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How Authors Can Help Market Their Book

Leave a comment June 21, 2023 Kelly Zatlin

The process of getting your book published with Ooligan Press can feel both exciting and nerve wracking in equal measures. To demystify some of the process and help our authors understand what the process will look like, let’s talk about what happens after you’ve received the great news that Ooligan Press has acquired your project. So what’s next?

After your manuscript has been accepted by Ooligan, following our democratic pitch process, your first point of contact is with the two Acquisitions managers. In the following weeks after the contract negotiations have completed with the publisher, you work with the Acquisitions managers in the first stages of editing your book. At this stage, you’ll also be filling out Ooligan’s author questionnaire, which will be an incredibly useful tool when it comes to implementing the marketing strategy for your book. Depending on the scope of your project, you may do two rounds of developmental revisions before sending your completed work back to the Acquisitions managers to review.

Once the hand-off from Acquisitions is made following your revisions, your first point of contact will primarily be with your project manager (PM). Your PM has a team at their disposal to assist from the beginning stages of the production cycle, all the way to until its publication. For example, your PM will track down potential contacts that may be willing to write a blurb or a review of your book. At this stage, it’s very helpful to share any ideas that you may have with regards to said contacts, such as other writer friends or people with a social media presence. Additionally, you’re free to share with your PM your ideas about the marketing strategy for your book. If that sounds scary, fear not, and read on!

So, how do you become your own book’s best advocate? While your PM and book team are here to help you, it definitely doesn’t hurt to be present in your book’s marketing strategy. And while it helps to have a platform established for you to utilize, it’s perfectly alright if you don’t. What if you aren’t comfortable with social media? Like anything else, flexing your social media skills takes practice, and it’s a skill that can help you in the long run. To get some ideas, do some light research on some of your favorite books and see what their marketing copy looks like. What about their authors? What do their social media profiles look like? Start small and work your way up to feeling comfortable posting. Aim to have a balance between posts related to your book and everything else.

As Ooligan gears up to prepare your book for publication, so should you be gearing up on social media to get the word out about your book. Make sure to engage your audience in any way you can, whether it’s by striking up a conversation or posting about interesting topics that relate to your book.

Another great tip is to look to your immediate community. You don’t want to just be shouting in an oversaturated market. Your local community is a great place to find people to support you. One way is to look into local writer groups or other community groups specific to your area. If you’ve got a book about great hiking spots around Portland, for example, you’d search out relevant groups that could represent your target audience. It’s good to brainstorm at this point, and if you get stuck, your PM is a good resource for coming up with some ideas of who to reach out to.

You can also shout out other authors. For instance, you can promote other authors, who in turn will show appreciation for your buzz by promoting your book right back. That way, you’re also building a network of other authors who can help you get connected to other bookish people, or people who would be interested in your book that might not otherwise hear about it.

Lastly, make sure you are genuine. Insincerity can be sniffed out from a mile away, and you know your book better than anyone. Don’t doubt your own expertise and get out there! Don’t forget to have fun along the way, too. Publishing a book is an exciting process, and you almost have your book in your hands!

black and white photo of a desk with laptop, pens, comic images on paper, books about comics editing

What Have I Done: Acquiring Ooligan’s First Comic Book

1 Comment June 2, 2023 Alena Rivas

I was asked recently how I felt having acquired Ooligan Press’ first comic book. I meant to say excited or hopeful, or perhaps confident. What came out of my mouth surprised me and elicited laughter from the roomful of editors I was addressing. “I’m terrified,” I answered. And it was the honest to goodness truth.

In theory, bringing Ooligan into the world of comics makes perfect sense. Portland has a thriving comics community with several well-known, successful publishers based here. Many of our alums have gone on to work for these houses. Portland State University has a Comics Studies program. And above all, we are a learning press. Producing a comic presents tremendous learning opportunities to supplement the skills we’ve gained producing books for trade publication, particularly in the editing, digital, and design departments. So then why am I terrified? I’m glad you asked.

When people learn about what we’re doing, entering the world of comics with no experience, with only logical reasoning and a sincere desire to learn spurring us on, I generally get two reactions: enthusiastic delight or doubtful dissuasion. Either way, you’re facing something unsettling. Those who love comics and think it’s great for us to infiltrate this industry could wind up disappointed. And those who think we should stick to what we know because we’re going to fall flat on our faces going down this hostile road could wind up being right! For transparency’s sake, and to reassure our supporters and, maybe not silence, but soften our critics, let me share with you how seriously we are taking this.

Before the pitch, I consulted with our publisher and the director of the publishing program, and together, we consulted with the director of the Comics Studies program, Dr. Susan Kirtley. She provided guidance and resources and agreed that this project would be a great educational opportunity for our departments to work collaboratively. I also consulted with an editor at Dark Horse, who graduated from the publishing program a few years ago, for my first lesson on comics editing. It became apparent after speaking with them and a few other experts that I was in over my head! All of these experts, while incredibly supportive, warned of the dire consequences of not doing this right. Comics makers and readers are passionate about the craft and will take you to task when you get it wrong. But that simply meant I had a lot to learn and little time to learn it, so I got right to work despite the fear creeping in.

During and after acquisition, we have been working with the author, Henry L. Miller, to raise funds to pay for the intensive illustration work (it costs a lot of money). Artist Jeff Parker will be illustrating this project, and he is an incredibly skilled, experienced professional, who is lovely to work with. He didn’t shame me or make me feel bad for being new to comics, or not knowing the difference between a word balloon (it’s balloon, not bubble) and a caption box. His willingness and ability to work with a first time author and an amateur comics editor is the only reason we were able to take on this new medium as a press.

Aside from reading a bunch of comics and books about comics, I’m also taking the Comics Editing course at PSU, taught this term by comics editor extraordinaire, Shelly Bond, who literally wrote the book on the subject. Not only have I learned about the rules, about word balloons and caption boxes, panels, tiers, and gutters, shots and angles, roughs, pencillers, letterers, inkers, and all the rest; I’ve also learned about creating harmony, among your creative team as well as on the page.

What does this all mean for Ooligan’s first foray into comics? Well, I’ll be passing along what I’ve learned to the person taking over the editorial role after I graduate in June. And continued collaboration with the Comics Studies program, particularly the editing course, will be highly encouraged if the press doesn’t want this first comic to be our last. After all, there’s a changing of the guard every year. Thankfully many students are participating in both programs just to be part of this project, which is a promising sign!

So what have I done acquiring Ooligan’s first comic? I can honestly say I have done my best.

Inside Ooligan Press: The Beginning Stages of a Manuscript with Ooligan

Leave a comment February 10, 2023 Jackie Krantz

The dust has settled. The Where We Call Home launch party went off without a hitch (unless you consider a random man offering Ramon, the illustrator, some homemade chocolate drink in the middle of the book talk a “hitch”). Josephine and Ramon continue to participate in book events and sell the book. I am a proud project manager.

Now we get to do the whole book production process all over again!

My project team is sticking to the nonfiction category, but we’re moving away from the natural sciences; our next manuscript, A Family, Maybe, is a memoir by Lane Igoudin about his and his husband’s struggle to form a family in the mid-2000s. It’s got drama. It’s got humor. It’s got love. My team and I are having a great time working on it.

Much has been happening this term for A Family, Maybe. The acquisitions team wrapped up the developmental edit, we’re working on the copyedit now, and we are about to start on the cover design. For my team specifically, the main focus this term has been on generating the inward-facing documents that will help us market the book. The two main documents that we’ve had our hands on so far are the persona exercise and the marketing plan. The persona exercise is an activity that my team and I did together to make up characters who we think would be interested in the book. We make up a primary audience member and secondary audience member from the ground up, identifying everything from their demographics to their family lives to their favorite foods. Being familiar with these characters’ lives helps us figure out how they would find A Family, Maybe. Would they see posts about it on social media? Would people in their lives recommend it? Would they purposely, directly seek it out?

The marketing plan is similar in the sense that we are creating the backbone of the manuscript. We include the “demographics” of the book (title, ISBN, BISAC codes, etc.) along with comparative titles, hook, back cover copy, and much more. This document serves as the foundation from which all subsequent documents stem. Soon it will be finalized, and then we’ll be moving onto generating a contact sheet. Once we reach that stage, I’ll have come full circle as a member of Ooligan; when I joined the press back in January 2022, the team I was on was in the contact stage.

It’s bittersweet, the thought that I’ve almost arrived at the same place that I started. Professionally, I’ve come so far in the past year. I have so many invaluable skills and experiences that I will take with me into my career. Yet my time at Ooligan is approaching its end. I’ll be training up a new manager in spring who will take over my role when I graduate in June. Although I am looking forward to imparting my knowledge to my successor, I’m finally starting to feel like I’ve really got the hang of this whole Ooligan thing.

But so it goes. I’m going to give my last few months, and the A Family, Maybe manuscript, my all, and I can’t wait to help it be the best it can be. There are some strong contenders for project manager after me, and I know that the next cohort is going to do a fantastic job!

Inside Ooligan Press: Your Manuscript is Accepted! Now What?

Leave a comment January 20, 2023 Alena Rivas

Note: This is part of the blog series “Inside Ooligan Press”, about how we take a manuscript from an idea to a professionally published book.

So, you wrote a killer query letter and submitted a proper proposal. You won over Acquisitions and we pitched your project to the press successfully, then we offered to publish your book: now what? For the sake of transparency and in an effort to demystify this crazy little thing called publishing, I humbly offer you an inside look at what you can expect when working with Ooligan Press.

Once you get notified that our pitch was successful, we enter into the contract negotiation phase of the process. We are a small, not-for-profit press that generally cannot offer author advances. However, authors are compensated for their work, receiving industry standard royalty rates for trade paperbacks based on cover price and units sold, paid out biannually after publication. The Publisher and author negotiate terms of the contract including dates and deadlines for revisions, the final manuscript and any additional materials, and publication, among other things. This process generally takes about two weeks, give or take, during which time it is encouraged that the author has a trustworthy individual review the contract with them.

Once the contract is signed, we will typically go straight to work with a light or heavy developmental edit, determined by the Acquisitions Editors when we evaluate your manuscript. As a teaching press, we accept manuscripts that are strong and show immense promise, but that offer learning opportunities for the members of the press. This includes the need for editorial work. Expect to do revisions! The Acquisitions Editors lead a team of editors in reading and analyzing your manuscript to determine what is working and what needs work based on our knowledge and experience. We craft an editorial letter full of our critiques, compliments, and suggestions for revision and deliver it to the author for review. We follow up with a phone call or video chat to discuss the letter if the author feels it would be beneficial to do so. The DE process takes about a month, sometimes more. Then the author gets to work on revisions, for which they also get about a month to complete, though timelines may vary based on the project.

During development, your title may change. Sometimes it is necessary to tweak the title, or change it altogether, but not always. Acquisitions Editors must consider best practices for title generation and consider whether yours is appropriate for the genre and market, the literal and connotative meaning of the words or phrases used, and whether it encapsulates or represents the content found within the book. If we feel a change is necessary, we provide the author some alternative titles to consider and deliver them with the editorial letter. While the author’s input is taken into account, the final title is decided upon by the editors.

While we are hard at work developmentally editing your manuscript, you will be completing Ooligan’s Author Questionnaire: a document that will be used by all departments to produce and promote your book. While this questionnaire is lengthy and can feel slightly invasive, the author can of course choose which questions they will and will not answer depending on their comfort level.

Upon delivery of the revised manuscript and questionnaire, the author is then introduced to their Project Manager: the person who will see the project through the rest of the way. They are responsible for keeping the production of your book on track and are your primary point of contact for questions and concerns after acquisition and development.

Your manuscript will undergo copyediting by a team of editors, led by Ooligan’s Managing Editor. Depending on the needs of your manuscript, this may be a light, medium, or heavy copyedit. We use The Chicago Manual of Style as our primary style guide. This process may take one to two months depending on the time of year and the current stages our other titles are in. The author then receives the edited manuscript and reviews and implements the editorial suggestions, for which they typically get a month to complete.

While these editorial processes take place, your book’s dedicated project team, led by your Project Manager, has already begun their work crafting the sales hook, back cover copy, and so much more. They work with the managers of each department, Acquisitions, Editing, DEI, Digital, Design, Marketing, Publicity, and Social Media, to create a master plan to produce a quality book and launch it into the world. But wait, there’s more.

Be sure to check out future installments of this blog for a look at more stages of the production and promotion process at Ooligan Press!

What’s in a Proper (Book) Proposal?

Leave a comment January 13, 2023 Alena Rivas

Note: This is part of the blog series “Inside Ooligan Press”, about how we take a manuscript from an idea to a professionally published book.

So, you wrote a killer query letter and we requested a proposal package, but what does that mean? Before you go and resubmit the same query letter and call it your proposal (as MANY have done) think again!

The proposal package consists of two crucial items, submitted together on our Submittable page. They are your cover letter and your full manuscript, but let’s break it down even further. If you followed our directions with your query, you only sent us the first ten pages of your manuscript. When we request a proposal package, this is your invitation to submit the full manuscript—you got a full read request. Go you! Submit the most up-to-date, most polished version of your manuscript, preferably in a Word document.

The how and why of the cover letter are a little more complex. With your query, you provided just enough to get us interested in reading your full manuscript. With your cover letter, you are trying to convince us that you and your book are the right fit for our press, for our mission, and for our reach. You’ll want to help us envision the future for your book and provide pertinent details about how to best present it to the world—and how you plan to participate in that presentation if we publish it.

Your proposal cover letter can be a beautifully designed document organized into sections and contain striking headings, images, and mock-ups of the cover, or it can be a bunch of words on a page. While a stylized document certainly helps us envision your book and its potential future more readily, it is not required, and words alone will suffice. Just be sure to include the words we’re looking for.

First up is the content warning. This means letting us know if there is anything in your manuscript that may be triggering to a reader. Triggers vary, but the most common ones include self-harm, suicide, sexual assault, graphic violence, substance abuse, and disordered eating. If you are unsure whether something you’ve written may be a trigger, err on the side of caution and warn us. Do note that this warning will not prevent your manuscript from being read and considered: it simply ensures that the right person will be reading and evaluating it (the right person being an editor to whom the content will not cause mental or emotional harm).

The rest of your letter should include a synopsis of your book, the projected page count, a table of contents if appropriate, the genre and intended audience, comp titles, marketing ideas, and any connections or platforms you have that may be utilized for marketing and promotion purposes. If your query letter did not contain an author bio written in the third-person detailing your pertinent background information, include that here as well. Yes, this requires a little effort, but there is a reason for it, I promise.

Once the Managing Acquisitions Editors decide yours is The One, we still have to pitch your manuscript to the entire press before voting to accept or reject the project. We must convince them to see what we see, that there is potential for a successful collaboration with you and your book. We do this with a pitch presentation, which contains the information from your cover letter, along with our own in-depth market research guided by our expertise in the publishing industry. We set it to music and a little light choreography. That last bit is not true. But we do have to make a strong case for why we should publish this book and be convincing in its presentation: a solid informational foundation and an author who understands their book, has realistic expectations, and is willing to work alongside us to get the job done can make or break our case—and it is your cover letter that reveals all of this to us.

Every manuscript for which we request a proposal package gets thorough, careful consideration. But even with an excellent manuscript, the author’s work is not done. You’ve got to convince us that you and your book are the right fit for us, that you are willing to do what is asked of you and more—and that begins with creating a proper proposal.

Let’s Hear It For The Slush Pile!

Leave a comment December 9, 2022 Brenna Ebner

One of the first terms I learned in editing and publishing was “slush pile.” This is standardly how the industry refers to their collections of unread manuscripts that they acquire through open and often unsolicited and unagented submissions. Despite being a large part of the acquisitions process of publishing, the slush pile has a rather poor reputation.

To begin with, the name is rather disparaging. Slush isn’t typically glamorous. It’s mushy and gray. The term may have originated from something quite similar. According to the only source I could find on the history of the slush pile, The Awl, manuscripts were manually submitted, often delivered through office transoms when the press was closed, creating a literal pile in their doorway very similar to mounds of snow.

Another possibility is how it is synonymous with “slush funds” in that there is money stashed away and used when needed, similar to these manuscripts waiting to be used. Slush fund also derives from another version of slush that refers to the extra money sailors made from ships selling their leftover cooking fat and oil. Similarly, these are extra manuscripts that presses can use to bring in extra funds as well.

Finally, the third possibility of slush pile origins comes from a 1907 Washington Post article accusing J. H. Seward & Co. of fraudulently obtaining higher refunds for their waste fruit or slush by adding water and sawdust so that the pile would weigh more and they would be further compensated. With the way the article used slush to infer sifting and mining, it’s a strong possibility this is where the term originated.

Because it is expected that one will find so many pieces to reject, the slush pile is seen as tedious and time consuming. So, this job is commonly tasked to interns and editorial assistants—those on the lower rungs of the ladder. Between the name, the seemingly monotonous work itself, and the lower ranking of those expected to work on the slush pile, this step in the acquisitions process is easily looked down upon. It holds little to no glimmers of admiration.

But that’s not true at all. In my experience, everyone in the press works on the slush pile, and as a manuscript is accepted, other editors will read it to confirm this piece fits the press well. It’s an important process in which managing editors and the editor-in-chief get involved for the sake of not only the press but the authors as well.

Acceptances and rejections are taken very seriously, and oftentimes rejections come for numerous other reasons. It may not fit that specific publisher’s focus, theme, genres, length, or timeline for publishing and is passed on, but that doesn’t reflect the author or their work. Slush piles are full of fascinating, creative, quality work.

Editors take submissions seriously because we understand the importance of this piece to the writer. Time, energy, care, tears, and sometimes the author’s own personal money have gone into these pieces. We understand that in sharing your work with us you are being vulnerable and trusting us with your piece. And as a publisher, we would be nowhere without you taking that risk to be open with us and sharing something so personal so that we may find it, admire it, and help you send it out into the world for others to enjoy as well.

The slush pile is an exchange and one that is very sensitive and private. Blind reads (reading the manuscript with no information about the name, age, sex, race, gender, etc. of the author unless directly relevant) are often done on submissions to deter bias in the editors and keep reading as fair as possible because everyone deserves a chance at being published. We let your hard work speak for itself.

With all the caution and consideration editors put into going through their slush pile, it shouldn’t have the reputation of being lesser in comparison to the other work done within a press. It is an imperative step that begins a book’s lifecycle and puts authors in vulnerable positions. There’s so much weight held in the slush pile, and for me personally, it is my favorite step for all these reasons. To see the vastness of creativity from so many and then to see their courage in sharing it with us specifically is beautiful. I hope going forward more people can admire the slush pile the same way I do.

Acquisitions

Acknowledgements