community about the release
- Formatter: converts content into accessible formats for readers (minimum: web, editable, and offline formats), does content layout and styling, adds front and back matter
- Designer: creates an engaging ebook and print cover (which may also be openly licensed), makes other marketing collateral as needed (e.g., pamphlets, slide decks, videos)
- Accessibility reviewer: reviews the formatted book to ensure that formats meet accessibility standards, meets with instructional designers to make sure the book meets all learners’ needs (including those with recognized disabilities)
- Proofreader: final check after formatting, to catch any small errors
- Marketing team: updates the book description, prepares a release announcement, collects blurbs about the book to feature on the cover or in communications, creates promotion plan
- Others: help with final checks, submit the book to repositories, set up print on demand, and spread the word
Once content is finalized, you can start working on some of these processes:
- Work backwards from your target release date to distribute workload and allocate time for tasks.
- Remember technical openness—make your book available in web, editable, and offline formats.
- Also make a print-on-demand format available for those students and teachers who need or prefer a physical format.
- Create a cover that attracts potential adopters, distinguishes your book from others, and shows its personality upfront.
- Include front and back matter that complements the main content, rounds out the appearance of the book, and lends some professionally created appeal.
- Create an adoption form and encourage users to self-report adoptions, and use this information to prove the book’s impact.
- Follow accessibility checklists provided by your university or regional boards and prepare an accessibility assessment that shows your book meets these standards.
- Update the book’s metadata, check the license, and verify the information on the book’s homepage (including links to the Adoption Form).
- Submit the book to institutional and OER repositories or referitories.
- Send copies to the team if possible, or at a minimum, include them in the book’s acknowledgements.
- Execute your promotional plan and shout it from the rooftops, and ask the team to do the same!
Release is just one of the many débuts that your book will have. After you send it into the world, it will be used, expanded, and adapted in many other ways. So this phase of the process is about having confidence that the resource is ready to be shared, while also being ready for it to be taken on (and maybe released anew) by the communities of practice that form around it. Then, as it becomes part of the disciplinary landscape, start thinking about a long-term vision, including ancillaries, new versions, and/or remixes.
Keep reading to find out more about planning and implementing the Big Release.
Release Overview — Rebus Guide 2.0, Apurva Ashok & Zoe Wake Hyde
After the work of scoping, creating, editing, and review is done, it is finally time to share your textbook with the world! This section of The Rebus Guide to Publishing Open Textbooks (So Far) takes a deep dive into one of the most gratifying phases of the publishing process: The Big Release (as well as the many small steps that lead up to it). Making your open textbook (or other resources) public requires a coordinated effort, much like the rest of the publishing process. In what follows, we summarize the final tasks that link the creation phases of publishing with those in which you get the word out and the resource into people’s hands. We cover formatting and layout, cover design, final proofs, print-on-demand, and more.
As in the other sections of this Guide, these suggestions are based on our experience with open textbook projects. If you have questions about this overview, or suggestions for what else we could include, please share them in the Rebus Community project home. This document is an evolving draft, based on what we have learned so far in managing open textbook projects and gathering community feedback. We welcome your thoughts and contributions, including ways to improve the Guide overall.
It starts with a little math
Timing is important when it comes to release. If you want your textbook to be adopted for a course in a given academic year, for example, then it may need to be released as much as three months in advance of that course start date. (Check with your local institution on their policies regarding textbook adoption deadlines, and assume that anyone wanting to adopt your book will need at least a month to review it and make a decision.)
Alternatively, you might work to the deadline for a course you teach yourself, and be prepared for wider adoptions to happen in the following semester. Instead of thinking in terms of the school calendar, you might want to time the release with another big event, such as a major conference in your field. Or, depending on the type of resource you are creating, you might not need to work towards having it ready for a particular course or time of year at all, and can see how things develop as you go.
In any case, there are two ways to approach working out your release date. One is to figure out an approximate release date right at the very start of your project (e.g., a June release for September adoptions), and the other is to work it out once you’re getting close to having all your content written, edited, and reviewed. In fact, don’t be surprised if you end up doing both of these! Having a target release date from the outset can be very useful for keeping things on track and focused, but realistically, things can change over time.
In the first scenario, during the project scoping phase, you can get out your calendar and calculator, and start adding up the number of weeks you estimate the entire process will take. Then, count backwards from your desired release date and see if it’s looking realistic. In the second, you can plot out how much work is left to do, and see what release date that gives you, and whether you want to adjust at all to bring it closer, or push it out.
Even if you aren’t constrained by a specific target, we still recommend working backwards from a projected release date. In that way, you can see when the preceding phases need to take place, and allow time for processes that are less under your time-management control, like peer review and review by potential adopters.
Regardless of the approach, however, it’s important to keep revisiting and re-confirming whether your timelines are on track for release. If you do need to do some schedule rejigging as you go, don’t worry—that’s normal. There will always be some adjusting on every project. Just remember to chat with your team about where to reduce time spent (and where not to), so the book still comes out when you want. And if it comes down to it, and you need to delay publication, that’s okay! What’s important is that you and your team are happy with the final resource, and proud of what you decide to share with the world. Besides, as an open resource, either you or your readers and adopters may choose to keep revising it, so “release” is just one of many possible débuts that the book will have.
Prepping for release
Once your content has been finalized, and closer to your release date, you can start working on some of the processes outlined below. (Some of them, like cover design and front/back matter, can be initiated sooner, but others like formatting and arranging for print-on-demand obviously require the content to be finalized.) We’ve included a variety of steps that most Rebus-supported open textbooks have gone through prior to release, but you might have ideas for additional steps or, alternately, discover that your project requires fewer.
Formatting
Formatting is the process of converting your content from a word processing file into the format that will be consumed by readers. In the case of OER, content should be made available in a wide variety of formats, including web, offline, and editable formats. While Creative Commons licenses permit a range of uses, actual technical openness is vital to ensure that those uses are in fact possible (e.g., consider the difference between an openly licensed text available solely as a PDF versus one available in PDF, on the web, and in a downloadable, editable format).
Regardless of the book formatting software that you are using, it’s important that you create, at a minimum, one web-based format, one offline, and one editable format of your open textbook. There are many ways in which you can meet this standard, but one of the easiest and most popular in the OER world is to use Pressbooks, an open-source book production software. (In the interest of transparency: We love Pressbooks for how functional and useful it is, and we are a paying client of the software. Moreover, we also share an office with them, as well as a co-founder!) With Pressbooks, you are able to produce professional, platform-agnostic outputs of books in multiple formats. These include: web, PDF (print and digital), EPUB, MOBI, ODT, XML, WXR, and XHTML. You may have access to Pressbooks through your institution, or you can create a one-off book at Pressbooks.com. Rebus also offers access to the Rebus Press for many of our projects that do not have access elsewhere. Let us know if you’re in that group.
Formatting also includes styling your text, images, tables, and any other parts of your content. Overall it is about structuring and presenting your content so that it can be used and understood by readers in the best possible way. To ensure consistency throughout the book, we recommend making an inventory of the different types of content you want to have (i.e., learning objectives, case studies, summaries, key takeaways, or other recurring sections in each unit). With that in hand, you can create a “style guide” for each of these categories or elements in the inventory. Then create a template for each, which you can easily apply to every instance of them throughout your book. Not only will this help you create an overall look and feel that is coherent throughout the book, you will also be able to ensure that all types of content are styled and structured the same way. That is, your tables, charts, bullet lists, subtitles, end-of-section questions, etc. will look the same from chapter to chapter, making it easier for your readers to recognize what type of content you are presenting.
During this stage, it is a good idea to talk with the instructional designers and accessibility practitioners on your campus, or in your network, and ensure that the resource meets its learning objectives and is formatted with all readers in mind. Formatting for accessibility is critical. This means, among other things, ensuring that headings are styled for contrast, size, hierarchy, etc., so as to make them both legible and comprehensible for all readers. Similarly, images need to contain alt text, which acts as a machine-readable placeholder when the image itself cannot be viewed. These are small points, but important to think about during formatting, so as to reduce any remediative work that might need to happen after your book is released. For more information about accessibility best practices when creating your open textbook, we highly recommend the BCcampus Open Education Accessibility Toolkit.
Cover Design
Some people may think that open textbooks don’t require book covers, because they are simply ‘digital texts.’ In fact, covers are an important way to give your book a face and visually engage potential readers and adopters! What’s more, open textbooks can be printed, just like any other book, and it’s nice to offer more than just plain text on a plain background.
Book covers also help to attract potential adopters by conveying the book’s subject matter and overarching themes. For students and readers who will interact with the book, the cover distinguishes it from other resources, and allows it to show its ‘personality’ up front. While the possibilities are endless, we suggest keeping book covers simple, and dedicating a reasonable but not excessive time to creating the design. Enlisting the help of a student designer or another volunteer who is looking to grow their portfolio can be a good approach, but make sure to give them a clear briefing on what is wanted, as well as a specific timeline and set of deliverables.
As well, put a clear feedback and decision-making process in place, so that the cover doesn’t end up getting stuck in ‘design-by-committee’ delays. When it comes to visual and textual elements, you may want to use open-source fonts and open-license photographs, so that your book cover can also be openly licensed. Public domain image repositories, and open license platforms such as Unsplash can be great resources. Let us know in the Rebus Community project home about your own go-to image and graphic sources – we’d love to share them!
Front and back matter
Adding front and back matter to your book is a good way to include information that complements or supports the main content, without necessarily being central. It can also help round out the appearance of your book and lend it some of that professionally created appeal. The table below contains a list of common front matter and back matter elements that you can choose to include in your book. (We’ll be expanding on these in a later section, so stay tuned!)
Front matter |
Back matter |
Abstract | About the Team |
Acknowledgements | About the Publisher |
Copyright Page | Accessibility Assessment |
Dedication | Afterword |
Epigraph | Appendix |
Foreword | Author’s / Editor’s Note |
Image Credits | Bibliography |
Introduction | Conclusion |
List of Abbreviations | Epilogue |
List of Illustrations | Errata |
List of Tables | Glossary |
Other Books by the Author(s) / In this Series | Index |
Praise for this Book | Licensing and Remixing Information |
Preface | Review Statement |
Prologue | Suggested Reading |
Recommended Citation | Versioning History |
Adoption & Adaptation
One of the challenges of OER creation is tracking the resource’s use following release. In conventional publishing, purchase serve as tracking metrics, but that is not the case with open textbooks. Nonetheless, it’s important to know who might be using your resource, and for what purposes, not only to grow the community around your book, but also to provide statistics, calculate savings, and report back to your administration or granting agency, if required. Given the technical challenges of tracking use, we advise you to solicit users to self-report. Learning how your resource is used, and the impact it has on student success and retention, may also help you secure funds to improve the resource, create ancillaries, or work on another OER project.
An easy way to get notifications of new adopters and adapters is to have them fill out an adoption form. (You can take a look at our Adoption Form as an example.) Our form asks for the adopter/adapter’s name, institution, course information, current course materials in use, cost, and number of students. Forms can be more detailed if you require additional information. Make sure that you link clearly to the form from your book, from the project’s public listing page, and from the release announcement or other communications. The wider the form’s reach, the higher the response rate!
Accessibility Assessment
With open publishing, creators are able to take enough time to ensure their resource is accessible and usable by all students and readers from the moment of release. This means planning for accessibility and inclusive design from the very beginning, and executing that plan during the subsequent phases. Then, prior to release, a final check of the resource, across the various formats you produce, ensures that the original goals have been met. We recommend running through an accessibility checklist to determine how your book holds up to these standards. We find this checklist from BCcampus to be a helpful starting point, but you can also use checklists or standards provided by your institution, state, or national governing body.
Once you’ve completed this work, it’s important to then include the assessment in the back matter of your book, so that potential users can determine the suitability of the book for all students. There’s also value in surfacing this kind of information for those who may not think of it otherwise, so be transparent and forthcoming with the work you’ve put in, as well as with any known shortfalls.
Final Checks
Other final checks include a visual test, during which you look at the layout in each format – web, PDF, and ebook – confirming consistency and coherence from beginning to end. (Note that this is not as close a read as you would do during proofreading, but instead, it is a more macro-level verification of the layout.) When you’re checking content that is web-native, it’s good to confirm that external links are all working, that the information about the book on its landing page is clear and descriptive, and that there is a link your adoption form. Licenses should also be clearly displayed, and contact information can be made available, using email links. Check also that the metadata attached to your book is updated, accurate, and comprehensive – this makes it much easier for your book to be discovered in repositories!
At this point, you may want to have your book proofread (or proofread a second time if you have already done one pass). Someone with fresh eyes can catch little errors that might have been introduced during formatting, or new (minor) edits that you make to the content as you go through all these last checks. Remember, however, that when you’re so close to a resource, it may never seem perfect to you, so draw a line (and set a time limit) when it comes to ongoing tweaks and adjustments. Or, if you prefer, start up plans for a second edition, and feed this work into the next project!
Submit your book to repositories
To encourage adoptions or adaptations of your open textbook, it’s crucial that you make your book easy to find in various institutional and OER repositories. By submitting your book in multiple repositories, it increases the chances that your book will be discovered by educators and researchers looking for openly licensed content in your field. We recommend submitting to major OER repositories/referotories such as MERLOT, Open Textbook library, BCcampus Library, and OER Commons, in addition to your institutional repository, or other local or national repositories in your region.
Print-on-demand (POD)
Even if your open textbook has been born web-native, there’s something to be said about the power of print. Print remains an important option for students, many of whom still prefer to engage with content in a physical format. There are also readers who will opt for print, given that digital and online versions necessitate reliable access to digital devices and an internet connection. Print-on-demand is therefore a good way to support accessibility and choice for students, even if you yourself don’t plan to use a print book in teaching.
Giving your book a physical presence can also be invaluable for how your resource is perceived. Some adopters will still prefer to see a printed copy of a book: that materiality can make it all-the-more “real” in their perception.
If you’re using Pressbooks, you can easily export a print PDF file that is optimized for printing. If you’re using other formatting tools, you should check the specifications and requirements by the print-on-demand service that you plan to use. Some common providers are Lulu, IngramSpark, CreateSpace, and Kindle Direct Publishing.You may also want to look into the printing options at your campus bookstore, or with local printers in your area, as their rates might be more favorable. As this section of the Guide develops, we’ll be outlining how to set up POD in detail, so check back soon!
Update & involve your community
Be sure to send a notification to your community regarding the release, and if possible, send a token of appreciation to anyone who has had a particularly significant role in the development. This could be as simple as a handwritten thank you card, and/or a print copy of the resource. Many people helped create it, after all, and it’s generally a small cost in exchange for a lot of goodwill (and another potential adopter!).
In your book’s acknowledgements, it’s also a nice gesture of gratitude to include a list of all the team members involved in the project, and those who have been part of its broader community. Sharing your thanks with them publicly makes it clear to everyone who uses the book how important the team has been in shaping it!
If you’ve been sharing updates about how your project is going, there will likely also be a certain amount of anticipation and enthusiasm about the impending release, which you can tap into in a number of ways. For instance, as you’re letting people know that the book is close to release, take the chance to ask people to share some feedback (a short review, a statement of endorsement, etc.) on the book and/or process. You can use their words in your promotional assets, and follows any recommendations they have about where to share the book (e.g., listservs you might not know about).
Promotional Assets
With all the care and thought that has gone into creating the resource, it’s only fitting to have a coordinated effort to make as much noise about the release as possible. While there is no limit to the number and kinds of assets you can create, we recommend the following as a minimum:
- a release announcement
- a short, shareable book description (you likely have this already in your project scoping docs)
- blurbs or praise for the book
- a book cover
- several Tweet-length blurbs that can be cut and pasted
If you have the time, it can also be valuable to write up a short narrative about how the book was conceived and created, including a description of your experience during the process. Since publishing open textbooks is fairly unconventional, highlighting what distinguishes the production process is bound to attract some attention. It may even inspire others to follow in your footsteps! You can also create pamphlets, slide decks, or other marketing items, but only do what is feasible given your timelines and workload. For more inspiration, take a look at our Marketing and Communications overview.
Whatever assets you prepare, be sure to share them widely – on a blog or other web page, in key listservs, at major conferences, on social media, within your team, and in the Rebus Community platform. Ask others to spread the word, too, and keep the momentum up so that your release is on the radar for a few weeks. You may want to create a detailed promotional plan, with key dates and major events, so you can add momentum over the course of the release. If you do, share the plan with anyone helping out, so that everyone is on the same page.
Execute the plan, and savor the moment!
Once you’ve completed the steps above, the only thing left to do is to execute your promotional plan and shout it from the rooftops. As this happens, build in some time for you and your team to celebrate the moment, and pat yourselves on the back for this incredible achievement. Creating an open textbook is no easy feat, but you’ve done it! Take it all in, and enjoy the calm, before thinking about any next steps.
Start looking ahead
As your book becomes part of the disciplinary landscape, and communities of practice around the world begin to adopt and adapt it, it may be time to think about a long-term vision for your book. Do you want to create ancillary materials? Is there a series to be created, or a revised edition to be planned? Should the book be translated into different languages? Try to engage the community around you in this planning – they may become part of a future project’s leadership team.
Need further assistance?
We hope these suggestions will help you share your resource with the world. As we noted, we’ll continue to add to this Guide as we work with more projects, and we welcome your ideas on what else we could add, or your feedback on how these approaches have worked (or not!) for you.
If you have questions, or anything to add, please let us know in the Rebus Community project home.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.