October 18 marked exactly four weeks until Where We Call Home officially enters the world! I know you’ve all been champing at the bit to get your hands on Josephine Woolington’s poetic nonfiction essays and Ramon Shiloh’s beautifully crafted illustrations. Some lucky Pacific Northwesterners who went to Josephine’s first book-related event already have signed copies. If you weren’t there but you are near Portland, don’t you worry—the book launch event is happening right in your backyard.

The Where We Call Home team has been hard at work generating fun, aesthetic graphics to get the word out about the book launch. You can check out our graphics on our social media, but they match the cover of the book seen in the image at the top of this blog post. Our posts and graphics adhere to the design kit that the Design manager and I made last term. Inside the design kit, we have a color palette, font options, design elements, and basic templates for making social media posts. (Because yes, we do have to make social media posts. It’s the best way to reach an audience to promote our books.) If you go to Ooligan’s Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, you’ll see that the Where We Call Home posts all have generally the same feel to them. If you see blue-gray or pale purple balanced with eye-catching text and images, then you know you’re seeing a post about our book.

Along with getting the word out via social media, Ooligan has also been working on pumping out the last of the review requests. We are planning on reaching out to some pretty cool partners, and I can’t wait to send those requests out once they clear the necessary channels inside the press. And Ooligan hasn’t been the only one reaching out; Josephine has been a rockstar about making connections and booking events for herself. She had the one I mentioned above, and after the book launch she has several more lined up for the rest of the year and even one in 2023 already. This is an excellent example for any author working with any press: be your own best advocate. A good press will be there to support you in your endeavors. It’s like one of my editing professors once said: “The author is the mother. We’re the midwives helping to birth the book into the world.”

So once Where We Call Home is “birthed,” what’s next? For this title, we will enter the post-launch phase, meaning that we will keep promoting the book and Josephine’s events. In addition, the team will be starting on a new manuscript from the beginning of the publication process. This mystery manuscript has not been announced yet, so I can’t give you much of a hint as to what it’s going to be. All I can tell you is that after mid-November, my team will be focused on generating inward-facing documents like the marketing plan. I’m going to miss reaching out to the public and hearing such great things about the book, but that will be for posterity to experience. My team and I will lay a great foundation for the next project manager who will take over for me in spring.

Before that, though, we are so excited to share Where We Call Home with you. Join us on November 15 at Powell’s Books in Portland to welcome the book into the world!