Ooligan Press is very excited to announce our newest title, tentatively called The French Sci-Fi Project, publishing in Spring 2024! This book will be a collection of translated French science fiction short stories. These stories cover many topics ranging from language and technology to utopia and health in futuristic contexts.

We are thrilled to be working with
Dr. Annabelle Dolidon for this project. Dr. Annabelle Dolidon is a professor of French at Portland State University. She teaches French language classes as well as literature seminars and courses on film and comics. She specializes in post-WWII novels and short stories and has a special interest in science fiction. She has published articles on the genre in academic journals and an open-source textbook for all to use, available on PDXScholar, the open educational resources platform of the university. She has also published three other textbooks for the French classroom.

The goal of this project is to introduce the French science fiction genre to English readers and foster discussion. Each of the stories will feature an introduction by Dr. Dolidon and discussion questions to accompany the story and help guide conversation around the topic.

This project is Ooligan’s first translated anthology title, which makes it extra special and allows the press to learn additional skills. Our Rights department has been working closely with French publishers and authors to acquire the rights to the stories and negotiate their terms. At this point, we are in the early stages and still working on acquiring rights to the remaining stories and going through the process of contracts. The translation process for the titles we have acquired is currently taking place as well.

My name is Kyndall Tiller, and I am the current project manager. We have a fantastic team currently working hard on this project! Over the summer our team started working on the beginning marketing stages. We did a lot of market research, which is crucial since science fiction is not a genre that Ooligan works with a lot. In our research, we created personas to best identify who the target audience for this book will be. We also looked at comparative titles and their place in the market, along with their marketing strategies. During the fall term, the team focused on the marketing plan and continued to build our contact list. Some of the marketing aspects we’ve been working on are key selling points, keywords, and brainstorming marketing strategy. Because of how unique this project is, this process has been really interesting and allows for a lot of creativity from the team. We are also working on a fundraising campaign to raise money for the rights and translation costs, so keep a look out for that!

This project is so fun because it is something completely new to the press. We have a longer timeline than the past few titles have had, which is going to give us the opportunity to experiment with some really cool marketing and publicity ideas. It will be a learning process for everyone involved and allows students to work with a new genre and translations. Stay tuned for more updates on this exciting project!