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.