- Master of Publishing
- Admissions to the MPub Program
- Masters Courses
- PUB 600: Topics in Publishing Management
- PUB 601: Editorial Theory and Practice
- PUB 602: Design & Production Control in Publishing
- PUB 605 Fall Project: Books Publishing Project
- PUB 606 Spring Project: Magazine/Media Project
- PUB 607: Publishing Technology Project
- PUB 611: Making Knowledge Public: How Research Makes Its Way Into Society
- PUB 800: Text & Context: Publishing in Contemporary Culture
- PUB 801: History of Publishing
- PUB 802: Technology & Evolving Forms of Publishing
- PUB 900: Internship Project Report
- PUB 899: Publishing Internship
- Faculty and Staff
- Awards and Financial Support
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Undergraduate Minor
- Undergraduate Courses
- PUB 101: The Publication of Self in Everyday Life
- PUB 131: Publication Design Technologies
- PUB 201: The Publication of the Professional Self
- PUB 210W: Professional Writing Workshop
- PUB 212: Public Relations and Public Engagement
- PUB 231: Graphic Design Fundamentals
- PUB 331: Graphic Design in Transition: Print and Digital Books
- PUB 332: Graphic Design in Transition: Print and Digital Periodicals
- PUB 350: Marketing for Book Publishers
- PUB 355W: Online Marketing for Publishers
- PUB 371: Structure of the Book Publishing Industry in Canada
- PUB 372: The Book Publishing Process
- PUB 375: Magazine Publishing
- PUB 401: Technology and the Evolving Book
- PUB 411: Making Knowledge Public: How Research Makes Its Way Into Society
- PUB 431: Publication Design Project
- PUB 438: Design Awareness in Publishing Process and Products
- PUB 448: Publishing and Social Change: Tech, Texts, and Revolution
- PUB 450: The Business of Book Publishing
- PUB 456: Institutional and International Event Planning
- PUB 458: Journalism as a Publishing Problem
- PUB 477: Publishing Practicum
- PUB 478: Publishing Workshop
- PUB 480 D100: Buy the Book: A History of Publication Design (STC)
- PUB 480 OL01: Accessible Publishing (OLC)
- Undergraduate Courses
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- Publishing Workshops
- Contact SFU Publishing Workshops
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Four Reasons I Secretly Wish I’d Done an MPub
When I first started teaching in the Master of Publishing, I was anticipating some culture shock. I have a much more traditional graduate school background -- an MA and PhD in English literature -- and my graduate education consisted largely of traditional seminar courses, deep dives into specific topics culminating in journal-article-length research papers. Trained in close and careful reading, scholarly research skills, and academic writing, I was a little nervous about teaching in a more professionally-oriented program. What I didn’t anticipate was a feeling I slowly developed over the course of my first few years, a feeling of jealousy.
Because as it turns out, the job of being a professor involves a whole lot of skills that grad school never taught me. But you know who is being taught these skills? My students! What follows is a brief list of reasons I secretly wish I could go back to school and do an MPub.
Aranea Press with their final book project titles
- Every piece of text my students produce looks better than the best thing I can make, based on my fairly solid understanding of Microsoft Word. That’s because MPub students learn how to typeset text in Adobe InDesign, and learn how to do it with an eye to accessibility as well as aesthetics, from an actual professional book designer. Imagine how good our CVs and cover letters and syllabi and all the many many documents we produce would look if we actually knew what a hierarchy of type was!
- They’re also better at making websites than me, which is a bit embarrassing because I swear back when I worked in English departments I was a real WordPress expert. Not only do my students know how to build beautiful websites, they also know how to use SEO and web analytics, all skills that would be wildly useful for any academic trying to build a platform for their work online (which, in the 21st century, is pretty much all of us).
Festive project room poster for Margin Press. Photo provided by Ariel Hudnall.
- They learn how to collaborate effectively and manage projects, a skillset that didn’t seem particularly relevant to me when I was writing a dissertation (a decidedly lonely undertaking) but that I’m deeply jealous of now that I spend my weeks chairing meetings, running committees, and overseeing collaborative grants.
- They can balance a project budget! Many of our students come into the MPub certain that they’re bad at math, but they all come out able to balance a P&L (a profit and loss statement, used to calculate the costs and revenues associated with publishing books). Meanwhile I’m over here building my grant budgets in Word because who has the time to learn Excel?
We still have seminar classes (that’s what I teach!) in which our students can explore the history and theory of publishing, but those ideas are always intertwined with a focus on practice that is much closer to the reality of my own academic work. One of these days I’m going to sit down with my colleagues and make them teach me how to set a line of type, how to dig into my website’s analytics, and how to balance a budget. But until then, I’ll just keep hiring my own wildly useful students as research assistants, and wishing I was as good at project management as they are.
A trip to Special Collections and Rare Books on the Burnaby campus (just to prove we have fun in my class, too!)
If you want to live my dream and join the Master of Publishing, learn more about applying here!