Distributing Your Call for Content

Following is a list of useful tips to get the most out of your Proposal Phase:

Listservs

• Send your call to at least 3–4 listservs
• LSOFT CataList (http://www.lsoft.com/catalist.html)
• This is a list of listservs. You can use the site to search for mailing groups in your topic area, broadening your base of contacts.
• IRMA-L (http://www.irma-international.org/irma-l/)
• To post your call to IRMA-L, copy and paste the full, approved call into the body of an email, exactly as it should appear in distribution, and submit to irma-l@irma-international.org
• Choose listservs that are specific to your topic for the best results.
• Send the call once at the beginning of the acquisition phase and once more within a week of the deadline to remind potential authors of the opportunity to contribute to your project.

Personalized Invitations

• Personalized invitations should be sent to specific individuals in separate emails. A Sample Personalized Invitation is available in the Editor's Guide.
• The best way to quickly send a large number of individual invitations is to use a mail merge. You can find detailed, step-by-step instructions on how to complete a mail merge using Microsoft Office.
• Send out at least 200 personalized invitations
• Reach out to authors with whom you have collaborated in the past.
• Send the invitation email once at the beginning of the acquisition phase and once more within a week of the deadline to remind potential authors of the opportunity to contribute to your project. Reminding authors in this way will help to reinforce the due date and also indicate that you are highly interested in seeing their work, which will help to foster a quality working relationship.
• Follow up with unresponsive invitees.

Other Contact Sources

You can often find additional contacts for personal invitations in these areas:

• Relevant conferences you may be attending
• Journal articles/book chapters recently published on your topic
• If someone declines to contribute, you can still ask them for additional contacts.
• Encourage members of your editorial board to post the call on their own sites and reach out to their own networks and colleagues for submissions.
• Encourage those who have recently completed a dissertation or thesis to take research ideas and condense them into a submission for your book or journal.
• With a quick web search, you can often find the names and contact information for the organizers of recent conferences and workshops on a variety of topics. Reaching out to these individuals directly can garner additional interest in your project.

Additional Tips

• If you have a personal or university website, feel free to post a link to your call.
• If you're attending a conference in the same subject area as your project, bring a few hard copies of your call or (for journal editors) past issues of your journal. As you converse and meet with others in the field, you can mention your work and provide them with the call for content if they are interested.
• Online research communities and forums are another great place to post about new book or journal projects and calls for contributors.

The most successful editors use a combination of both general calls on listservs and personalized invitations while putting the majority of their efforts into personalized invitations.