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!
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