Tag / NDSU

by ndsupress

A Safe Place

. . . where-in we share “A letter to Lance Richey,” author of Champagne Times: Lawrence Welk and His American Century (NDSU Press 2025) from Allan Burke, Secretary-Treasurer, Friends of the Welk Homestead, Inc., presented here with Allan’s permission.

Author Lance with a photo of Lawrence.

Lance,

I found one of your statements in the recent radio interview so profound that I spent considerable time transcribing it. I’m sure there is a way to transcribe it instantly with AI, but I did it the old-fashioned way by listening, typing, rewinding, listening, typing . . .

Here’s that section, which I’d like to title “A Safe Place”:

“Lawrence gave the people what they wanted. He was an entertainer. He wouldn’t describe himself as an artist. He loved Jazz music. He loved Dixieland. But he said, ‘I don’t play much of that on my television show because the audience wants something different.’

“Lawrence’s greatest success on network television actually came in the most tumultuous times, the 1960s. He hit the Top Ten of all television programs in 1968. In 1969 when the nation was coming apart at the seams with the Baby Boomer revolution, with the Vietnam War, with the civil rights movement. Because everyone knew for one hour a week I can check into Lawrence Welk and I’ll hear music I recognize, I won’t have politics in my face, and I can just for a moment step away from all the turmoil and enjoy a show that presents to me the America that used to be or that I imagine used to be. That was Lawrence’s secret.”

This section is what I think could be the heart of a marketing campaign for the [Welk] biography and documentary.

The times we live in today, highlighted by this week’s assassination of Charlie Kirk and earlier by the shootings of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband (not to mention school and other shootings), call for “A Safe Place.” At the risk of being declared sophomoric, I believe Public Television can provide that with the Welk documentary and The Lawrence Welk Show, and NDSU Press can market Champagne Times: Lawrence Welk and His American Century.

It seems to have gone unnoticed that The Lawrence Welk Show by Joyful Voices drew an estimated 600 people to the Welk Homestead on June 1. This past Sunday, Joyful Voices’ Lawrence Welk Hoedown drew several hundred people to a steamy machine shed at the South Central Threshing Show at Braddock, N.D. Contrary to the notion that Mr. Welk’s fans are dead, none of the people at the show in Braddock appeared to have left this life. In fact, there was some dancing at the end of the show.

In my opinion, public television stations across the country should be adding The Lawrence Welk Show . . .

Just some thoughts.
The best to you and Carol,
Allan


P.S. from Suzzanne Kelley, Publisher, NDSU Press: Here are some links to the Prairie Public documentary about Lawrence Welk (viewed already by 37,000+ people!) and the NDSU Press publication of Lance’s book Champagne Times: Lawrence Welk and His American Century. The biography (a 3-volume limited edition [just 500 copies, autographed and numbered], printed as hardcovers in a beautiful protective slip-case) contains photos and stories beyond the documentary with more insights to Welk’s motivation, aspirations, and success-driven route from farm boy roots to becoming a media mogul millionaire. A history of Lawrence Welk–North Dakota’s and the nation’s eminent entertainer of his time–is also part of a month-long exhibit at the NDSU Memorial Union Gallery, showcasing unique historical objects and running through October 9. For parking as the guest of NDSU Press, email NDSU.Press@ndsu.edu to obtain a free pass. 

by ndsupress

How Our Books Go from Us to You

Note from NDSU Press Publisher, Suzzanne Kelley

Here is Emma Borah, Graduate Research Assistant in Publishing, taking care of sales and communications during the 2024 Western History Association conference in Kansas City. Hosting an exhibit table at conferences and book festivals is one way we are able to get our books into the hands of readers.

Almost every time we sign on a new author, they ask about our methods for distribution. This is a good and important question to ask. Authors (and their presses!) want to make sure that their books are getting into the hands of readers everywhere. Our authors are much relieved when I share the following information about our distribution practices.

  • All of our books (since 2015) are available at Amazon, which works with us as a wholesaler. When Amazon receives orders for our books, they will then send us a list of the books we are to ship to one of their multiple distribution hubs. We receive that list every Monday at 3:00 a.m. We can only send Amazon the books that they request.
  • Ingram Content Group also works with us a wholesaler, meaning they place orders with us when they receive orders from third parties, usually from bookstores.
  • Follett School Solutions and Higher Education Follett work with us as wholesalers, too, filling orders for public schools and university or college bookstores.
  • Baker & Taylor places orders with us for libraries across the United States.
  • We sell direct to public libraries and bookstores (at discounts to each). For the past couple of years, we’ve opened subscription accounts to public libraries that want to receive a copy of every book we publish. As soon as we have those books in hand, we ship them off to the subscribing libraries. We also gift a copy of every book to the eleven higher education institutions in North Dakota. We send those gift copies to the North Dakota State Library, and they take care of placing the copies with the universities.
  • We sell direct to individuals at our online store, at various conferences and book festivals, and at our own events, such as the POPP Poetry reading event that will take place this coming Saturday, December 12, and at our annual NDSU Press Party. Our 10th Annual NDSU Press Party is scheduled for May 3, 2025.
  • We even give some copies away! If a book editor from a journal requests a copy, we send it, no charge. Likewise, if a faculty member at any college or university is thinking about using one of our titles as required reading for their classes, we’ll send a desk copy to that faculty member.

With the various vendors that are involved, we spend a lot of time on fulfillment: accepting purchase orders; picking, packing, and carting orders to delivery points; and then invoicing the companies in a variety of ways that meet their requirements for record keeping. We try to send out all orders within two business days of receiving them.

So, that’s the distribution scoop for NDSU Press!

by ndsupress

Wish Us Luck!

Note from NDSU Press Publisher Suzzanne Kelley

Will we take Gold or Silver? Or maybe one of each or two of one–since one of our titles is a finalist in TWO categories: History and Multicultural! Whatever way, we’re fine with the outcome! This Friday, April 26, 2024, the Independent Book Publishers (IBPA) Award winners will be announced during the dinner and ceremony being held in Denver, 6:00 to 9:00 P.M. CDT. This celebration of “the best in independent book publishing” is an exciting gala to attend for publishers and authors alike, but alas we cannot be there in person. Instead, you’ll find us tuning in at 8:15 P.M. CDT, as that is when the hosts will livestream the announcements via their Facebook page.

And who is our charmed finalist author? Historian John M. Shaw, whose debut book is garnering great attention! NDSU Press published In Order That Justice May Be Done: The Legal Struggles of the Turtle Mountain Band of Pembina Chippewa, 1795-1905 in July 2023. We hope you’ll tune in to the award announcements, too, and maybe even cheer us on!

 

In Order That Justice May Be Done is available from our NDSU Press online store, Ingram, Baker & Taylor, Amazon, and your favorite independent bookseller.

by ndsupress

A Good Day to Give

Today is the perfect day to contribute in large or small ways to the work we do at NDSU Press. ALL of our production, marketing, and distribution are dependent upon sales and donations. Your contribution is most appreciated. Please help us in our efforts to give region a voice.

Follow the link below to Arts and Sciences and choose NDSU Press Endowment. THANK YOU.

https://bit.ly/NDSUPressGivingDay23
#NDSUPress #NDSU #NDSUFoundation

by ndsupress

Keeping a Close Eye on Fonts

Note from NDSU Press Publisher Suzzanne Kelley

Breanna (at right) and Megan scrutinize each font’s every twist and turn in their mystery collection.

Our 2023 Introduction to Publishing class has just returned from its Braddock Expedition. While at The Braddock News Letterpress Museum, located on the grounds of the South Central Threshing Association, NDSU students were tasked with a number of activities under the tutelage of Leah Burke and Allan Burke. The museum collection of fonts is magnificent, replete with multiple cases full of alphabet and punctuation pieces. The fonts are mostly formed of metal, but some are wooden and large. A few of the font styles are italic; some are bold. Each case contains lowercase and uppercase fonts of a single type. Previous classes and volunteers have sorted the type so that there is only one style per case, a detail-oriented task that has taken place over time in order to organize the collection. Now, students and volunteers are tasked with the detective work of identifying the measurement and name of each type style. 

Type Gauge Tool

There are tools–physical, printed, and digital–to help the students determine the size and style of the type case they are assigned. Beginning with the Type Gauge Multi-Tool, students insert a sample piece of type to determine the height of each font. Font heights are measured as “points,” there being approximately 72 points to an inch. A size 36 font is about one-half inch, and a size 12 (typically used for Word documents) measures at 12/72 of an inch, or, about 1/6 of an inch. (OK, that is enough math.) 

 

Sara, shown here using digital means to narrow down her font identity search.

A digital resource our font detectives enjoy using is Identifont, one of many free options available for finding font families. Identifont asks questions such as, “Do the characters have serifs?” If the answer is yes, then the next question might be, “What style is the upper-case ‘Q’ tail?”

Each question the students answer leads them to the next narrowing-down clue, much like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure kind of book. Students can also make use of type-face identification books held in the museum library.

Ella and Mike study a printed font-style resource.

 

Once the students identify the font style in their type case, they have the great fun of setting type, using their fonts to name the type in their case, and thus building pages for a museum catalog in progress. 

 

Some mistakes were made. It is not easy to set type to “read wrong” and “print right.” (Yes, these are the technical terms.) Here, we see that a first try at typesetting and printing the font identity and size needs a little work.

 

Fortunately, our mistakes are easily corrected. (Maybe not completely in the first try. Can you see the extant error?) 

 

Check out this brief video, where you’ll see that Anish (in the blue jacket and yellow tee) and Abby keep at the task until everything reads right.

Mission accomplished! 

Among other assignments on site this past weekend at The Braddock News Letterpress Museum, all students had their try at identifying fonts, typesetting, and printing. Our hands-on learning experience illustrated how typesetting and printing were done at the turn of the twentieth century and provided a plethora of new-to-the-students terms for the art and process of letterpress publishing. (They also learned about the magic of Gojo.)

We so appreciate our community-university partnership, teaching students (new and) old ways of publishing, while providing aid to the collection management at The Braddock News Letterpress Museum. Special thanks go to Tracy and Paula Moch–who kept us fed and hydrated (and to Johanna for her delicious homemade brownies)–and to Allan and Leah Burke, who kept the training and tasks a’coming! Leah, in all those years of running the newspaper business, you may have missed your calling as a teacher! 

by ndsupress

C’mon in! The door’s open!

Publisher’s note from Suzzanne Kelley

Here you see visible proof of why moving our chapbook publishing project from the spring to the fall semester was a good choice. Iron Man Tracy Moch, with the South Central Threshing Association, illustrates how this winter is progressing as he works to gain access to The Braddock News Letterpress Museum, located in Braddock, North Dakota. As our spring semester draws to a close, we would have been hard pressed—with snow piled high—to conduct our letterpress printing project of printing, assembling, stitching, trimming, and numbering individual chapbook copies. Instead, our students in the Certificate in Publishing program now use the spring semester to acquire our next chapbook collection in preparation for publishing in the fall.

Facing east from inside The Braddock News Letterpress Museum. Thank you, Allan Burke, Pressman Extraordinaire, for this picture and the photo of Tracy. Between his work at preserving and operating The Hunter Times (Bonanzaville, West Fargo, ND) and The Braddock News Letterpress Museum, Allan has his hands full of good projects!

 

These days, as we hunker down in the wake of more blizzardy weather, we continue the process of giving first reads to dozens of manuscript submissions for our 8th Poetry of the Plains & Prairies (POPP) Award. Students learn how the acquisition process works for literary press prizes.

The first step is to learn how to navigate our online submissions portal at Submittable, a platform used by more than 11,000 organizations. Submittable is known to poets and writers of all genres as a place to submit their work for publication consideration. In a 2023 review conducted by FinancesOnline, Submittable ranked 3rd of 253 popular apps used for applicant tracking. I chose Submittable because of its familiarity among authors at large, its user-friendly design, and its price. Submittable is an easy place for students to see how publishers (and nonprofits and institutions offering grants and scholarships) are able to receive and track submissions, and it is a place where authors can keep track of all the presses and magazines where their work is being considered.

At Submittable, we are able to design our online entry forms. Here is what the form for submitting POPP Award nominations looks like.

 

 

Once manuscripts start rolling in, students in the Practicum in Publishing—taught every spring—learn how to assess manuscripts based on the aim of the POPP Award series and the mission of the press. They will each read each of the submissions, ranking them in accord with this call for submissions:

North Dakota State University Press seeks poetry submissions of any style for our annual Poetry of the Plains and Prairies letterpress chapbook publication. While authors may call any place home, their submissions must deftly capture the feeling of, as well as the reality of, living on the plains and prairies. Authors may submit any number of poems equaling thirty to thirty-five pages in length, with no more than one poem per page.

We accept new submissions for the POPP Award every year from January 17 through March 17. Answering a series of questions about the aim and mission for each submission, students—undergraduate and graduate, coming from studies in multiple disciplines—take part in winnowing the submissions down to about seven to ten finalists. Where submission selections are close, we meet to advocate for favored collections. Thus, the experience prepares students for work at other literary presses, where interns or other in-house readers pore through what they call a “slush pile,” discerning which manuscripts should go forward for further review and acquisition. Our finalist selections are then sent to the previous year’s POPP Award winner, who serves as our finalist judge and selects the winning manuscript.

Our team of students learn about the history and form of chapbooks in the Introduction to Publishing class. They take the POPP Award-winner’s manuscript, chosen in Practicum in Publishing, and they are introduced to the line-editing process, standards for book design, selection of cover art, building a copyright page, and developing marketing and publicity plans.

Instead of printing, assembling, stitching, and trimming chapbooks at the Letterpress Museum during our chill “spring” months, the hands-on labor takes place in the more accommodating fall months. How lucky we are to have the good fortune of reading poetry manuscripts indoors, while the snow piles up around us!

For more information about the Certificate in Publishing, check out our course descriptions for undergraduate and graduate students. If you are age 65 or older, and you would like to audit the publishing courses for free, check out the option in Project 65.

Destiny Manifested, by Bonnie Larson Staiger, was our first POPP Award chapbook publication solicited through competition. The award was first named Voices of the Plains and Prairies, and—in 2019—the award name changed to Poetry of the Plains and Prairies Award (the POPP Award).

by ndsupress

A Ponder & a Podcast

a note from Suzzanne Kelley, Publisher, North Dakota State University Press

 

These cold and blustery northern plains days are perfect for sticking around the home-front, preferably indoors and near a fireplace. Friday is a work-from-home day for me, and I look forward to hearing the washer agitate and the dogs snore as I edit and write and read and ponder the business of publishing.

Things went kablooey last week, over the weekend, and on into this week. There are five of us holding down the fort at the Press—none of us full time, and some of us just a very little bit of time, but all of us pulling our weight . . . except that two tested positive for Covid (and a third had a scare this morning) . . . and one of our designers injured her back . . . and our other designer was out of town . . . and I accidentally deleted ALL of my emails (which are slowly being recovered) . . . which meant very little went according to my master plan. It is only now, at the end of this week, with everyone returning, slightly bedraggled but smiling and ready to pitch in, that I feel like we’re in forward motion again. In fact, this afternoon I turned off my email, shut my office door, and left my office only to refresh my coffee. I got enough good work done to lift my spirits. Supply-chain challenges and Covid be damned . . . we can do this!

In fact, we have all kinds of exciting happenings to share in the coming days and weeks. Here’s one piece now!

Check out this just-out-today announcement—featured on the NDSU News page!—about our brand-spankin’-new podcast: NDSU Press announces new podcast | NDSU News | NDSU

Announcing our brand new NDSU Press Podcast!

 

by ndsupress

How NDSU Press Acquires Manuscripts

from Suzzanne Kelley, Publisher / Editor in Chief

At NDSU Press, we accept manuscript submissions year-round. There are no fees to submit manuscripts for publication consideration, and we seek works in nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. This past year, from January 1 through December 31, 2020 , we received more than one hundred manuscripts and about a dozen manuscript proposals for publication consideration.

Searching through this lot for the best manuscripts requires a considerable amount of reading and due deliberation. While I am on a constant search for the best scholarly and literary works, I must also be conscientious about balance in filling out our catalog for each year. We cannot publish only poetry or only fiction, and we choose not to publish only scholarly works. We can select only six to ten works for publication annually.

As we are completely self-funded—reliant upon sales and donations for all our operations—I must also be aware of what kinds of books will situate well in the market and how the balance of our creative and scholarly works can produce a return on investment.

Paying close attention to scholarly research and literary contributions, all within the parameters of the mission of the press, is more than a guess-and-by-golly proposition. The process requires being mindful of where we have gaps in knowledge and what kinds of works can reach an interested audience, and we must be aware of current pricing trends in printing and distribution. The process also recognizes that while our production schedule mirrors those of big publishers like Random House, we are not publishing on the same commercial scale. Our mission is generally focused upon scholarly, intellectual, and creative works of regional interest. Like a puzzle piece, each acquisition must contribute to the whole picture, balanced in content and profitable.

A crucial element to getting things right in our acquisitions process is to follow the professional standards of peer review for university presses. The best practices for peer review, as proposed by the Association of University Presses, may be found here.

Our process for manuscript acquisitions—in accord with best practices—has four stages, each building upon the other for making the final selections.

  • In-house review, wherein I make a first determination about whether a manuscript meets our mission for publication and has a potential market or audience.
  • Blind peer review, wherein two experts in the field—unknown to each other and to the author—make an assessment about manuscripts that have passed muster for stage 1. At this stage, I rely upon professionals knowledgeable about the scholarship and/or writing style in the manuscript. I have worked with reviewers who are located locally, within our state, regionally, nationally, and even internationally. Peer reviewers provide a summary overview of the work, noting strengths and weaknesses, gaps or omissions, and they make one of the following recommendations:
    • Accept (manuscript merits publication; some revisions may be requested)
    • Reject with invitation to re-submit (manuscript does not merit publication in its present form but has potential; requires substantial revision)
    • Reject (does not merit publication)
  • Consultation with the author, wherein—if the reviewers have recommended publication or resubmission—the author and I go over each of the reviewers’ observations and recommendations. The author and I map out a plan for addressing the recommendations, and we develop a timeline for the author to deliver the revised manuscript.
  • Certification by the Editorial Advisory Board, wherein I make a summary report, providing our board members with descriptions of the reviewers’ areas of expertise and experience, the reviewers’ comments, the author’s response, and a copy of the manuscript. The Editorial Advisory Board, comprised of faculty and lay-persons at large with a variety of backgrounds and expertise, scrutinize the submissions, ask questions related to content and catalog, and—if everything is in good order—affirms that we have followed all of the standard university press peer review procedures. The board’s certification determination reads as follows:

I certify that [manuscript title], having undergone the peer review process, has scholarly, intellectual, or creative merit for publication with NDSU Press. I further find that this work contributes to scholarly knowledge of region (that is, discovery of new knowledge) or to public consciousness of region (that is, dissemination of information, or interpretation of regional experience).

Following all of these steps keeps us on our toes, and by sheer number of submissions, I am not always able to render a quick response to writers. This is our process, though, and it is thus far working splendidly. In fact, in the next few days, I will be sending two nonfiction manuscripts to our Editorial Advisory Board to seek certification for that fourth step of the acquisitions process.

If you would like to become one of our blind peer reviewers and assist in this important process, I invite you to visit our online submissions portal at Submittable and add your area of interest to our Manuscript Reviewer Database.

Dr. Suzzanne Kelley is assistant professor of practice and editor in chief for NDSU Press. She directs the Certificate in Publishing program and manages all aspects of NDSU Press operations.  Suzzanne is a graduate of University of Texas–Austin, summa cum laude, with a BS in Applied Learning & Development. She holds an MA in History from the University of Central Oklahoma, where she was honored with the Edward Everette Dale Graduate Student Award. Suzzanne graduated from North Dakota State University with her PhD in History, and she has been working in publishing since 2002, first with scholarly journals and then in book publishing since 2005.  She is a member of the honor societies Pi Lambda Theta, Phi Alpha Theta, and Phi Kappa Phi, where she is the immediate past president. Suzzanne is at present serving a second term as president of the Midwest Independent Publishers Association.