Greetings, dear reader, and welcome to Ooligan’s first Manager Monday blog post! Manager Monday is a brand-spankin’-new series on the Ooligan blog that will be released every other Monday, beginning around the middle of each term. It will showcase the specialized expertise and general industry wisdom of a manager from each of Ooligan’s departments: acquisitions, editing, marketing, digital, design, social media, and operations. All second-year students with backgrounds in their respective departments, these managers represent the apex of Ooligan’s passion for a growing knowledge of the book publishing industry, and we are delighted to lend our voices to these topics. These posts will also give readers an insider’s look at the workings of each department—à la what Start to Finish posts do for Ooligan book projects—as the managers tackle challenges unique to their own department, same as they will in professional, post-Ooligan workplaces.

As it was my idea to pitch this new series in the first place, it only makes sense that I, your friendly neighborhood social media manager, would be the one to kick us off. Come along, will you?

As much as I wish I could begin this series with my musings on the fascinating enigma that is social media in book publishing, it seems more prudent that I should, instead, bring all of you into the fold and let you know about the myriad changes that Ooligan’s social media department is currently experiencing. Bear with us; all of these changes are being carried out with you, the reader, in mind.

• First, the posting schedule for the Ooligan blog is changing to three posts per week instead of two, now running on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. As a student-run press that experiences a new batch of bright individuals every year, all of whom transmit their wealth of knowledge and opinions into literary goodness for the blog, I wanted to be sure that no post was getting left behind. With a twice-per-week schedule, many students were seeing their posts lose all relevance and timeliness, and because the blog typically has a surplus of content ready to be posted, this seemed the most sensible action to deal with the issue and also benefit our readership at the same time. More posts, more often. Hooray!
• Start to Finish, Ooligan’s initiative to show the internal development of our in-process titles, will now be posting updates monthly to our blog. These posts will still be written by each book’s project manager and will go up Monday thru Friday on the last week of every month. Honestly, publishing is a slow process, perhaps one of the slowest processes in the business world, and for good reason. Our project managers want to be sure they are posting updates that are consistently meaningful and exciting, and this new schedule will allow them to do just that.
• Last week, Eliot Treichel, author of Ooligan’s newest title A Series of Small Maneuvers, released three posts on our blog as a guest blogger, and we loved it so much that we didn’t want it to end. So, we have decided to ask a new author each term to take over our blog for one week—the only requirement being that they write about, well, whatever they want. Our authors—former, current, and future alike—are our most talented and beloved partners, and we can’t wait for them to show off their writing chops here on our blog.
• Lastly, Ooligan will be introducing a new subscription service for our blog in the next couple of months. As it stands, our current system demands that our readers commit our posting schedule to memory and check the website accordingly or keep their eyes peeled for the links to be posted on our Facebook and Twitter feeds. While we absolutely encourage stalking us on social media, we want to make it all the more easy for our readers to stay up-to-date on our excellent blog content. We will be rolling out this service in the near future and will notify everyone via our social media platforms. Trust me, you’ll want to subscribe—there will be some nifty giveaways in it for you.

It is our hope as a press, and my personal endeavor as social media manager, to ensure that Ooligan’s online presence is an authentic and engaging one that fosters a sense of community and encourages participation among our fans, partners, and readers. These changes are just a few of the things we are doing as a press to make this happen, but we also recognize our audience’s agency and welcome your input. What would you like to see out of our social media presence, and how would you like to get involved in helping Ooligan publish the best books our beloved Pacific Northwest has to offer? Let us know in the comments below this post! We’d love to hear from you!