Identifying Audience: Revolution or Convolution?

The long tail of the internet continues to get longer as online traffic develops audiences for niche markets. There is no exception for the book publishing industry. In researching the look and design of several book publishing websites, I decided to narrow the scope to progressive book publishers. The common theme around the progressive book publishing industry is the idea of anti-corporate criticism and democratic inclusiveness of many marginalized and oppressed groups, e.g. G.L.B.T, labor/unions, Native Americans, African Americans, and other oppressed people around the world.

While there are many Left leaning, Liberal, and progressive websites, one book publisher that stands out is McMillan Publishers’ imprint Metropolitan Press (http://us.macmillan.com/Metropolitan.aspx.). This imprint has a very clean and distinct voice. The first thing I noticed with McMillan Press is the clean look of the logo and name. The next immediate thing I noticed are the book cover images of the press’ new titles: The Checklist Manifest by Atul Gawande, Footprints in Gaza by Joe Sacco and Rewilding the World by Caroline Fraser. The books on the front page are appealing to a liberal/progressive educated audience of college students, teachers, and other academics and activists. The front page contains two blog columns: Barbara Ehrenreich’s Working in America which covers labor issues and the blog The American Empire Project which discusses the role of the expansion of the American empire and global militarism. Also on the front page are videos of feeds for other websites: The Daily Show featuring an interview with Barbara Ehrenreich and a video of author Thomas Frank discussing his book The Wrecking Crew. There are is also a “News” feed for some authors and politically relevant authors in the news as well as a Twitter page to follow the press and develop a fan base. The very top of the website has tabs for Home, Books, Authors, Our Imprints, News, FAQs, and Contacts.

A progressive publishing website that seemed very cluttered and hard to read is AK Press (http://akpress.org). Much of the front page is dominated by tons of text in 8 point fonts with a black, white, and red colors dominating the page. The left hand column of the page displays in tiny type the list of subjects that dominate articles e.g. Anarchism, Armed Struggle, Atheism, Avant Garde/Surrealism, Beat, Calendars/Organizers, Comics/Graphoc/Photo, Cookbooks, Drugs, Eco/Green, Economics, Fascism/Anti-Fascism, Feminism, Fiction, Film, etc… There are 54 links in the column and all the subjects are listed in alphabetiocal order. This website appears to want to be everything for everyone on the Left. There are small graphics of 8 book covers on the front page with two or three paragraphs each giving a brief summary of the books. The books range from You Don’t Have to Fuck People Over to Survive by Seth Tobacman to the history of Italian Anarchists by Nunzio Pernicone. Nine tabs across the top display: Home, AK Press Blog, Bookstore, AK Picks, Friends/Bookmobile, Events, About AK/Acera de AK Press, and Links. While the audience is clearly a Leftist audience, it does appear to be overwhelmingly broad that one on the Left could be overwhelmed by a sense of ADD.

I was hoping to find a leftist headache pain reliever button on the front page before a headache set, but the little "x" in the upper right hand corner worked just fine.