It’s not really news that I recommend Thomas Woll’s Publishing for Profit. The book was one of the first I purchased in the fall of 2012 when I started at Rosemont College’s graduate publishing program, and my copy is one of the most-referenced books I own.
In fact, I reference Publishing for Profit so frequently that it’s also my number one most recommended title for new students at Rosemont. When a new student asked me this fall what books I think she should read as she starts the program, I told her to get a copy of Publishing for Profit and keep it near her desk, because I’ve used it almost every single semester of graduate school.
The class I used it for most often, though it wasn’t required reading for the course, was a class I took called Maintaining & Operating a Small Press. The course has since changed, and it’s taught by a different professor now, but at the time, the main project in the course was to create a (fake) small press, manage the titles the press would publish, and create a business plan to project how the press would run.
Publishing for Profit offers incredible advice for nearly all aspects of running a publishing company. My endgame as a publishing graduate student has always been to either found or work at a small press, so not only did the course help me gain the skills I’d been looking for, but so did Publishing for Profit.