A selected topic course infrequently offered at Ithaca College, I took Editing & Publishing in the fall of 2012. The purpose of this class is to educate students on the nature of publishing companies, what careers in publishing imply, how to get published, when and how to self-publish, the tenets of Chicago style and the ethical implications of publishing, along with the social responsibility of editors.

The course revolves around the completion of three major projects. In the first, students generate (or at least conceptualize) a manuscript, research potential publishing options, and then write a practice query letter with a specific publisher or literary agent in mind. The second project is done in small groups: each group comes up with a publishing project that they then conceptualize, compose, edit, market, print and then hold an event for. This part of the course is intended to generate an experience like that of working at an independent publisher. For the the third project, the entire class works together on a larger publishing piece, working collaboratively to create a substantial physical product in the end. This last project simulates work at a publishing company by having students break into production teams and consider large-scale issues like legal rights and production costs. 

To complete the second project, I worked with a team of four other students to produce the first issue of Collage Comics, a literary magazine composed with a collage of texts and images within a comic-book like format. For this issue, we received submissions from all over the country and saw a turn-out of thirty to our release/reading event. In my group, I functioned as the head editor (creating the layout in Microsoft Publisher), social media coordinator (mainly running our highly successful Facebook page) and group organizer. 

For the third project, my class produced a photography book called Fifty Shades of Grey Fur as a parody of the popular romance title. I directed the research, production and distribution teams by coordinating meetings, drafting emails and keeping in constant communication with the editor-in-chief. After becoming familiar with Microsoft Publisher with the second project, I did much of the layout work for this piece as well.