[KS] books, sellers, readers & collectors

[Witteveen GP]

With regard to clearing the stock of books, it makes sense to go back to first principles:
What is the mission of the publisher/distributor/author?
 
Supposing that the goal is to engage a wider audience in matters concerning Korean language, society and culture.
Then the goal becomes how to identify collectors and readers - go to them directly, rather than to wait for them to come to you.
The Korean Studies Discussion List perhaps reaches the widest circle of fellow authors, researchers and institutional settings.
But then there are other allied audiences such as the diasporic communities of (hyphenated) Koreans who could be reached through other channels, or in association and affiliation with products or services they may use. Lastly there are libraries where readers of the indefinite future may discover the works while browsing.
 
Given the task of distributing the titles and disseminating the discussions contained between the covers, I can imagine a few courses of action beyond the above pin-point marketing directly to target readers and collectors:
 
1. Check with books.google about getting 10% (or whatever their sample proportion may be) of each title digitized into their system.
 
2. Possibly "cherry-pick" a few pages, illustrations or at least the ToC to put online for everyone to browse and bring them one step closer to a buying decision.
 
3. Create a "friends of RASKB books" to voluntarily distribute copies, working as "mules" to major cities, universities and libraries (using personal luggage space to carry 8-10 titles prearranged for delivery to the various destinations for the cost of RASKB publishing; "at cost" clearance in other words). This system depends on trust for executing it and maybe something like Paypal.com for transactions since I seem to recall that they specially support non-profit usages.
 
4. Offer special buying incentives to RASKB event attendees and tour participants: minimal mark-up, but even better pricing if buying 3 copies or more. Students of Korean language in-country are another special audience to pitch to.
 
5. Planning ahead, consider transitioning all future titles to mostly digital publication for eBook reading. Hardcopies would be via a 3rd party "print on demand" vendor. For your reference, I'm collecting useful advice on the publishing process electronically at http://sites.google.com/site/anthroview/ebooks
By following the digital path, you will have few pulpable titles. Of course, there will always be a place for the older technology of ink set on paper, but the eBook method has many merits, too.
 
Wishing RASKB well from middle Michigan, USA,
 
Guven Peter Witteveen, sjmi_y at yahoo.com
Outreach Education Consultant and Evaluator
 
 
--- On Wed, 8/24/11, Brother Anthony <ansonjae at sogang.ac.kr> wrote:

From: Brother Anthony <ansonjae at sogang.ac.kr>
Subject: [KS] RASKB Books
To: "Korean Studies Discussion List" <koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws>
Date: Wednesday, August 24, 2011, 12:49 AM


I wonder if I could ask the members of the list for some advice? The Royal Asiatic Society Korea Branch has been publishing its journal Transactions since 1900 and scholarly books about Korea since the 1960s. In our storeroom we currently have thousands of unsold books and several hundred copies of every issue of Transactions since 1960, as well as 60 reprints of the complete volumes 1-40 of Transactions. Our question is what we should do with them all? We would like to sell them, of course. But how? For example, Sam Hawley's "Imjin War" is currently priced on Amazon.com at? $450 new from individual sellers, whereas we (the publishers) have several hundred copies in stock available at about one tenth of that price. Yes, we are not good at marketing, obviously. And getting listed in Amazon.com from overseas is out of the question. The full list can be seen in our home page http://www.raskb.com/ and I would be very grateful for suggestions. The radical
solution,? "pulp the lot," has something to be said for it but there are some very fine books there. Richard Rutt's edition of James Gale's "History of the Korean People" for example. Do we have any alternative?

Brother Anthony
President, RASKB
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