Wired headphones connected to an Iphone on a table.

Alternatives to Audible

Leave a comment July 17, 2023 Savannah Lyda

Over the last few years my appreciation for audiobooks has increased exponentially, but I noticed that I only use one source to get my audiobooks and that source is Audible. Audible offers a monthly subscription, between $7.95 and $22.95, along with a credit system for purchasing certain titles. The lower fee allows for access to the Plus catalog only and the higher fees include an allotment of credits. The Plus catalog is a selection of titles that do not require a credit to listen. Any title outside of the Plus catalog is one credit. If you run out of credits there’s no need to panic, you can always buy three more in the app for $28.68 or $35.88 depending on your membership status.

While I’ve enjoyed Audible, I can’t help but feel I’ve fallen into the trap of a familiar app. There must be more out there. So, I decided to look into other audiobook sources to expand my library, and potentially, save some money.

Audiobooks.com is a monthly subscription, $14.95, with a credit system. Each book is worth one credit and you can purchase more credits if you run out. They also have an option to join a “book club” for a credit per month. The book club is a curated list of titles that you can listen to unlimitedly for thirty days. Members enjoy the VIP catalog, a monthly selection of titles that you select one free audiobook from. Audiobooks.com offers sales on audiobooks that are available to members and non members alike.

Downpour is a monthly subscription, $12.99, with a credit system. Each book is worth one credit and additional credits are also $12.99. Downpour only offers one membership plan in an effort to cut down on confusion and make using them easier.

Libro.fm is a monthly subscription, $14.99, with a credit system. Like the others it is one credit per book and you can purchase more credits if needed. Unlike the others, libro.fm does credit bundles starting at two for $30 and ending at twenty-four for $360. You can also get thirty percent off “à la carte” purchases of audiobooks. When you set up your account, you choose a local bookstore to support and a portion of the proceeds will go to them!

Chirp is not a monthly subscription and they don’t mess around with credits. Chirp offers discounted audiobooks that you can download to your device or stream on their app. You only pay for the audiobook and you only sign up for the emails to let you know the deals.

Librivox is not a monthly subscription. Librivox only has public domain audiobooks and the narrators are volunteers. Which means all the audiobooks are free! Their catalog is not as robust as the others and does not offer contemporary titles but it is worth looking into.

Libby lets you check out audiobooks from your local library (if they use OverDrive). It is free to use but, like a library book, you are only borrowing your audiobook and have a limited time to listen.

You can also purchase audiobooks directly to your device at the Apple Store or Google Play.

This is a small list of audiobook sources outside of Audible but it does show that they are out there and are worth looking into!

Creating a Book Branding Design Guide: Why and How

Leave a comment April 14, 2023 Elaine Schumacher

A section of Amazon book pages has been catching my eye lately. Authors and publishers have recently been getting creative with the “From the Publisher” section—taking advantage of the space to post some beautifully designed blurbs and headlines.

When I first noticed it, I immediately thought about how similarly designed blurbs would look in a social media campaign, or how elements from the designs could cohere a book’s tipsheets, press release, and other materials. As it happens, other managers at Ooligan had been thinking similarly.

At Ooligan, everyone is a designer, editor, proofreader, marketer, and publicity specialist. So, our efforts, while always noble, are not always cohesive and streamlined. Some book project teams have had beautifully designed social media campaigns (Short, Vigorous Roots and Court of Venom
are recent examples), others have had lovely designed tipsheets, press releases, and other marketing and publicity materials. But it varies, depending on the design interest and experience of each team. How can the design department support all project teams and cohere their design efforts?

A book branding design guide! Each book project team could use a design guide to help make each title’s marketing and publicity efforts easily recognizable, to help define and convey each book’s voice, and to help designers learn to work with design principles and implement brand guidelines—useful skills to have beyond our time at Ooligan.

I have worked with brand guides before in other organizations, dutifully following the guidelines for typography, color, logos, and aspect ratios. But I had never built one and wasn’t sure where to begin. Book marketing is about making people aware of the books they want to read but don’t yet know exist. Who wants to know about this particular book, and what do they need to know about it? And, how do we best speak to them? What is the distilled essence of this book? What makes it special? How can we convey that visually?

I turned to Adobe for help getting started, modifying their advice to better fit with our specific mission. The following elements form the new basic book branding brief for each title.

Color

I began by creating a color palette based on the book cover’s background color, plus a lighter and darker version, adding secondary colors that matched the tone of the book, hoping to keep our cohesiveness from becoming stale and to offer designers a little flexibility. I found through trial and error that an exact match to the cover materials is not as important as conveying the right mood, and made slight modifications to the color swatches used in the covers, including each color’s HEX values for consistency.

Typography

Selecting type was more complicated. At Ooligan, we use Adobe Creative Suite programs to design our books, along with the fonts Adobe provides us license for. But most designers in the press don’t have their own full-time access to the software, and many prefer to use Canva. Fortunately, Canva has loads of fonts available for free, and so we were able to choose some similar to what the book designers had used, selecting fonts for headlines and body text that complemented each other and matched the aesthetic of the book cover and content.

Images

We often go to Pixabay, Unsplash, and Pexels for images. Sometimes our books will have some of their own graphic elements to incorporate into our marketing and publicity campaigns. Canva also has quite a few little graphic elements available for free use. We put together a document with some photographs, png files, and Canva graphics for designers to use when creating their posts and documents.

Templates

The project managers can use the above elements to make templates in Canva for their team to use for the various social media dimension requirements, as well as blurbs and quotes for them to feature or incorporate into their designs. These design elements can also be used later in creating other marketing and publicly collateral.

Ooligan is a teaching press, and we are all learning every day. I see this new design process as an iterative one; we are already constantly adjusting what works and what doesn’t, and will do so with each new title. The team for The Keepers of Aris by Autumn Green, our next title to be published, has been busy designing away in preparation for their upcoming social media campaign and book launch. I look forward to seeing their designs!

This image shows a table from a birds eye view with hands out on the table in collaboration. There are books, pencils, coffee, and food on the table.

Bookish Meetups in Portland: A Guide to Find Other Booklovers in the City

Leave a comment April 10, 2023 Eva Sheehan

A book lover in a big city can seem like an oxymoron. A vast majority of the book community are introverts and it can be hard to find others like ourselves, but the good news is that Portland is known for its lively book culture. Here are a few places to visit for events and meetups so you can find other like-minded individuals in a big city!

An obvious event would be the Portland Book Festival. This book-friendly city is home to an annual book festival. Last year’s book festival was held on November 5, 2022 and contained author lineups, writing workshops, pop-up readings, and an extensive collection of book people. This annual event is a perfect opportunity to be encompassed by book lovers from all over the city. To keep updated on tickets and location check out literary-arts.org.

If you are looking for a place more consistent and intimate, the Rose City Book Pub will be your refuge. When you first walk in, your eyes immediately draw up to the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf jammed with an extensive book collection, which is just a warm hug to any fan of the literary world. They hold community events, music, art, open mics, and discussion. It is also a place for people to retreat to a corner to work or read alone. They carry beer, wine, books, and food for their customers to enjoy. For someone in any sect of the book industry or someone simply a book fanatic, this pub is a great place to connect and even make friends. To check out upcoming events, look up their Instagram @rose_city_book_pub.

Diving further into the book and alcohol fusion, the Workers Tap in Southeast Portland is another great venue for literary events. Just from the outside, this pub is housed in a comfy Victorian-style house and is adorned with string lights. This building is a vessel for writing workshops with communities like Eastside Poetry Workshop and author meetups. In an article in Willamette Weekly, Corbin Smith describes the extensive library, “Essential to this ideas-focused bar is a library on the top floor: several bookshelves holding a few hundred books regarding union organizing, LGBTQ+ rights, anarchism, radical environmentalism and anti-imperialist struggle.” To check out upcoming events, you can visit their Instagram @workerstap.

Along with these three literary hubs, Portland is stuffed with independent bookstores, libraries, and pop-up book events. Starting out with these few places mentioned, a fellow book lover will be able to grow their community and connections as well as make friends scattered across the city.

Girl making a peace sign towards her phone camera on a mount in front of her

Why Influencer Marketing is More Important Than You Think

Leave a comment April 3, 2023 Lena Rixinger

Would you feel comfortable hiring an influencer for marketing purposes? A lot of startups, but also many traditional companies, swear by it. Others strictly stick to the classic marketing measures. What is it about influencer marketing that drives opinions so far apart? I have taken some of the most popular counter-arguments and contrasted them with my own view.

Argument 1: Authenticity
Influencers only promote products for the money and don’t care about their followers. To a certain extent, I agree. However, every form of paid advertising does the same thing. The difference is that influencers stand behind their advertising message with their own face and name, which should make them more careful in choosing what products they advocate for.

As studies show, the media channel we trust most in is Word-of-Mouth. No medium can compete with a personal recommendation, especially if you are familiar with this person—and yes, this includes influencers, even though most of their followers don’t know them personally. Good influencers are in close and friendly contact with their community, and through that, they achieve the feeling of belonging to a group for people in that community. While you could imply influencers fake closeness to their communities to make money, I think that many underestimate the group dynamic of a community that follows the same interest and, of course, the feeling of being the center of such a community. Because even if no one likes to admit it, no one becomes an influencer without liking being the center of attention.

Argument 2: Giving up control
When I hire an influencer, I have no control over the content spread about my product. First of all, it is absolutely possible to remain in control by creating a detailed brief for the influencer beforehand. However, I would highly recommend giving up some of the control.

When you book an influencer, you are not only booking an advertising channel, but also a whole personality that comes with it. They produce authentic content by often using the same way of speaking, imagery, et cetera. They are probably closer to the target group than you are. Furthermore, they have expertise or engage themselves in a certain topic, through which they achieve an opinion leadership in that area. That expertise can be in factual topics as well as in creative topics like dancing, makeup, and so on. Therefore, it is recommended to take advantage of their experience and involve the influencer in the creative process from day one.

Argument 3: Social media equals bad
As soon as I hire an influencer, I make myself dependent on the social media platform. As mentioned before, booking an influencer is more than just buying an ad space on a social media channel. Influencers are the rock stars of the digital age. Depending on their success and their target audience, they appear in TV, radio, newspapers, you name it. Some might even have a format of their own or have established a brand. Use this for content marketing in any media channel. By offering content instead of pushing ads in the audience’s face you will bypass ad fatigue, which occurs after people see a particular ad too often. Instead, you can place your product directly in the channel they choose to see.

However, what should not be forgotten is that social media is the most sought-after medium among the younger target group. It also facilitates a direct dialogue with them. Dialogue marketing has long been used as a very effective method, as you can get direct feedback from the target group or even use crowdsourcing for creating new content.

In the end, it is important to note that influencer marketing is nothing new in principle. Our buying decisions have always been influenced by friends, celebrities, fictional characters, and so on. Booking influencers on social media, on the other hand, is really new and combines a whole lot of very effective marketing methods among saving you a lot of work steps in the operative execution. However, it is important to remember that every influencer is also a human being who makes mistakes and can get into crises. Therefore, you should not see them only as a marketing tool, but you should always be in close contact with them and solve problems together. This way you not only ensure that your product doesn’t go down the drain together with the influencer, but also preserve your own authenticity.

Where Are All My Latinxs At?

Leave a comment March 17, 2023 Yomari Lobo

Image: Cover design of Lobizona by Kerri Resnick, featuring art by Daria Hlazatova

The fantasy genre, particularly young adult fantasy, is (slowly) becoming more diverse. Authors like Tomi Adeyemi, Sabaa Tahir, Tahereh Mafi, and Chole Gong have written well-received and very popular fantasy novels. Yet, there are almost no fantasy novels by Latinx authors or starring Latinx characters that have entered my radar or the radar of BookTok.

I don’t mean to discount the fantastic gains other marginalized authors have made in fantasy or literature as a whole, but Black, Asian, and other authors and characters of color still need more representation in the fantasy genre. But that got me thinking about the lack of Latinx representation in fantasy and why it has yet to gain that kind of momentum in recent literature.

So here are three reasons why Latinx characters are underrepresented in fantasy literature.

Fantasy has a long history of racism.

Fantasy fiction as categorized in The Lord of the Rings routinely erases real-world people of color in favor of representing a variety of fantastical “races.” Good guys (elves, dwarves, hobbits) are described as white and the bad guys (orcs, goblins, dark elves) are described as dark-skinned, and unlike in the real world, it is based on biological differences. But this isn’t just in The Lord of the Rings. In A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas, the good guys, Spring Court, were described as having pale skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes while the bad guys, Night Court, were described as dark-skinned. While people love to say fantasy doesn’t see racism, it does. The fantasy system created by the author represents the author’s outlook on life: who do they see as the top of the food chain, who are the bad guys, who gets to be the hero, and who gets to be the villain?

What does it mean to be Latinx in a fantasy world?

Latin America is one of the most diverse places on the planet with its residents becoming united and divided by language, culture, and history, not by race. So if you want to include Latinx people in your fantasy novel, it would either need to be in your own world where you can set up your own races and the history behind them or in a world similar to our own where the knowledge is there for the reader. There lies the problem. It can become hard to create a world that represents Latin America since Latin America has a messy history and development, which makes the creation of a fantasy world a little more complicated. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done, clearly. Fantasy authors have everlasting imagination, it’s in the job description, and it shouldn’t pose any roadblocks when it comes to creating Latinx characters.

There just aren’t enough Latinx authors.

In 2022, Zippia stated that the most common ethnicity of authors is White (79.4 percent), followed by Latinx (7.2 percent), African American (5.8 percent), and Asian (4.0 percent). If Latinx authors, just like any author of color, don’t get a shot at telling stories about people like themselves and the history of their culture, then there aren’t going to be stories that represent Latinx people. With Latinx authors making up only 7.2 percent of the authors publishing in 2022 that means we, as diverse readers, have to make more of an effort to read books by authors of color, women, and LGBTQIA+ authors. If we want a change, we have to show the publishing industry that we do want to read and support these stories.

Here are some of my recommendations if you want to read some Latinx fantasy literature:

Cemetery Boys

Lobizona

Together We Burn

Velvet Was the Night

Hands forming heart with rainbow color overlay

Queer Book Labels: Are They Helping or Hurting Sales?

Leave a comment March 6, 2023 Shoshana Weaver

While cultural movements abound trying to increase queer inclusion and understanding, it’s no wonder that there has been a rise in queer books being published and, according to NPD Bookscan, a rise in queer book sales as well. It seems that being an LGBTQ+ book is a good thing right now, at least for sales. But what if, in some ways, those same labels are losing sales as well?

Consider, for instance, the pros and cons of these queer books ending up on various published “banned books” lists. When a queer book ends up on a banned books list, there is a possibility of the book gaining an audience, rather than being repressed, especially an audience that wants to fight back against this oppression and will go out to buy the books in support. This leads to increased sales of certain books.

Unfortunately, of course, not all books benefit from “banned books” lists in this way. This article argues that many books will just fall by the wayside and be forgotten. This is a tragedy, especially for all those potential readers from wherever they have been banned.

For now, however, many publishers still feel that queer books need queer labels to be discoverable. There are other aspects of the books that can be marketed as well, but according to sources in this article, a large percentage of the audience still finds queer books because they are looking for queer books. And that audience isn’t just queer people, either. This article is from 2020, so it’s a bit outdated, you could say, considering how quickly some things change, but the current trends in LGBTQ+ books being sold suggests this may still be the case.

But, even with this seeming success for the books that are making it, we publishers need to ask ourselves, is this actually what we want? Are these people just buying books because they are labeled “queer” or are they actually going to go home and read the book, process the book, and hopefully even love the book and want more like it? Is this trend actually a sign of cultural change or just a phase that will blow over like so many others have?

There are other things to think about as well, in a less philosophical vein. Are such explicit queer labels on our books actually helping reach our intended audience? For instance, this librarian warns that making queer labels too blatant can scare off some of the very people we are trying to reach because they aren’t ready or feel safe enough to walk around with an obviously queer book.

And what about people who would love these books, but aren’t actively looking for “queer” books? Some people are willing to read books with queer characters, but aren’t looking specifically for queer books. Not to mention, there is more to a book than just being queer. For some books, yes, the main point is being queer, with queer characters, and addressing various aspects of queer life, but for other books, it is the genre, the adventure, the plot, etc. that are more central, with the queer characters/stories being a bonus on the side. Are we doing these books an injustice by labeling them as queer, rather than letting them shine for their more central themes?

For now, yes, it still seems like queer book labels are not only helping sales, but one of the leading causes of their sales, despite whatever backlash might come from that designation.

But, hopefully, someday LGBTQ+ characters will be such a normal, accepted part of culture it will be an expected possibility in the books we read. Someday, we’ll be able to go out, look in any category, and find plenty of queer books right alongside their counterparts because it will be accepted that any book, anywhere, may reflect real life with real characters.

Two women on a picnic blanket, one reading, on a fall day

5 Books about Strong Women, by Women

Leave a comment March 1, 2023 Sarah Samms

On June 24, 2022, Roe v. Wade—the legislation that allowed women’s access to abortion as a right in healthcare—was overturned. Since then, communities of women—with and without uteruses—have been scrambling for ways to support one another during these bleak times. For some, especially for those who feel the impact of the overturn in our personal lives, a good story with a strong woman protagonist to ignite the fire within and remind us of the strength that we possess is just what we need. Strength comes in many forms and this book list explores many of them.

For this list, I am presenting to you five books about women, by women, so that as we explore these forms of strength, we too are supporting fellow women.

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

Robin Wall Kimmerer

This beautiful creative nonfiction book is written by writer and scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer who is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. In this breathtaking book, Kimmerer’s ethereal prose braids stories of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, the science that surrounds us in our everyday lives, and the never ending offerings that plants have within their medicinal properties. A delicious treat.

Assata: An Autobiography

Assata Shakur

This autobiography takes us back to the 1970s when political activist and Black Panther Assata Shakur—godmother of Tupac Shakur—finds herself in custody after a tantalizing battle with the FBI and local police. She was incarcerated for four years before flimsy evidence led to her conviction. Assata’s story is unlike anyone else’s and her personal account of the Black Liberation movement of the 1970s will teach you the strength of Black womanhood and motherhood and the reason to fight for police abolition.

Heartbroke

Chelsea Bieker

Bieker is Portland State’s very own MFA graduate who debuted with her book Godshot last year. While her debut had a very strong female protagonist, I’m recommending her short story collection, Heartbroke, in this article. Why? Because this story collection hosts a variety of strong women who come in all shapes and sizes. From a houseless mother in a shelter to teen girls in an online game that plays on their fate, and even a sex phone operator who chases around a cowboy in the pursuit of a better life, this is an enthralling collection.

The Poet X

Elizabeth Acevedo

In The Poet X, Dominican American poet and author Elizabeth Acevedo introduces Xiomara Batista into the world—and I must say, my life has been better ever since. In this novel written entirely in profound poetic prose, Xiomara finds refuge in her own poetry while navigating through a tough teenagehood where the church is law and her Mami’s word is God. Xiomara encompasses all the strength I strive for in life.

The Dragons, the Giants, the Women: A Memoir

Wayétu Moore

Last but not least, Moore’s creative memoir The Dragons, the Giants, the Women shares the gripping details of when the First Liberian Civil War broke out and how she and her family escaped. This book leads up to the life she has built for herself here in the United States and shares intimate details of the strife that she overcame in between. If you are ever second-guessing the power to behold in a woman who faces crisis, this book will convince you that Moore, and women like her, can achieve anything that is possible in a show of true resilience.

books

Acknowledgements