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.

Tests, quote requests, and work experience

The past couple weeks have reminded all of us on the course that we are, indeed, students, and sometimes students have to do crazy things like hand in work and take tests. In the past couple weeks we've had a Marketing test, a proofreading test (part of Editorial), and a Production assignment.

I've said before that Marketing is the class that requires the most work, which remains true. Due to this fact, there was a general sense of panic before the test, despite the fact that we were allowed to use notecards. In the end though, the test went better than I expected. The test had 15 questions, and we had to answer 9. This ended up being a good thing as I had absolutely no idea what one of the questions was talking about, so I was quite pleased to skip that one. Most of the questions were about things like the marketing mix, push/pull, competitive intelligence, stuff like that. And the best part was, my work experience actually helped me with the test (specifically on the competitive intelligence question). So it went well, and the results were emailed to us on Friday. I got a 74%, which is a distinction/A, so I'm quite happy.

No word yet on results from the Production assignment, but my seminar leader said Adrian (the main Production guy) wanted all the results back by Friday so he could put everything together, so I expect to hear about that soon.

And last week we had our proofreading test! This consisted of one reading against copy exercise (this is where you take what the typesetter has done and compare it with the original, so see if the typesetter has introduced new errors and if there are any stray errors left over by the author), one cold read (just reading through it on its own) of a children's story, a cold read of an AI (Advanced Information) sheet, and 10 questions about random stuff we've been learning. I found the test quite jarring as this was only the second or third time in my life I haven't finished a test early (with the Marketing test, I was one of only three people to leave early). Well, to be fair, I did get through everything with still about 15 minutes to spare, but a proofreading test isn't like other tests as there's no set end: just because you've gone through the entire extract doesn't mean you've caught all the mistakes. So I finished early, then went back through stuff, which was a good move as I picked up several things I'd missed before. No idea when we'll hear back about our marks for that.

Work experience continues. Last week instead of doing journal homepages, Fellow Student and I were doing some social media marketing stuff (Facebook and Twitter), which I found a bit odd as we're working in editorial, not marketing, but most of our work seems to be more of a marketing thing any way. It was not the most thrilling thing to do in the world, but it was nice to have a change. Tomorrow I suspect we'll be back on journal homepages. We have 4 more weeks (days) left in the placement.

My Editorial group continues to meet every week to work on our project, though it's getting to the time where we're going to have to start working a bit harder. The project is to come up with a new title/project proposal for a UK publisher (any UK publisher, and the title/project should fit their list). I quite like the idea my group is working with; we're sending a couple representatives to speak with Beverley about it this week, with the hope being that she'll like the idea too and we won't have to start from scratch.

Our Wednesday morning random lectures have become themed: now we're talking about research methods for our dissertations. I find this only semi-useful as I fully plan on doing a major project instead of a dissertation, but oh well

Friday was our deadline to register for next semester's modules (well, to be fair, we can still change what we want to do, we just have to go through a more complicated process to do so). I'm doing the straight-up MA in Publishing (as is the vast majority of the course), so I can't speak to different requirements for the MA in Digital Publishing people or any other the others, but next semester, we all have to take New Product Development, which leaves us with two options. I've chosen International Publishing Management (run by Clare, who also runs the Marketing class), and Rights Management (run by Beverley).

Post-grad life continues to be hectic, but I'm still enjoying it. It's hard for me to look back at my time as an undergrad and make a specific list of things I learned; I could do it, but it'd be a bit of a struggle and I think a lot of the things I learned I didn't really notice learning, so I wouldn't list them any way. But now I'm just over half-way through my first semester as a post-grad, and it would be impossible for me to list everything I've learned, simply because there's so much.

Back to work experience tomorrow. We have a Publishing talk on Tuesday night, an OPuS event on Wednesday night, my flat is celebrating Thanksgiving on Thursday night, and Friday a group of us are going to see Harry Potter in the afternoon, then there's a big publishing house party that night. It's going to be a busy, busy week.

Work experience and post-grad life

So my work experience placement started last Monday. The first day went rather well, though I didn't get to do any of what they actually want me to do since my IT access wasn't set up yet. Instead, a fellow student and I were asked to have a look through what they call the picking stock, which is where they keep examples of journals so production and other people can have a look at them. The picking stock is not what I would call maintained, so Fellow Student (FS) and I were asked to have a look through, pull out old ones, generally tidy up the place. The thought was that this would only take us a couple hours and it'd be pretty easy. It ended up taking us all day, and resulted in two HUGE stacks of old journals. And when I say "huge" I mean to say that the piles together were enough to fill half a skip/dumpster. It was epic. We were given the option of leaving early and not finishing it, but FS and I were of the opinion that it would be incredibly annoying to keep walking by those shelves, knowing we hadn't finished, so we wanted to get it all out of the way. And we did, so yay.

Tomorrow is Day 2 of my work experience, and I should actually have computer access and be able to do some real work. They have a new online system for their journals (just launched a couple months ago) and FS and I will both be updating the homepages for some of the journals, and adding info.

Classes are going well. There's a proofreading test coming up in Editorial in a few weeks, and we've just realized that we should probably start working on our group projects, so my group will be meeting up this week to discuss it. There's a test coming up in Marketing as well, and we've had to hand in the names of our partners for our next assignment, though we don't yet know what that assignment is. We have our first Production assignment due next week, which involves taking a book, figuring out all the specs (size, binding, colours, paper weight, etc) and writing up a quote request for a printer. In Design we continue to learn about, well, InDesign.

Last week we had our first author talk, and Barbara Trapido, author of such books as The Travelling Hornplayer and JUGGLING, among others, came to speak with us and the undergrads. She was really quite amusing, and I really enjoyed it. She spoke a fair bit about her different editors, and why some were good and some weren't, and I think that information was incredibly useful to all of the students there. I also think it was useful to hear a writer talking about what it is to write. I did Creative Writing as an undergrad, so I already understand how quirky writers are, but most people on the course didn't, and I think it's very valuable to have that insight. If we don't have writers, we don't have books, and publishers are out of a job. We need to understand how they work, and how we can work with them. I'm glad Brookes realizes this and addresses the issue.

This coming week is relatively slow, as it's reading week. This is supposed to mean no classes but, well. Work experience on Monday. On Wednesday we have someone coming from Nielsen BookScan (I will no doubt have an entire entry just about BookScan soon) to teach us how to get in to the system and how it works (in Marketing last week we had a guy come talk to us about all the things it can do and why it's useful, which I honestly found fascinating). My Editorial group is also meeting on Wednesday. Some people have signed up for catch-up InDesign sessions on Friday, but I've passed on that as I feel comfortable with the program. We also have a lot of practice to do for proofreading, and lots of reading to do for Marketing. And as our Production assignment is due next week, my partner and I need to do that as well. And I think there are two SYP events this week as well. So despite it being an easier week than usual, it's still very busy.

Printers! Work Experience! BLADs! Oh My!

So in case anyone was wondering, being a post-grad is really busy. I was working before I started this course, regularly doing 50+ hours a week, and I figured my MA would be a piece of cake. Roughly 4 hours each on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, no problem! Well it's more than that. We've had (different groups of us, that is) Excel workshops and library tours on a couple Tuesday and Thursday mornings. Wednesday mornings are reserved for extra publishing lectures, and believe me, they make use of this. There are Society of Young Publishers (SYP) or Oxford Publishing Society (OPuS) events in the evenings. There are informational sessions on work experience. There are make-up lectures for ones that were cancelled due to Frankfurt. Then there's all the homework for Marketing!

Which all means that I am busy. In addition to all of that stuff, I'm also a member of a social society at Brookes that has regular activities (two of which I've already missed due to scheduling conflicts with publishing activities), and I've taken it upon myself to organise a bi-weekly game night for the people on the course. So I am most certainly staying busy! I'll try to be brief with my update.

Editorial: This class is broken in to three parts. In the first part we have a lecture, which so far has been on issues such as commissioning/acquisitions, copyright, and the author. After this we break into groups, half the class staying to learn about proofreading, the other half going off to work on other things. The "other things" have included talking about potential problems with a list whose sales are down and how to revitalize that, and also author contracts.

Marketing: This is the busy class. There is always reading to do before, usually from a couple different sources and there are usually websites to look at. We have an in-class test coming up... at some point in the semi-near future... which we're allowed to use notecards for, but we get one notecard per week, which we have to fill out and then hand back in the following week. This means time and effort put into the cards as well. Then the lectures are generally quite full with a fair bit of information, then seminars where we try and apply what it is we've been reading.

Production: We've only had one class so far, to be fair. Last week was cancelled due to most of the people on the course being in Frankfurt, and this week's isn't until tomorrow. Tomorrow we're supposed to bring a book, a ruler, and a calculator, and it looks like we'll be getting into the nitty gritty stuff of books.

Design: They tried to schedule a replacement lecture for this last week, but it didn't work out so well, so instead we're having it this Friday, which will mean lecture, workshop, lunch, lecture. Part of our grade (all? I should look into that) is based on a BLAD, and we've just been told that we should be setting up test pages for this by next week. Um, eek? I consider myself lucky though, as my undergrad gave me experience with Photoshop, Flash, and Dreamweaver, and if you've used one Adobe program, the others are pretty easy to figure out; this means that I'm finding InDesign to be fairly straight-forward. I still need to get to work though!

Last week those of us who didn't go to Frankfurt were given the option of going to a printing press instead. I of course jumped at this opportunity and found it incredibly fascinating and informative. I'll try and do a post this weekend with more info about it, as well as some pictures.

Tonight we had an OPuS talk, with two booksellers (one successful independent, and one guy from Blackwells) speaking with us about what it's like as a bookseller, what they do to sell the books and get customers in the door, and how we, as publishers, can help them. It was very interesting, and the conclusion seemed to be that Amazon will keep selling books, supermarkets will keep selling books (both of them screwing over the industry as they do so), and independents will keep selling books, but chains will start to encounter problems with their low margins and high costs of rent.

And the big important news: WORK EXPERIENCE! I think everyone on the course has had a slight panic about this, myself included. It's all turned out well though, as I have secured a 9 week placement for myself, doing editorial for journals at a big-name publisher with offices in Oxford. (Said publisher has had me fill out about a million forms, including confidentiality and non-disclosure stuff, so at this point I feel more comfortable not naming names, even though I'm sure I could say where I'm working, but I'm just playing it safe.) Journals is not the area of publishing I want to go in to, but I am seriously thrilled to have this opportunity, and a anxiously awaiting Monday when I'll start!

First Week

So the first week of classes is behind us now. It's been incredibly busy, and this next week is shaping up to be the same. But to recap the past week...

Monday: We have Mondays off to give us time for work experience, which is nice as until I actually have work experience, this gives me time to get stuff done. This past Monday my Marketing group (who are no longer my Marketing group) and I went around a bunch of bookshops doing our assignment, which was really quite interesting (see previous post for more details). Then I went to Career Services and had them give me some advice on my CV, which was fantastically useful (no sarcasm). This was followed by a meeting with Beverley, my personal tutor, which was just to touch base and say hi and whatnot. Then it was home for dinner then back to Buckley for my first Society of Young Publishers event!

The SYP got David Fickling to come speak with us. David Fickling has his own imprint with Random House. David Fickling publishes some books you may have heard of, such as The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, as well as Lyra's Oxford and Once Upon a Time in the North: His Dark Materials (David Fickling Books) by Philip Pullman. Mr Fickling was, in short, an amazing speaker. He was passionate, he was knowledgeable, he was funny, and he had a fantastic bowtie. He talked about whether or not he thinks there's a future for the book industry what with all the developments with ebooks (he thinks the role of the publisher may change drastically in years to come, but there will always be a place for us as long as people are interested in stories). He talked about some of the problems the UK is facing as far as literacy and a lack of funding for literacy campaigns and charities is going. And he talked about how the most important thing you can do as a trade publisher is to publish books you feel passionate about. He (in summary) said that trying to sell a book you think stinks is very difficult and does not make you happy, so be true to yourself, and do what you believe in. Very inspiring, also a big relief (knowing both that I'm not crazy for wanting to do just that, and that there should still be a job for me in two years!), and generally a fantastic night all around.

Tuesday: The start of classes! There's a lot of construction going on at the Gipsy Lane campus right now as they get ready to start building a new and obscenly expensive building, which can lead to some confusion. I tried to find a shortcut to the Gibbs Building, where the lecture is, and ended up accidentally taking a tour of a local secondary school instead, so that was an unexpected turn of events. But I got to class on time (early, actually), so whatever. The class was largely introducing the instructors, a brief overview of what editors do and what we'll be doing on the course, and then we divided into (assigned) groups of about 7. These are the groups we'll be in for our group projects and presentations in Editorial, so I was a bit disappointed in that none of my friends were in my group, but it's fine because we all seem to get along well, so the group work should be fine (fingers crossed). We did a couple of group activities, and that was Editorial.

Wednesday: Marketing is, from what I've heard from previous students and second-year part-timers and also what I've observed myself, going to be the crazy class. Not "haha this is fun" crazy, but "holy crap this is a lot of work my brain is numb" crazy. We had work to do before the first lecture (the bookshop thing, and an article on Wired that was the basis of this book: Long Tail, The, Revised and Updated Edition: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. For our second class, we have a bunch of reading to do, some questions on an industry report to answer, and we need to familiarise ourselves with Elsevier so we won't be idiots when our guest speaker comes. Any way. In class we talked a bit about the 4 P's (product, place, price, promotion) mainly, examples of those, and other basic marketing stuff. Most of us have absolutely no marketing experience, so they're having to shove a lot into a 12-week module.

We also had an independent lecture Wednesday morning, called "Inside British Book Publishing", which was just an overview of what's going on in the industry, where it's going, the major players, stuff like that. Wednesday mornings are going to frequently be used for stuff like this throughout the semester. This upcoming week Design has been moved to Wednesday as most of the course will be in Frankfurt on Friday. Later on in the semester, Wednesday mornings will be about dissertation/major project stuff. It's basically a time they've reserved so they can be like, "We have lots more stuff to tell you but it won't fit in anywhere else."

Thursday: Production! Design and Production is technically one class, but they run it like two, with Production on Thursday and Design on Friday, different people running the different bits, different module guides. As for the final grade though, 50% will come from Design and 50% from Production. So we met two of our Production teachers on Thursday, and let me tell you, they have some pretty impressive qualifications (including the fact that Adrian speaks TWELVE languages!). I was completely blown away, both by how knowledgeable they were, and how much information they have to give us. I think the roughly 2 1/2 hours we were there was perhaps the most densely-packed time of my life as far as new information goes. We learned about project management, and what that entails, and what goes in to producing a book, the different things you have to consider, the different people you have to work with, the different countries publishers go to for printing, just a lot of stuff. It was, however, oddly interesting. Production isn't my first choice, but it sounds like something I could do, could possibly enjoy, and would possibly be good at.

Friday: Another busy day! Design is the one class that starts in the morning (9 am!), so that's sad. There was a bit of talk about how workshops run (two groups with alternating times, so the group that goes first in the first week goes second in the second week, then first, then second, etc) and other housekeeping, then we talked a little bit about typeface. We were also asked to bring an illustrated book with us, and as it turns out, we'll be using these books for our projects, which will be making BLADs: Book Layout And Design. These are sort of teasers made for illustrated books, and show the cover (we have to design our own), some sample pages, other information about the book. After the lecture it was off to the Tonge Building, where the Publishing computers are, and we played with InDesign for a bit.

Friday afternoon was the trip to Wiley-Blackwell to hear about work experience there. Wiley, and their division Wiley-Blackwell, publish a great deal of books and journals (though the vast majority of their income comes from journals), but the ones I'm sure everyone has heard of are the Dummies series, such as English Grammar For Dummies and Your Dream Career For Dummies. We had people speak to us from HR, Content Management, Marketing, Editorial, and Rights & Permissions. It was a very informative and (I thought) interesting overview of the company, but also useful to learn more about publishing in the broader sense (for example, now I actually know what the Rights people do). They then told us about the positions they're looking to fill (17-20 slots, I believe, which cover all the departments in the Oxford office), how to apply, and the deadline. The deadline to submit CVs and covering letters is Tuesday at 5 PM. This Tuesday. So four days to get your stuff together and get it in, with the succesful people starting their placements the following Monday. So basically it's all moving Very Fast.

Then Friday night was a pub crawl with the SYP. It was supposed to be literary, but I think it was only a little bit literary. But to be fair, the only real purpose of a pub crawl is alcohol, so I can't really complain about the lack of Tolkien stories. I did have a fantastic time though.


So now we're about to embark on Week 2. This week will be slightly odd as most of the course are going to Frankfurt Thursday, which means Production has been cancelled and Design has been moved to Wednesday morning. I have an interview for a (non-publishing) job on Thursday. And Friday I'm going on an excursion organised by Adrian, the Production guy, to a printers. So it's a busy week, but I'm sure I'll be saying that until after I've handed in my coursework in December.

Brookes!

Ah! Delays delays delays! My intention was to update this blog once a week, but obviously that hasn't happened. I ran into some visa problems which created a great deal of stress, and this blog was the last thing I wanted to deal with. Things are a bit more sorted now though, which is fantastic. On that note, I'd just like to say that the International Student Advisory Service at Brookes is really amazing, and I don't know what I'd have done without their help, advice, and support. Absolutely fantastic.

And since we're talking about visas, due to the issues I'm having (which are extensive and absurd; if you're an American applying for a student visa from within the UK, speak with ISAS before you apply, and actually, probably just go back to the US and apply there), I have had to back out of the Frankfurt trip. This is very disappointing, but there's not much I can do about it. There's always the London Book Fair though.

So I'm at Brookes now! Those of us living in halls moved in last weekend; I moved in to Cheney Student Village on Sunday. That ended up being quite the busy day what with the move and all, and that was followed by a meet and greet at a pub called The Cape of Good Hope, where some of the incoming students met up with the ones who have just finished. The event was a hit, and it was really great to have that chance to meet people on my course, and ask the old students questions. It was also the beginning of a very strange time for me, as a surprising number of people recognized me. Ros (the publishing senior tutor, who is amazing) had started up a Facebook group for us, and apparently the fact that I started the first topic combined with a really clear profile picture meant that loads of people recognized me. It was a bit odd, but fantastic as well since it acted like an ice breaker and helped me meet a lot more people than I think I otherwise would have.

So that was Sunday. Monday we had free, so I went into town with a couple other Publishing students from Cheney in search of a Sainsbury's. Tuesday we had enrolment, where we got our library cards and computer passwords. Enrolment was followed by a 3-hour information session in the Buckley Building for everyone on a Publishing MA (there are several different ones), which was in turn followed by drinks and mingling. After that we realized it was someone's birthday, so some of us went off to the pub. Wednesday and Thursday were IT sessions, introducing us to uni resouces and some of the software we'll be using. Today was just for visa nationals; we had to go to the Main Hall on Gipsy Lane to get our passports and visas scanned (this was a surprisingly painless process due to the complete lack of a queue).

Things are already quite busy, and it's obvious this semester is going to be quite go go go. We already have our first assignment for Marketing, which is to go around to a variety of local bookshops and take a look at the different ways they market books. Oh, on Wednesday we also had a work experience/CV workshop, which they said they generally don't hold this early, but needed to this year because Blackwells wants students for work experience more or less NOW, and they're hosting a tea and biscuits thing for us next Friday, 1st October. Harper Collins is coming on the 11th, I think? So it's all getting a bit real as we realize work experience and assignments aren't some vague time in the future, they're NOW. It is exciting though.

I've met a lot of my fellow students so far (thank you, Facebook!), and though I have a long way to go to remember everyone's names, that's coming along. And so far, everyone is absolutely fantastic. Everyone is nice and welcoming and helpful and just really easy to get along with. The lecturers I've met so far seem to be largely the same. I found out the other day that my personal tutor is Beverley Tarquini, who is head of the various Publishing MAs, so that's exciting. She interviewed me back in March and was generally fantastic. I'm also excited about having her as my tutor because I want to go in to editing, which is exactly where her experience lies.

The only bad thing I have to say about my experience so far is that I wish the bus stop was a little bit closer to Cheney, but to be honest, that's just me being lazy; it's not THAT far.

It is a bit intimidating thinking about all the work I have ahead of me, but it's exciting as well.

Reading Lists and Frankfurt

The 2010 Publishing MA reading list was sent out on Monday, much to my delight! It is as follows:
Inside Book Publishing
From Pitch to Publication: Everything You Need to Know to Get Your Novel Published
Book Commissioning and Acquisition
How to Market Books: The Essential Guide to Maximizing Profit and Exploiting All Channels to Market 4th edition
Publishing for Profit: Successful Bottom-Line Management for Book Publishers
Getting it Right in Print: Digital Prepress for Graphic Designers
Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works (2nd Edition)

As I mentioned earlier, I've been really quite pleased with myself as I've already started reading Inside Book Publishing, but there's always a but. The reading list made it clear that we're expected to read this before the start of term. I'm still ahead of things, but not as ahead of things as I'd thought. It's still miles ahead of where I'd usually be at this point though (reading? for school? now? ha.) so I'm still happy.


And now, for the most amazing news in the history of the world (which may or may not be a slight exaggeration): I am going to The Frankfurt Book Fair this year. Also known as Frankfurter Buchmesse, it's the world's largest trade fair for books. It's a huge deal in the industry, and I'm going! To say I'm thrilled would be an understatement. This is a fantastic opportunity for me professionally (networking!), academically (getting a better understanding of The Big Picture), and socially (getting to know the people on my course). I've also never been to Germany before, so that's a bonus.

But most of all, what I'm looking forward to the most at Frankfurt is just one thing: books. Books, books, books, and books. So many books I'm pretty sure I'm going to tear up (no joke) when I first walk in.

But in the mean time, I still have 1 month, 3 weeks, 2 days until the start of term, and a few more weeks on top of that for Frankfurt.

Two months!

It's two months until the start of term, and things are moving along sporadically. I've been allocated a place in halls, and though I'm wavering between accepting and declining that offer, it is very nice to know that I most certainly have a place to live in September. On the finance side of things, the US Government has decided to change the way they do stuff with student loans, which is delaying my funding and starting to slightly worry me.

I'm told we (those of us on the course) should be receiving reading lists by email soon, which will be good to hear. When I went to Brookes for my interview, Beverley Tarquini mentioned two books to me, both of which I'm sure will be on the syllabus. The first, Inside Book Publishing, I purchased a couple months ago. I've been reading a few pages here and there and I think I'm on chapter 5 or 6 now. I have never been this interested in a textbook before. Everything I've read so far has been fascinating, which, frankly, is somewhat of a relief as it means I am doing the right course after all. The second recommendation was Alison Baverstock's book on marketing, and now that I'm looking for it I realize she actually has several, but I think it was How to Market Books: The Essential Guide to Maximizing Profit and Exploiting All Channels to Market 4th edition. Alison Baverstock is actually one of the reasons I had a difficult time deciding if I was going to do my MA at Kingston University (where I did my BA) or anywhere else. You see, programmes everywhere but Kingston seem to use Baverstock's book when they cover marketing. When Kingston covers marketing, they use Alison Baverstock the person.

Any way, I digress. I still need to get How to Market Books: The Essential Guide to Maximizing Profit and Exploiting All Channels to Market 4th edition, but I'm holding off on that until I know it's that one and not Marketing Your Book: An Author's Guide: How to target agents, publishers and readers (Writing Handbooks) or Are Books Different?: Marketing in the Book Trade.

In the meantime, I should be done with editing hopefully tonight, but tomorrow at the latest. That's a huge relief as it has been taking up the majority of my limited free time, which has been especially frustrating as I've been dying to write for the past month and just haven't had the time. So I'm looking forward to being able to write again, and to being able to read for fun again. Between January 1st and the end of June I read about 30 books, but this month I have read a big fat zero due to time constraints and impatience brought on by the inability to write.

I've been so busy with work and editing that it honestly seems like grad school is going to be (comparitively) relaxing. Of course, I'm saying that on the slowest day I've had at work in three months, a day so slow I've had ample time to write this entry.

Editing

Last month I was given a fantastic opportunity: a retired Disney artist I'm acquainted with asked me to edit his memoirs. Now, I've never really done any serious editing work for anyone other than myself before; I've read things for friends, but I've never gone through and done a sort of line-by-line thing for someone else, certainly not for someone who's not a friend. I was incredibly flattered, and of course I said yes. I have the chance to get some real editing experience and to read all this behind-the-scenes sort of stuff about some of my favourite movies from childhood. It's great, and it's also been quite a learning experience.

For starters, this is a lot harder than I thought going into it. I thought I'd be through it in a couple days, but it's been about a month now and I still have about 1/4 of the book to go. It's not just reading. It's not even reading and pausing occasionally to say I did/did not like something. It's like making a cross-country road trip in rush-hour traffic. Going going going picking up speed aaaaand stop, comma here. Take out this semi-colon. Going going going going picking up speed aaaaand combine these two sentences, incorrect use of the apostrophe. Going go-- stop, that's not what "literal" means. It's really quite labour intensive. Maybe it's been too long since I've seriously edited any of my own work, but the speed has seriously surprised me. Granted, it doesn't help that I'm working at my regular job between 45 and about 60 hours a week, usually six days a week, but still.

The toughest lesson I've had to learn though is the issue of voice. When I first started, I wanted to rewrite everything. I'd look at something and just be like, "This is wrong, that's not how I'd say it at all. It SHOULD be like THIS." But then I'd stop, take a step back, and struggle to find a less-invasive approach. No, it's not how I'd say it, but that doesn't matter. You know why? Because this isn't my book. I'm helping with it, I'm putting a lot of work into it, but I'm not the writer, I am the editor. My job is not to change the book to my voice, it's to help my writer improve his voice. It can be tough, to the point where sometimes I think I'm about to start bleeding from biting my tongue so hard, but it's worth it. I'm learning how to make less-intrusive edits, how to tell if something really needs to be changed, and how to support my writer as opposed to doing things for my writer/trying to replace my writer.

It has been quite the interesting experience so far, and as I said, there's still a chunk to go. I'm really glad I've had this opportunity, and I think (hope) it will really help me to have a better understanding of things in my Editorial Management module this fall.

Why Publishing

NB: This is part of a scholarship application I recently submitted.

One day when I was six years old, my first grade teacher decided to tell us how books became books. My response could best be described as incredulity. Edits and rewrites? Multiple rewrites? Why not just do it right the first time? Art and design departments? Surely once you had all the pictures together, the rest of that stuff would only take five minutes. Why all this pointless time wasting?

These questions bothered me for years; I thought about them every time I picked up a book. I didn't know what I was missing, but I knew it had to be something. When I became interested in writing at the age of 13, I began to understand a little more. When I was 15 I read The Complete Idiot's Guide to Getting Published, but while it answered many of my questions, it only raised more.

This course is the culmination of 18 years of curiosity, and I'm approaching it with a mindset that would have given my six-year-old self homicidal thoughts. I don't want all my questions answered. Oh I want some of them answered, of course, but not all. I want to spend my life learning everything I can about books. I want to wake up in the morning with a smile on my face because I know that when I go into work I will discover something new. I don't want a job so easy I can be perfect at it, I want a job where I make mistakes because new things are happening and there's something more for me to learn.

The MA in Publishing will prepare me well for my career in the industry, but it is not my end point. The next year will answer many questions for me, but I expect many more will be raised, which is how it should be. This course is a starting point, both for my career and my continued personal development. I want to learn what I'm good at, and what I'm bad at. I want to learn about things that seem to have nothing to do with editorial work because I think knowing all those different things will only make me a better editor.

Why an MA?

I put a lot of thought into how I was going to get into the publishing industry, and ultimately decided an MA was the best way to go. Publishing is a difficult field to get in to, in no small part because places don't want to hire you if you don't have experience, and there aren't many houses willing to give you that experience. By doing an MA, I'll be able to gain real experience through placements while on my course. The qualification and additional knowledge and skills I will gain on the course should not only make me much more employable, but will also (fingers crossed) help me to find a job more easily. An MA will also give me a firm foundation in a variety of publishing areas, which seems like something that can only help me in the long run.

Plus there's also the fact that I just think it'd be cool to have an MA, and this is a subject that I'm not only interested, but that I already study about on my own. Plus it's about a million times more useful than something like an MA in English Literature. (No offense if you have one, you've just got to admit that it's pretty damn useless for anything outside of academia.)

So basically that's three reasons:employability, interest in the field, and simply wanting to be able to say I have an MA.

The Meaning of Life. Or at least this blog.

Hello, my name is Editrix, and I'm a bibliophile.

I love books. I love the way they smell. I love the way they look on my shelves. I love reorganising them on my shelves. I love when cheapily-printed books leave me with black thumbs, like some sort of battle scar I can take pride in. I love the way they transport you to another world. I love the way they make you think and reconsider things you thought you already knew. I love the way they bring people together. I love the way they break down barriers. I love the feeling of satisfaction that comes with reading that final word. I love the way they can make you smile, laugh, cry, frown, mourn, celebrate, feel. There is simply nothing better than a well-written book.

And that is why I am devoting my life to the printed word. I have a BA(hons), First Class, in Creative Writing with Media & Cultural studies, and in September I will be starting my MA in Publishing. I'm already tens of thousands of dollars in debt from my undergrad, and I'll be entering into more with my postgrad, all so I can get into a profession with notoriously long hours and low pay. Why? Because I love books.

So now we have this blog, Cacoethes Carpendi, Latin (pretentious, I know) for "a compulsive habit for finding fault", which seemed especially fitting as my goal is to become an editor. My purpose here is twofold: first, to document my time as a publishing grad student at Oxford Brookes University; second, to document my journey to find my perfect book. Expect information on why I chose to do an MA, how I went about selecting schools, why I chose the school I did, what I learn on the course, and ultimately my experiences within the industry. These posts will be interspersed with posts about what I'm reading, what I do and do not like and why.

And there you have it: me and my blog. If I ever fail to answer any of your questions, please feel free to ask, either through comments or through the contact info you can find on my profile.

It is now three months to the day until I start grad school.