The Insanity that is the End of Semester

So I wrote up about 3/4 of a post on the London Book Fair, but then my computer freaked, the browser crashed, and I lost the post. And then I had deadlines. So we'll come back to that.

We all thought first semester was bad: that Editorial was loads of work, BLADs were demonic, and Marketing was he-who-shall-not-be-named. Well we were wrong. First semester was a walk in the park. This last semester was probably 3x as worse.

Rights had a multiple choice test, a short presentation, and a report. Having the load spread out like that was nice, and made the final report much easier. For the report, we had to find a particular publisher (our choice) and suggest an event for them to attend where they could sell rights (not one they're already going to). I chose Walker Books (of Guess How Much I Love You fame) and suggested they go to the Guadalajara International Book Fair. I thought the report would be of negligible usefulness as far as I'm personally concerned, but I ended up getting a lot more out of it than I anticipated. It wasn't just an issue of "Oh here's this thing we could be doing, let's go", it was looking at the event in detail, making sure it's the right fit. Researching the types of people who are going to be there, if they're going to have an interest in your product and what that interest is. If you're going to go, how long you're going to go, if you're going to shell out the money for a stand, what you're going to do with your time. And most importantly: money! I think I have a much more realistic view of book fairs now.

International Publishing Management was... well, Clare did warn us that the main thing about the report was research, and that the research would take up a lot of time. She was right, and I should have listened to her more closely. But I got it done, and I got it in, and while it's not amazing I think it was ok. It was somewhat similar to the Rights report, actually, though on a larger scale: we had to take a publisher and suggest a new country for them to enter to do business. This involved not only researching the country and the opportunities there, but also the publisher... we even had to examine their finances for the past three years. It's interesting seeing the finances, and how they change and what it all means, and how it compares to other publishers.

New Product Development was everyone's worst nightmare. It was literally editorial, marketing, design, production, digital, and rights all rolled into one, with some extra on the side. Thank god we had groups so we could split the work up. Some groups did have some hiccups as far as contribution levels went, but the lecturers do have a system in place in case someone's not pulling their own weight, and overall I think it worked out fairly well. My group, luckily, did not have problems. We had the first draft of our 15k report (with appendicies it was something like 190 pages) finished about a week before presentations. Then it was time to work out what each person was going to say, how much time they had, put together presentations, and put together any extra stuff to go along with the presentations (we had a voice-over at the beginning, and later a video clip that we recorded). Then it was practice practice practice, then presentation day! Presentations lasted ALL. DAY. I was expecting to be bored out of my mind, but I was actually far more interested and engaged than I thought I would be; everyone did a fantastic job. And most everyone was clearly influed by the guy from Wiley who came earlier this semester to speak with us about the For Dummies series, as most everyone used Prezi for their presentations.

Any way, the presentations were great, though stressful. My group (children's) got third place for our choose your own adventure graphic novel series; there was a tie for first place between STM's open-access journals and AAD's 21st century architecture database. We were quite pleased with the result.

But we were even more pleased to be done. The presentations were on a Tuesday, and that Friday I had to hand in not only a peer evaluation form and a review of the presentations from Tuesday, but also my IPM assignment. Then Monday Rights was due, as well as the final NPD report. Everyone obviously finished at different times due to different deadlines with optional modules, but the last group (Digital Publishing) finished up yesterday.

It was really a very intense semester, and even now, 5 days after finishing, I'm still reeling. All that's left now is my dissertation. It's crazy because it honestly does feel like I just got here.

Publisher Speed Dating and the Oxford Literary Festival

So way back in the beginning of March we had Working in Publishing Day, which everyone just called speed dating. This is unique to Brookes, and in fact I think it's only the second or third time they've done it. In the morning there was an alumni panel and talks from some publishing recruitment companies, then in the afternoon the fun started.

There were 31 publishers at WIP this year, ranging from tiny companies like Zed Books up to mammoths like HarperCollins and Palgrave Macmillan. The spread was truly impressive, and there really was something for everyone. No sci-fi/fantasy specific publishers, unfortunately, but enough trade houses to keep me happy. Sign up sheets went up about a week in advance, and we were allowed to sign up for 5 slots initially, then after a few days they lifted that restriction and it was open season on appointments.

As to the format of the day, each appointment lasted 15 minutes, and when time was up, Angus blew a rather deafening whistle and everyone moved on to their next appointments. This was not an afternoon of job interviews, but rather a choice to ask questions and learn more about publishing and specific publishers. There were a few publishers there looking for people for work experience, and it was also a great opportunity to make contacts both for future career stuff and for dissertation research. All in all, I think the event was quite good, and I'm still marvelling at the fact that I was able to stay awake through it all (there was an IPM assignment due at 5 that day, and because of all the events that meant I had to have it in that morning, and I ended up with 20 minutes of sleep).

More recently (ending yesterday) we had the Oxford Literary Festival. We had the opportunity to volunteer to help out with this, though I think some people may have missed out as the email went out while about 1/3 of the course was at the Bologna Book Fair. I volunteered for three days, and it was a great experience. I was able to attend 15 lectures, which would have cost me £10 each, for free, and had a free lunch tossed in as well. I was in a different venue each day: the first I was in the amazingly-beautiful library at Christ Church College, surrounded by 17th century books. The second day I was at Corpus Christi College, in a smallish (~120 people) new conference centre surrounded by lovely gardens. And the third day I was in the somewhat-uninspiring marquee, which fortunately had some interesting talks.

The sheer variety of talks was astounding, especially as I know I only saw a small fraction of them. A sampling of the titles/subjects discussed in the lectures I attended is as follows: The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War, Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean, The Alice Behind Wonderland (especially apt at this took place in the very library Lewis Carroll used to work in), A New History of Western Philosophy, Globalization for Development: Trade, Finance, Aid, Migration, and Policy, Boris Pasternak: Family Correspondence which was a talk given by the translator who is also Pasternak's nephew, Norman Foster: A Life in Architecture, and One Day by David Nicholls.

Of particular note amongst the lectures were Alistair Urquhart, who wrote The Forgotten Highlander: An Incredible WWII Story of Survival in the Pacific. His story is truly astounding, including 3 1/2 years as a Japanese POW building the bridge over the river Kwai, sickness, starvation, being on a Japanese prisoner ship sunk by the Americans, being lost at sea alone on a raft for 5 days, and even being at a POW camp 12 miles away from Nagasaki when he watched the Bockscar fly overhead on its way to nuke the city.

Also of note was Edmun de Waal's talk on his book The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss. De Waal easily sold out the 450-seat marquee, which surprised me as I'd never heard of the book before, but it was very interesting. The book is about Edmund's research into his family's collection of Japanese netsuke, which traces not only the lives of the netsuke, but also his family, including their unfortunate luck at being Jews living in Vienna during WWII.


Any way, in short: speed dating and the literary festival were both great experiences, and have helped to reinvigorate my love for publishing, I think. This semester is really, really busy, and my time at the literary festival served as a great reminder about how important and diverse and interesting publishing is.

Tomorrow I'm off to the London Book Fair as a visitor, and I'll be back there on Wednesday as a volunteer. (The opportunity to volunteer at the LBF, which is one of the three major book fairs in the world, is another thing unique to Brookes.)

International Publishing Management

International Publishing Management, IPM, is the third and final module I'm taking this semester. It's taught by Clare, who also ran Marketing last semester, so that was a bit of forewarning about how much work it was going to be, but I still did it any way. Not only that, I did it in combination with Rights, which only two other people were crazy enough to do to themselves, and one of those two people is an Erasmus student, so she perhaps didn't fully realise what she was getting herself in to. Any way, point is: LOTS OF WORK.

IPM and its connected name degree (MA in International Publishing) are unique amongst publishing programs to Brookes. Even the UCL guys I interviewed with who spent the entire interview going "We're better than everyone else because we're UCL! You don't need anything more specific than that! WE'RE UCL!" admitted that Brookes are experts in the field of international publishing. So having this module available to me was something I viewed as a great opportunity, and I jumped on it. With Clare as the teacher I knew it would be a lot of work, but Clare is also a teacher you learn a lot from.

I'm not sure exactly what I was hoping to get out of IPM, I just thought that with an increasing trend towards globalisation in business in general, it'd be a useful background to have. As it turns out, IPM has been very business-oriented. In fact, there's so much of a business focus that the business schools considers it an acceptable optional module for MBA students, and we consequently have two of them in the class. (Side but related note: the publishing deparment is currently in the process of moving from the arts and humanities school to become part of the business school.)

What we've been looking at in IPM is, basically, how to take your publishing company global. How do you choose which new country you want to go in to? How fully do you comit when you do/how do you enter the market? How do you maintain control over your brand, and is this even a priority? What are human resource issues you need to consider when operating abroad? What are some of the strategies established publishing houses like Macmillan, OUP, and Elsevier use? Why would you want to expand abroad in the first place? We've also looked at financial issues, building on some finance lectures we've had before in other modules, looking at profit and loss, balance sheets, cash flow, and how to use things like liquidity ratios to make all these numbers mean something. The finance bit actually surprised everyone, I think, as it ended up being unexpectedly interesting and enjoyable.

We've had a few guest speakers in so far, and have a few more lined up. This past week as probably the highlight, with a lecture from the head of international development at Random House. He covered (briefly) publishing on a macro scale (big) as well as micro (just Random House). He actually shared with us a lot of RH sales information, which publishers tend to guard very jealously, which was fantastic and incredibly interesting. He told us how much of RH's sales are from exports, who they mainly export to, how things such as fluxuating exchange rates can destabalize existing supply chain models. He pointed out that you need to be aware of formatting issues, like the fact that mainland Europe tends to have small bookshelves, so you can't sell trade paperback format there as those books literally won't fit on the shelves. He also stressed what Clare has been stressing, which is that one size does not fit all and each market needs to be approached with its own strategy.

It has so far been an incredibly intersting class. We obviously don't have the time to cover every country in the world, but we've looked at a few as case studies and learned what it is we should be looking for when we want to go in to a new market, and, most imporantly, how to find that information. I have a feeling the second assignment is going to be a giant headache, but at masters level most assignments are.

Rights Management and a general update

I've come to the realization that grad school is a lot like monkey in the middle. In this scenario, I'm the monkey, and my MA is the ball. It is exhausting.

Next week is "Working in Publishing Week", which is basically their way of telling us we had damn well better not leave town during reading week. Tuesday morning we're apparently going to have some talks from alumni and publishers, then in the afternoon we have something unique to Brookes: publisher speed dating. We've been allowed to sign up for five slots (with the potential for more if there are any still available on Friday) where we'll have 15 minutes to sit down with an employer and a fellow student and chat/interview. This is an absolutely amazing opportunity. I've signed up to meet with HarperCollins, Macmillan, Faber and Faber, David Fickling Books, and the Oxford Literary and Rights Agency. They have a HUGE selection of publishers (academic, trade, charitable, travel), there's an agent, there's the rights agency I mentioned, just loads of stuff.

NPD is going well, and I've been very pleased to discover that both of my optional modules (Rights and International) are helping me out with my role in our division. We had two emergency meetings last week (in addition to our regular Monday meeting) due to some panic, but we got things sorted out and are back on track now. We have to hand in a sort of mini-proposal on Friday, which details our top three choices, and why we're going with the one we are. It's not marked, but it is important as we'll get feedback as to whether or not we're being absolutely stupid with our idea. I think we've got all the bits and pieces of ours, we just need to stick it together and proofread. I (in my capacity as Deputy MD) will be meeting up with our Managing Director tomorrow to start going over things. This is a bummer as Wednesday is my day off, but oh well.

Any way: Rights! What is Rights? There is far more money to be made in publishing than just what you get from print and e-books: the valuable bit is the content, not the product. The role of a person in the rights department is to buy and sell permissions. This can include selling or buying the rights to reproduce a quote or poem, getting permissions to use photos, selling movie rights, or audiobook rights, or translation rights, or performance rights, and the list goes on. The rights person tries to maximize the potential of a given work. Their job can be made more or less difficult depending on whether or not the author has an agent (agents like to keep rights to themselves, which is great for the author and agent, but means less profit for the publisher, plus you have to keep careful track of what rights you do and do not own).

This module has so far been a whole lot of reading. We were assigned about 200 pages to read between weeks 3 and 4. I did not finish this, but I've done all the rest of the absurd amounts of reading we've been assigned. Most of this comes from Publishing Law, which is actually not as bad as it sounds. Yes it's a law book, and yes it goes on at great length about copyright and libel law, but the authors have at least a vague sense of humour. In the section about ghost writing, they referred to a case where someone challeneged the ownership of a copyright, as the copyright holder was a medium, and the arguement was that the medium didn't actually write the book, (s)he just copied down what the ghost had to say... go actual ghost writing.

Any way, copyright law really is oddly fascinating. It's complex and strange and funny and touching. Peter Pan, for example, is a unique case. When J.M. Barrie died, he passed the copyright on to Great Ormond Street Hospital. When it was coming time for Peter Pan to leave copyright, Parliament realized that Great Ormond Street would be losing a great deal of badly-needed income, so they passed a special law (bill? whatever) giving Peter Pan perpetual copyright. See? Touching.

We had a lawyer specializing in intellectual property (particularly in relation to publishing) come speak with us in week 2, and as much as we were all dreading it (lawyer? Copyright law? BORING!) it was actually fascinating. Class lasted about three hours, and I don't think there would have been much arguement if it would have gone much longer. At one point he showed us a packet of crisps and pointed out everything on it that was IP and I was speechless. EVERYTHING was protected. And you get protections within protections, so like the copyright of a portrait belongs to the photographer, but the photographer can't use it without the permission of the person as they have a right to privacy.

We have a test in Rights this week (Thursday), which we're all a bit nervous about. Beverley has told us though that it's multiple choice (3 possible answers), and that last year's class had an average of 70% (which is a Distinction/A), so it should be fine.


Tune in next time for "International Publishing Management: or: Why the hell did I pick the two most intensive optional modules?"

New Product Development

The tedium of the winter holidays has passed, and life has returned to what can perhaps be described as "complete madness". Classes are back, extra lectures are back, SYP events are back, group meetings are back. I'm not doing any work experience at the moment, but I'm back at paid work (I have an irregular schedule, where sometimes I don't work for weeks on end, then I get a whole bunch of work thrown at me at once).

This semester is a bit different from last as this time around we all have different schedules. In the first semester it doesn't matter which MA you're doing (regular Publishing, International Publishing, Publishing and Language, or Digital Publishing), everyone does the same classes. In the second semester, everyone who is full-time does New Product Development (part-timers do it second year). Digital people do Digital and E-Publishing. Publishing and Language do a class by the same name with one option. International does (surprise) International Publishing Management, and an option. And those of us on the regular Publishing track get two choices. In addition to what I've already listed, this includes things like Rights Management, Book History and Culture, Journals, Magazines, and Children's Publishing.

For my options, I'm doing International Publishing Management and Rights, but I'll talk about both of those in later entries so as to keep this one from becoming too long.

New Product Development (NPD) is kind of like Editorial on steroids. Actually, it's like all of our classes last semester rolled in to one, with extra stuff thrown on top for good measure. In the end, we have to produce at 15,000 word report, and a 25 minute presentation. Luckily this is group work, otherwise we'd all be screwed. As it is, the fact that all the other lecturers seem to be planning deadlines as far away as possible from NPD's deadline makes me a bit worried. The general consensus from lecturers and past students is that NPD will be a huge beast. I have yet to find any evidence that might contradict this opinion.

The premise of this project is that we all work for a company called Buckley Publishing (Buckley is the building where the publishing department have their offices) as members of its various divisions. There are, I believe, 9 divisions: STM (scientific, technical, and medical), trade non-fiction, social science and humanities, ELT, AAD (art, architecture, and design), textbooks, education, children's, and fiction. They socially-engineered the groups only so far as to make sure each group had a guy (there's a huuuuuge gender inequality on the course), and they tried to give each group someone with good design skills, but other than that, I have no idea how they assigned the groups. We weren't asked our preferences or anything, so it could have easily gone quite horribly as the only two I really would have enjoyed were children's and fiction. As it is, I count myself incredibly lucky as I was, indeed, assigned to children's.

Each division is responsible for, surprise, developing a new product, preferably some sort of series. Apparently last year's Fiction group did erotica which... seems like a gutsy thing to go with. We were all given descriptions of the state of Buckley Publishing as a whole, and of our individual departments. Children's has had past success with illustrated books, but sales have started to decline recently. We've never had much success with genre series like HP or Twilight. We have a strong history of selling rights to Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. And... we need a new product (series, really, by which I don't mean genre series, just more than one book).

We each have jobs within our groups, which we decide amongst ourselves. We were told very clearly that we MUST have a Managing Director, and that they have the final say on everything. (They said there's always one group that tries to be democratic about everything, which always seems to fail miserably.) Other than that, what positions we have and who has them is up to us. My group's first order of business was to decide who was going to be our finance person: as practically everyone on the course is a humanities graduate, finance tends to scare the crap out of damn near all of us. After several tense moments of silence after asking for a volunteer, our token guy raised his hand and the rest of us rejoiced. The end result of our job delegation was: Managing Director, Deputy Managing Director, Rights, Editorial (x2), Sales and Marketing(x2), Design and Technical, Production and Finance. I'm doing rights and I'm the deputy MD as well.

We're already having a fair bit of fun with the project, which is awesome. We talked about ideas last week, and bouncing it all around was great, which is good, because the children's project SHOULD be fun. Kids have got to like our idea, and if it puts us to sleep, we're doomed. This also means that we absolutely must have the most entertaining presentation. We've also been warned to avoid "death by PowerPoint" with our presentations, so we're all trying to think up ways to spice it up.

So that's NPD. For comparison, our dissertations also have to be 15,000 words. It's going to be a nightmare, but I've got a fun assignment, we've narrowed things down to three fun ideas, my group is well-organised, and I think we're going to do well.


More on IPM and Rights later.

Interlude

So the Christmas holidays in Oxford are rather dull. Due to an extended argument with the UK Border Agency, I was unable to fly back to the US over the holidays, and therefore spent it here. Damn near everyone was gone, so it was quite boring. People started coming back last week though, so it's improving.

I've just sent off my CV (as in half an hour ago) to Solaris, completely unsolicited, asking for work experience. The entire reason I want to go in to publishing is because I want to work in sci-fi/fantasy, and when I found out there was a sci-fi/fantasy publisher right here in Oxford, I about died. They're small, but I actually view that as a plus. They also publish some authors I've read, some I want to read, and some that are on my shelf waiting to be read, so fingers crossed on this one. It would be quite awesome, but as they haven't said they're actually looking for any help that may lower my chances. We'll see.

I've also just had an email saying that Oxford University Press (OUP) is looking for someone, so I'm going to apply for that. My flatmate just started there this week, and she says so far it's a really great place to work; they give you real, meaningful work, and free lunch. Fingers crossed on that one as well. I have two days off a week this next semester, so theoretically I could handle two placements.

In other news, yesterday I found myself accidentally doing research for my dissertation. And even stranger, once I realized what I was doing, I didn't stop. I'm surprisingly excited about the whole thing. I want to do mine on co-authorship in fiction, so if anyone knows of books or writing teams I should add to my list, please do let me know.

Results from semester 1 are out on the 24th, and I think we're all a bit nervous about that. Classes start back up on the 31st, except for the people doing Children's Publishing, who have their first lecture on the 28th. We've also been warned that due to things like Easter and Prince William's wedding they may need to add additional teaching times to cover what we're going to miss. That's not exactly thrilling, but they're quite good about not wasting our time with useless lectures, so I can't complain too much.

The Best Christmas Gift of All

The best Christmas gift isn't expensive jewellery. It's not a nice skiing vacation, or a new plasma TV. It's not even spending time with your family and those you love. No, the best Christmas gift is this: freedom.

We are done with our first semester. Done done done done done. This means that (except for the part-timers and the two people doing a European Masters) we are 1/3 of the way done with our masters. Wooooo!

The end of the semester was hectic. We got our marks back for the Production assignment (my partner and I got a B) and for the Editorial proofreading test (I got an 81%, which I was very pleased with until I realized the class high was an astounding 94%). That was the easy stuff. The non-easy stuff was the past two weeks.

Editorial: On Friday the 10th we had to hand in our group report, which made things busy for me as I was one of the two people in our group actually writing the report. We met up on Thursday night to go through everything as a group, make sure everyone agreed on everything. Then some of us met up again Friday morning to print off and hand in the report. (It cost us £17 to print and bind! But god did it look good.) Then we met up again on Sunday to work on our presentation. Met again Tuesday morning to run through the entire presentation a few times. Tuesday afternoon was the actual presentations, and I've got to say, they really surprised me. There were 12 groups, which meant plenty of chance for a cringe-worthy presentation, but there wasn't one. Everyone actually did a really good job, and I didn't feel embarrassed on anyone's behalf. On top of that, I'm very happy with my group's presentation. No idea when we'll hear about the marks though.

Production: We had a test on costing/estimating on Wednesday the 15th (it was originally scheduled for the 16th, but the class reps convinced Adrian to move it as the Publishing party was Wednesday night and this cleared the way for post-party hangovers). There was quite a bit of panic around the test, largely due to inconsistencies with how Adrian rounded numbers in the practice questions, but the test ended up being far easier than anyone expected. In fact, everyone passed the test and the class average was just over 95%. We haven't had our individual scores yet, but obviously no one is too worried about that.

Design: We had to hand in our BLADs (brief, layout, and design) on Friday the 17th. I didn't properly start mine until that Monday, which had me a bit worried as the general Facebook consensus seemed to be that BLADs were evil and people kept having to re-do them. Considering the fact that design is quite the opposite of my strong suit, this had me worried. But it actually went rather well, and I'm quite pleased with my sample pages, if not the BLAD itself (it looks ok, but I don't have the artistic eye to make it look great). This was the first year they had BLADs as the Design project, which explained some of the incredibly frustrating and vague answers/instructions we were given, but in the end I think it was a really good idea. As the name suggests, doing the BLAD gives you a really good (but reasonably-sized) idea of what goes into the design and layout of a book. It also gave a great insight into marketing materials, as that's exactly what a BLAD is. I'll post some images of my BLAD later on, to give an idea of exactly what it is.

Marketing: aka THE BEAST. I'm pretty damn sure it's safe to say that no one enjoyed the marketing assignment. As I've said in previous entries, that class was a LOT of work, and the assignment was no different. The assignment was to come up with a marketing plan (including budget, which we had to stick to) for one of four scenarios, all of which were non-fiction titles (my partner and I chose a print and digital journal about communications and media studies). It was a useful and informative assignment, but it was also a pain in the ass. It was due at 5 pm on the 22nd, and my partner and I submitted ours at about 2:15 am on the 22nd. I know several people submitted theirs 5-10 minutes before it was due, and several others submitted it several days early. We'll see how that goes, fingers crossed.

Work Experience: is DONE. Now I need to start looking for more. It was a good and informative placement, but it also reaffirmed by original thought, which was that journals are not something that appeal to me, personally.


So that's that. We're done with the semester. Classes resume something like 29th January (I should really find out exactly what that date is), and in the meantime we are freeeee. Well, mostly. We're supposed to come up with a proposal for a dissertation or major project and have that ready to hand in when classes start back up, but I already know what I want to do, so I'm not worried. But since I'm in Oxford for the next month and a half with nothing to do, I'm considering spending some quality time in the library doing some background reading.