With our most recent audiobook title Faultland by Suzy Vitelllo, Oolies are now in charge of the entire production process. This is an exciting opportunity for students to get hands-on experience with a vital part of the audiobook production process. Although it may sound daunting, editing audio is an incredibly satisfying process and a marketable skill that students can add to their growing repertoire of qualifications.
Sometimes a book moves through its journey from acquisition to publication quicker than the average two-year timeline, and in the case of our Multnomah County Library Writers Project titles, like the forthcoming The Blue Line Letters, we are on an expedited one-year publication cycle. As the book’s project manager, I’ll take you through what I have been working on with the project team in the first several months of its publication process and give you a glimpse into what comes next.
When I started managing the rights department at Ooligan Press about a year ago, I took on one of our first major projects: acquiring the rights to nine different French science fiction short stories for an anthology. It was an ambitious enterprise, but the previous managers did all of the legwork for setting it up. They found a French professor at our university who already had the idea for the anthology and agreed to translate (with the help of a few others); all that was left to do was find the owners of the rights to each story and acquire them for the anthology.
What is it like to read and evaluate manuscripts from real authors? What is the best way to give authors feedback on their work in order to bring it one step closer to publication? How do you know if a story is the right one for our press to publish? These are just a few of the many questions I had when I became an acquisitions assistant for Ooligan Press.
Our project teams, managers, and department leads have spent the last 12-24 months shepherding your book through all the critical processes necessary to turn a manuscript into the product readers pick up off the shelf. The book has been edited, proofread, designed, marketed, posted about on social media, and submitted for awards. What could possibly be left? Welcome to the hidden final step of publishing a book: the archive!
At Ooligan Press, we have a set of best practices for supporting our authors and their books with social media channels. As part of the “Inside Ooligan” series, here’s a look at what the Ooligan Press Social Media Manager does for our books in production.
Like many Oolies before me, when I first started the graduate program in Book Publishing at Portland State University, I thought I would be most interested in editorial. In fact, besides being an editor, I didn’t really know anything about the other jobs that existed in the publishing industry. I had a lot to learn!
Take a peek inside Ooligan at our audiobook scripting process.
People often wonder why exactly it takes so long to publish a book. Well, here’s a peek inside our process at Ooligan Press.
We read content all the time that doesn’t align to any style guide at all and title formatting is based on what the author may vaguely remember from high school. This guide will help clear up some of that confusion and create a document that you can refer back to whenever you come across this problem in your own writing or editing.