Perhaps you’re wondering, now that we’ve successfully launched Memories Flow in Our Veins and tracked its production from start to finish in this blog series, what does the “finish” really look like for an Ooligan Press title? The answer is complex, and it is best answered with another question: when your title is ostensibly finished, what do you do next?

Once Memories was released, the project team made a very familiar return to a document that we’ve used throughout production as a guide to our goals and a map to achieve them: our marketing plan. At the suggestion of Ooligan’s marketing lead, our team took a quick post-publication reassessment of our marketing plan and some of our early marketing brainstorms to seek out those great ideas that had yet to be implemented and what marketing strategies might be upcycled in fresh ways for our sell-through plan.

In tandem with our publicity strategies already underway—including our feminist trivia launch event in Portland, our continued efforts to spread our digital marketing artifacts to reach readers seeking out more women for their bookshelves, and our work to research and pitch Memories as the fresh and insightful women’s lit resource we know it to be for academic markets—we’re continually working to prepare for new opportunities to publicize our title. Even as we gear up to take on the next project acquired by Ooligan Press later on the spring, our team is in constant motion to make sure that all our strategies for Memories are in place and ready to be unrolled over the coming weeks and months.

What do you do when your book is finished? You hop on that sell-through plan your team has created and ride the publicity long-tail all the way to shore; and if you can keep running from there, you keep running right into the backlist. As we’re taught in our Business of Book Publishing course: always sell your backlist!