Earning a scholarly reputation can be a lot like buying real estate. You first stake a claim on a particular field of knowledge, you build your knowledge base through research, and finally you shape your particular perspective on that topic. After a while, people come to identify you as an owner of expertise in that particular field of knowledge. Fortunately, scholarly real estate today is cheaper than ever in the infinite world of digital publishing.

Digital publishing gives authors and scholars the opportunity to control the promotion of their writing and research interests like never before. Writing a regular blog, creating a website, publishing e-books, and filming videos to post on the Web are all great ways to become well-known in a particular scholarly field. One particularly effective way to bring all of these publishing mediums together for maximum promotion is to purchase a domain name (i.e., a URL).

Domain names are cheap and buying one is incredibly easy. I purchased the two domains I own through my web hosting service for about $10 a year each, which is the standard rate, but there are many other websites where you can buy one.

You don’t necessarily need to purchase an expensive web-hosting service in order to use your domain to create a blog or website. Some free blog-hosting websites, like WordPress.com or Blogger.com, allow you to map your own domain to their hosting service for free or for a nominal yearly fee. That is, instead of having “wordpress.com” added on to your blog name when you create a blog through their website (e.g., “yourblog.wordpress.com”), you can arrange for the URL to appear as your own domain (“yourblog.com”). (The downside of using free services like these to create your own blog or website, rather than using a more expensive paid service, is that you lose full control over the function of your blog or website and sometimes you are limited by what you are allowed to display. The more control you want over your blog or website, the more you have to pay.)

Think long and hard about choosing your domain name. You want to use it for a long time. If your goal is to promote yourself as an individual scholar, and you already have a fairly widespread reputation, you may want to use your own name. Another way to go is to incorporate your area of interest into the domain name like I did for mine (www.EarlyAmericanCrime.com). Or, you can make up a clever-sounding word like many websites do, although you generally need a heavy marketing blitz to make it stick.

My advice is to go with something descriptive, whether it be your name, your area of interest, or some kind of moniker that represents who you are and what you are about. If you decide to go with an area of interest for your domain name, choose something that is specific, so that people know what to expect when they visit your site, yet still broad enough to incorporate new research interests you may want to pursue down the line.

By purchasing a domain name, you are gaining a powerful tool that you can use to promote yourself or your research. You can display your domain on business cards, on e-mail signatures, and on your cv or resume. Depending on the hosting service you select, you can even use an e-mail address that includes your own domain name, e.g., “yourname@yourblog.com.”

A well-defined and a memorable domain name can help you build your scholarly reputation. As soon as I purchased the domain for EarlyAmericanCrime.com, I suddenly realized that I now “owned” this area of knowledge on the Web. Of course, it was now my job to fill this space with quality content if I wanted to build my scholarly reputation, but getting people to identify my name with this particular area of knowledge was mine for the taking. I no longer needed to rely on editors of academic publications and the arbiters of scholarly conferences to help spread my scholarly reputation. I could still pursue these usual outlets for sharing my scholarly work, but now I had the means for securing a more public and immediate audience for it.

The process for publishing your e-book on the Digital Text Platform can be a bit tricky, and Amazon does not provide much in the way of support documentation. Instead, they rely on a series of disjointed Knowledge Base topics and Discussion Forums to help guide you through the process. My suggestion is simply to jump in and consult the support area as needed. The FAQs can probably handle most of the questions you may have. You should also consult the Terms and Conditions of publishing on Amazon before proceeding to make sure that you are comfortable with them.

Once you sign in through your Amazon account (or create a new account), you will need to enter the product details for your e-book. You will be asked to provide a title, a description of up to 4,000 characters, and the name of the publisher (which can simply be your own name, the title of your blog, or some other made-up name).

You do not need to upload a cover image for your e-book, but if you don’t, a generic cover will display on its product page in the Amazon store and your e-book won’t have as much buyer appeal. You will also need to select up to five categories from Amazon’s standard classification system, so spend some time identifying titles similar to yours and noting the categories that have been assigned to them. Likewise, you need to provide a list of search keywords for your book.

Once you enter all of these product details, click Save and move on to uploading your e-book. You can simply use a Word document, and Amazon will automatically convert it to the Kindle format. As with the publication of any e-book on the Web, the less formatting you use on your document, the better. Keep it simple. Also, do not bother creating a table of contents, since page numbers have no relevance in the e-book world. Do, however, consider adding copyright information identifying you as the copyrighter holder.

After uploading your e-book, you have the opportunity to review the text as it would appear on the Kindle. If you are satisfied with the way it looks, move on to setting the price. E-books typically sell for less than printed books. The lowest price you can sell your e-book for on Amazon is $0.99 and the highest is $200. No matter what price you set, you will only see 35% of the retail price from any sale. Amazon uses the difference to discount the book as it sees fit and pockets the rest. Once you enter the price of your book, click the Save Entries button.

Now that you have completed the three main steps for publishing your e-book on Amazon, click the Publish button in the upper right-hand corner. Unfortunately, your e-book will not automatically appear on the Amazon website. Amazon takes time to review your e-book to make sure that it meets its minimum publishing standards and then formats the e-book’s product page. Several days to a week can go by before your e-book appears for sale on the Amazon website. You can periodically log in to the Digital Text Platform website to see if your e-book has been published. Once it appears, you will see a “Live” link under the Status column, which can take you to your e-book’s product page.

Seeing your published work for sale on Amazon is a gratifying experience. Now you are ready to enjoy the fun of receiving your first reader review and seeing your e-book compared to other books sold by Amazon.

Like all scholars, digital or otherwise, I feel passionately about my subject. Writing about local history gives me a means of self-expression, and digitally publishing my scholarship in a field in which I have expertise easily allows me to share what I learn with the public.

Michael J. Maddigan

By publishing digitally, I am afforded a number of advantages that are not always available through more “traditional” publishing. For 11 years, I have written a local history newspaper column also known as “Recollecting Nemasket” for the Middleboro Gazette. However, a newspaper column can be restrictive in regards to the limitations that are placed on the subject or format of an article. Topics that require a more lengthy, more detailed, or more technical analysis are generally not best served in a newspaper column. Because digital publishing is less restrictive, it permits me to publish longer works, more technical works, works with more images, portions of longer works that I have yet to complete–essentially whatever I choose. A website may also be used as a “proving ground” where articles can be subjected to criticism and comment before they are published elsewhere.

I find that digital scholarship is also advantageous because it is more immediate, more interactive, more accessible, and less ephemeral than traditional publishing. It is also less expensive. My blog costs me nothing beyond the time that I put into it. Readers can read my posts as they are published and respond to them nearly instantaneously, providing feedback on what I write and occasionally offering a differing perspective. With traditional publishing, the process of receiving feedback is much more arduous. And unlike traditional scholarship published in books, magazines, and journals, digital scholarship does not necessarily go out of print or become unavailable when the next issue is published.

As with more traditionally published scholarship, the caliber of digital scholarship on the Web varies greatly. My intention is to maintain a high standard of scholarship for Recollecting Nemasket, partly in keeping with the goal of developing the website as a local history resource for the community. Despite the fact that its subject matter–the history of Middleborough and Lakeville, Massachusetts–is relatively esoteric with probably a limited appeal beyond these two communities, it is no less deserving of serious scholarly treatment. I believe that the best digital scholarship is that which draws upon the advantages of both digital and traditional publishing, combining the small expense, the immediacy, the interactive nature, the accessibility for readers, and the frequency that digital publishing affords with the high level of academic standards that is associated with more traditional scholarship.

Michael J. Maddigan is the author/publisher of Recollecting Nemasket, a blog devoted to the history of Middleborough and Lakeville, Massachusetts. He currently serves as Curator of the Middleborough Historical Museum, and his book Middleborough (Images of America) is due to be published in October 2009.

The great thing about the Web is that you can find a website for practically anything you have an interest in; the downside is that you will find exactly that. The vastness of the Web and our ability to access it gives the impression that we are taking advantage of this depth whenever we enter a term in a search engine. The reality is that too often people only find what they want to find on the Web. Keyword searching only gives back a list of websites that are shaped by your particular search term. Any exploration of this list will be shaped by the concept that started your search in the first place. More often than not, though, your search usually stops once you find the piece of information you were originally seeking.

This kind of searching isn’t bad. In fact, it is necessary if you want to pinpoint the information you need within the morass that is the Web. The problem is that you are less likely to find that “something you never knew that you wanted to find” if you solely rely on keyword searching in search engines when exploring a topic.

Librarians have long lamented the loss of serendipity in the digital age, and scholars should as well. You probably have your own story of stumbling upon a book or other information resource you never knew existed that suddenly opened up a whole new field of exploration for you. These are the kinds of moments that make research so exciting. But when was the last time that you can honestly say this kind of moment has happened to you while sitting at your computer?

The practice of serendipity is more art than science, but it still involves using a system or a plan of attack. It is not a totally random act. If you have absolutely no interest in science or political science, say, surrounding yourself with resources on these topics will be a fruitless endeavor–although you may want to stop and explore how these seemingly unrelated topics may actually apply to your area of interest. You might be surprised by what you find.

Reference librarians can often give the impression that they magically have all information at the fingertips. The reality is that they use a kind of serendipity to help guide the person seeking information with the principle, “Go to where you are likely to find the information you need, then look around.” Older research methods were built on this principle, which is why they can still be incredibly valuable for researchers today, if they take the time to practice them.

In his article, Darlin profiles a few search websites that are trying to utilize serendipity in the digital age, although he isn’t satisfied with their results. Here is my own list of seven ways that you can add serendipity to your research. Some of them involve using a computer, but some of them ask you to put it aside and explore the world of information in a different way.

1. Go to a library and browse the stacks. Books in libraries are organized by subject specifically to encourage serendipity. If you don’t know where to start browsing, pick a book that you happen to like and get the call number. Then go to where it should be on the shelf (even if it is already checked out) and start looking around. The great thing about this method is that you can easily pull a book off the shelf to see what it is all about, and you don’t have to wait for it to load onto a computer screen.
2. Surf the Web. Older scholars probably remember the first time they encountered the Web and how much fun it was to follow the links embedded on each website. When was the last time you did this? Again, start with a website you happen to like, and then start following the links.
3. Use the Browse function in a database, rather than the Search box. We usually go to a database and plug our search terms into the search box, because we are looking for something specific. But if the database has a browse function, try to find what you are looking for that way instead. For example, if you have a citation for a journal article, rather than keyword search the title in a database, use the browse function to pull up the journal issue. That way, you can see what other articles were published along with your article and even explore other issues of that journal.
4. Rather than go to Amazon.com for information on a book, go to a library catalog and start exploring the linked subject headings. By clicking on a linked subject heading in a library record for a book, you will usually find yourself in a browsable list of subject headings. (If not, copy the subject heading and enter it into the “Browse subject” or “Subject beginning with . . .” search box.) Start exploring this list and clicking on other subject headings in other book records.
5. Click around in the subject categories on Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and Borders. Rather than enter a title or subject in the search box, use the Browse categories and see what books appear.
6. Track down sources listed in the notes or bibliography of a book or journal article. Pull out a book or journal article you like and start tracking down the resources that it cites. You can even start “surfing” the citations in the resources you find.
7. Go and talk with a reference librarian. Go to the reference desk or make an appointment with a reference librarian and tell him or her about your area of interest. I bet he or she can guide you to some resources you never knew existed.

Below is a short list of some of these reading/publishing community websites. All of them are free to join and they don’t charge anything to publish your work on their site. They also use elements of online community websites to help you market your writing and to connect with other writers and readers.

Through these websites, you become the publisher of your own book by formatting and uploading the content yourself. In most cases, this process is very easy to do. Keep in mind, however, that when writing for the electronic publishing world, the less formatting your original manuscript contains the better. When you upload your writing to some of these sites, the website converts your text into a different format, so any special formatting your writing originally contains may get in the way of this conversion process.

You can make your content available for free on all of the websites listed below. On some of them, you can earn money by opting to charge readers to download and read your writing. There are many good reasons for making your writing available for free, however, foremost among them is that it will help you spread your reputation faster. Readers are much more likely to download your book if you make it available for free than if you charge money for it. All of the sites that give you the option to charge money for your work also allow you to set your own price for it, although the website will keep some percentage of that price.

Through these websites you can dabble in publishing your work without having to find a publisher for your book. All of them let you edit or even un-publish your book at any time, so they can be a great way to test out your ideas and gauge your market before finding a publisher for your book or article.

Even if you are not interested in publishing your work on these websites, you can find interesting works to read and comment on–and maybe even build a community of writers and readers with similar interests as you.

Goodreads – The Goodreads website focuses more on creating a community of readers than on a community of writers. As in Facebook, you create a profile where you can share what you have read with other friends, comment on and rate books, and even track your progress in the book you are currently reading. You can also upload your writing to the website by copying your text into their highly structured template, which organizes it into individual chapters. Writing uploaded by individual users, however, can only be read on the Goodreads website.

Feedbooks – Whereas Goodreads focuses more on sharing the reading of traditionally published books, Feedbooks focuses more on the sharing of writing. The profile you create in Feedbooks strictly centers on content available on its website, which is mainly works that have been uploaded to the website by its users. Unlike in Goodreads, this content can be downloaded in a variety of formats, including Kindle, Sony Reader, and PDF, so that you can take the writing with you.

Scribd – Scribd gives you a choice of uploading your documents to share (i.e., offer them for free) or to sell, and the uploading process is incredibly easy. The site offers all kinds of documents, including books, magazines, brochures, recipes, sheet music, and even resumes and CVs. The website also allows you to create communities, where books can be grouped together on a specific topic. Navigating through the morass of titles on the Scribd website can be difficult, but they tell me that they are working on improving the search and browse functions. Books published on Scribd can be read on the website or can be downloaded in PDF or plain text formats.

Smashwords – Smashwords works a lot like Feedbooks, but it allows you to create a more vibrant author page where readers can learn more about you. You can even add an author video to your page. Just like on Scribd, you can make your writing available for free or for purchase. Books can be read on the Smashwords website or can be downloaded in a plethora of e-book formats.

Do you know of any other reading/publishing communities on the Web? Share them by clicking on the Comments button for this article.

Writers often acknowledge that their writing can always be improved. In the old publishing world, though, once a book went to press it was pretty much set in stone. Even minor changes or corrections to the text would have to wait until the next print run, that is, if the book even sold well enough to warrant another print run.

Nowadays, as print-on-demand (POD) and e-book technologies continue to proliferate within the print industry, books can more easily be corrected and improved. The “finished” manuscript can easily be tweaked or parts of the text can be re-written at any time, and these changes will go into effect when the next person orders or downloads a new copy of the book.

Publishing, in other words, is becoming more of a process than the production of a free-standing product. Writers are beginning to publish books electronically–and sometimes even in print–with the sole intention of soliciting feedback from their audience about how to improve their manuscript. They are also using different publishing mediums to distribute their work, so that they can reach as many readers as they possibly can and develop a following. All of this means that a finished book is fast fading.

The move towards publishing becoming more of a process has some real benefits. Scientific works, for example, can easily be updated to accommodate new findings and discoveries. Time-sensitive material can go to print faster, with the knowledge that any editorial errors can easily be corrected at a later time. And authors can test the waters by publishing their ideas and seeing if there is an audience for them before devoting even more time and effort to them.

But there is also a downside to this movement. The widespread circulation of different editions will make it more difficult to ensure that two people are talking about the same text, which is critical in some fields like the humanities or political science. The ease with which texts can be corrected or rewritten may also prompt authors to publish their manuscript before it is ready. The reputation of authors who publish and circulate too many texts of inferior quality can easily suffer as a result. And finally, readers may find it more difficult to find quality reading or research material if publishers rush manuscripts to print and then take a long time to go back to correct them or, worse, never do.

Writers may miss the sense of accomplishment they get when they submit their finished manuscript to their publisher. While such a sense of accomplishment may not be as concentrated in a singular moment in today’s publishing world, these kinds of moments become more frequent as the writer continues to improve the work and publishes it in various venues. These small victories can give the writer a much needed incentive to keep writing over time. I’m sure at least some writers will not miss the agony it takes to complete a finished manuscript that needs to be perfect in their eyes.

Textual editors know that even in the print world, the finished book is like an object placed between facing mirrors. The job of the textual editor is to look at various versions of a printed work and then reconcile the differences among them–which can result from printing errors, authorial changes or corrections, and subsequent editions–to produce a singular “authoritative” text. Of course, the text they produce only adds to the work of the next textual editor, who again is supposed to figure out what is the real “finished” book.

With current changes in publishing technologies, the textual editing of twenty-first century works may no longer involve facing mirrors; rather, it may well become impossible.

There are many easy ways to get the ball rolling in becoming a Digital Scholar, and you may already be doing some of them. Setting up an account with LinkedIn or Facebook to network more easily with friends and colleagues–especially those with whom you have lost touch–is one way. Setting up a Twitter account for similar reasons is another. You can go to Amazon.com and create recommendation lists to help other readers identify the seminal books in your field of expertise, or you can even start contributing articles to Wikipedia.

All of the above activities can help spread your reputation as a scholar. But if you are serious about preparing yourself for the new world of publishing, starting a blog is the best way to go.

One of the reasons why writing a blog is such a powerful tool for participating in the new world of publishing is that once it is up and running, you are perfectly positioned to utilize to the fullest the new publishing technologies for producing, distributing, and drawing attention to your scholarship.

Here are some other reasons why blogs are one of the best publishing tools for the Digital Scholar:

• Blogs are relatively easy to set up and maintain. Even though setting up a blog can be time consuming and a bit tricky at first, it is still much easier and faster to put together than designing your own website. Once you get your blog up and running, adding content to it is a breeze, so you can focus on your writing and scholarship, not website design. (See Blogging for some links and tips to help you get started building your blog.)
• People can easily discover you and your scholarship through your blog. People turn to the web to answer questions and find information about topics that interest them all the time. Your blog can become an authoritative source on the web for providing information about your area of expertise.
• Blogs are a great showcase for you and your work. You can easily direct people to your blog, where they can gain a deeper understanding of what you and your scholarship are all about. You can include the URL for your blog in e-mail signatures, on business cards, and on your Facebook profile. If your URL is catchy enough, you can even verbally encourage friends and colleagues to check out your blog.
• You can build a regular readership with a blog. The regular-article format of a blog gives people who are interested in your area of expertise a reason to return to your site to read your next article.
• You become an instant author/publisher of your own work with a blog. As soon as you hit the “Publish” button, people from around the world can read and comment on your work. A blog is a great place to try out new ideas and see what people think about them before taking those ideas to a traditional publisher. It also lets you build or enhance your reputation in that subject area while you are still testing out those ideas.
• A blog can help you create content for other publishing formats. If you find the task of sitting down to write a book or journal article daunting, the short-article format usually associated with a blog can help you break your subject down into smaller chunks. Keep writing these small articles, and before you know it, you will have plenty of material for that article or book.
• You can use your blog to get a traditional publishing contract. If you write an active blog, you become more attractive to traditional publishers because of the attention you can generate through it.
• You can use your blog to advertise your book or other writing. Whether you publish a book independently, go through a traditional book publisher, or write an article for another venue, you can use your blog to market it. In turn, you can use these other writing opportunities to drive more traffic to your blog.

Blogs can produce big dividends for the Digital Scholar, because they are an idea and content generator, publishing mechanism, and marketing venue all rolled up into one. Blogs require some effort to get started, but once they are up and running, they can pack a powerful punch in the publishing world.

The wonderful thing about new publishing technologies is that they practically allow anyone to take advantage of them. This democratic approach to publishing means that anyone with an intellectual passion can now find a means of publishing and distributing his or her ideas and become a Digital Scholar.

Professors and other practicing academics who become Digital Scholars find that these new publishing platforms force them to rethink how they create and distribute their work, and in the process give new life to their scholarship. These Digital Scholars also find a far greater audience for their ideas than they normally would within the confining walls of academia, thereby helping to build their reputations to a scale that is far greater than what was before possible.

Independent scholars and other people who left the academic rat race to pursue other forms of employment find that by becoming Digital Scholars they are by no means abandoning the exciting exchange of ideas that universities seemed to monopolize. These Digital Scholars discover that publishing their own academic work allows them to define the level of scholarship they want to produce and in the course of doing so gain a greater sense of respect and authority for their thoughts and ideas than they ever commanded or found within a university setting.

Becoming a Digital Scholar does not require the use of a particular set of publishing technologies, because these new technologies can be combined and used in ways to suit the goals of any individual scholar. Some Digital Scholars write blogs, some publish e-books, some use social networking websites, like Facebook, to create intellectual online communities to facilitate the exchange of ideas, and some create podcasts or videos to distribute lectures on the web. Many Digital Scholars combine some or all of these publishing mechanisms so that they feed on one another and reach a greater audience. Writers of blogs might use its contents as a basis for creating an e-book and then use the blog to publicize the book.

Becoming a Digital Scholar does not mean completely abandoning the traditional publishing world either. Many Digital Scholars find that these new publishing activities help lead them to traditional publishing opportunities that they may not have found otherwise. In fact, participation in this new world of publishing is becoming a requirement before entering the traditional world of print.

Are you a Digital Scholar? Use the comment link to share your experiences.

[W]e have to rethink our conceptions of literary forms or genres, in view of the technical factors affecting our present situation, if we are to identify the forms of expression that channel the literary energies of the present. . . . [W]e are in the midst of a mighty recasting of literary forms, a melting down in which many of the opposites in which we have been used to think may lose their force.

. . . [This] mighty process of recasting . . . not only affects the conventional distinction between genres, between writer and poet, between scholar and popularizer, but also revises even the distinction between author and reader.

An author who teaches writers nothing, teaches no one. What matters, therefore, is the exemplary character of production, which is able first to induce other producers to produce, and second to put an improved apparatus at their disposal. And this apparatus is better the more consumers it is able to turn into producers–that is, readers or spectators into collaborators.

–Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” 1934.

In writing the above quotations, Walter Benjamin was interested in identifying the qualities that mark a properly Marxist literary work. Even though the politics behind the writing of his article isn’t very popular nowadays, I am surprised that his essay doesn’t receive more attention than it does, given its seemingly prescient description of communication that is now possible with new information technologies.

At this point, I probably do not need to re-document how websites, blogs, and the ability of readers to share and respond to them have been recasting the way that popular media is produced and consumed. Traditional media outlets are struggling to figure out their role in this new economy of ideas and entertainment, and some media forms, such as newspapers, may not survive the recasting.

Instead, I am interested in how information technologies are recasting the author/publisher divide. New technologies have essentially reduced the costs associated with publishing to near zero, creating a situation where authors can cheaply and easily distribute their own work. Authors can make their own blogs, produce an e-book for sale or giveaway, or publish a printed book using print-on-demand (POD), and they can do all of these things for free.

Of course, some of these free publishing venues have catches to them. While it is possible to create a print-on-demand book for free, the printer will take a fairly big percentage of any sales of the book. And some free blog hosting sites will insert their own ads onto the pages of authors. The larger point, however, is that traditional publishers no longer hold exclusive keys to the production of creative works.

Nor do these publishers hold a monopoly on distribution and marketing. Blogs, of course, are available to anyone with an internet connection, but even independently published e-books and POD books can now appear on Amazon.com and other popular online book sellers, right next to titles distributed by big publishing houses.

There still may be good reasons for authors to publish their work through third-party publishers, but the line that used to keep author and publisher apart is beginning to blur. We are beginning to enter the age of the “Author as Publisher.”

For tips and links to resources that can help you get a blog up and running, visit “Blogging.”

Comment Question:

If you have a blog, what are some of the reasons you would use to convince someone else to start one?