Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Many Moving Parts Behind Brandon Sanderson’S Record-Breaking Kickstarter Campaign, Kathi Inman Berens

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

The creation and fulfillment of Sanderson’s Kickstarter relies on a crack team managing massive amounts of data as well as all aspects of production. Sanderson had been running a multi-million-dollar, mid-sized publishing company well before his March 1, 2022 Kickstarter shot north of $28 million in two weeks, making it the biggest campaign—for now—in Kickstarter history.

Publishing In The Pacific Northwest, Kathi Inman Berens, Rachel Noorda, Nathalie Op De Beeck

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

Overview of how 11 Pacific Northwest booksellers survived Covid, and continue to thrive after pandemic lockdowns have lifted. After many consumers shifted to online book buying, what techniques are these book stores using to attract and keep customers?

Killer Serials: Amazon’S Kindle Vella, Kathi Inman Berens

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

Can Amazon's Kindle Vella Break Through With Younger Readers? From its inception, Amazon has pushed book publishing toward a digital future that other entertainment industries such as video games and streaming media have been quicker to embrace. Kindle Vella, one of Amazon’s most recent digital programs, is worth watching.

Kindle Vella is a serialized reading experience folded into Amazon’s Kindle app. It quietly launched in July 2021. If it can catch on, it has enormous potential to capture the attention of a new generation of readers and writers already engaging serialized stories in apps like Webtoons and Wattpad--GenZers reading serialized …

Book Readers Who Are Buccaneers And Buyers, Rachel Noorda, Kathi Inman Berens, Chris Kenneally

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

These readers buy, subscribe to, and borrow books at higher rates than the general population. They engage at higher rates in fan fiction and discover new authors across multiple media, including streaming movies and television. These readers are also pirates.

Immersive Media and Books 2020 is the first study to capture data expressly about how people engage with books, video games, film, and TV. The final report focuses sharply on reader behavior across a wide range of demographic groups, based on surveys conducted before and during the pandemic.

Co-authors Dr. Rachel Noorda and Dr. Kathi Inman Berens probe especially for …

Ooligan Press: Building And Sustaining A Feminist Digital Humanities Lab At A R-2, Kathi Inman Berens, Abbey Gaterud, Rachel Noorda

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

How can practitioners outside of R-1s afford to build a DH lab? How to connect a lab’s output to the communities it serves? This essay is a case study of Ooligan Press, a student-run trade press housed within a R-2, teaching-intensive university. Two elements make Ooligan Press distinctive as a DH lab. First, Ooligan is a not-for-profit business folded into a Master’s program in Book Publishing. Profits from sale of Ooligan Press books sustain the lab, which would collapse if its books were steadily unprofitable. Second, the essay uses the DH feminism “M.E.A.L.S.” framework to explain how Ooligan's horizontal management …

Lifecycles Of Digital Files And Staff Labor At Ooligan Press In Portland, Oregon, Kathi Inman Berens

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

This Sidebar is an overview of the human process of creating, sorting, storing and preserving digital files in the lifecycle of one book made by Portland State University's Ooligan Press. Ooligan is a teaching press staffed by students pursuing master's degrees in the Department of English.

The Power Of The Small Press: Entrepreneurial Publishing And Disruption Of The Industry, Rachel Noorda

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

Due to the conglomeration of media and publishing companies in the twentieth century (McCleery, 2007), the size of publishing companies has become more polarized, with a majority of small publishers comprising a small percent of revenue and market share compared to the few, but powerful, larger publishing houses (Publishers Association, ‘UK Book Publishing Industry in Statistics’ 2014). In economics, the polarizing principle asserts that ‘developments at one pole of the corporate/cultural spectrum are often counterbalanced by antithetical innovations at the other’ which has, in the publishing industry, led to ‘the emergence of tiny publishing houses’ at the other end of …