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.