In our final post of the Industry Insights segment, we hear from the Grattan Street Press Web Team. Throughout this semester, the four students have worked alongside authors and other GSP teams to curate and develop the website and blogs. Georgia Quirke-Luping, Laura Bianca Cecile, Katie Hollister and Sunniva Midtskogen have left us with their final thoughts from their semester in the Press.
Name:
Georgia Quirke-Luping
What is your role in the Grattan Street Press?
Website Lead/Designer
What about this process have you found most rewarding?
In addition to my role as Website Lead, I was also tasked with the redesign and production of grattanstreetpress.com
In this capacity I was granted almost free reign over designing the website, other than the obvious elements like the GSP logo and the coral red colour scheme, because of the existing branding. At first this part of the job was challenging. We use WordPress as a site provider and it can be a tricky beast to master. However, once I got the hang of things–and managed to get a grip on the existing organisation of the site–it was really fun. It has been rewarding to see my initial design ideas slowly come to life.
I have particularly enjoyed the Industry Insights segment. This semester, the website team wanted to introduce a new blog element that would be a real draw-card for potential readers. Our hunch was right! Like us, our readers are apparently fiends for new information–so each week the readership of this series grew and grew.
What challenges have you encountered in your role?
My role was, for the most part, managerial. I had established an online publishing schedule early on and spent a lot of time after that checking in on my three editors. We all worked very well as a team and shared a similar vision for the website. My challenge was to learn when to take a step back and let the blog editors take the reigns.
A challenge that I really enjoyed was the role that I had to play as a liaison between the sales, marketing and media teams, and the website team. It was vital to the success of the website that our blogs were getting social media attention. I had to get into the habit of providing copy to the social media team so that they could prep to promote the blog on the GSP Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages.
Any final thoughts?
I have learnt that consistency and frequency is key to successful websites. Making an online publishing schedule–and sticking to it–meant that our readers knew when they could find new content. We ended up posting every Monday, Wednesday and Friday over the span of about ten weeks. All of these blogs were promoted on Facebook within a day of the posts going live, meaning we could channel our readers towards the newest content. If you want to set up a blogging-based site, my biggest piece of advice would be to post often, post a lot and post regularly. This is fundamental in generating those much-coveted ‘clicks’.
Name:
Laura Bianca Cesile
What is your role in the Grattan Street Press?
I was the non-fiction blog editor for the Grattan Street Press blog, as well as a Submissions Officer. As editor, I commissioned many writers–both professional and amateur–to write or submit posts to the GSP blog, which I would then work with them on and eventually publish. As Submissions Officer, I assessed the book manuscripts and blog posts that authors and writers submitted to GSP.
What about this process have you found most rewarding?
I definitely found the process of taking a draft of non-fiction work from its barest form and watching it grow and develop into a strong piece to be the most rewarding. It’s such a satisfying feeling when you get to see that piece–that you and the author sweated, fretted and worked tirelessly on–finally up on the blog.
What challenges have you encountered in your role?
Not so much of a challenge, but this was definitely an eye-opening experience into the many responsibilities an in-house editor has to deal with. From communicating with the advisor, to commissioning writers, to assessing and editing the ever-growing list of protentional blog pieces, to liaising with the writer, and dealing with any unexpected turns that may come my way. As editor, I always had to be on my toes, ready for anything: even though our class was scheduled for one day a week, this position really required me to be on the ball, seven days a week. This was a demanding environment, but I learnt so much from this experience, too.
Any final thoughts?
I’m so thankful to have been part of a team that is friendly, hard-working and driven. I would be half so lucky to work with such a team in my future career.
Name:
Katie Hollister
What is your role in the Grattan Street Press?
Blogpost Editor of Millennials Project
What about this process have you found most rewarding?
I found it rewarding to work with authors who wrote articles that clearly showed that they were bursting with excitement because they had something important that they wanted to say about being a millennial. The authors were thrilled to have an outlet where they could finally voice their concerns or joys and have other people their age sympathise with them. They came to me with ideas such as open relationships, their love of Harry Potter or millennial feminist fiction and I was immediately interested and wanted to help them articulate their thoughts and feelings to the best of my ability. It felt so great to help create a piece of writing that will resonate with other people our age and make the author feel they succeeded in arguing their position.
What challenges have you encountered in your role?
Sometimes I found it challenging to balance the tone of the Millennials Project blog. Many of the articles are understandably negative in their tone because they’re about the trials of being a millennial (including my own article). Over the break, however, I plan on publishing a couple of funny and light ones if possible because being a millennial is not all bad! It would be nice to see more diversity on the blog, too.
Another challenge we faced was figuring out funding for paying writers at the start of the semester. One way to get more diverse perspectives on the blog would be to pay writers who are professionals. We are a recently started non-profit and have now successfully figured out funding for website, so I think it would be great if next semester’s group is able to commission a couple of professional writers (or whatever our funding will allow).
Any final thoughts?
I hope to see the Millennials Project continue as it attracts so many great writers who have a lot on their mind. Plus, people are naturally interested in this subject matter, so I think it could go onto be successful and garner yet more readers. I feel thankful to have had the opportunity to work on this fun project.
Name:
Sunniva Midtskogen
What is your role in the Grattan Street Press?
My role was as an online fiction editor and submissions officer. I would help look through all the manuscript and blog submissions we were being sent and decide which ones we wanted to publish and which unfortunately didn’t make our list. I also edited the fiction and poetry we got sent for our blog. However, as we didn’t get a lot of fiction submissions I spent a lot of time helping out across the platform; I helped commissioning and editing content for our Industry Insights series, I helped Laura edit some pieces for the general blog and I helped Katie with editing for the Millennial project.
What about this process have you found most rewarding?
There’s been a few things that has stood out to me working on the website this semester. Firstly, it’s been very exciting to work with the awesome texts. We have had a lot of really great writers who have spoken about topics that’s I’ve genuinely enjoyed reading—from digital publishing in China to the imposter syndrome. Even while having to pick from writers quite close to home, often from within the GSP team, the variation in topic has been fantastic. It’s also been really great to work with the girls on the blog team and being able to help each other out and bounce ideas off each other. And extending beyond the website, it’s been very rewarding to belong to GSP for this semester and see how hard everyone has been working on their respective tasks and see what we’ve been able to produce in only 10 weeks. I kind of think we should all just start our own little press together.
What challenges have you encountered in your role?
There were two things I found challenging: we didn’t have a lot of submissions for the website and the focus of the GSP list is a bit up in the air as we’re still a very new press. Wanting to have consistent, weekly blog posts going up online is great, but especially in the beginning and towards the end of the semester we didn’t really have enough material to keep up with our ideal schedule. I noticed this especially in terms of fiction, which was meant to be my area. I’ve ended up helping out Laura and Katie more than I’ve done my own role, simply because there was not been enough fiction sent to us. Even after putting the word out all semester, and myself getting in touch with the writers I know, we’ve only had three creative pieces up all year and one of those texts was my own. Having to commission something is definitely interesting, but since this was just a 12.5 credit program there wasn’t really enough time to reach out to people to write something each week. It was also difficult because we weren’t really sure what sort of material to ask for, especially in regards to fiction. So far the books published with GSP has been Colonial Australian fiction, but we’re also working on some other projects that don’t really seem to have a common denominator (expect for being great books, of course), so it was difficult to censor out what could fit our list, and what couldn’t, as the list is a bit hard to define.
Any final thoughts?
All in all I think that we did a great job with the time and the material we had for the website. It looks a lot better now and we are getting readers and visitors to the website, which is really great to see. Learning that the number of visitors has grown exponentially since we started posting regularly and since the social media began their brilliant marketing campaign, has been a highlight! Things are going upwards, so hopefully we’ve build a good base for the next group of students to take over the website and the blog.
