Two years ago I was confronted with a problem faced by many academics. An author of three previous scholarly books, I had written a manuscript intended for a much wider and more general audience. Called Government is Good: An Unapologetic Defense of a Vital Institution, the book was a response to the conservative campaign to label government as “bad,” and the ongoing Republican effort to cut taxes, slash social programs, and roll back regulations protecting consumers, workers, and the environment. Unfortunately, I could not find a popular press to take it on. And while a few university presses expressed interest, I was concerned that their relatively small budgets would mean little advertising and thus little readership by the general public. Then it occurred to me that there might be another way to get a larger audience for the book: put it up on the Web. Not just a sample chapter or two, but the whole book. It took a while to get comfortable with this idea. It would mean giving up royalties and losing the academic imprimatur of a published book. But the potential payoff of a much larger readership was tempting, so I took the plunge. I quickly realized that simply putting up 300 manuscript pages onto the web as a plain PDF file would be pretty unappealing to most potential readers. So I got a small grant from my college and hired a Web design firm to turn the book into a Web site with an esthetically appealing format. I shortened many of the chapters and turned each into an “article” that could be clicked on and read independently of the others – so people wouldn’t have to feel like they had to read the whole book. I also added some interactive bells and whistles, like a short quiz people could take on myths about government. I launched the site – Government Is Good – in the fall of 2007 with absolutely no idea of how it would do. Today, I’ve had over 75,000 visitors to the site. . . .
Read the rest here: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/06/18/amy.
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