The Book Resurrector (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love being a P.O.D. Administrator!) [Fishman]

As some of you will know, before xmas I was an Editorial and Marketing Intern (with a bit of Production work thrown in) with a publisher, based in a fine 18^th century Edinburgh building, who had very lovely staff and a rapacious appetite for cake. Well, after that ended I was kept on to carry out my own little project.

I was surprised when interning that rather than digitisation being a fast approaching challenge, it was already pretty central to operations here. Reporting to the Production head, my job has been to take over the responsibility for clearing the backlog of books and journals to be loaded onto our print on demand service and website respectively. I’m like the Google book project viewed through a giant pair of back-to-front binoculars. Except I already have permission. Because they’re our books. I also get to be on hand to help out the desk editors with their mountains of typescripts.

How profitable print on demand is was an even bigger surprise. Titles which had long languished out of print but never managed to build enough dues to justify a reprint can now generate a respectable profit through single copy print runs, available in perpetuity thanks to the PDF format (the cockroach of the digital world) and produced in copies sturdy enough to rival traditional printings.

In some cases having these books set up has been easy, with the electronic files of more recent titles having been retained, to be sent to the printer without requiring any amendments. Others require sourcing the book, finding a copy of the cover or having the cover amended or updated. And as Shamey mentioned, there is the thrill of books arriving when each job’s almost done (seriously, me with the box of ALL our covers – like a kid in a learned funhouse). While this does entail my having to skim over many a proof page like Johnny 5 on mogadon, to ensure that nothing has gone amiss in the scan (the actual scanning is a fairly straightforward photographic process; when printers are required to start altering things is when the dominos can start to fall), there are plenty of points of interest to keep me distracted.

I think we were all agreed, at least when the course began, that trade fiction was the most popular of the publishing fields people wanted to work in. Books allow us to hear more unusual voices, weirder viewpoints, and fiction is where it can get weirdest. Having been here almost eight months, I’m beginning to think the weirdness of academic publishing could blow fiction out of the water. Freed in many cases from the possibility of a runaway broad success (textbooks being a form of exception), academic publishing can often produce incredibly niche books provided it can find a niche academic market big enough to make the production profitable. High points of the weird have included articles on a specific set of three 18^th century decorative cloth birds; a book review of ‘Rhubarb: The Wondrous Drug’; and a sixteen-page article on the history of Stirling’s Raploch estate (whose negative connotations date back to the early 19^th century, with Burns subsequently using the word ‘raploch’ to mean coarse and unrefined!); but above and beyond all of these is a recent scholarly monograph we published which examines the relationship between avant-garde modernist aesthetics and modern military technology. As an indication of how great this book is, it has an entire section headed ‘Aesthetics, Poetics, Prosthetics’! It’s also quite obsessed with snipers.

Even what I expected to be the major downside of the position – being deskless and having to hotdesk all over the building – has turned out to be surprisingly beneficial. While during the internship I had the opportunity to work with, or at least meet, staff from every department, people’s willingness to accommodate a hotdesker has effectively allowed me to sit in on each department as it goes about a normal day’s work – from currency conversions in finance and Comic Sans typescripts (no, really) with the commissioning editors, to the bizarre demands (and names!) of journals contributors and listening to Henry Rollins’ excellent radio show in the chief exec’s office.

And once the backlog has finally cleared, the journals all scanned, and I have probably followed classmates south of the border, there will still be plenty more developments to come for POD. Our Production head has been traversing the country with an eye to changing our POD supplier, which has been giving me a nice eye on how their arrangements vary, and various new and improved formats are vying for the cockroach’s position.

So, that is my world in publishing. Who’s next?

D

Academic Production [Shiv]

Welcome to a day in the life of Production Editor 1b.

As of Monday 1st of February I will be full-time permanent staff (rather than maternity cover as I have been since July). It’s the first time I’ve ever signed a permanent contract but I genuinely enjoy my job and I’m looking forward to it.

So – What is it I do?

As a production editor – I’m in charge of a manuscript from when it gets handed over from our editorial department through to being a finished book. I basically project manage a word document into a printed product. We get the title, some preliminary details and information, and the actual text files (and image ones if needed). Some books get sent out to be project managed externally. This is easier for me, slightly quicker and a little bit more expensive. The rest of the titles are produced in-house and that’s where I have to roll up my sleeves. We run the initial documents through a special program that does all sorts of behind the scenes stuff to make copyediting and typesetting easier. We get it copyedited. We run a different part of the special program to make the document into a shiny tagged up xml file for our typesetters. We send it out to the author and a proofreader (and sometimes an indexer). We do up a costing and get editorial to sign off. We liase with design and get the cover to proof. We collate the author and proofreader queries and get them corrected by the typesetter. And then we (if everything goes to plan) send off the press ready files for the paperback and hardback cover, the text file itself and tell them how many to print on what paper etc.

After a while, a bunch of wonderful new books arrive on my desk (that I have to send to various people rather than take home). The little tingle of pride and joy I get from that hasn’t faded in 6 months.

Obviously, I do some other stuff too but my main job is helping to make books. I’m on the humanities team so my subject areas are religion, philosophy, history, drama, literary studies, media, culture etc. I’ll have anything from 10 to 30 titles on the go at any one time (though I haven’t had to juggle over 24 yet), all at various stages of the production process. Sometimes I get disctracted for a while and end up reading parts of my books instead of checking the corrections, which is a nice little indulgence when I’m not too busy.

The team I work with are helpful and friendly. I don’t feel as if I completely grasp all the aspects of my job yet but I guess we never really stop learning. The company as a whole, despite being quite large and taking up two buildings in an industrial estate, is good at welcoming new people. There’s an abundance of sports and social clubs if you’re that way inclined. And they’ve employed 3 Stirling graduates from our year of the course alone so they obviously have good taste in people.

I hope you found that at least vaguely interesting. I’d love to hear what other people get up to in their publishing jobs.

The Beginning – Part 2 [Shiv]

Dear Publishing Circle,

Many things have changed since we started studying publishing. Some of us have moved to new and exciting parts of the country. Some of us are still seeking employment in our chosen field. Some of us have landed on our feet. And some of us are happy just to have landed.

So I propose a new era for The Publishing Circle – (and I know, we have far less free time now than when we were students) - let’s share what we’re up to these days. Give us all a glimpse into your daily tasks at work or home, your successes and failures. And let’s keep sharing ideas and comments on things happening in our professions and in the world around us.

Publishing has always thrived on good communication skills so we’re following in the finest industry traditions.

Kind regards and best wishes for the future,

Circle member

Study, Job-hunting, Rain and Caffeine [Shiv]

So…

In approximately 24 hours the M.Litt in Publishing Studies class of ’09 will be walking out of our exam. It’s a strange thought. When sitting the final exams of my undergraduate degree I remember thinking; you’ll never have to do this again. I guess the lesson is never say never.

I’m about halfway through Inside Book Publishing and haven’t even looked at my lecture notes (some of which are still haphazardly strewn on the floor of my room from when I ‘cleared’ the desk last week). I’m on my third cup of tea this morning and have run out of milk. But it’s raining far too heavily for me to leave the house to get some. There’s something poetic about the slight bitterness of black tea and my slight bitterness about the process of job hunting.

As I’m sure most of the class are, I’m writing cover letters and emails to beat the band. With few responses. I was lucky enough to get an interview with Intellect, journal publisher in Bristol. A 12 hour round trip and even though they seemed to like me, I didn’t get the job. Now I’m facing a similar situation trying to get to Oxford for an interview with Taylor and Francis. I’m honoured to get an interview (that sounds a bit sycophantic I know but they’re huge and probably have tonnes of uber-qualified candidates) but I’m apprehensive about making that trip, going through pre-interview and mid-interview nerves, either feeling devastated or getting my hopes up only to have them quashed again. And getting back up to Scotland will be a nightmare the day before our end of year party and results.

I really ought to stop whinging and get back to work. I guess the mild bitterness about job-hunting is bleeding through and becoming exam apathy. Then again, I’m just out of practice at procrastinating.

I’m looking forward to being finished on this course, though I’m going to miss my classmates. Entering the real world and getting a proper publishing job is going to be exciting and scary and wonderful. Just going to have to face the rain as well as the studying.