My first paid job in publishing

The day kicked off by processing lots of London Book Fair e-mails which had been sent overnight from around the world. I confirmed a couple but was mostly trying to fit in others like an advanced-level jigsaw puzzle!

We were then asked to meet to update the Director about our progress on organising the Office Move (which reminds me that I still need to type up those minutes). We're considering using VOIP instead of paying BT for our phone calls but we still want a BT line for the broadband so there's a lot to sort out.

The evening before I had proofread several pages of the vegetarian cookbook and I showed them to the Editorial Director who wanted to check how I was doing it. She seemed pleased with what I'd done so far but also asked me to check on some layout and image issues that may come up, as well as to write a 'general notes' sheet with information for the next person who would be taking in the changes to the document. I had had a thought the evening before about the cookbook. I plucked up enough courage to make my suggestion and see what she thought about it. I am vegan and quite a few recipes I find tend to be on vegetarian websites or in veggie cookbooks which are marked up as vegan. This particular cookbook however didn't mention at all whether the recipes were also vegan or not! I found this strange as it's kind of a standard thing to do but also it would widen their audience so that (if enough recipes were vegan, I have to check..) vegans could buy the cookbook for themselves too. Or relatives and friends may notice the vegan comment and think, "Ah, I should buy this for my niece Jane, she's vegan!" The Editorial Director said that she didn't really know what vegan meant but if she could leave it to me to mark up the vegan recipes and add a note to the general notes sheet, she can discuss it (if there are enough recipes to warrant it). I feel so proud of myself for a) voicing my own opinion and b) furthering the vegan cause!

Just before lunch, the Director asked if she could talk to me in private. My internship was due to finish next Wednesday so I thought she'd be giving me an assessment or hopefully asking me to stay! Indeed, it was the latter! She said she'd like to offer me a 6-week temping contract as a freelancer (for a very minimal amount, no holidays, no sick pays etc). I was flattered to have been asked and very happy to be offered a paid job within publishing - my first! It's a huge step for me. However I was really worried about money so I phoned my father who is an accountant to check on taxes and NI. I'll have to pay taxes but not as much as I thought however it still won't be enough wages to cover my rent, bills, transport and food (and food for my cat!). At least I still have a bit of redundancy money left to subsidise my living costs for a bit.

The afternoon started off rather mundane as I was asked to send out presentations to a couple of publishers - these are high quality A3 print outs of the layout/spreads, jacket covers and an A4 synopsis of the book. Except that there were so many options that I messed one up regarding the page scaling and had to re-do it all which the Director was understandably not happy about! In my defence, no one had actually shown me what to do.. but I could've checked.

I then made a non-refundable booking for a hotel during the Frankfurt Book Fair in October on her credit card. About an hour was wasted trying to print a 33-page PDF document which kept crashing my computer and my colleague's, when I tried it on hers. It worked on the 3rd colleague's computer though.

Towards the end of the day I was asked to draft 2 contracts which I'd never done before. I located the template and the COR (confirmed order report) and filled out the blanks as best I could with names, dates and payment terms then asked my colleague for help with the rest. It took a while as we discovered the template was wrong so I had to change the 2 contracts and the template as well. Then at the end of the day my computer crashed for another half hour so in the end I just left it and went home 20 minutes late.

Still, a good day overall ;) I feel very proud of my first paid job in publishing.

This does lead to the question though whether I should continue to blog once my internship is over.. would you like to read more about my daily tasks in this role? Thank you, also, for the 350 hits I now have on this blog! Spread the word :)