BookCAMP Magazine, published out of Glen Ridge, New Jersey by Ted Olczak of Printed Word Reviews, has landed a genuine coup for the independent publishing community, announcing that longtime Book Industry Study Group executive director Brian O’Leary will begin writing a new quarterly column for the publication following his recent retirement from BISG. The addition gives BookCAMP’s readers direct access to one of the publishing industry’s most respected voices on metadata, distribution, and the broader business mechanics of getting books into readers’ hands.
Before diving into what O’Leary brings to the magazine, it’s worth clarifying exactly what BookCAMP is, since the name overlaps with several entirely unrelated publications that share a similar title. BookCAMP by Printed Word Reviews should not be confused with BootCAMP Magazine, the internationally distributed independent fashion freepaper launched in Tokyo back in 2006, which focuses on global streetwear culture and frequently collaborates with prominent Brooklyn and New York design collectives like LQQK Studio. It also has no connection to Photo BootCAMP Magazine, a separate digital and print publication curated by Share Inspire Create that showcases the training work and portfolios of students enrolled in an online photography academy, occasionally featuring scenic imagery from the New Jersey Shore submitted by amateur photographers around the world. Nor is it related to the recurring wellness and lifestyle features on local fitness boot camps that New Jersey Monthly Magazine has run profiling operations in towns like Branchburg and Hillsborough. BookCAMP, the publication now welcoming O’Leary as a columnist, is a dedicated quarterly magazine built entirely around the business of book publishing itself, addressing the genuine challenges authors and independent publishers face navigating today’s market.
The magazine operates under the direction of Ted Olczak, a career long publishing professional who holds a master’s degree in marketing management with a concentration in book and magazine publishing from New York University. Olczak’s own résumé within the publishing world runs deep, having worked with major publishing houses including St. Martin’s Press, Workman, Chronicle Books, Candlewick, Dark Horse Comics, and Harvard Business Press, among numerous others spanning genres from children’s literature to manga to military history. Beyond BookCAMP itself, Olczak also manages marketing for the Independent Press Award and the NYC Big Book Award, and he previously helped New York Magazine launch its sister publication IN New York Magazine, giving him genuinely broad experience across both book and magazine publishing over the course of his career.
Olczak has also built BookCAMP into more than just a printed publication, expanding it into an annual live event held under the same name, bringing together independent authors, publishers, and industry experts to exchange strategies and build professional connections. That event has already featured Brian O’Leary as a speaker in his prior capacity as BISG’s executive director, where he discussed metadata and its critical, often underappreciated role in helping authors succeed in a crowded marketplace, a topic he has spent much of his career championing.
O’Leary’s broader career reflects a genuine, sustained commitment to modernizing and professionalizing the publishing industry from the inside. During his tenure at the Book Industry Study Group, he played a foundational role in helping the industry adopt better metadata standards and data driven practices, work that colleagues have credited as essential groundwork for later industry innovations. He also served in leadership with the Green Book Alliance, where his years of work on sustainability reporting directly enabled the organization’s development of its Book Carbon Calculator, a tool aimed at helping publishers understand and reduce their environmental footprint. Colleagues within that organization have spoken warmly about O’Leary’s retirement, crediting his contributions with helping shape a smarter, more connected publishing industry whose effects will continue to be felt well beyond his own departure from formal industry leadership.
With O’Leary now stepping into a recurring column for BookCAMP, readers can expect his signature focus on the practical, often technical mechanics of publishing success, the kind of metadata literacy, distribution strategy, and industry data fluency that he spent his BISG tenure trying to instill across the broader publishing community. For a magazine built specifically around helping independent authors and publishers navigate an increasingly complex market, adding a columnist with O’Leary’s depth of institutional knowledge and hands on experience represents a genuinely significant addition, one likely to give BookCAMP’s readers direct access to exactly the kind of expertise that used to require attending an industry conference or BISG working group to encounter firsthand.
