Monday 30 November 2015

UCLPub2015 - Term 1: Week 8 [23rd- 27th Nov]

Tuesday morning's Publishing Skills lecture was on vlogging; something most of us were really quite hesitant about. With YouTubers flooding the book charts at the minute - greeted with joy by their fans and cynicism by booksellers and publishers alike - it is becoming more and more important for publishers to make sure they're making the most of this particular form of social media. Nick Coveney (part of the team that brought Alfie Deyes The Pointless Book 1 & 2 into the world) enthusiastically attempted to win us over to the side of the YouTubers with a mix of fun facts and plenty of emojis. Personally, I'm maybe slightly less cynical about it all, but I'll still be glad for every week they're not number one in the charts!
Next week: further InDesign training with Marita Fraser

Tuesday afternoon is probably what made this week slightly stressful. Having decided that we would open our submissions on 30th November, we gave ourselves very little time to get on top of all of the marketing and social media. Tuesday afternoon's session, and the rest of the week really, became a manic stress pot as we designed a temporary logo (drawn by me, very glad to say that that has now been removed from the internet) and a full set of official profile pictures and banners to plaster our social media platforms with (designed by the awesomely talented Kara Dekko). At the time of writing submissions are now open so we're looking forward to getting our first submissions while we continue to work hard on getting our hands on the best prizes and judges to make this the best UCL Publishers' Prize yet!
If you fancy keeping up with how things are going follow us on Twitter (@UCLPubPrizeYA) or like our Facebook page here.

In Thursday morning's Author Management session we discussed Rights Management with the dynamic duo of Diane Spivey and Lynette Owen from Little, Brown and Pearson respectively. They were able to give us an insight into both the fiction and the non-fiction side of rights and permissions and the importance and methods of rights selling. This includes territorial rights as well as serial, TV & Film, and translation etc.
Next week: Literary Agents with Matthew Hamilton (from Aitken Alexander)

Theories of the Book on Thursday afternoon was, once again, a hugely interactive session. After a short information segment on the Literary Citizenship movement Sam asked us to create a literary citizen-ship full of things we could do to make us better literary citizens. Us being us, and therefore nerds, we decided to forego the standard pirate ship idea - oh no, much too simple. Instead we went for a spaceship; and not just any spaceship but the Starship Enterprise (check it out below, shoutout to Kate for the unmistakable drawing!). Noticing how tired we all were, Sam followed by giving us an abridged and punny version of her talk "Star Texts: The Next Generation" (get it?!) - about classics and canon texts and who it is who decides which texts fall into these categories.
Next week: Globalisation and the Book with our own Melanie Ramdarshan-Bold


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