Sample Grant Proposal Projects

Descriptions of grant-winning projects that will inspire you to think creatively about how to describe your needs to funders.

Email us if you'd like us to include your successful grant project here.

Previous winners of the NYTAP Travel Grant. Get ideas for projects that involve travel for your NYTAP Travel Grant application or other grants that fund travel.

Publisher: Arte Publico Press
Funder: Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund
When: 1999

Arte Publico Press is implementing a unique program to place books in Hispanic grocery stores where Latinos do their food shopping. APP will display and sell its books in its own spinner racks in some 200 Hispanic supermarkets and convenience stores throughout Texas.

In recent years, APP has researched the accessibility of the Hispanic grass roots market in Texas, market-tested its books in the supermarkets and convenience stores and developed a plan for reaching Hispanics by displaying its books in stores where Hispanics do their food shopping.

The need for this special distribution system arises because bookstores have not extended themselves to Hispanics, a situation which has been exacerbated by the growth of the chain stores and the demise of the independent booksellers. In addition, there are very few bookstores in the country that specialize in Hispanic books and/or cater to Hispanic clientele.

Publisher: Boston Review
Funder: Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund
When: 1999

Project Goals: Boston Review plans to increase its literary readership substantially through an aggressive, multi-tiered project that combines:

• a new editorial section designed to fill a void in current fiction reviewing by providing a unique nexus for readers, writers, and publishers of mid- and back-list fiction,
• innovative approaches to media and cross-promotional marketing opportunities, and
• strategic alliances with other publishers, with a promise of expanding the overall market for current fiction and poetry.

Pursuant to these aims, Boston Review will adopt four new initiatives that build on current publishing alliances and small-scale experiments: a New Fiction Forum, collaboration with publishers such as Beacon Press, radio outreach, and an extended Web site. Together, these initiatives will expand Boston Review's own subscription base. Moreover, by exploiting the Review's reputation as a leading national forum for political and cultural debate, they promise to create a new crossover audience for literature.

The New Fiction Forum: In the inaugural issue of the New Fiction Forum, we begin a wide-ranging dialogue about contemporary fiction, a dialogue founded on a simple premise: that despite the intense commercialism of current publishing, there are original, vital novels published every season and readers to whom such narratives are of the profoundest importance. Alongside evaluative reviews, the Forum will feature essays that explore the complete works of individual writers (in this issue, Stewart O'Nan on Richard Yates); discuss emerging trends and innovations in fiction (creative and commercial); and probe the shifting meaning of genres as writers stretch and bend them. Moreover, in an effort to provoke debate about the very nature of reviewing and its role in the fate of a novel, we will invite authors to respond to reviewers (in this issue, Ron Hansen replies to Melvin Jules Bukiet). Throughout, the Forum will approach fiction as what we strongly believe it to be—an essential part of our individual and collective lives—and in so doing, reassert why it so deeply matters.

Publisher: Coffee House Press
Funder: Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund
When: 1999

Coffee House Press's grant is in support of the creation of a reprint series of titles by key authors from the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and the development of a web site linked to other on-line services to promote this series to the academic audience as well as to specialty audiences. The plan includes the creation of an editorial board that will work with the press to determine titles for reprint, and will provide introductions and other supporting apparatus to the texts. The related internet marketing strategy is divided into three parts: the design, development, and maintenance of a Coffee House Press web site; the marketing of the web site; and the marketing of our books on other internet sites and through other Internet sales opportunities.

Coffee House will document each step in the creation and maintenance of the editorial board, as well as in the process of developing and modifying an ongoing web site. We plan to use the Internet to help us reach the individual niche markets that our titles appeal to, and to introduce our new titles to the academic market. In our penetration of the academic market, our objectives are to develop new audiences for Coffee House Press books, to increase backlist sales, and to help stabilize earned income. Through our documentation procedures, we hope to establish models that will assist other publishers in taking similar paths.

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Funder: Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund
When: 1999

We are conducting a three-year marketing initiative designed to increase the number of 1) library book groups reading and discussing poetry, and 2) library systems that regularly purchase Copper Canyon Press titles. Our strategies include:

Producing audio-and-text listener's guides featuring CDs of poets reading their work packaged with study texts that include critical essays interviews, and various reference materials. Guides and books are made available to all interested library-sponsored reading groups.

• Arranging for Copper Canyon poets to facilitate discussions with reading groups and setting up author library reading tours in different regions of the country
• Distributing our first complete catalogs geared towards library buyers
• Advertising the reading group initiative and the Press in library trade journals
• Attending ALA and PLA conferences to promote the Press and reading initiatives
• Creating a print and electronic archive of materials for librarians about building poetry collections.

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Funder: Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund
When: 1999

Our current grant uses the Internet as the primary means of reaching, educating and cultivating au audience of serious readers of innovative literature. It aims to establish a broad critical context through which such literature is best appreciated and enjoyed, and to create forums in which readers can initiate and participate in ongoing discussions of authors and their works.

The program builds upon the success of the Press's previous Wallace Fund grants which allowed us to institutionalize various marketing practices and helped us to take all sales representation in-house. Two of its major objectives are:

1. To expand our website to use it and the Internet as the primary means for reaching a larger audience and educating them about the literature to which the Press is dedicated; and
2. To reach a targeted audience of 18 - 26 year olds through publishing, in both print and on-line versions, a literary tabloid titled CONTEXT that will provide an interpretative context for innovative writing, emphasizing retrospective articles and recommended reading lists by well-established critics and writers.

A few of the strategies we've implemented thus far include: moving our site from its former home on Illinois State University's server to a commercial server which provides us with ongoing access to user statistics and allowed for a name change; placing relevant critical materials concerning our authors on-line—including author interviews, criticism, bibliographies, and book reviews; developing an on-line casebook studies series; establishing a database of email addresses and site user profiles; focusing all advertising efforts on getting readers to our website. We also have instituted an initial advisory board of 175 academics and booksellers who have provided input to the first edition of CONTEXT (currently in the final stages of production).

Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Funder: Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund
When: 1999

In today's publishing environment, selling principally to trade markets as a small generalist press, the inefficiencies of, in effect, building a marketing plan for each book place a strain on budgets, staffing, and organizational capacity. In 1997 Milkweed implemented a rolling, three year integrated strategic and business plan, the goals of which are to stabilize and grow our backlist revenue to provide a secure economic base for realizing our mission. We will accomplish this by focusing our nonfiction publishing program and targeting and reaching our readers more directly through institutional and special sales utilizing web and direct mail vehicles.

Literary fiction (adult and middle grade juvenile—3 - 4 titles each annually) and poetry (2 - 3 titles annually) provide most of the seasonal frontlist revenue in the retail trade and libraries through our national distributor, Publishers Group West. Beginning in 1999, our nonfiction program is exclusively dedicated to The World As Home: literary works that explore the ethical, cultural, and esthetic dimensions of our relationship to the natural world. This program is a forum for distinctive, literary writing that not only alerts us to vital issues, but that offers personal testimonies to living harmoniously with other species in urban, rural, and wilderness communities.

In concert with traditional promotional and publicity vehicles to reach our core markets of educators, writers, and environmental organizations, the centerpiece of the marketing plan will be a dedicated World As Home web site that will become a network resource that will feature not only Milkweed publications but other books and periodicals and will provide information on and hyper-links to writer, academic, and environmental organizations and an interactive presentation of online literature, workshops, and relevant activities around the country.

Publisher: The New Press
Funder: Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund
When: 1999

Since its launch in 1992, The New Press has undertaken an ambitious program of literary translation from around the world, publishing over 30 works in our first six years and introducing several major writers to American audiences. The Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund's recent grant to The Press will allow us to apply academic marketing strategies that have proven effective with our nonfiction titles, to our international fiction list. Our hope is to bring our international literary fiction into classrooms at the high school, community college, college, and graduate levels, encouraging a new generation of readers from every background to explore writing from around the world.

We are in the process of launching several parallel marketing efforts to reach difference education audiences.

High School Audience

• We will create a special "literary fiction" section in our education catalogue, mailed to over 20,000 educators and educational organizations.
• We will give sample copies to high school teachers.
• We will commission three anthologies of international literary writing specifically aimed at high school audiences.

College Audience

• We will create an international fiction direct mail catalogue, describing our literary titles and cross referencing with appropriate courses for potential adoption.
• We will give sample copies to professors.
• We will attend relevant conferences including MLA and ALA annual and regional conferences.
• We will expand our coverage of literary fiction on our website, including sample chapters, author interviews, and teaching suggestions.

Library Audiences

• We will undertake a series of library mailings focussing on literary fiction and featuring groups of titles offered at a discount.
• We will advertise in key library review media literary fiction titles that have been well-received in the press or won major awards.

With these efforts we hope to build new, young audiences for international fiction and also ensure that important works of literature are available and affordable to all categories of lifelong learners.

Publisher: Ploughshares
Funder: Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund
When: 1999

Ploughshares plans to dramatically expand its Web site, presenting dynamic pages with revolving presentations of poems and short stories, building individual pages for each of the two thousand writers who have been published in the journal, offering on-line chats with authors, digitizing all of the journal's back issues, and developing a sophisticated shopping-cart system for orders.

Publisher: Sarabande Books
Funder: Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund
When: 1999

Go Write to the Source: Sarabande in Education

The primary goal of the Sarabande in Education project is to expand the audience for Sarabande and other small press titles in the academic market by focusing on three specific areas: Composition, Contemporary American Literature, and Creative Writing. To make course adoption more attractive to processors we are introducing an interactive, education Web sub-site designed to enhance the relationship between Sarabande authors and their readers. Launch date for the site in January 2000.

Professors who adopt one of six featured titles receive a password, allowing them access to the Sarabande in Education Website, where Sarabande authors make appearances via real-time chats. At designated times throughout the semester, students will be able to ask questions about style, background, approach, and authors will respond. Readers can also discuss our books in two areas we're calling the Teacher Lounge and the Student Lounge.

The site also provides interactive Reader's Guides that contain questions posed by the authors themselves, essay topics, creative writing exercises, and suggested further reading. There are links to interviews, biographical material, book reviews, syllabi and more. So far, Sarabande authors have been eager to participate and expressed a great deal of interest in helping others understand their work.

The first year of our project involves research, building a list of contacts, development of the Website, production of a Reader's Guide and brochure, as well as attendance at several professional conferences. We launch the first promotional effort this Fall, targeting 129 Kentucky colleges and universities as a test group. In early 2000, we will expand this effort nationally.

Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
Funder: Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund
When: 1999

The overall purpose of this project is to enable TCG to compete more successfully in an evolving marketplace; to develop a broader, more knowledgeable reading public; and to make dramatic literature a more elemental part of American culture. To this end TCG will develop and test a number of marketing and promotional strategies targeted to our major market areas. Key components by market segment include:

Foreign Market — TCG will work with Nick Hern Books and Playwrights Union of Canada to create a series of print ads on mutually identified titles that will appear in specialty publications in England and Canada to enhance visibility and sales of TCG authors.

Playwrights Voice Reading Series — Develop a playwrights reading and discussion series curated by playwrights that will foster a greater appreciation for dramatic literature.

Independent and Chain Bookstores — TCG will launch a national campaign in independent and chain bookstores entitled "Put a Little Drama in Your Life." The campaign will include in-store displays; cooperative advertising in the print media and in-house sales organs; and author readings and signings.

Library Market — TCG will engage the services of a library consultant to research/identify 75-100 libraries/systems in each discipline (public and academic) that have major or growing holdings in drama or funding available to develop new collections. The consultant will also help develop a marketing strategy targeted to the library sector. TCG will also test the viability of exhibiting at the American Library Association Conference.

Academic Market — TCG will exhibit at regional theatre and academic/professional conferences, and increase mailings of its book catalogue by 15,000 over the next 3 years.

On-line Bookstore — TCG will develop the TCG bookstore as part of our new Web site which will include over 700 titles with descriptions and cover art. Additionally, TCG will work closely with on-line bookstores to develop an expanded presence of our books.