Author Michael A. Burstein just completed Boston University‘s Certificate in Publishing program, which he started in January. He tells SFScope “although I enrolled in the program to make me a better editor in my day job [Burstein is a science book editor], I found that I learned a lot about book production and book marketing that is also useful to me as a science fiction writer. One of my final projects was to develop the marketing plan for my own collection. My marketing teacher, Lissa Warren, let me tailor my assignments to my own book; so the assignment to ‘create a press kit for a book’ became creating a press kit for my own book.”
Burstein’s collection, I Remember the Future, is a gathering of all his Hugo- and Nebula Award-nominated short fiction. It will be published by Apex in November. Warren is the author of The Savvy Author’s Guide to Book Publicity.
Burstein continues, “In my final course, we took on the role of a book publisher and did all the work a publisher does when publishing a collection. We created a book proposal, a Profit & Loss statement, a marketing plan, a press kit, and a finished product. So now I have a much better idea of what any small press goes through whenever they acquire a book. (And I have a mockup of what could end up being my second short story collection!)”