• Emerald's new website is a force to be reckoned with
• Pure360 Best Practice Guide to welcome emails
• Why the word encyclopedia may now be tainted
• On The Marketability Grapevine on Facebook
• Tip of the week: The pique technique could just improve your open rates

Emerald's new website is a force to be reckoned with

Emerald is 50 in 2017 and their new bookstore website brings their brand messaging bang up to date. This is an academic publisher to watch right now, astutely positioning themselves as retaining the ‘old values’ of putting authors and content at the heart of everything they do. There’s lots to admire here, and I especially like the completely new books author hub with a range of useful guides and plenty of real contacts to support their messages about people at the heart of the business.

The Why Publish with Us? page includes an impressive new author guide too.

Explore Emerald’s new website for yourself.

Emerald’s Laura Ingle is co-tutor on our Academic Marketing Workshop. If you’d like to hear more about Emerald’s marketing (and pick Laura’s brains!), why not join us on our next London date of 5 October?

Pure360 Best Practice Guide to welcome emails

That it is good practice to send welcome emails to new subscribers is hardly news. What I like about this new guide from Pure360 is that it’s short and snappy, with lots of practical tips it’s good to be reminded of, and illustrated with plenty of examples. They’re not from publishing but there are lovely elements that we could all learn from.

Read more and download on the Pure360 website.

Our Email Marketing Workshop is the place to be if you’d like your best practice perfectly tailored to publishing.

Why the word encyclopedia may now be tainted

Thanks to a participant on our last Copywriting Workshop in London for this observation. We’d been talking about the importance of word association in copy, specifically avoiding words with negative connotations, and they pointed out that the word encyclopedia may have become devalued due to the prevalence of Wikipedia. This hadn’t occurred to me before but I’m positive they were right and it will affect the way I promote encyclopedias in the future.

Talking of word association, I saw a reference to ‘solid, research-based approach’ in copy last week. If solid conjures up unfortunate images for you too then maybe it’s time to ban it from our copy. ‘Impressive’, or even ‘rigorous’ would both have worked as alternatives here.

If this has got you thinking, why not join us on our next Copywriting Workshop, in London on 3 October?

On The Marketability Grapevine on Facebook

• A new book from Bloomsbury explains why Google has the biggest and most honest data of all …
• Read something that hit the spot in this eBulletin? Click through and like the item or add a comment on Facebook
• Watch the wall for postings of new jobs, or feel free to add to them.

Visit The Marketability Grapevine.

Tip of the week: The pique technique could just improve your open rates

As Oliver Burkeman points out in this recent article in The Guardian, we all ‘trundle through life giving scripted responses’. Yet break away and say something different and everything changes. When someone on the street asks ‘can you spare 17 cents?’ they do better than if they say ‘can you spare any change?’ This reminds me of supermarket Asda’s policy of charging seemingly random prices (£3.86 rather than £3.99) because it suggested that they really did set the best prices they could for their customers. Not seeing the predictable makes you sit up and pay attention again.

The tip (and the challenge) is how to ring the changes in our copy whilst still ensuring that the message is instant for the reader.

Read Burkeman’s thought-provoking article (fascinating examples) on The Guardian website.