Inside Social Media at Ooligan Press

Leave a comment July 7, 2023 Nell Stamper

Most of us have some sort of feeling about social media. But whether we love it or hate it, there’s no denying that it’s an important way for authors to reach their audiences. At Ooligan Press, we have a set of best practices for supporting our authors and their books through social media channels. As part of the “Inside Ooligan” series, here’s a look at what the Ooligan Press Online Content Manager does for our books in production. As with many elements of book production, it starts earlier than you might expect—about six months before launch. Here are some of the key milestones and tools that we use.

Social Media Strategy Document (SMSD)

The SMSD is the customized go-to social media guide for each book. It is a combination of branding, marketing, communication, and author/illustrator information. The strategy document gives a timeline for different phases of social media engagement (announcements, awareness, pre-orders, launches, and sustainment). It also collects information such as the author’s social media handles, types of posts for each platform, who we think would love to read this book, and ideas for engaging with audiences about the title. We start on this document about six months before publication, and collaborate to keep it updated through the launch phase of the book.

Campaign Schedule

Each book gets its own focused set of posts, which we call a “campaign”. The campaign is coordinated with objectives for each phase as mentioned above. For example, about 120 days before the book’s pub date, we share a well-designed announcement post. That is the prompt to start posting weekly content about the book, to generate interest, and grow its audience in the pre-order months prior to launch. As we get closer to the pub date, the pace of posts will increase and we start looking for posts from the author to share. Some of the tasks are dependent on book milestones—for example, we won’t have an author unboxing video until the printed copies arrive. The timeline for the social media campaign is integrated into the Ooligan Press Production Timeline template, so that the book’s project team and author know what to expect.

Third-Party Scheduler and Bulk Upload Sheets

Ooligan Press has several goals with social media. We want to connect audiences to our books, share information about Portland State University and our program, support and engage with other regional independent publishers, and be a voice for increased representation in publishing. That’s a lot of moving pieces and varied content! So we use a third-party social media scheduler to help us stay on track. We are currently using Buffer, which allows us to schedule content ahead of time, and also provides some key analytics for different campaigns and types of content.

To ensure that our posts look good and are easy to understand, and to maintain some consistency with many different folks designing content, we have an established approval process for social media items. Like many organizations, we use Bulk Upload Sheets to organize draft posts. Our Design Manager and Copy Chief are then easily able to approve posts or suggest edits. Afterword, the Online Content Manager can find everything that needs to be scheduled in one place. The Design Manager also provides a color palette, fonts, and approved images to create social media content for each book (drawn from the cover). This helps everyone stay consistent with imagery and makes the book’s content easy to identify visually.

Engagement with Authors and Author’s Followers

One of the most important things that we do in social media as a publisher is to amplify and support an author’s own social media presence. We always ask authors to tag us, share photos, and be as present as they can in this process. It comes very easily to some authors and others aren’t so involved, but audiences are really eager to know who is behind these beautiful covers and they love to see “behind the scenes!” While actively working with authors, the Ooligan social media team holds giveaways of advance copies or other book-related swag, posts live from events, and answers questions and comments about the book. We have also collaborated with outside publicists that authors hire. This process doesn’t end after a book launches and we are always delighted to share and boost an author’s social media efforts.

All publishers want to generate interest and excitement about each of their books, and to help readers find the books that are right for them. Social media is a key piece of that effort at Ooligan Press. Take a look at our social media accounts to see these tools in action! What are the most challenging or important parts about this process? We’d love to hear from you.

The Ins and Outs of the Publicity Department at Ooligan

Leave a comment July 3, 2023 Tara McCarron

Like many Oolies before me, when I first started the graduate program in Book Publishing at Portland State University, I thought I would be most interested in editorial. In fact, besides being an editor, I didn’t really know anything about the other jobs that existed in the publishing industry. I had a lot to learn!

After learning more about the industry from different classes and through my work as a team member on Ooligan’s YA title, Love, Dance & Egg Rolls by Jason Tanamor, I discover that I had a penchant for marketing and publicity. I applied to a few different managerial positions, but I was thrilled to be assigned my top choice: Publicity Manager!

So, what is book publicity? And how does it work at Ooligan Press?

Here’s the basics:

What is Book Publicity?

A book publicist’s job is to serve as the liaison between the author and the media with the goal of acquiring press coverage for the book and/or author. Publicity is often defined as “earned media,” being something that generates attention without necessarily paying for it.

How Does it Work at Ooligan?

The Publicity Department is relatively new to Ooligan—I’m only the third person to hold the title of Publicity Manager! The Publicity Department is responsible for:

Press Kits

Press kits provide information to the media on our books and authors, which saves media editors time in research and preparation. Press kits should be easily accessible, have consistent messaging, be author-centric, and be kept updated like a resume. For more about press kits, check out this blog on The Anatomy of a Press Kit or this blog on How to Write an Effective Press Release.

Review Requests

Review requests are just that—requests for reviews! We send out review requests to different media outlets, bloggers, bookstagrammers, authors, and book reviewers. For more about review requests, check out this blog on writing review requests, or this blog on what to do about reviews!

Launch Events

Launch events can be held in a variety of ways, and there have been many different types of launches with Ooligan and our authors—from events at pubs and bookstores to virtual events! At Ooligan, our launch events are about giving the students and the authors a chance to celebrate together. To get an idea of how to plan a successful launch party, check out this blog, or for a look at what we’ve learned from a year of hosting virtual book launch events and some helpful advice from past Project Managers, check out this blog!

Awards

It’s Publicity’s responsibility to organize and apply for awards for all of our books! There are a few awards we generally apply to, like the Oregon Book Award and the Foreword INDIES, but project teams will also gather other viable options, sometimes based on things like genre or author identity. To learn more about the importance of awards, check out this blog!

Author Events

It’s also the Publicity Department’s responsibility to submit our authors for events such as The Portland Book Festival and The Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association (PNBA) Fall Tradeshow. The publicity manager fills out submission forms and writes cover letters pitching our books and authors to be featured at these events.

IPS Updates

If our books or our authors receive any publicity—reviews, events, interviews, awards, etc.—the Publicity Department updates our distributor, Ingram.

Some Final Thoughts.

Publicity is about cultivating authentic attention for our authors and our books.
Something I love about publicity is that we’re receiving recognition and validation for our authors, our books, and Ooligan Press!
In a way, finding the right media outlets to reach the right audience can be a bit like matchmaking.
At Ooligan, we’re passionate about our books, so it makes marketing and publicizing them easy!

Inside Ooligan Press: Building a Contact List at Ooligan

Leave a comment April 21, 2023 Maliea Ruby

Most books that are published these days have some number of quotes of praise from various sources, usually other authors or major newspapers. If a reader is familiar with a genre, they’ll recognize many of the authors as being from the same genre. If not, it might leave a reader to wonder who these people are and why they are an authority qualified to review a book. It’s pretty well-known that “blurbs help attract readers to your books.” The question becomes, how do publishers choose who to contact for a blurb or review of a book? Here at Ooligan Press, The Keepers of Aris team recently got a glimpse into creating a contact list for a diverse YA fantasy novel.

The process actually begins a little earlier in the publication process, when we decide who is the ideal audience for our title. In this case, we are publishing a YA fantasy novel written by a Black woman, and our primary audience reflects that, as should the people we choose to reach out to. As we began to research and collect the names and contact information of authors we intended to reach out to for a blurb, we started with those we wanted to prioritize, Black and BIPOC fantasy authors. Bonus points if they wrote YA as well. We chose successful authors such as Tomi Adeyemi, Kalynn Bayron, and Rin Chupeco. Once we found as many as we could, we turned to other YA fantasy authors. We concluded this part of our research with a total of around seventy reputable authors as possible contacts.

The next step of building our contact list was to find major industry publications that Ooligan always reaches out to for a review. We got these contacts from Ooligan’s master contact list, so all that was needed was to ensure the information was up-to-date. Some of these sources include Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Shelf Awareness. We consistently reach out to them because they are major sources of book reviews that many are familiar with, and we are capable of successfully reaching them. Another internal source for contacts was the contact list of the previous fantasy novel we published, Court of Venom. Given the two titles are within the same genre, if for different age groups, the number of contacts that would be ideal for our newer title is significant enough to make the previous list an effective source. These contacts consist of digital magazines, blogs, and book reviewers that focus on fantasy titles. Currently, the team is expanding on these contacts by researching new ones.

Of course, it must be noted that Ooligan Press’s contact list practice is not like most publishing companies. The contact list for each title is created largely from scratch and personalized per the primary audience. We are also a small press, so authors or online personalities that have reached a certain level of fame are simply out of our reach. It’s important to keep our expectations realistic while working to reach as many people as possible. This is a glimpse into how publishers choose who is on a title’s contact list and ends up with their blurb on the cover.

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!

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!

publicity

Acknowledgements