An Excerpt from Event Recap: Winter Student Research Showcase on DePaul’s WRD Blog:

“Brittany Griffiths is the senior manager of operations at Brown Books Publishing Group. She graduated last autumn, after earning her BA in WRD as a fully online student living in Texas. Her research focuses on hybrid publishing: an alternative option to the more well-known options of traditional and independent publishing. It requires authors to invest more at the outset, but it lets authors keep a higher amount of the proceeds than a traditional publisher would.

In her research project, supported by a Summer Undergraduate Research Grant (SURG) in 2025, Brittany performed a rhetorical analysis aimed at determining how this publishing method is perceived by different people in the publishing industry, and why those perceptions exist. Through qualitative interviews with industry professionals and a digital ethnography of spaces where authors and publishers are connecting (like Reddit and Instagram), Brittany found that traditional publishers do not seem to view hybrid publishing negatively, but that authors often do.”