On April 21, the Outreach and Project Development team hosted the tenth annual Write to Publish conference and raised over $2,500 to donate to Ooligan Press. We are so grateful to every speaker, attendee, volunteer, sponsor, and vendor who spent a beautifully sunny Saturday exploring the journey through publishing with us. At the conference, industry professionals mingled with aspiring writers discussing pitch techniques, award-winning authors discussed the internal workings of their craft, and participants had the chance to interact with various literary organizations in a vendor fair.

Now that the conference is over, we’re starting to envision what Write to Publish 2019 will look like as well as focusing more heavily on the project development side of the team. Spring term is always a time of transition at Ooligan Press—we, the current managers, are training our successors so they can efficiently and successfully take over the leadership of this team in June. The new managers, Brennah Hale and Zoe LaHaie, have been members of the Outreach and Project Development team since they started at Ooligan in fall 2017; both were instrumental to the success of the Write to Publish 2018 conference. Looking toward the future, they’ve already established the location for next year’s conference and tentatively booked a keynote speaker. We’re excited to see Write to Publish 2019 as program graduates and attendees!

If you attended Write to Publish 2018, we invite you to take our survey so that we can continue to improve our conference. In addition, if you have any other comments, you’re always free to email us at w2p@ooliganpress.pdx.edu.

For our projects currently in development, as always, there isn’t much we can reveal to the public, as these manuscripts are unfinished and have not yet officially been acquired by Ooligan. What we can say is that we’re very excited about all of our projects! At this time, our team has five to six projects that are all at varying stages of development; one is at the evaluation stage (we’re deciding if it’s a good fit for our team), one is at the author commissioning stage (we have an idea for a manuscript, and now we’re trying to find authors to write it), two are going through thorough developmental edits, and one is going through a final review before we send it to the acquisitions team.

The next OPD team blog post will be written in the summer by our incoming managers, and at that point we should have some very exciting updates about our projects currently in development (hopefully one or two will have moved on to Ooligan’s acquisitions team) as well as next year’s Write to Publish conference!