Today is the first day of teaching in Portland State’s Ooligan Press publishing program. I am very excited and I want to thank Abbey Gaterud, the interim director of the program for inviting me to join the faculty as one of the instructors.

I have done a lot of teaching over the last fifteen years ranging from two hours to two days, but this will be the first time that I have to put together 20 sessions of instruction. Luckily, the course topic is the business of publishing, a subject I find endless fascinating. The students in the program have been exposed to the process steps of book publishing and, in a variety of courses, the commercial aspects of the business. The purpose of the class is to pull together those learnings, learning the business “rules” of publishing, and how those rules are changing.

During each week of the course, I am asking the students post links on Google+ that inform the rule-making and rule-breaking going on right now. Students will also be commenting on those links and creating some opportunity for more conversation outside the classroom.

Given what I know of the audience for this blog, many of you might also be interested in those conversations. The class will be using #psupubmgt as a hastag to mark posts, giving anyone on Google+ a way to find them. You can easily a search for the hashtag and save the search (there is a button in the header next to the search term) to go back to. You can also follow me on Google+ and see the posts that I am commenting on.

I hope you will also consider jumping in and adding your thoughts to our Google+ discussions.