Improving Author Communications: 4 Pillars for Journal Publishers
In scholarly publishing, every communication with an author is more than a transaction—it’s a brand moment. Whether the message originates from marketing, editorial, or production, each interaction shapes the author experience and reflects the values of your organization.
Yet too often, these communications are treated as administrative operations—functional but not recognized as strategic assets. Routine messages go out with outdated language, vague instructions, or a tone that feels disconnected from the messaging that first sparked the author’s interest.
When neglected, author communications become fragmented, inconsistent, and misaligned with your organization’s goals—undermining trust, frustrating authors, and weakening the very experience they’re meant to support.
Conversely, when author communications are clear in tone, cohesive in voice, and purposeful in timing, the impact is tangible:
- Authors move through processes more smoothly
- Author satisfaction, loyalty, and repeat engagement rise
- Your brand and mission come through more consistently
Nailing author communications does more than attract authors—it strengthens relationships across your entire community. Authors don’t engage with your organization in just one role. They may also be members, reviewers, volunteers, event participants, and learners. Failing to reflect that broader relationship in your communications misses an opportunity to build trust and deepen engagement.
When you use audience insights and personalization to tailor even automated messages, you signal that you recognize the individual—not just the transaction. That recognition strengthens credibility, fosters goodwill, and reinforces the author’s connection to your mission at every touchpoint.
In this article, we share practical advice for improving author communications across four focused pillars:
- Laying a Strong Foundation
- Shaping Your Communications
- Delivering with Greater Precision
- Extending Capacity Through Technology and Generative AI
Whether you’re refreshing a few key messages or developing a more strategic communications program, these tips are designed to meet you where you are—and support progress toward a clearer, more consistent, and author-centered approach.
Pillar 1: Laying a Strong Foundation
Author communications are more than transactional messages—they’re a core part of how authors experience your organization. Improving them doesn’t require starting from scratch. It is about strengthening what already exists—building greater clarity, cohesion, and connection over time.
Before improving content or scaling delivery, organizations must first establish a clear strategic base. This means understanding what messages exist, who owns them, and where they come from—across teams, systems, and the full author lifecycle. A solid foundation aligns teams, clarifies governance, and creates the shared understanding necessary for any meaningful change. This section is about how to build that foundation.
Conduct an Author Communications Audit
The first step to improving author communications is knowing what you already have. Start by conducting a communications audit. Inventory all the communications an author might receive across their journey—emails or other communications inviting them to submit or providing submission instructions, peer review reports, decision letters, production notices, or post-publication updates. Classify them by type, channel, and owner.
As part of this process, map out the systems and platforms involved in delivering these communications. Understanding where messages originate helps identify constraints (like rigid templates and formats imposed by some systems), overlaps between systems, and opportunities for integration or streamlining.
Once you have gathered everything, analyze each communication in context: What is this message meant to convey? Is it informational, instructional, motivational? Is it redundant with other messages? Does it arrive at the right moment in the author journey? Is the essential information easily scannable? Is the recipient encouraged to take action? Is the primary call to action clear? Is the right tone used?
This full-scope audit reveals gaps, inconsistencies, and opportunities to strengthen and simplify your author communications and the author’s experience throughout your publication process.
Establish Brand Voice and Messaging Infrastructure
Author communications should consistently reflect your organization’s voice, tone, and identity—regardless of which team (marketing, editorial, production) is sending the communication touchpoint. Authors should not feel like they are hearing from different departments speaking in conflicting styles. A cohesive, professional voice builds credibility and reinforces trust across the entire author experience.
Achieving this consistency requires more than editing individual messages. It starts with building a core set of brand and messaging tools that can be used across teams and platforms. This includes:
- A clearly defined brand voice and tone framework
- A style guide specific to author-facing communications
- A shared message library of approved positioning statements
- Core copy approved for important and key communications
- A designated owner (typically within communications or marketing) responsible for maintaining and evolving these assets
With this infrastructure in place, teams across editorial, production, and marketing can create communications that are consistent by default—without requiring constant handoffs or rework. Training and evolving messaging will be easier over time.
Put Communications Governance in Place to Sustain Consistency
Building your strong messaging platform is only the first step. To keep communications consistent and well-managed over time, you need clear governance—a system for applying, updating, and evolving messaging standards across teams and tools.
Governance doesn’t mean controlling every word—it means ensuring there are processes in place and guidelines or instructions for how messages are created, reviewed, maintained, and improved. If your author communications governance is not documented, changes in internal teams present risks to ownership and responsibilities for these key communications. A natural time to review governance of author communications is prior to journal editorial board changes or when editorial policies change.
Plan for the Full Author Lifecycle
A strong communications strategy considers the entire author journey—not just getting to submission or decision, but what happens after publication. Many organizations focus heavily on pre-submission and peer review messaging, while neglecting the post-publication phase. Yet this is where trust is reinforced, and long-term relationships are built.
To cultivate loyalty, organizations need to intentionally design communications that span the full lifecycle—from outreach to post-publication follow-up and ongoing engagement. This includes planning for:
- Acknowledging author contributions (i.e., thanking them for publishing and providing tips on how they can share their work)
- Sharing article performance (e.g., citations, downloads, Altmetric) after publication
- Welcoming back authors (i.e., encouraging authors to submit their next paper with you)
- Providing peer review, guest editor, and editorial role opportunities
- Connecting authors to the organization’s broader mission and activities
Ask Authors About Your Communications
Feedback loops are essential—but they shouldn’t only ask authors about their publishing experience. To truly improve communications, your organization should also ask about what and how you communicate. Are messages clear, timely, helpful, or overwhelming? Which messages do authors value, ignore, or find confusing?
Incorporate specific questions about communication clarity and usefulness into post-submission or post-publication surveys. Where possible, conduct lightweight message testing or gather direct input through interviews or advisory boards. Listening to authors can help identify friction points, eliminate unnecessary messages, and uncover opportunities to better support their journey.
Pillar 2: Shaping Your Communications
Once the communications landscape is mapped and responsibilities are clear, the next step is to improve the content itself. This pillar is about the art of communications—making sure communications are well-written, brand-aligned, structured for ease of use, and accessible across different formats. It is about reducing friction, increasing clarity, and ensuring every message feels intentional, professional, and human.
Keep It Fresh and Consistent
Author communications need regular maintenance to stay effective. Messaging that was clear and relevant a few years ago may no longer reflect current workflows, policies, tools, or author expectations. Communications can also drift over time as incremental edits accumulate across teams and systems. For these reasons, we recommend reviewing all communications at least every two years, with lighter annual reviews to catchquick updates or corrections. A regular refresh ensures communication remains clear, consistent, aligned with brand, and responsive to authors’ evolving needs.
Make Communications Clear, Structured, and Easy to Absorb
Good author communications are built to be understood. Dense, text-heavy instructions overwhelm authors and create friction. Effective communications use the principles of information architecture: clear hierarchy, logical flow, and visual structure that supports quick scanning and confident action. This means using headings, bullet points, spacing, and visual cues—like annotated screenshots or examples—to break complex steps into digestible parts.
Structure isn’t cosmetic—it’s functional. How a message is organized directly impacts whether authors understand it, trust it, and follow through. Brevity, clarity, and a scannable layout are core to a communication experience that respects time, reduces frustration, and improves engagement with the call to action.
Leverage Multimedia and Other Content Formats to Enhance Understanding
Different authors consume information in different ways. Incorporating multimedia, such as short videos or interactive tutorials,makes instructions more accessible. Training and customer service videos can also fit well into the author communication journey and may be less overwhelming. Checklists can be helpful to share detailed information succinctly. Infographics can explain a process or workflow visually, especially for authors whose first language is not English.
Pillar 3: Delivering with Precision
Once communications are well-crafted and consistent, the next step is delivering them in a more coordinated, intelligent way. This pillar is about using your marketing technology stack to orchestrate communications—so they’re timely, relevant, and aligned to where each author is in their journey.
Personalize Communications by Segment and Channel
Authors engage with your organization in many ways—and your communications should reflect those connections. Move beyond one-size-fits-all templates by tailoring messages based on each author’s relationship with your organization: whether they are first-time submitters, repeat contributors, lapsed authors, or highly engaged advocates.
Even basic segmentation—by submission history, topic area, or engagement level—can dramatically increase relevance and engagement. Over time, layered segmentation enables more personalized journeys, more effective re-engagement strategies, and stronger long-term author relationships.
Orchestrate Author Journeys with Purposeful Timing
With the right MarTech tools in place, you can automate and personalize communications across the author journey—delivering timely, relevant messages based on an author’s behavior, stage, or history. For instance, first-time authors can receive guidance about the review workflow, while returning authors get targeted outreach to resubmit or engage further. Modern platforms also support cross-channel orchestration, ensuring consistency between email, web, and other touchpoints.
Liberate Email: Move Beyond Peer Review Systems
Many author communications today are trapped inside rigid submission and peer review platforms—limiting formatting, branding, and flexibility. There’s a powerful opportunity to move communications out of system-generated templates and into modern, flexible email platforms that enable better design, stronger branding, clear calls to action, and personalization. By freeing communications from the constraints of submission systems, organizations can deliver clearer, more effective, and more professional messages that reflect their brand and better serve authors.
Measure, Learn, and Continuously Improve
Author communications shouldn’t be static. To make them more effective over time, organizations need to measure performance, analyze behavior, and iterate based on what they learn. MarTech makes this possible at scale—allowing you to test multiple versions of messages across different segments, monitor performance, and adapt in real time.
This includes testing formats, subject lines, message timing, and calls to action—but also means tracking broader engagement patterns and identifying where authors may be dropping off, getting confused, or disengaging. Don’t treat communications as “set it and forget it.” Use data to surface blind spots and validate assumptions.
The most effective organizations treat author communications as a living system—one that evolves continuously to be clearer, more useful, and more aligned with what authors need.
Pillar 4: Extending Capacity Through Technology and Generative AI
Thoughtfully used, generative AI can support faster development of author communications—if they are built on the right foundation. To be useful and brand-aligned, AI needs more than prompts. It needs structure, clear guardrails, and thoughtfully designed workflows. This pillar outlines how to prepare your organization to use AI effectively and responsibly to enhance communications capacity—without compromising quality or consistency. More capacity can create opportunities for more customization and experimentation across different channels.
Build Your Messaging Infrastructure
The first step is developing a messaging system that’s designed to support both human and AI use. A structured messaging library—like C&E’s Capsule Messaging Collection™— serves as the foundation. Your messaging library organizes core messages into modular components that can be mixed, matched, and adapted for different formats, audiences, and delivery channels. This gives both humans and AI a consistent base of approved language to work from—improving clarity, reducing duplication, and accelerating content development.
Define Brand Voice, Tone, and Editorial Guidance
In addition to a structured messaging library like C&E’s Capsule Messaging Collection™, AI systems require complementary inputs that reflect your organization’s unique voice and communication style. This includes tone and voice frameworks, editorial style guides, channel-specific norms, and usage policies. Together, these elements provide the guardrails that keep AI-generated content aligned with your brand—ensuring outputs are consistent, appropriate, and audience-focused.
Train and Equip Your Brand LLM
Once your messaging infrastructure and brand guidance are in place, you can begin training your generative AI tools—not through complex machine learning, but by feeding them structured, brand-approved content. Tools like ChatGPT, Jasper, or Claude can be fine-tuned or instructed using your messaging library, editorial guidance, tone frameworks, and channel norms. When these tools are set up with the right content and controls, they become a powerful extension of your communications team—able to support faster, more consistent content creation across formats and channels. From email campaigns and landing pages to audience-segmented outreach and real-time content adaptation, a well-equipped, brand-aligned LLM can help teams scale their efforts while staying firmly on-message.
Closing Thoughts: Your Brand Lives in Every Author Touchpoint
The way a journal publisher communicates with its authors is essential to the author’s experience throughout the publishing journey. Each touchpoint shapes how an author perceives your brand, understands what to expect, and decides whether to submit—for the first time or as a loyal author.
Author communications throughout the publication process are much more than notifications—they are personal. Every message signals your commitment to the individual author and their own professional reputation when publishing with you. Every call for papers, decision letter, and post-publication outreach shapes an author’s experience of your brand. When communications are clear, cohesive, and thoughtfully designed, they build trust, foster loyalty, and contribute directly to stronger submissions, increased referrals, and deeper community connections.
Improving author communications takes coordination, structure, and intention—but the payoff is real: better relationships, reduced friction, and a more resilient publishing pipeline.
How We Help
At C&E, we help organizations transform their author communications into a strategic advantage:
- We advance author communications by partnering with your team to audit, redesign, and build clear, cohesive messaging aligned to every stage of the author journey. Our communications professionals offer hands-on support—from strategy to content creation—to ensure messages reflect your brand, meet author needs, and strengthen engagement. See more: https://www.ce-strategy.com/services/author-experience/
- We help organizations build structured messaging systems—from foundational message libraries to advanced Capsule Messaging Collections™ designed to support personalization, multichannel reuse, and AI-powered content creation. Our team offers hands-on support to build your Capsule Messaging Collection or to develop a brand-aligned large language model (LLM) using your messaging, voice, and editorial frameworks. Prefer to build internally? We also provide training and tools to equip your team to confidently create, manage, and evolve these assets on their own. See more: https://www.ce-strategy.com/services/capsule-messaging-collection/
- We advise on MarTech strategy and adoption—helping organizations identify the right tools, assess skills needed for adoption, select platforms that match their goals, and support implementation to ensure the right messages reach the right authors at the right time, across channels and throughout the author lifecycle. See more: https://www.ce-strategy.com/services/marketing-technology/
