About-Bio
About-Bio
John Rodzvilla is currently the Senior Electronic-Publisher-in-Residence in the Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing at Emerson College in Boston, MA. He is also the ePublishing Consultant for Ploughshares Magazine. He is also sits on the Board of the Bookbuilders of Boston where he chairs the Forum Committee. He holds a Masters Degree in Library and Information Science from Simmons College, where he also worked as a Library Assistant in the Technical Services Department at the Beatley Library. He also has over a decade of experience in the trade book publishing world and may have even worked at a bookstore right out of college.
Sometimes he finds time to work on a variety of drawings and paintings. More about that can be found over in the art section.
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John is developing the electronic publishing curriculum for one of the few graduate programs for publishing in the world. He has been teaching an Electronic Publishing Overview class for graduate students since 2007. In 2009 he introduced a similar course for undergraduate students at Emerson. The two overview classes are designed to help students become savvy in using the latest tools for writing and publishing on the web while also studying the history and theory of hypertext and the internet. In the Fall of 2010 he introduced the first advanced digital publishing call on Web Development, in the Spring semester he began teach a class on the creation and distribution of e-books. for graduate students. Both of these classes are now offered to undergraduate students as well.
John has also developed a contracts and subsidiary rights course for the graduate program. Students in the class learn how to read and negotiate an author contract and license foreign and digital rights throughout the world. Students are divided up into teams that need to license rights for a select title list to a variety of publisher and create subsidiary rights catalogs and licensing agreements.
While at Emerson he developed a relationship with Ploughshares Magazine, a respected literary magazine published three times a year at Emerson College. John is currently work with them on their digital strategies and working with them to develop an iPhone app for the magazine.
John has also consulted with other publishers in the Boston Area on social media and database design.
John has worked in a variety of roles for the Perseus Books Group. He started with the now defunct Perseus Publishing (formerly Addison-Welsey-Longman trade) where he was an Assistant Managing Editor. In this position he helped to manage the publication schedules for Perseus Publishing and Da Capo Press. He was also involved in developing a UK imprint for the Perseus Books Group, the Perseus Press. While an Assistant Managing Editor he acquired and developed a variety of books including, The Copy-Editing and Headline Handbook, Blood Evidence, and The Weblog Handbook. He also developed a line of print-on-demand books that brought dozens of backlist titles back into print from a variety of publisher associated with the Perseus Books Group. Including a large number of books that had only been published in hardcover. He was also the editor of the first collection of early writing on weblogs, We’ve Got Blogs.
After Perseus Publishing was folded into Basic Books and Da Capo Press, John continued to acquire select titles for Da Capo Press, including Consider the Eel and Mishima’s Sword. At this time he was also the Operations Manager in the Cambridge, MA office for the Perseus Books Group. In this position he was responsible for the management of the Cambridge office, including on-site IT support, and working with property management on a new lease and redesign of the offices. John also worked within the Subsidiary Rights department on licensing books as English reprints and translations in Eastern Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia on the international side and inexpensive reprints, electronic editions and large print editions on the domestic side. John also managed the back-end of the subsidiary rights department including allocations, flow of contracts, dunning of advances and upgrade of databases.
In 2007 John left the publishing world to focus on a Master’s Degree in Library and Information Science at Simmons College. His focus in the program was on digital management, metadata creation (digital and traditional cataloging). During his time at Simmons he worked as a Library Assistant in the Beatley Library. His time was split between the Acquisitions and Periodicals department. While with the Acquisitions department he helped find out-of-print or special printings of books and doubled the size of video holdings at Simmons, this included researching and finding DVD editions to replace the library’s 16mm holdings. In the Periodical department he helped to itemize the entire collection of bound periodicals, create a display of diversion periodicals and helped with the renewal and weeding processes. He also had a weekly shift on the Reference Desk. While at the Library he was awarded a grant to purchase an Amazon Kindle to research the practicality of e-Readers in Academic libraries.
