TSTC Publishing’s new marketing manager is Sheila Boggess. Sheila earned her bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri School Of Journalism.

Previously, Sheila worked as news editor for The Standard-Times in San Angelo, Texas, for nine years and went on to be managing editor of a daily newspaper in northern Arkansas for seven years. She also has led newsrooms in Illinois and Indiana.

In addition to newspapers, Sheila spent three years in public relations for a health care system in her hometown of West Plains, Mo. She brings her acquired knowledge to TSTC. “In every position, I learned one has to market your image and your products. That’s what I look forward to doing here at TSTC.”

Sheila began doing contract work for TSTC Publishing after meeting Publisher Mark Long. After hearing about the open marketing position, she decided to interview. “I was excited that a technical school like TSTC would have the forethought to put the best of their professors’ work into written form.”

She is ready to tackle any marketing challenge TSTC throws her way. “Getting the word out is one of my primary goals in my new position. I also want to take full advantage of the latest in social media … I was excited to attend a social media seminar right here on the TSTC campus my first week at work.”

Sheila and her husband, Bob, live in Prairie Hill, east of Waco. Sheila is also a proud new grandmother to baby Ellanor, born Aug. 5. “I grab time with her as a much as I can!” she said.

Kristin

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TSTC Publishing staff members enjoy working with all the interns. Earlier posts introduced TSTC and Baylor interns. This posting introduces you to Andres Torres and Laina Juarez, our workstudy interns.Andres Torres is a computer science technology major from Grand Prairie, Texas. As a work study intern, Andres works with everyone on the publishing team, assisting with special projects. Andres is now well-experienced in the Highrise program, He describes his level of expertise as “just below a Jedi.” Andres said he chose TSTC because it will help him reach his ultimate goal to program for a big company. In the future, Andres sees himself working for Microsoft or Blizzard.

When he gets a little free time, Andres likes to play sports, video or computer games, and indulge in his love for science fiction. Andres loves the adventures of science fiction because he likes to imagine himself as the character, and being a part of “all of the amazing stuff that happens on the adventures.”

Arlington native Laina Juarez works as a data entry intern at TSTC Publishing. Laina is a computer science major. She hopes to work as a database administrator. “My dad is a database administrator and has the flexibility of working at home,” said Laina.

Originally furthering her education at Ball State University in Indiana, Laina transferred back to Texas after her freshman year, and began studying computer science at TSTC Waco. She said she thought would be more advantageous to have a two-year degree in computer science than a four-year degree in psychology, so she made the move to TSTC.

When Laina isn’t studying or working, she enjoys reading the “Twilight” saga and “Great and Terrible Beauty.” She also enjoys playing pool at Clicks.

Although she hasn’t planned her future completely, Laina knows she wants to stay in Texas. She has family in Florida, and “it snows too much in Indiana,” she said. Laina plans to graduate with a degree in computer science in the summer or fall of 2010.

Kristin and Alyssa

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TSTC Publishing interns include six Texas State Technical College Students for the fall semester. They include:

Margarita Seely has been an advertising intern for TSTC since 2007 and will graduate with her associate’s degree in advertising in the spring of 2010. She and her husband, TSTC Biomedical Engineering Professor Garrett Seely, have two children, Gavin and Isabella. Margarita said in ten years, “ I plan to still be married and working. My kids will be twenty!” Margarita is a busy mom and wife; she enjoys supporting her kids, “being there for them, cheering them on,” she said.

James Haug is an Advertising, Design and Print Technology (ADP) student who commutes from Temple. Being an artist and a TSTC student runs in the family for James. His mother earned a degree from TSTC in commercial art. “I have been an artist since I was a little kid. I stole my mom’s sketchbook and started drawing,” James said. During his free time, James sketches tattoo designs and travels to Austin for the live music scene.

Jordan Long is a Waco native and an ADP student. As an intern, Jordan has created a poster and a flier for the MCC cookbook and a brochure about Waco sculptures for the Waco Cultural Arts Fest. Jordan said he enjoys the creative freedom the ADP field offers. “As a kid, I was always the doodler in class, said Jordan. In the future, Jordan would like to stay in design and advertising, possibly doing freelance work or working for himself. For now, he stays busy with his three kids and enjoys lifting weights.

George Harry Miller V is from Colony, Texas. Working at TSTC, George enjoys expressing creativity through assigned projects, such as the MCC cookbook cover, illustration works and other projects. When George isn’t working, he is on the soccer field practicing martial arts. “These activities help relieve stress,” George says. After graduation, George plans to move to the Dallas area and work in a graphic design firm.

Heather Lorraine Johnson is from Gatesville, Texas. An ADP student, Heather enjoys the creativity she gets to use in adverstising. In the future, Heathers plans to work in design packaging. “I’m not leaving Texas,” she said. Heather said in Texas, she is living in her element. In her free time, Heather enjoys playing the flute, watching TV and spending time with her two-year-old daughter Elizabeth. Heather will graduate from TSTC in December 2010.

Victoria Luz Ricoy is a second year double-major ADP and digital media student from Karnack, Texas. As an intern, Victoria designs book covers, interior page layouts for cookbooks and just completed a TSTC Publishing Christmas card. Victoria works mostly with Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign. In her free time, Victoria works at Bealls and takes full advantage of her employee discount. Victoria is looking forward to a bright future in the creative design aspect of advertising, and is considering living in Austin or San Antonio.

Alyssa and Kristin

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TSTC Publishing interns Heather Padgett, Jessica Luckey, Amanda Knight, Laina Juarez and Victoria Ricoy plan to compete as the Purple Pandas in the 2009 TSTC Powder Puff Football game at 6 p.m., Thursday, Nov. 19, at the TSTC Recreation Field.

The game is sponsored by the Student Ambassador Association to help pay for the student ambassadors to attend an out-of-state conference for the National Orientation Directors Association in the spring.

However, the game is about more than just the Student Ambassadors. TSTC recruiter Autum Outlaw is looking for ways to add tradition to the TSTC campus. The powder puff game is a way for students to meet each other while supporting a campus cause, she said.

The Student Association has raised $250 from team entries and plans to sell T-shirts for $8 during the game. There are four teams entered, and the winning team will receive bragging rights for being the best TSTC powder puff team.

Cheering on the Purple Pandas are fellow male interns James Haugh and George Miller. George is excited about the game and expects a large turnout from students. Be sure and keep an eye on George, he might demonstrate some of his gymnastics skills. Goooo Pandas!

Kristin

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TSTC Publishing is in full gear this fall, and we couldn’t keep it all rolling without our interns. Over the next few days, I’ll introduce you to this semester’s interns who work on design, write copy and inject a youthful exuberance into each day’s work.  First, meet Alyssa Massingill and Kristin Moreno, from the Baylor University public relations/marketing program.

Alyssa is a senior studying journalism, concentrating in public relations with a minor in Spanish. She  has been studying Spanish since kindergarten and hopes to add it as another major.

Alyssa discovered the TSTC internship through her advanced public relations course at Baylor. Alyssa enjoys interacting with co-workers and learning how the company handles day-to-day business.

“I hope to build a strong portfolio and to leave TSTC appreciative of the effort publishing takes. You know, Ben Franklin was in publishing, and he achieved some pretty great feats. Hopefully TSTC will help me accomplish half of what he did,” says Alyssa.

Alyssa is from Lufkin, Texas, and is thinking of heading home, being with family and working as a Spanish teacher post graduation.

In her spare time Alyssa saves her money so she can indulge in her one of her passions: traveling the world. Alyssa also has another passion for dance and likes to combine the two, “I have been to about 15 countries and can give you great dancing stories from each place.” Alyssa also enjoys jewelry, “New pieces, vintage, gaudy, I love it all.”

Kristin Moreno is a junior at Baylor University, and is studying public relations and Spanish with a concentration in marketing. She spent the summer in Spain, studying Spanish and traveling around the country.

After receiving an e-mail from the journalism department at Baylor, Kristin decided to apply for the public relations/marketing internship. Upon working here for a few months, Kristin said, “I have learned how a real office works. Baylor gives us a lot of knowledge and information and to put those learned skills to work is rewarding.”

At TSTC Publishing, Kristin makes marketing calls to technical colleges, telling representatives about new books available. She also does editing and some writing. She keeps TSTC Publishing updated on social networking such as Twitter and the TSTC Publishing blog.

In her spare time, Kristin enjoys running, hanging out with friends and reading Margaret Atwood and Joyce Carol Oates books.

For the future, Kristin hopes to stay in the journalism field. She said picking a dream job “is a tough one because I have so many! I would love to do PR for a sports team, PR for a fashion company, PR for an individual, or even teach. I’m all over the map. Cliché life motto: do what makes you happy. So I’ll try those out until I find one that does!”

Stay tuned to meet more interns in TSTC Publishing.

Sheila

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As the new Marketing Manager at TSTC Publishing, I understand the need to use the latest technology to reach the masses. I embraced e-mail, desktop publishing (or pagination in newspaper circles), and love Facebook so why am I so reluctant to blog?

Now my new job description actually dictates that I learn to blog and blog often. I’m not even going to try to analyze my blog-phobia. Suffice to say, I spent years, yes, decades telling the tales of others. I came up through the newspaper ranks when objective reporting was just that. We weren’t to give our view of anything unless it was through an editorial. When I became a newspaper editor, I faced the same type of phobia. How do you give out your opinions freely when you’ve been trained to be objective, fair and unbiased?

Now, I’m blogging about the whole process of blogging. For the record, I haven’t got into the texting mode, either. On the one hand, I think it’s great that everyone is returning to the written word after spending mindless generations in front of the tube, that frankly no longer even has a tube in it. Remember when you turned off the TV, and the picture went away slowly until there was only a pinpoint of light remaining? And why did we have to watch that pinpoint until it wasn’t there at all? It also was way too exciting to stay up until the stations signed off on the air at midnight. Now, we’re inundated 24/7. OK, back to blogging.

Or maybe this is enough of a post for a first attempt. Who’s to say how long a post should really be? I’ve said my piece, and now I’m done. Why prolong the agony?

Sheila

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Blogging has been light lately; then again, blogging has been intentionally light for a while as we rethink exactly what audience we both want to reach and serve with this site. However, one thing we have been wanting to do for a while now is get feedback on different cover designs that the graphics interns work up in the office for different projects. To that end, our first experiment with trying this out are some cover roughs our second semester graphics intern Adam Chumley has come up with for a datebook/planner we have in the works.

This project came about because one of the bookstores we work with asked us if we could do a custom datebook for them so we’re taking a stab at it. Datebooks aren’t really anything we’ve done before but as a publisher it seems pretty attractive in one sense: there are only about half a dozen different page styles that just get updated for each month. The usual caveats apply: these are just cover roughs, nothing is set and stone, and, of course, all final designs have to get approval from the appropriate places and so on.

So, with no further ado (other than my apologies in advance for the wonky alignment of the images), here are your five designs (click on the thumbnails to see larger versions) to vote on below:

Label Maker Cover

'60s Psychedelic Cover

Rollerball Gears Cover

Texas Flag Cover

Space Age Cover

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

Of course, we’d also like to get feedback from folks about why they liked one design over another or particular elements in designs that they like or don’t like so much. If you’ll take the time to leave a comment below after voting, one lucky commenter will be chosen at random to receive a copy of The TSTC 40th Anniversary Cookbook.

Adam (and I) thank you in advance for your feedback,

Mark

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Just as soon as I did my last post about Issuu, a documenting sharing Web site that we’ve started doing some book previews on, I almost immediately came across Scribd, another site that provides the same basic kinds of online publishing services. I haven’t been able to find exact user/member/subscriber figures for Issuu, but supposedly Scribd is the largest of these sites with +50 million users and 50K documents being uploaded every day. So, I thought I would upload some of the same materials we’d put on Issuu and then track the results to see which one was generating the most views/traffic.

For the purposes of comparison, I’m only using view numbers from files on both sites:

On the one hand, it wasn’t  much of a battle—even with Issuu having a head start as we uploaded all these files there longer ago—as Scribd easily generated the most traffic (that is, in terms of document views). On the other hand, what does it actually add up to? By tracking click throughs—the number of people who went to our e-commerce site from the Scribd page for a particular book—I know that we didn’t generate a single sale from the exponentially greater amount of Scribd views. This confirms something I have long believed but have had much trouble explaining to other folks about their pet publishing projects: people will look at and/or download all kinds of stuff that they absolutely would not pay a single cent for. It’s the classic marketing dilemma: it’s not a matter of how many eyes see your product, it’s a matter of getting your product in front of the eyes that might actually buy it.

Most of our current titles with significant sales are textbooks that generate revenue through adoptions—that is, an instructor chooses to use it for a class being taught—and I’m just not sure how many instructors are cruising Scribd or Issuu looking for new texts for classes. In general, instructors get more than enough info directly from textbook publishers by way of sales reps, direct mail pieces and catalogs, and booth in conference exhibit halls. I wouldn’t say the Scribd-Issuu experiment has been a great failure or anything–after all, you never can tell when all that traffic may generate some key hit somewhere—but I would certainly encourage the tempering of enthusiasm with the idea that there is a direct correlation of traffic = money. Plus, the case of Issuu, whose viewer I like better than Scribd, we are using it at our e-commerce site so people who make it there can see samples from our books.

Another issue, though, relating to these sites is piracy. For example, if you use the search term “grisham” at Issuu you will almost immediately—this morning, at least—come across a pirated version of John Grisham’s The Broker, uploaded by eddypedro over a year ago on February 8, 2008. A similar search at Scribd shows that many pirated Grisham books have been removed but, at the same time, it’s still simple enough to find the full version of The Street Lawyer uploaded on October 9, 2008, by api_user_11797_kushdude58. For me, it comes down to a kind of philosophical dilemma . . . do you really want to use a service from—or be associated with—a company that allows piracy? Yes, I know both these companies will say they do everything they can to prevent it. They will say when publishers request it offending files will be taken offline. But, I mean, really, one of these Grisham books has been up over a year, the other one more than six months, and you’re telling me that there’s no program/filter/protocol for finding these copyright violating materials any sooner or more easily? After all, I can go to a doctor who has treated me perfectly well but if she/he lets prescription pads periodically “walk off” is that a doctor I want to use? Do I want to frequent a bar that consistently lets underage kids drink there under the guise of “well, they looked old enough” or looking the other way when some crappy fake ID is presented? There is certainly a place for document sharing sites on the Web, but as a publisher I’m pretty leery of how these services are being misused, especially in terms of the actual return they do (or don’t) provide.

[UPDATE #1: Since this post was completed this morning, the pirated version of The Broker at Issuu has been taken down although the account of the user who uploaded it is still active. See, that's one of the things I just don't get. It's not just some tragic accident/misunderstanding that Grisham's book wound up online---it's illegal!---so why does that user seemingly get a pass on this?]

[UPDATE #2: In the hour or so since my first update to this post, The Street Lawyer at Scribd is now down as well.]

Mark

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One of the things that we’ve been looking for lately is a good online book previewer to integrate into the individual product pages at our e-commerce site (as well as using elsewhere as applicable). The first good application I remember coming across like this was Amazon.com’s system. Another one is used by National Academies Press. Both these systems, though, are proprietary and what we needed was a system that was robust enough for our purposes and, because we don’t have tons of money for a new stand-alone application or one off the shelf, at the right price.

Thankfully, I think we’ve finally found what we’re looking for with Issuu.

As described on its Web site, Issuu allows you to publish documents online via their platform for free. (While there is an Issuu Pro option, the basic level is working well for us.) Some representative examples of what gets uploaded there include:

• Magazines (Blush)
• Catalogs (Architecture 2008)
• Newspapers (HCC Times)

From what I’ve seen through an informal, not scientific, assessment book publishers are using Issuu primarily for book catalogs. But there’s no reason not to use it for more. So far, in addition to uploading our catalog, we’ve also used Issuu’s sharing capabilities regarding printing/downloading to utilize the following options:

• Full text, downloadable & printable—(TSTC 40th Anniversary Cookbook, Shelbert Goes to Summer Camp)
• Full text, no download or printing—(biotechnology, nanotechnology, home technology integration, fuel cell, and gaming technology forecasts)
• Table of contents & sample chapter, downloadable and printable—(Biomed TechCareers, Contemporary Math Using Maple and TI-89, Installing & Administering MS Windows Server Operating Systems and others)

(Plus, we’re beginning to link to these previews from individual product pages at our e-commerce site. For example, there’s a link at the Taking Charge page under the jpeg of the cover that goes directly to here.)

Anyway, overall it seems to be working pretty well as we’ve uploaded previews and/or full text of many of our titles with the rest coming in the near future at our Issue page. I will say that we looked pretty long and hard at Google Books but it was going to be to harder to integrate with the software at our e-commerce site. (And besides, do Google and Amazon.com have to be source of everything that is innovative and new!?!) Plus, Issuu just seemed to be the easiest to get started with. That being said, of course, once we get this first set of previews done Google Books is next, especially given that the book info there has links that go directly to booksellers like Amazon, Barnes & Noble.com, Books-A-Million, Borders, and Indiebound.

This is all thanks to Sarah-Jane Sanders over at marketing & communications here on campus at TSTC Waco. A while back I was kvetching once again about my inability to find a good book previewer application—after all, as Marge Simpson says “It’s easy to be critical” while Homer follows up with “And it’s fun too”—but it’s thanks to her pointing out that TSTC Harlingen has been using Issuu for a while—for example, putting their college catalog online—that we’ve actually got a solution.

Mark

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