(no subject)

[alg]

Good morning! I have gotten several pokes from a lot of you, asking where I've been. Do y'all post every day? What is up with this? Anyway, I've been off dealing with real life (particularly sticky lately), plus gearing up to launch the Winter 2007 trade season at Tor, buying a bunch of new books, working until all hours of the evening, all that fun stuff.

Oh, and watching The Evidence. The conceit is boring, but Orlando Jones? In purple pants? He is very very dapper. He is a dapper crime solver! Where is the bad? I have no patience for the pain of Rob Estes's character, but Orlando Jones makes up for it. DAPPER CRIME SOLVER. Those are really the only words I can use.

To keep me fresh in your mind, here is Q&A. Please keep in mind that it is 8 AM and I have no coffee yet.

Q: How does one get started in publishing? (question from jadzia325)

A: One gets started in publishing by moving to the city The Company Of Your Dreams is located in, and submitting your resume. If you want to work for Tor, you come to the New York area. If you want to work for a company out of Boston, move to the Boston area. If you want to work for a company out of Los Angeles.... you get the picture?

I guess I'd recommend reading mediabistro.com -- I know that Holtzbrinck's HR publishes our open positions there. I think there are a few companies posting to craigslist.com too.

Internships are really helpful, especially because a lot of the time people who think they want to be in the editorial department actually want to be in the marketing department or something (and vice versa), but most places don't only hire interns. You will, of course, have to start at the bottom. That means making around $25,000 - $30,000 per year. That's not a lot of money, and it's very difficult to survive in NYC on that salary, and it only gets harder.

A lot of people who come in to interview for entry-level positions (and sometimes even higher) have very unrealistic expectations. Entry-level is seriously only one step above an intensive internship. You read slush and do filing and write cover copy and chase your assigned editor(s) down to make sure s/he (they) get everything done on time and every once in a while you have to get the coffee, take notes at a meeting, dress up pretty to impress someone -- really! 95% of your time is slush, filing, and data entry.

We don't actually expect people coming in at entry-level to have experience. That is why it's called entry level. I've helped hire a bunch of people for Tor's editorial department, and what we expected from them was a willingness to learn and a commitment to books and enthusiasm.

I don't know how other companies do it and what they look for. When we am hiring people, we almost immediately dismiss the ones who have only ever done things related to "literature" -- we are a commercial fiction house, and we want people who are versed in commercial fiction. We also tend to ask people about what magazines they read. You can tell a lot about a person based on their magazine interests. And we want to know what people do outside of books... I can't remember exactly, but one of the reasons we hired claireeddy's assistant was because her resume was so interesting -- cocktail waitressing (she can multi-task!) and professional ballet (she is good under pressure!) and something else.

It was a smart resume and a clever cover letter. She made a good impression on us during the interview process, and she wrote some really good sample cover copy that wasn't perfect but showed a hell of a lot of potential. We said, "YES SEND HER YES!!!"

(That's because Claire and I tend to talk in caps lock.)

Of course, that said, we at Tor tend to hire our interns. 2muchexposition and I are prime examples of that. I was Jenna Felice's intern, just as Liz was mine. I can think of at least two other interns right off the top of my head who were also hired, but they were publicity interns, plus the art department has hired their last intern, too. And I have an intern right now who I would love to hire.

That's the best way to show off your skills -- go to a school in NYC and get hired as an intern for the company you'd like to work for, and show them that you're a damn rock star and they'd be fools not to find a place to put you.

Anyone who has gotten a job at a publishing company who would like to share how they did it, please feel free to post your experiences in the comments, and I will link to them up here! More information is good!

ETN: Many people have posted their experiences in the comments:
safirasliv talks about Ballantine/Del Rey here;
indigosarah talks about academic publishing here;
claireeddy talks about the response to writers who want to work in publishing here;
zingerella talks about editing textbooks in Toronto here (with bonus info from tnh on trade publishing in the comments over there);
madrobins talks about her jobs as tnh's and Tom Doherty's assistant at Tor, and also about working in comics, here;
castiron talks about academic publishing here;
gloryhunt talks about being a Tor intern and moving into academic publishing here;
barbarienne talks about getting a job in production (as a text-design manager) here;
deannahoak talks about her career in publishing here;
readwrite talks about his career in publishing here.

I am not going to keep linking -- but people may keep posting, so make sure you scroll down!

Comments

[readwrite.livejournal.com]

My first job in publishing was at a legal publisher in Seattle. A neighbor who worked there suggested I apply when I told him I was looking for a job. He knew that I was widely read, and I told him I could spell. I took a proofreading test, told the manager I wanted the job, and was hired as a proofreader. After a while I moved up to being an "editor," essentially an in-house copy editor. The material, mostly municipal codes, with occasional other state and county lawbooks, was on the dull side, but the work turned out to be very good training: I had to take extremely messy material and whip it into shape quickly.

When I moved to New York, I right away got work as a temp legal proofreader, and eventually was on staff at a large corporate firm, but the stuff I was reading there made municipal codes seem like The Demolished Man. But it turned out that several of my Seattle homies, including pnh and tnh, had also relocated to NYC. When I mentioned that I was doing legal proofreading, they hooked me up with the house they were working for, which was doing literary criticism--sometimes a bit dry, but actually interesting reading. Another friend of ours was an editorial assistant at a mass market house and gave me the name of their production editor. At last I was working on actual trade books!

Yes, I now had Trade Book Experience--the necessary hidden power a freelancer must have.

I gradually expanded my freelance contacts: sometimes through networking, sometimes through cold calling and taking tests (and some of those tests can be tricky, let me tell you).

So far I had done only proofreading, as far as trade books were concerned. But I carefully studied the manuscript of every book I proofread. By the time an author's original manuscript is typeset, it often resembles a graffiti-covered bathroom wall--you know, the kind where each writer says something to top the previous one: First the editor makes edits, sometimes very sparingly, sometimes virtually rewriting the whole book, usually somewhere in that vast space in between these two. Then there might be a separate line editor who whips the prose into better shape. Then the copy editor goes to work, often writing her or his queries directly in the margin. (Tor doesn't do this, but many houses do.) The author then may reply to the marginal queries and do additional rewriting, sometimes considerably. The production editor may do some cleanup of loose ends, or the original editor may also add a few last-minute edits. The designer may also insert codes or type specs, and the compositor may also write occasional codes here and there.

If you learn to recognize who is who, this can be the best copy editing course in the world. And as the proofreader, part of your job is to watch out for what all these people missed, so you really kind of have to study it in detail anyway. Eventually, I felt I was ready to copy edit as well as proofread.

Eventually, I was recruited to work at Tor by tnh. I did that for about two years, then felt I needed less structure for a while. Another house was kind enough to put me on staff as a part-time production editor, though it was a tough commute to an outer borough.

After all this, I had enough contacts to freelance indefinitely. In recent years, through other people I've met, I've managed to copy edit at some major magazines as well. Magazine work is very different from book work--more intense and fast-paced, with strict style guidelines, though not necessarily quite as interesting--but generally better paying. I find the ideal situation to be a bit of both magazines and books. I'm toying with the idea of a full-time job again--I think I could use a little organization for a while--but I'm not quite there yet...