How to Get a Job in Publishing Part 2

About book publishing.

We wrote this book to help you get your dream job in publishing. And that innocent term 'publishing' covers a vast array of very different types of product magazines, books, journals, e-publishing for very different buyers in very different markets looking for very different things.

This chapter looks at those differences, and asks you some tough questions about whether you've got what it takes to be successful in each of those markets. And that's important, because to publish in a particular field you have to really identify with your customers, with their needs and wants; with your authors; and with the market itself. This is no place for dabblers!

Publishers need to be part of the target community they seek to serve, not just a distant supplier. (ROBERT MCKAY, DIRECTOR CCH INFORMATION UK) Different jobs for different kinds of people what suits your style best?

It is important to keep reminding yourself that your first job and the first market you work in is highly unlikely to be the one you spend your whole career in. So, settling for expert status in just one small corner of publishing isn't the best move, since it limits your future potential. It makes much more sense to move around now, while you're early in your career and change is still a possibility. Otherwise you could find it's too late and you're stuck for good.

It gets harder, as you become more senior, to move from one part of the industry to another, and particularly into trade publishing from another sector. It's very helpful to move from one area to another in your formative years in order to see beyond the detail, but you should probably have in mind the sector you want to move up in by the time you're 30. Publishing has crises every ten years or so, so everyone goes through one in their formative years it's the best time to make big leaps.

(ANTHONY FORBES WATSON, PUBLISHER, UK).

So, in this chapter we're going to look at 'the big three' trade publishing, schools publishing and higher education publishing. (You may be mildly surprised that it's worthwhile splitting schools and higher ed: we're coming to that.) There are other markets hundreds of others, in fact but by taking a systematic look at these three you'll soon develop your own ability to a.n.a.lyse any market in similar fashion.

In each case we'll look at: * What's going on? What's being published?

* Who's the customer? (This is more complicated than you'd think, actually) and * What does it take to get ahead . . . ? What it takes for you to succeed in this market Trade publishing This is a general term for products sold through bookshops the 'trade' refers to the outlet through which t.i.tles reach the buying public (although, increasingly, consumers see online shopping as part of the same thing).

By the way, did you notice the use of the word 'products' back there? You may find it off-putting (we do), with its implication that books are like widgets, doobries or any other manufactured item. And that's just the point: they are. To be in publishing at all you have to drop (or at the very least be careful about) the sentimentality and the romantic swooning: this is business, and if you get it wrong you lose money for the company you're working for and pretty soon you're out on the street wondering what happened.

Besides, as we discuss elsewhere in this book (in Chapter 6 on e-publishing, for example), any publisher planning to be around for a few years is publishing in a mult.i.tude of digital formats, while continuing to publish the good old-fashioned book.

What's going on?

Trade publishing covers a huge range of different types of product, from ma.s.s-market to literary fiction, from biographies and 'how to' books to children's t.i.tles for reading on their own, to picture books for babies and everything in between. In effect, it's everything except everything else.

Trade sales matter to publishers because they are as close to cash in the bank as publishing gets and that's not very. On the downside, publishers have to pay out a year or more before they see any sales revenue to authors, copy editors, designers, printers and so on. On the upside, t.i.tles ordered ('subscribed')1 ahead of publication by bookstores stand a strong chance of generating cash. The publisher knows with a fair degree of certainty that the t.i.tles selected will be displayed once the book is published and so will be ready to meet the demand they plan (hope) to orchestrate at the same time.

Trade sales are the bread and b.u.t.ter of publishing, and publishers try to make big sales in this way to support more speculative ventures investment in writers who are just starting out, perhaps, or the luring of an author to their list from another publisher (costly in the short term), or the setting up of a new imprint, or buying up another publisher.

And don't, by the way, think that publishers invest in new authors out of a sense of duty or public-spiritedness. They're doing it because today's brash new author is tomorrow's bread and b.u.t.ter. Imagine if you'd signed up JK Rowling or Stephen King. Not only would you be walking about with a grin from ear to ear, you'd also have a ma.s.sive cash float to go out and try and find the next blockbuster author.

Who's the customer?

That sounds like a daft question. Of course the customer is the person in the shop who's just picked up that book, carried it over to the counter and is about to fork out their hard-earned cash as you've done for this book, and we thank you for it.

But hang on a second. There are in fact two customers for every book, and while their interests overlap, they are by no means identical. The book-buying punter is one of those customers, for sure. But the other is . . .

The book retailer/buyer If you, the publisher, don't persuade the bookshop to stock your book, you'll never get the chance to wow your potential customer with that flash jacket and beautifully crafted blurb.

In fact, for trade t.i.tles the most important person in the whole world is the book buyer or retailer the person who makes the vital decision whether their shop(s) will have your book on their shelf. Or not.

How do they make this decision? How do you persuade them to carry your t.i.tle? Funnily enough, they're actually not so much concerned with the quality of the book, the intricacies of its plot or even its literary merit. All they want to know is this: will it sell? So you've got to persuade them to believe in your book's commercial worth. You've got to convince them that it will get enough support, through marketing and publicity, for the book-buying public to actually know it exists.

Remember, too, that the bookseller has very limited s.p.a.ce and budget, and has to choose from the offerings of every publisher out there, not just you. Either they get a very acute sense of what jumps off the shelves in their shop, or they go out of business. They work to incredibly tight margins (perhaps a couple of per cent profitability), and that makes them very, very good indeed at spotting the good stuff. Publishers dismiss booksellers as tired cynical old dodderers who have no drive and won't take a risk to save their lives. In fact, the opposite is true: it's their lives, or at least their livelihoods, that quite literally depend upon them taking as few risks as possible.

Get yourself into a bookshop today. Look around at what's selling. Read the bestseller lists in the media avidly. Follow the emergence of new subjects as they take up more and more s.p.a.ce in the shops. A while back, for example, the Western made a somewhat surprising revival, and you'd have to conclude from the shelves that your average punter was a creative writer with a deep interest in punctuation, worries about the environment and an obsession with bizarre and obscure trivia. There's money to be made from jumping on the bandwagon, which is why so many publishers do just that. There's even more money to be made from being there first.

My other tip is that industry experience such as having worked in a good bookshop or volunteered for work at a writers' festival can be more impressive than academic qualifications. It is all very well to have a degree in literature and to say how much you love books, but having worked in a bookshop actually demonstrates your pa.s.sion.

(JESSICA, AUSTRALIA).

The customer And so we come to the book buyer, the person who actually keeps this whole three-ring circus going by flexing the plastic.

Publishers have always relied on a steady bunch of regular book buyers most of the books bought are sold to those who are frequent purchasers. These people buy wherever they see books available (in supermarkets and garage forecourts as well as in bookshops). On the back of this (or perhaps because of it) comes the accusation that publishers are happier commissioning t.i.tles they themselves like reading, for sale to their friends, which they can then discuss together. But even if this is true, this core market is getting older and, unlike previous generations, today's youngsters have lots of other calls on their time than the joy of reading a book: Today's under-30s who ought to be tomorrow's hardcore book buyers live out their lives on the playing-card screens of mobile phones, preferring to interact online with the social networks of Mys.p.a.ce, Flickr and Facebook. Inveterate multi-taskers, they listen to their iPods and text their friends while watching television with laptops, not books, on their knees. (MICHAEL HOLDSWORTH, THE LONDON BOOK FAIR DAILY, 18 APRIL 2007) Finding new markets Today the search is on for new markets of readers who can be persuaded to buy, and to widen the generational appeal of t.i.tles. So the trade publisher is not just trying to sell the latest batch of wares, but also to promote the habit of reading and book buying in the hope that a new generation of buyer will arise to fund the industry in future.

Similarly, publishers are undertaking initiatives to widen partic.i.p.ation within the industry, because without a broad range of ethnic backgrounds and lifestyles represented, we have little chance of producing the kind of books these groups want to read.

The other complication for the trade publisher is the difficulty some might say the impossibility of predicting the tastes of book buyers. Authors often speculate about what is going to be the next big thing in publishing, but some of the recent successes have been very surprising. Recent runaway successes have included a book on punctuation (Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss) and a novel for young adults about autism (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon). If you can honestly say you could have predicted the ma.s.sive success of either of these t.i.tles, then (a) you deserve a big slap on the back for being so clever, and (b) why didn't you tell us about it? We could have made millions.

A recent compet.i.tion to find a new writer on the UK TV show Richard and Judy offered publication as the prize. It duly produced a winner . . . and in fact the publishers sponsoring the compet.i.tion considered the shortlist so strong that they decided to offer all five runners-up a contract, too. Guess which one of the six t.i.tles published was the runaway bestseller? It wasn't the 'winner', but one of the runners-up! The moral of the story is that picking winners is virtually impossible.

What does it take to get ahead in trade publishing????????

In a word: curiosity. In two words: insatiable curiosity. In three words: absolutely insatiable curiosity. You need to be that unusual kind of person who spots trends and fashions way before anyone else sees them coming. In short, you have a keen nose for the spirit of the times.

What are people reading on buses, by the swimming pool on holiday? What books are the media getting all excited about? What are your friends talking about? For children's t.i.tles, watch what they choose themselves, given a completely free choice (preferably with the parent waiting outside the shop rather than helping them make their selection which will undoubtedly influence what is taken to the cashier). Sometimes you'll find it is the jacket blurb that attracts attention, sometimes the cover blurb, at others personal recommendation. An effective trade publisher needs to be constantly curious about why people make particular choices and what they are interested in.

Ten Ways to See If You Have the Right Stuff to be a Good Trade Publisher 1. When did you last go into a bookshop? Or look through the book selection in a supermarket? How many books are for sale in your local garage? If you were looking for something specific, how long did you browse for after you had found it?

2. As well as looking at other products on offer, did you look at who else was shopping? If so, what time of day was it, and were they the type of customers you would expect? Anyone who surprised you by being there?

3. When you are out shopping for groceries and waiting in the queue to pay, do you habitually look into other people's trollies to see what they are buying? Does this prompt a daydream about what kind of lives they lead?

4. What is your partner/best friend/parent reading now?

5. When you use public transport (and you should2), what's the book you see being read most?

6. When you drive, do you listen to talk radio and commercial/popular stations to find out what people are talking about?

7. Do second-hand book stalls at your local fundraising sale (and you need to be there too) tell you anything about which t.i.tles people bought but no longer want to live with? Why is this? Which non-book stalls are the most popular?

8. How much do you interact with popular media: news programmes that are targeted at different groups during the day, quiz and magazine programmes, chat shows and children's media?

9. What about newspapers do you read a wide range or stick to those that confirm your own opinions?

10. How do you find out things that you consider news?

You can tell of course what the 'right' answers to these questions are. It's not something you can fake, and although you can sharpen your instincts and work on them, if they're not there in the first place you can't grow them.

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Trade Publishers3 1. Spot movers and shakers, who are not necessarily writing books at the moment. Publishers often have to find not only the idea, but also have to spot the potential writer and the person they settle on may not even be thinking of writing a book. Ideas for people to commission may come from almost anywhere: you may hear them on the radio, or spot something else they have written. If you notice a magazine article that generates a lot of hotly argued letters, for example, you could well be looking at a book in the making.

2. Organise. A strong ability to remember names, contact details and where you noted them.

3. Sharpen your research skills to explore and explain the trends you spot and the hunches you develop.

4. Empathise. Develop a genuine interest in other people and an ability to relate to them the kind of interpersonal skills that encourage people to talk to you.

5. Question everything and ask open-ended questions (the kind that encourage the other party to talk to you rather than just listen).

6. Ditch the arrogance. A willingness to listen to what other people are interested in and hence might want to read/read about rather than an a.s.sumption that everyone should be reading the books you enjoy/consider life-changing.

7. Be bold when explaining your preferences to your colleagues and able to persuade them around to your point of view. Balancing this one and (6) is every bit as difficult as you'd imagine.

Schools publishing Imagine a school without textbooks. You can't well, we can't either. So, right away you have a ready-made market. Even better, in the developed world, education is compulsory, so not only is there a ready-made market, there's a ma.s.sive one. 4 Throw in a need to keep revising these textbooks to stay up to date with new knowledge and educational trends (or, the cynical would argue, a need to keep updating these textbooks so that the publishers can make millions) and you can see why schools publishing is such big business.

What's going on?

Lots. Schools publishers produce resources for schools and teachers: * Courses and textbooks * a.s.sessment and diagnostic materials * Resources on educational theory, practice and implementation strategy for teachers * Computer software, DVDs, audiotapes and much more Unlike trade publishing, where publishers need to make decisions about what they think people might be interested in, educational publishing is very curriculum-focused so topics and approaches are often predefined, and the variation between books competing for the same audience is much more narrow. So, while there's a lot to love about this market, it's also extremely compet.i.tive and cut-throat. This is no market for the faint-hearted.

Who's the customer?

Just as with trade publishing where you have to convince not only the end-user but the book buyer, so too with educational publishing you have to consider not only the kids who'll be using the books, but their teachers, their parents and, quite possibly, the government (in the shape of the Education Department), too.

Teachers are a group of people that are easy to identify and reach through marketing. They can be identified by where they work, and by the look of tension and frustration on their faces. You can reach them very easily with an e-mailing list.

Att.i.tudinally, too, they can be grouped. There have been huge changes in the management of teaching in schools and colleges and most of these changes are in operation internationally. These have included more rigorous checking of what is being delivered through the curriculum, how it is taught with strict parameters specifying what happens when and an additional range of measures to cover what teachers can and can't do in the course of their professional lives. As a result, they are time-pressured, on the receiving end of many newly-developed government initiatives (not all of which have been, how shall we say, fully thought out), and frequently suspect that those advocating and implementing change do not understand the day-to-day realities of being in a cla.s.sroom.

If only it were that easy. In fact, selling resources to schools is a horrendously complicated issue, as so many people tend to be involved in buying decisions. Teachers are natural collaborators and, while it may be the cla.s.sroom teacher who wishes to use materials by a different publisher, the decision will have to be discussed with the head of department, the head teacher/princ.i.p.al, agreed with those who also teach from time to time, and it will usually be the school administrator who places the order. And all that is a.s.suming, of course, that you've already got past the local education department.

What does it take to get ahead in schools publishing?

* It sounds obvious, but you really do, quite genuinely, have to be interested in education, and preferably even like teachers. A background as a teacher is immensely useful, of course, but not essential. What is essential is an understanding that teaching is a profession evolving all the time; an att.i.tude that it will have changed little since you were last in full-time education (whether as pupil or teacher) is definitely not helpful.

* An understanding that teaching is a profession and that the best resources are developed through a clear grasp of teaching dilemmas and practicalities.

* An ability to isolate important initiatives from surrounding discussion. Proposed and even announced changes get shelved, while others get the green light and become immensely important. If you are able to predict which is which, you'll save yourself lots of time and your company lots of false starts (which means money).

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Schools Publishers 1. Befriend teachers. Bribe or breed children of school age you can talk to and do so on a regular basis. You absolutely have to be swimming in this water to succeed.

2. Spread those contacts as widely as possible; you need an awareness of lots of different educational delivery mechanisms, not just those you have chosen/experienced yourself.

3. Think laterally. A book may not be the most logical format. How will your material be used in the cla.s.sroom? What kind of additional support materials do teachers need in order to get the most out of your material?

4. Develop an eye for detail, and in particular an ability to master educational buzzwords (and spot which ones are falling out of use or sound dated). Educationalists thrive on jargon and to be taken seriously you need to be able to get it right, too.

5. Fight your corner. If you work for an educational division that is part of a larger organisation, your in-house reputation may be dull/worthy; it's easy to brand educational publishing as less s.e.xy than trade publishing. And, frankly, it is. But educational markets are here to stay, teachers will always need resources, and by coming up with the right materials you have access to future generations, at the time of their maximum openness to receiving marketing messages. Educational publishers of the world, stand up and be counted!

6. Be a political animal. With more and more educational initiatives driven by central government, within financial/political objectives and spending plans, educational publishers need to be vigilant and good at spotting the long-term consequences of what is being proposed. They need to be effective negotiators, who can represent the industry position and the educational consequences without attracting accusations of pure devotion to their own profits.

7. Acquire good communication skills. Teachers feel patronised by the rest of society, and they feel this way because they are, in fact, patronised by the rest of society. Stupidly, many people a.s.sume teachers only work during the school day and get long holidays. You must be joking. With all the monitoring strategies in place these days, teaching is immensely labour-intensive; lesson preparation and marking extend far beyond the school day. This leaves them little time or patience for fluffy, vague or ill-considered communication. You have to sell hard and fast just to get their attention, let alone win their business.

Higher education publishing Those teaching at universities and colleges need teaching resources, too, to reinforce the material delivered through lectures, and to support independent learning, a.s.signments and preparation for exams.

What's going on?

This market needs: * Textbooks to support courses * Upper level academic t.i.tles for more detailed exploration of specific topics, and increasingly * Summary and revision guides to help prepare for exams (and which are often bought as a short cut instead of textbooks) To support all these materials, the market has developed a vast array of additional items that offer 'added value' websites (different ones for students and academics); resources for the lecturer, such as crib sheets that help them teach the textbook, and question banks that save them having to make up their own exam questions; free downloadable resources; compet.i.tions to enter for cash prizes/ enhancement of the organisation's reputation; suggestions for a.s.signments and accompanying marking guidelines.

This market is heavily and increasingly into online delivery. Academics were one of the first professions to access information via e-mail (they all got free early access through their universities), and their learning resource centres (what used to be called libraries) make as much information as possible available online through searchable resources, because that is how students like to access it.

Who's the customer?

Lecturers expect free copies of textbooks, on the grounds that they can recommend them to those who are taking their cla.s.ses. Cla.s.s sizes are getting bigger all the time, and in theory their recommendation should result in a sizeable order. In practice, however, students are very short of money; they have to fund their studies and lifestyles, and most emerge with substantial debts. Book buying can be very low down their priority list.

The most 'wired-up' generation there is, students have got used to Amazon-style search and delivery speed for other commodities they need, and expect the same standards from libraries and publishers. In fact, such is the demand for specific information, and so great the concern that students are accessing material which is correct as well as quickly available, that many universities are moving to the production of a standard 'cartridge' for courses, culling chapters from a variety of different publications (with permission from the various original publishers).

Given the various pressures on them, many students are also seemingly just trying to get through and there is less inclination to read well or widely around a subject. With vastly increased cla.s.s sizes, and more a.s.sessment through group-based a.s.signments, individual contributions can be hidden. Librarians seek to stock what their users want, and don't want to tie up capital in resources no-one uses.

For printed products produced for this market, it is vital that they both look appealing and are sensitively priced as students will find every reason not to buy them (while expenditure on phones and beer is essential, of course).

What does it take to get ahead in higher education publishing?

* An understanding of the nitty-gritty details of how teaching in your allocated subject area works, and what makes good resources whether it's sociology, biology, economics or physics; whether you're interested and have technical knowledge of the subjects or not. A degree5 counts for a lot here, not least because it means you've got a great understanding of how academic inst.i.tutions function, and also because you've seen enough of academics to realise that for all their vagueness and blather, underneath it all, they're nearly as human as the rest of us.

* An understanding of the new delivery patterns for academic learning. You'll hear the older people talking about the 'good old days' and mixing up their jargon in most amusing fashion. That's where they're looking to you, as someone who 'gets' all this stuff.

* A nose for opportunities in this furiously evolving market, such as courses that are growing in popularity; delivery mechanisms that suit your existing product range for instance, cross-curricular materials that meet the needs of several courses. The truth of the matter is, no-one knows where all this is going, and if you can develop even a better-than-average instinct for reading the runes, you'll rapidly develop a reputation as a guru.

* A genuine interest in delivery mechanisms (books, magazines or websites), supported learning environments and the student mentality.

The Nine Habits of Highly Effective Higher Education Publishers On top of the seven highly effective habits of schools publishers (see above), you'll need another couple of tools in your kit box: 8. 'Instant expert' skills. Given the specific nature of higher education, few publishers find themselves working on an area they know or understand. So you need to establish your credentials pretty well instantly. In your favour, it's true that a model of academic delivery can be adapted from one discipline to another. Following on from that, you need to be actively interested in the resources you are marketing, and the people you are selling to. It will probably not occur to academics that someone not qualified in the subject could possibly be employed, so the best advice is to keep your mouth shut until you feel you can say something useful.

How did I get my first job in publishing? I wrote to all the publishers I could find in the Writers' and Artists' Yearbook, asking for a job. I think I got two replies, one at Fontana, and was interviewed by Mark Collins, which I didn't get, and one as Science editor at George Harrap and Co, which I did. 1, 200 per annum, looking after anything to do with science schools, universities and general. I suspect I got the job because I was the only candidate with a degree in science or perhaps the only candidate.

(RICHARD CHARKIN, BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING).

9. Be a good mixer. Academics can be quite isolated; the profession these days is fiercely compet.i.tive and there are huge bureaucratic responsibilities to juggle as well as teaching and researching. And having a good research record is vital; both their department's and their own research funding depend on it.

Worse, they're often in direct compet.i.tion with their colleagues, which certainly doesn't help. The result can be an unhappy working environment and one from which you as a publisher can provide a very welcome relief. In fact, you'll need to develop some pretty sharp techniques for getting away from them without causing offence. It is rumoured that several higher education publishers have in fact been found dead of starvation in the offices of academics, who were still chuntering away oblivious.

Conclusion In this chapter we've looked at just three areas of publishing trade, schools and higher education, in case you weren't paying attention. There are, of course, many, many more. Wherever you find a bunch of like-minded consumers hanging out together, whether in a physical or virtual s.p.a.ce, you'll find publishing companies antic.i.p.ating and serving their needs. Sometimes they're subsets of bigger firms, and sometimes they are highly specific niche firms with a very limited area of operation. So, to take just three examples from among hundreds, there are publishers making entire businesses out of servicing: * The business community legal commentary for lawyers advice on the latest financial regulations and how to present the information that is required for accountants * Doctors and dentists ill.u.s.trated manuals on how to carry out the latest procedures 'how to' guides on running a practice * University academics, with their need for highly complex and theoretical materials often provided by specialist university presses Pretty much everything we've said in this chapter is relevant to whatever group you're publishing for. The bottom line? You must be fascinated by what fascinates them, and desperately obsessed with coming up with new ways to serve their needs now and in the future. Above all, you need to be flexible, to listen to their buying signals rather than impose your own. That show-stopping, epoch-defining, last-word-in-completeness book you had in mind may in fact be most usefully published for them as an e-newsletter with supporting website!

More reading.

Clark, Inside Book Publishing, Routledge, 2000.

Independent Publishers Committee, An Introduction to Australian Book Publishing, 2005.

1 Or 'subbed', short for 'subscribed', meaning the bookstore agrees they will stock to a certain level once the t.i.tle is published.

2 This isn't a moral point well, actually it is but more importantly it's a commercial one. The more you hang around with people who could be your customers, the more you'll know about what they want 3 We're paraphrasing here and below the famous business bestseller The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey.

4 In the UK, that is. In Australia, with multiple state educational curricula, schools publishers have more (and more fragmented, and smaller) markets to serve 5 Not necessarily in the subjects you publish in, by the way any old degree does the trick.