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.