Agate Publishing president and publisher Doug Seibold has launched Agate Publishing Academy, an online professional development program, produced and delivered by working professionals in the industry, for individuals seeking to forge successful careers in publishing. Currently, APA offers certifications in Publishing Basics, DEI Basics for Publishing Professionals, Instructional Design Basics, and Freelance Business Basics, with many more courses to be added over the course of 2024 and 2025.
APA courses range from self-paced, online-only offerings to programs that integrate consultations and interactive seminars with industry experts and opportunities to network with other aspiring and working publishing professionals. The APA credentials were developed to support aspirants who might otherwise lack the resources or connections to advance in the field.
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| Doug Seibold | |
Agate had previously developed a live, on-site version of the program to find and train more than 130 interns over the past dozen years, most of whom are now working publishing professionals across the country. APA is scaling up this program to make it more broadly available--and sustainable--by connecting students aspiring to publishing industry careers with small presses in search of interns and trainees. The Training Intern Network expands Agate's reach to college and university career centers across the country to solicit potential candidates.
In 2020 at Winter Institute in Baltimore, Seibold and I had a conversation about his vision for this initiative. Four years later, I asked him how the pandemic had changed his expectations and approach regarding on-site, hybrid, and online learning techniques.
"One thing the pandemic did is raise the stakes for us here at Agate regarding our existing intern training program, which became the foundation of our 'Publishing Basics' flagship course," he replied. "Suddenly, with everyone working remotely, we had to do everything online. Fortunately, we had a rough draft of 'Publishing Basics' in place; we began putting our interns through that, and then following up with a videoconference discussion."
He added that Agate's experiences "made me realize how we could safely and effectively incorporate them into the larger offering. That's really when the hybrid aspect of 'Publishing Basics' took shape. Agate already had plenty of experience with both on-site and online learning, but our figuring out how to intertwine them in hybrid fashion was definitely accelerated by our experiences in 2020."
Fast forward to 2024, and APA is up and running. "Our big focus right now is just making more people aware of it," Seibold noted. "Since we launched in late 2023, we've put two small beta cohorts through 'Publishing Basics,' which has helped us stress test the platform and delivery; so far things have unfolded very smoothly. We're now doing everything we can to reach out to different communities of potential learners."
This week he is at the Independent Book Publishers Association’s Publishing University in Denver, Colo., to talk about APA, and is about to launch a broader marketing campaign aimed at recent graduates and career changers interested in starting publishing careers.
Reaction among the colleges he has reached out to has been "overwhelmingly positive," he said. "I think they appreciate how relatively few things like APA exist to help students in the humanities learn more about a field that many of them have always seen as an attractive professional destination. One of my key aims with APA is to make publishing less opaque to aspirants interested in the field, and to do it in a way that's more focused, more affordable, and more accessible than existing alternatives."
He described the feedback he has received thus far from small presses regarding participation as "cautious enthusiasm. A lot of these publishers have talked to me about their appreciation of how APA takes on some very glaring and intractable problems in the industry, both about training and developing younger staff and about diversifying the ranks of new industry entrants. The few presses that have taken part so far have been very positive."
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| Vicki DeArmon | |
One enthusiastic APA supporter is Sibylline Press publisher Vicki DeArmon. "We had talked about launching our own intern program but the Agate Publishing Academy provided the piece that's always missing from intern programs, namely context," she said. "Having been in business and worked with interns for nearly 35 years, I know that providing a background in how publishing works is difficult. It's a complex business. With that taken care of through the academy, we could simply assign work projects and give people real life experience in the business. We noticed that it elevated the work the interns were performing because they understood the pool in which they were swimming."
Sibylline has had two interns in the program and also sent one of its staffers who was looking for a greater understanding of the industry. "It was well worth the investment," DeArmon noted. "Will we do it again? Absolutely. For our small yet growing press, it's an ideal program."
When asked what a successful 2024 would look like for APA, Seibold observed: "As a longtime independent publisher, my aims in business are all about building sustainability. I don't have a specific target for enrollment or anything like that. I'd like to see the number of students we serve grow, and along the way get to a place where we can understand more clearly what the business might turn into, and what that might require of us staff-wise.
"One reason the whole enterprise has evolved so slowly has been because many of us here at Agate have had to work on it at the same time we've been doing everything else necessary to keep the company going. Until the pandemic, it had always been a back-burner sort of project. It's really exciting to see it emerge as a full-fledged, functioning operation, at long last."