Our highly engaged sales and marketing team promotes and sells our books to audiences in Canada and around the world. We work closely with our authors to determine the potential readerships for their books and the best ways to reach them. Our goal is to put your book in the hands of as many interested readers as we can.
Some highlights of working with MQUP:
- Global distribution: We offer global distribution for our books, with sales, marketing, and distribution partnerships in Canada; the United States; Latin America; and the United Kingdom, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.
- Author input: We believe that input from our authors is a crucial part of book promotion. We develop marketing plans for all books and rely heavily on your feedback to build these plans. We invite collaboration and ideas about how to reach potential readers throughout the publication process.
- Conferences and events: MQUP will actively promote your work at academic conferences and major book industry events globally. We attend more than forty conferences each year in a wide range of subject areas. We also attend the London Book Fair, Frankfurt Book Fair, and other international conferences and events.
- Book reviews: We will work hard to ensure your book reaches reviewers and readers at the publications that are most important to you. Our books are regularly reviewed by prominent publications such as the Literary Review of Canada, the New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books, as well as many scholarly journals.
- Awards: We want our authors to receive all possible recognition for the excellence of their work. We endeavour to submit books to all relevant awards and will proactively research new prizes. MQUP books are consistently recognized with major book awards in the humanities and social sciences; our book covers and interior designs are also award-winning across genres.
Additional Marketing Activities
Catalogues and Metadata
MQUP publishes three seasonal catalogues per year in a combination of print and digital formats. Our catalogues are distributed to sales representatives, booksellers, wholesalers, libraries, and media contacts in Canada and around the world. The information in each catalogue, in the form of book metadata, is sent in feeds to distributors, wholesalers, libraries, and online vendors, months in advance of publication, to ensure your book is discoverable and easy to purchase anywhere in the world.
Ecommerce
All MQUP books are featured and available for sale on our website in multiple formats. Each book page provides fulsome information, including book description, author profile, table of contents, reviews, and series information, as well as related links (to author interviews, videos, etc.). We offer regular online sales and promotions and invest in search-engine marketing and optimization to make our books discoverable by as many potential readers as possible.
Email Marketing
We maintain extensive mailing lists in a wide range of subject areas and send out publication announcements for each book to a highly engaged audience of relevant academics, librarians, booksellers, reviewers, and general readers. We also conduct email campaigns to reach instructors in key subject areas and more focused email outreach to specialized lists of associations and affinity groups.
Social Media
At MQUP we are currently active on Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, LinkedIn, and YouTube. We participate in both organic and paid social-media marketing and determine what kind of approach – and which platforms – will work best for each book or audience. We welcome input from authors about the social media accounts and trends that are most relevant to their book projects and online communities.
Advertising
We regularly advertise our books in leading publications such as the Literary Review of Canada, the New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and a mix of mainstream and academic publications in specific subject areas. On social media, we target audiences by interest in the topic of each book as well as by geographic region. We try to be strategic and socially responsible about the most appropriate platforms for this kind of advertising.
Publicity
Our publicist announces all new books to media contacts around the world by sending out press releases and review copies. In some cases, we will also print and distribute advance review copies (ARCs) to be shipped to select media months in advance of publication. Each season, we work with freelance publicists and digital marketing experts on customized publicity and influencer campaigns for our lead titles or to promote groups of titles. Where possible, our publicist will help coordinate interviews with radio programs, podcasts, and print outlets.
Events and Launches
We encourage authors to organize book launches and other promotional events such as panel discussions, public lectures, and workshops. We are happy to assist but we cannot coordinate these events ourselves. We will make every effort to attend launches where geography and resources permit, and when we cannot attend, we will work with local booksellers to ensure that books are available for sale and help to promote the event.
Marketing Materials
We are pleased to send our authors any promotional materials they need to spread the word about their book. This might take the form of a graphic to be shared via email or social media, a postcard to distribute to friends and colleagues, or a PDF flyer to be printed and distributed at in-person events.
Sales and Distribution
Bookstores and Sales Representatives
Each season we pitch new titles to our teams of sales representatives in Canada, the US, the UK, EMEA, and around the world. A lot of hard work and energy goes into pitching books for regional markets and ensuring that our sales teams have all the information they need to then sell directly to bookstores in their sales territories. We also ensure that major wholesalers and retailers have book information on time and can order books easily.
Potential Vendors and Buyers
We make all our titles available to major wholesalers, national retail chains, and online vendors – including Amazon, Google, Indigo, and Barnes and Noble – as well as platforms serving independent bookstores such as Bookshop.org. We also work with our sales teams or independently to pitch books to specialized stores, museum gift shops, and other groups and organizations where appropriate.
Library Outreach
We value our relationships with librarians and maintain a significant mailing list of libraries and librarians across North America and globally. MQUP also has longstanding relationships with all the North American academic and public library wholesalers. Our ebooks are sold by CEL, De Gruyter, EBSCO, JSTOR, OverDrive, and ProQuest, amongst others.
Course Adoptions
Each semester we solicit course adoptions through promotional email campaigns for most of our titles. We compile our mailing lists in-house by subject, tailoring each mailing to the book’s description and our knowledge of the teaching and research interests of individual professors. We also invest regularly in higher education mailing lists to run larger email campaigns semester by semester.
Rights Sales
We attend international rights fairs such as the Frankfurt Book Fair and the London Book Fair, usually in partnership with groups such as Livres Canada Books, to sell subsidiary and translation rights for select MQUP books.