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 18th 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 18th 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 19th 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
