Promotion & Marketing

Our Marketing Department promotes and sells our books to scholarly audiences and broader markets 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.

Author input

Input from our authors is a crucial part of marketing and promotion. Once a final decision on publication is made, we will send you an author’s questionnaire and ask you to provide a brief and accessible description of your work. We use the information provided to write catalogue copy and jacket copy, and to begin planning promotion of the seasonal list in which the book will appear.

Catalogues

MQUP publishes two seasonal catalogues a year and subject catalogues on an annual basis. We produce both a print edition and a digital version of each seasonal catalogue. In North America we send catalogues directly to library and bookstore wholesalers, to research libraries in the US and university and college libraries in Canada, to bookstores and online retailers, and to individual customers.

The seasonal catalogues also appear on our website. The catalogue entry for each book, including the cover image, table of contents, and updated extracts from reviews, remains on the website as long as the book is in print.

Promotion

Once your book has been catalogued, our marketing campaign begins in earnest. We will send you a marketing questionnaire and ask you for detailed suggestions on the audience for your book and how to reach that market. We seek input on where the book should be sent for review, the most productive focus for advertising, course adoption possibilities, lists for direct mail, and useful media angles. From this information we devise individualized marketing strategies for each of our books.

Awards

We want our authors to receive all possible recognition for the excellence of their work and endeavour to submit our books to all relevant competitions for awards and prizes. MQUP books have won many major awards in the social sciences and humanities, including:

• F.X. Garneau Medal, Sir John A. Macdonald Prize, and W.K. Ferguson Prize, Canadian Historical Association
• Gabrielle Roy Prize, Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures
• Donald Smiley Prize and C.B. Macpherson Prize, Canadian Political Science Association
• John Porter Tradition of Excellence Book Award, Canadian Sociological Association
• Donner Prize for best book in Canadian public policy
• Governor General’s Literary Awards

Our books are consistently recognized for their excellence outside Canada, winning awards such as the following:

• Grawemeyer Award, University of Louisville
• Chicago Folklore Prize and Elli Köngäs-Maranda Prize, American Folklore Society
• Alf Andrew Heggoy Prize, French Colonial Historical Society
• NACBS Book Prize, North American Conference on British Studies
• John Lyman Award, North American Society for Oceanic History
• Frank and Elizabeth Brewer Prize, American Society of Church History
• Meridian Book Award, Association of American Geographers
• National Jewish Book Awards

Our cover and interior designs are also award-winning and have been presented with such honours as:

• AAUP Book and Jacket Awards
• American Institute of Graphics Arts Awards

Many of our books have been designated as Outstanding Academic Titles by Choice. Please browse a list of these and other award-winning MQUP titles.

Distribution and Sales

MQUP is distributed in Canada by Georgetown Terminal Warehouses. In the US we are distributed by the Chicago Distribution Center. In Canada we have contracted one of this country’s largest independent trade sales forces, Ampersand Inc., which handles our retail, public library, and small wholesale accounts. In the US we are represented by the Columbia Consortium, the sales arm of Columbia University Press. They represent us to key wholesale, chain, and trade accounts across the continental United States.

MQUP also has longstanding relationships with all the North American academic and public library wholesalers. These companies range from large accounts, such as John Coutts Library Services, Baker & Taylor, YBP, and Ingram, to smaller wholesalers such as ULS and Midwestern. As few academic libraries purchase their books directly from publishers, these wholesalers account for the vast majority of library sales in North America, as well as supplying English language books to much of the world academic library market.  Our e-books are sold by Ebrary, Ebsco, JSTOR, and MyILibrary amongst others.

In the United Kingdom, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, MQUP’s marketing and distribution is handled by Combined Academic Publishers Ltd. (CAP), which is headquartered in London and Chesham, UK. CAP caters exclusively to MQUP and to eleven other major American university presses. In Australia, New Zealand, and most of Asia we are represented by East-West Export Books, a division of the University of Hawaii Press. For India and the Indian subcontinent, we are represented by Research Press.

MQUP attends the annual Frankfurt and London book fairs and Book Expo America in order to present our titles and to negotiate co-editions and translation rights sales. Our books have been translated into numerous languages, including Arabic, Chinese (simplified and complex), Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, and Spanish. For more information, please see our Rights and Permissions section.