A good social media presence is like a pair of jeans—casual and versatile. Successful social media represents you/your company/your product in a serious way without taking itself too seriously. When establishing and maintaining a social media brand, there is a gradient where you can play in the space you’ve created. You don’t want to be stuffy (a pair of nicely-folded beige slacks), nor do you want to be too laid back (a ratty pair of old sweatpants). Your social media presence should be like jeans: whether you dress your posts up or down, they maintain some consistency and remain just the right fit.
Manager Monday
The Compilation Edit
By Lisa Hein @lisamhein
The compilation edit is unique to the operations of our teaching press, but coordinating this type of edit has been an invaluable learning experience for me as an editing professional. Editorial work is often more of a flexible art than a task that follows a standard procedure, as there are many ways to work with an author to bring out the best in their work.
Digital Department Basics
By Stephanie Argy
This is my final Ooligan blog post as the manager of the digital department, and I’m going to share some resources that might be helpful to future Oolies, as well as to people outside the program.
By Word or By Bird: Acquisitions through Twitter
By Alyssa Schaffer @alyssalschaffer & Joanna Szabo @Joanna_Shwaba
As we are both primarily internet-dwelling creatures, the natural progression was to explore Twitter. But seriously, from the time we spent on Twitter, we noticed a large community of agents, editors, authors, and more using the Twitter community to broaden their reach and visibility. The community of writers and publishing professionals on Twitter is vast, but there are a few aspects of the engagement that we thought could help us spark new connections: manuscript wish lists, Twitter pitch events, and personal branding (find us @alyssalschaffer and @joanna_shwaba).
Book Sales, Or Math for English Majors
By Grace Evans @gracemalizia
Sit in a room full of English majors long enough, and you’ll eventually hear someone groan, “Ugh… math.” The topic may be differential calculus or how to split the tab, but the sentiment is always the same. Why, the lover of words bemoans, do we have to take a break from talking about books to do things with numbers?
Finding the Right Comp Titles
By Morgan Nicholson
Looking at comparative titles, or comp titles, is a great way to understand the market potential of a book project. To put it simply, a comp title is an already published book that has shared sales, genre, and marketing qualities to a developing manuscript that hasn’t been released yet. We use comp titles in publishing because they contextualize the future of an acquired manuscript by giving us information on how similar books performed, and they also help us strategize our marketing efforts as a project goes through the publishing process. But what makes a good comp title?