Nothing heralds the end of summer for a publishing student quite like the delivery of a much-anticipated manuscript from your client right on the eve of the first day of fall term. After a long summer of studying our production schedule and preparing the infrastructure for the projects to come, the team working on Memories Flow in Our Veins: Forty Years of Women’s Writing from CALYX was ready to jump in on some of the most exciting early steps in the life of a book: copyediting, proofreading, and preliminary design. So much to do! Here’s what we’ve been up to:

Memories is a unique anthology project for Ooligan in many ways, perhaps most notably in that our client is not an individual author or editor but rather a fellow publisher. The poetry and fiction collected for the anthology have all been printed previously by CALYX Press during their esteemed forty years in the publishing industry, and many of the contributing authors boast writing careers that are just as long and venerable. It’s an incredibly rare opportunity for Ooligan Press, and the needs of this special project have required us to be flexible in our approach to many established steps of book production that Ooligan students typically expect. This is perhaps most pronounced in our approach to the editing process for this project.

Though it is fairly standard for Ooligan Press manuscripts to undergo at least one or two developmental edits, we took the Memories manuscript directly into copyediting. About 80 percent of the book is reprinted work that has already been developed by CALYX’s editors through the years, and the purpose of the project is to showcase the CALYX legacy through their own work; thus, it is our goal to stay as true to each piece as possible. The lighter editing responsibility for Ooligan has meant that more new students on the team have been able to contribute to the editing process, getting their first hands-on experience copyediting and proofreading a real manuscript.

With CALYX heading up the effort to negotiate reprinting permissions on behalf of the project, the finer details about which authors and pieces would be included were a bit of a mystery for Ooligan—until now. With manuscript in hand, the team was quick to take a full assessment of the incredible roll call of contributors and pieces and begin to make appropriate updates to our marketing plans, tipsheet, collateral, and front cover. And just in time, too—the Memories team will be moving on to sales kits next, followed quickly by XML tagging, proofreading, and recruiting an interior designer from the ranks of our skilled peers at Ooligan Press.