As you may have read in our last blog post, there have been changes afoot at Ooligan Press—including the invention and rebranding of our team, Outreach and Project Development. Now that we’ve had a term to establish how our team runs, we’d love to share more with you. While we can’t tell you specific details about our projects in development, we can tell you more about us.
A large part of our first term in existence as a team consisted of developing protocols for the members to come. Since Ooligan has never had a project development team before, we had to start from scratch in terms of how many projects we wanted to take on, how to incorporate both aspects of our team in weekly assignments, and how to balance the sheer amount of work that has to be done to help create books and plan a conference at the same time. Our first step? Create a manual for future managers to learn from and follow.
In the nine years Write to Publish has been run by Ooligan Press, previous project managers have kept an annually updated manual detailing the previous years. Triumphs and challenges were meticulously recorded side-by-side, and there’s a breadth of information and advice passed down through those pages. We took that text and incorporated it into a new manual with a section for project development and other outreach opportunities. At the beginning of our new manual, we created a list of goals and intentions for the team. While this manual is a living document and still in development, it’s now full of rules and suggestions for the managers to come.
After creating our new manual, it was time to get to work. We have a conference to plan and projects to develop, after all—and with the beginning of the summer term, our projects have become more labor-intensive as our authors begin to produce material for us to review. As of July, we have communicated with multiple authors about potential future projects, and we have three projects in development. We’re knee-deep in plans for Write to Publish, and can’t wait to share more details about our tenth anniversary conference in our posts to come. We’re currently in the process of solidifying a venue and picking the perfect keynote speaker to best represent our theme: A Journey Through Publishing. We hope to use this theme to further educate curious attendees about the publishing industry and highlight some of the magic it takes to bring a book from a bright idea to a bookshelf.
We’ve just chosen a design aesthetic for the conference that will be developed further, and we’re working on options to revamp our team’s logo—while we love our typewriter, we’re open to see how the students of Ooligan can help best convey the idea of our new team. There’s a lot to talk about when a term goes by between public updates, and only so much can fit into one post. Suffice it to say that we’ve made good progress with our team this term, and we can’t wait to see how the rest of the year treats us!