An innovative collaboration involving a Vermont college is allowing students to self-publish books.

The project’s organizers believe it will aid give humanities students a concrete “deliverable” for the future as well as a tremendous opportunity for learning about the process of publication.

Inside Higher Ed’s Charlie Tyson has this report:

…[José] Ferreras’s writing career is launching earlier than expected, thanks to a publishing initiative announced Thursday at Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, Vt. The Shires Press Series, a collaboration between Southern Vermont College and the bookstore, will allow full-time students at the college to write and publish books.

The series, approved this spring by Southern Vermont faculty members and administrators, requires students to take four classes, including a course in book publishing that will address conceptual aspects of publishing, such as design, as well as the vicissitudes of the contemporary publishing industry. (The other courses are a writing course, a humanities elective, and a publishing “practicum.”) During the two-year sequence, students will complete a manuscript.

SVC will then pay to have five copies of each book printed from ShiresPress, an independent publisher housed within Northshire Bookstore; officials estimate Southern Vermont’s cost per student at less than the price of a MacBook computer.

….Officials created the publishing project in part to encourage students to study humanities. The initiative, [College President Karen] Gross said, makes visible a link between humanities education and the work place.

…Jennifer Burg, who chairs the Hunter Division of the Humanities at Southern Vermont, said she hopes the publishing series also attracts students outside the humanities division.

“I don’t know if people would expect students who you may not identify as college material to value having their name on a publication the way we would folks at an Ivy or people in graduate school, but from my experience with our students, I think that’s something they would prize,” the English professor said. “I think everyone has a story to tell, but I think that our students really have remarkable and surprising stories to tell.”

Gross said she expects the series to publish 10 books by students each year.

Southern Vermont officials think the publishing curriculum will encourage cooperation between Northshire Bookstore and the college by bringing speakers from the bookstore to campus and by sending students to visit the store.

“I think the future of higher education requires that colleges partner not only with each other but also with businesses in their community,” Gross said.

Northshire Bookstore has been a community institution in Manchester since 1976. ShiresPress, the bookstore’s publishing arm, is a more recent development. Debbi Wraga, the bookstore’s publishing coordinator, said the press, which launched in 2008, had published more than 550 authors, ranging in age from 11 to 99. The press publishes mostly fiction, although it also prints cookbooks, poetry and other genres.