How to Get a Job in Publishing Part 4

Even so, when they think of publishing, most people still continue to think of books, magazines and newspapers in other words, bits of tree squashed flat and driven around the country in a truck.

In one sense they're quite right to do so, because, despite all the hype, very little book publishing is actually done online, compared to what most of us might still think of as 'the real thing', magazines still continue to pack the newsstand, and not too many people are happy to pay real money for their online news.

To ill.u.s.trate, in the US e-books still represent less than three-quarters of 1% of the US$25 billion publishing market.

To judge from these signs, then, this is all a big fuss over nothing. But make no mistake, online publishing is not only well and truly here to stay, it's only going to get more important, even if it's taking rather longer than many people thought. And here's why. Because, despite what some say, it's not the reluctance of readers to read online and electronically that's holding things back. In fact, it's the twin difficulty of finding a workable business model and a reader-friendly technology that's preventing us going full pelt for an electronic future.

In short, you can't get people to pay as much as they will for a book or magazine or even a newspaper for its electronically delivered equivalent; and even if you could, you can't give it to them in as elegant a form as its physical counterpart.

It's the business of the three Bs bed, bath and beach: find a way of providing people with a good electronic read in those three leisure locations, and you have an official licence to print money on a grand, and perhaps even unprecedented, scale.

Here are three indicators that the digital earthquake really is about to happen, if it hasn't actually started already: * The chief executive of Bloomsbury, Nigel Newton, recently predicted that 50% of all fiction sales in 2016 will be digital half! Even if he's wildly out, that's still a ma.s.sive shift in the mode of delivery.

* In the UK, Random House and HarperCollins are digitising 25, 000 t.i.tles.

* The Chinese government has announced that it will supply all its 165 million students with e-readers.

Think about your own habits for a second. It's probable that you're one of the Digerati, a Millennial (born in 1980 or since), who's grown up interacting with your media, be it videogames, Facebook, Mys.p.a.ce, YouTube, instant messaging, text messaging, your iPod . . . You're used to scanning things fast and being in charge. You get much of your information online, be it news (if you're even interested in news chances are, you're not), reviews or what's on.

If you're a student you know all about Web-based course management systems. You may well access lectures and other materials via MP3. And you know what? Academic publishers and campus booksellers are absolutely petrified. They have no idea or rather, they have 100 ideas and no clue how to address these issues effectively, and simply cannot see what tomorrow's business model is. Yet.

Newspaper publishers have rushed online to deliver news . . . Actually, let's start that again. Newspaper publishers have rushed online to deliver eyeb.a.l.l.s (yours) to advertisers, and in the process discovered that once you've taught people to expect stuff for free, it's mighty hard to re-educate them to pay for it. So while newspaper sales continue to decline like a bike tyre with a slow puncture, the very publishers of those newspapers are busily engaged in teaching their readers to get for free what they used to pay for!

Finally, books. Even if you still only need to sell a few hundred electronically to have a bestseller on your hands, don't think for a moment that the publishers aren't taking it seriously. In fact, they're spending millions and millions on digitising everything they can. (They're doing it in India, which is a whole other story.) And they're also ensuring that they buy the electronic rights to whatever properties they buy these days (including the one you're holding in your hands right now).

So publishers worldwide are ready, poised and eager to take your cash for online delivery. All it takes is a decent e-reader and a workable business model. The sorts of issue they are struggling with are: How much would you pay for the electronic edition of a book? Would you pay the same as you'd pay for the paperback? The costs of circulating an e-book are substantially lower than printing the book version. How much is convenience worth?

Still, it's only a matter of time before the technical and commercial issues get sorted out just as the technical and commercial issues relating to the delivery of online music were sorted out by Apple and when they are, look out for seismic shifts in publishing that are every bit as dramatic as in the music market. When it happens, you want to be part of it.

So there it is. Books and magazines aren't going away, but they no longer have the place to themselves. Information that can be more efficiently published and consumed online will be so, and books and magazines will keep what's left, whatever that is. That's why we say, if you can get an e-publishing gig, take it.

But e-publishing is so much more than replacing one form of publishing with another. It has created thousands of opportunities that never even existed before. Just a few years ago, for example, hardly any business had a website or could see a need to get one. (By the way, an utterly fascinating way to spend a few minutes is to look at how websites you know have developed over the years, using the wonderful Wayback Machine, www.archive.org/index and its 85 billion archived Web pages. You can see what Apple's website looked like a decade ago, or Wikipedia the day it started, on 28 August 2001.) What do we mean by e-publishing?

It helps to think for a second about what e-publishing actually is. Because it can mean one (or more) of three (or more) things: * Selling online. For example, a publisher's website and a publisher selling books through Amazon or other online booksellers * Promoting through the use of digital information for example, e-mail marketing to customers and potential customers * Delivering digital content publishing a product electronically, to be read through an e-reader, or online And outside of what publishers themselves are doing there's a whole worldwide Web of online authoring and production. For instance, Steve used to work in marketing for a big corporate law firm, and any decent-sized firm in the professional services area (lawyers, accountants, consultants, advertising agencies) worth its salt these days produces a ton of reading material ('marketing collateral' in the jargon) for its clients and prospects.

Here are just a few of the many positions and career paths with an online twist: * Copywriter there are jobs for Web copywriters, sometimes called digital copywriters or technical copywriters.

* MarComms (Marketing and Communications) positions, from junior a.s.sistant through to marketing manager right the way through to a director on the company board.

* Production and Publications, pulling content and design together and making the whole thing happen.

* Editing although the delivery mechanism and the way content is put together have changed, the traditional role of an editor at the helm exists just as it always has.

* Graphic design a whole industry has sprung up creating websites.

* Web-delivered information services such as searching, online directory listings and other interactive electronic services have thrown up new jobs and careers that simply did not exist a decade ago.

* Advertising in particular has warmly embraced all things digital, expanding beyond print and broadcast ads into viral advertising, websites, advergames, the creation of rich media banners, ambient digital content and a thousand and one other ways to attract the attention of the time-poor and media-savvy consumer. In fact, UK online advertising spend now counts for more than 10% of the entire advertising market (globally the figure's about 6%), being worth more than 2 billion. It's worth more than national newspaper advertising, and in early 2007 overtook radio in revenue terms. Opportunities here include wordsmithing (copywriters who become editors who become creative directors) and crayon-wielding (graphic designers who become studio managers who become creative directors), online advertising account and traffic management (the traffic in this case being the mechanical handling of the advertising material itself, rather than looking after the company car park).

Conclusion As someone once said, in a somewhat different context, this is not the end for e-publishing. It's not even the beginning of the end. It is, however, perhaps the end of the beginning, in the sense that there is no longer any doubt whatsoever that we're living in the future. And this future-present is moving so fast that even to start a paragraph about it condemns you to be out of date by the time you finish it. It's for those reasons that it's so exciting and enticing. You don't have to be an uber-geek to be part of it, though if you find the life of an accountant, with its stability and solidity, even secretly just a little bit attractive then this is not the place for you. If, however, you love change and uncertainty and the thrills and spills of driving at 150 miles an hour blindfold in heavy traffic, then you've found your spiritual home (it's on wheels, naturally).

So, to repeat: faced with two attractive job offers, one of which has an 'e-' attached to it, take that one. It'll be a wild ride.

More reading Anything we put in here will be out of date by the day you read this.

1 Actually it's not at all obvious who said this first. Maybe it was Bill Gates? If you know, do contact us via the publisher.

Part II: About you.

Chapter Seven.

What kind of person are you?

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with their song still in them. (HENRY DAVID Th.o.r.eAU (18171862), US PHILOSOPHER) Many (too many: maybe even most) people hate what they're doing. They hate their job and they really hate their boss. Yet many (too many: maybe even most) of them never do anything about it, other than complain in the pub and bore everybody to death, again. Cue deep sighs and raised eyes all round.

If you think that's not nearly good enough for you, the best way to avoid this is to make sure you head off in the right direction to start with.

So this chapter is something of an honesty session. It's where you get to take a good, hard look at yourself in the mirror and work out what you love and what you're good at.

It's hardly a surprise that these two things what you enjoy and what you excel at usually overlap. It's probably something to do with the fact that your apt.i.tudes shape your skills and experience. Some people, in this corner over here, are fascinated by mechanical things right from the moment they can see, and that means they love to spend time taking things to bits and putting them back together again, apart from a mysterious very small spring. Meanwhile, over there you'll find some people who just love language, and reading, and books. That's them, with their noses in a book right now. If you fancy a good belly laugh, get them to swap places with the taker-apart mob over in this corner.

In effect, that's what happens to a lot of people at work. It's not them, and it's not the job: it's the combination. Find a square hole for the square peg and suddenly what used to be a crushing bore is now the most fun you can have with your clothes on.

The reality is, if you don't find out what you love doing and make a point of doing it, no-one will make you leave and go and find out what you were put onto this earth to do with your life. And ploughing on with a job that you can manage, but which you find soul-destroying, is hardly the route to happiness.

So before you go any further, give some hard thought to what you love to do and the key words here are you and love.

You, because too many people (perhaps nearly all people) live out their lives doing what their Mum and Dad want them to do, or what they think will impress people, or what they stumble into, and never, or perhaps only too late, put themselves first. If not now, when? Someone has to do that job you'd secretly love to be doing: why not you?

And love, because between, 'Yeah, wouldn't mind doing that I s'pose', 'I could see myself doing that', and 'I will not be happy until I'm doing that: that is what I exist to do, so get out of my way', there's all the difference in the world.

Who are you?

So if we're right, and how you're made up determines what you enjoy, and what you enjoy determines what you're going to be really good at, then how do you decide what's the right kind of job for you?

Try this. For each of the ten questions, circle the answer in the column that best matches your own response. There's no simple pattern here, so don't expect that all your answers will be in the same column. In some cases two columns have the same answer: circle both.

WARNING: The following contains gross generalisations, and may lead to elevated blood pressure and fainting. To counteract, take a pinch of salt and a reality check. Of course there are exceptions to all of these rules (including this one), and if you seriously think a five-minute questionnaire is going to sort out your career dilemma, then you should probably not risk exposing yourself to the next page or two. It's just a bit of help, is all, and can't be much more, even if it is based on a lot of self-reflection, experience and observation.

Mostly As? You're the cla.s.sic SALES BEAST As a sales person you're compet.i.tive, driven and career-minded. You're also . . .

* A talker and banterer, the life and soul of the party * Great at putting people at ease and at chatting up and flirting (some editorial people are too, of course) * Shameless and thick-skinned you need it, too: most of your life is spent being rejected. Don't fool yourself about this one. You can toughen up, but only if you're not sensitive to start with * An inveterate haggler, driven by the bargain * A master joke-teller and spinner of tall tales * A cynic, with no illusions about anyone's motives * Clear about why your boss values you, and it's not for personal reasons * Target- and bonus- and performance-related pay-driven * Compet.i.tive and status-driven. That's why you're attracted to a career that measures success by revenue and clearly visible wins/losses On the downside?

You're likely to find detail and paperwork and process less than exciting. You may think of it as a necessary evil at best, and just plain evil and not necessary most of the time.

Mostly Bs? You're the creative MARKETEER You're a people person, creative and bubbly. You're highly organised and a just a teensy weensy bit bossy. You're also . . .

* A lover of words, a reader, a talker and a chatterer * A diplomat, the public face of the company. But unlike Sales people, you're not completely brazen. You never forget that the product, not you, is the star * Detail-driven, with a keen eye for deadlines and how to hit them * An ideas person, constantly working on strategies to promote, position and push your product. You want brochures, you want better blurbs, you want the best for your authors and their books On the downside?

You're likely to be frustrated at the budgets you have to work with. They're laughable (and not in a good way). Plus, you're on display all the time and while you won't get any credit for most of what you do, the first little typo is apparently obvious to everyone, your boss included.

Mostly Cs? You're the creative PUBLISHING GURU You're the engine of the whole thing. Without you your Sales Department has nothing to sell and your Marketing Team has nothing to market. You're also . . .

* A lover of words and reading * Deadline-driven and you love the challenge of pressure * A sceptic. You're not cynical exactly, but you're not naive enough to think that things are going to improve that much * In love with what you do that's why you do it, despite the terrible pay and the slight career prospects On the downside?

For some ridiculous reason, publishing is still perceived as glamorous and s.e.xy, and so jobs are in high demand, which makes it harder to get on, and means you're expected to work for laughably small amounts of money. An ability to live on fresh air is definitely an advantage.

Mostly Ds? You're the indispensable COPY EDITOR You stand between the human, fallible author and the critic and the hyper-critical reader. If you weren't so good at what you do, your ma.n.u.scripts wood be jiberlish. You're also . . .

* The organised one if there are tickets to buy or a trip to arrange, it always comes down to you. You'll set out the timetable and make sure everyone's where they're supposed to be * Detail- and deadline-driven * Fond of a good argument and even a bit of a devil's advocate. You like to thrash things out by discussing and debating. But generally you're . . .

* Quiet, too. You're not necessarily always the most social of creatures you know who you like and they're who you want to spend time with And the downside?

Well, the world isn't always as neat and tidy as you'd like, and neither are the people you work with. You can no more understand how they can live like this, than they can comprehend why your CDs must go back exactly where they came from, thank-you-very-much-is-it-really-too-much-to-ask?

Conclusion Most of us don't fit one of these boxes precisely, and we're not suggesting that because you circled six in one column you should rush off and get a sales job and dismiss all thought of doing anything else. Of course not. Your authors ill.u.s.trate the point nicely. Steve is hardly a detail kind of a guy (Column D), but that's what he started off doing, working as a copy and production editor on a computer magazine. Susannah scores highly on detail, but of the three of us she's the one who's spent longest in sales roles.

But even so, you may find it helpful to start thinking about what your skills and, more importantly, your apt.i.tudes are, and use that knowledge to explore what kind of thing you want to be doing.

It's important in publishing to be yourself. Publishing is such an intuitive industry that you really need to be open and honest and yourself.

(STARR JAMIESON, SALES COORDINATOR, WALKER BOOKS AUSTRALIA).

Chapter Eight.

Getting ready for your job in publishing.

An undergraduate degree is the basic start point for any career in book publishing, and this chapter discusses the options open to you.

Which course should you take? Where? What do you do once you have graduated? Are you better off getting into a job as early as possible? Or would you benefit from getting some more letters after your name, perhaps with a publishing/journalism-specific MA? Such courses usually offer internships, and of course you can also try to get some work experience without embarking on a course. But are these useful opportunities leading to full-time jobs, or are you just being used as cheap labour (or perhaps both)? So many questions. This chapter explores your best choices.

A word of advice It's a great idea to ask around, but treat the advice you're given by friends and acquaintances with caution and even scepticism and this applies even if they're already in publishing and doing the job you'd love. If Daniel went to university and did a journalism degree, then you can bet your bottom dollar that's the route Daniel will commend to you and if Louise didn't, then she'll tell you not to waste your time. Making a decision based on a sample of one is not wise. By all means ask. But treat the answers with caution.

Higher education: university education An undergraduate degree may be the stated starting point, and you should be aware that some publishing staff will be more interested in where you went to (and how it overlaps with what they did themselves) rather than what you studied. What discipline you study tends not to get prescribed. You may already be clear about this and if you have already graduated then it's obviously in the past and not worth fretting over now. But if this is still ahead of you, the basic issue is how specific do you want your degree to be?

Seven Recommendations 1. Go to the best university you can This definitely counts. What is best, though? Some inst.i.tutions (and you know which ones we mean) just have that reputation, deserved or not. Others excel in particular subjects and even courses. Either way, aim as high as you can: you'll be living with this on your CV for the rest of your career.

2. Study what you're pa.s.sionate about Rather than what you think will be useful, work on something you're mad about. It may even be a talking point at interviews at least, that's what Alison's degree in Fine Arts and Mediaeval History was! Many publishing people have literature degrees it's much more common than having a business qualification.

3. Keep your options open as long as you can While you can change courses, the momentum of the system is always going to encourage you to continue with the one you began and three or four years spent on something you are not entirely sure is for you sure is a big risk to take. Some universities offer you the chance to spend a taster year (or sometimes two for a four-year degree) trying things out, before committing yourself to what your final subject will be; others work in modules where you build up credits as you go along. These are good options for the undecided.

4. Consider studying something with a wider applicability . . .

. . . especially if it's something that will sustain your interest. Most people working in publishing and in the media generally didn't start out with a burning desire to do exactly the position or even the career they now find themselves in. If you're lucky enough to know that your calling in life is to be the Sports Reporter on The Toowoomba Chronicle or the Birmingham Post, then studying journalism gives you a head start, because it's much easier that way to head in the direction you want. Most of us have a hankering to be in publishing, but may not know precisely what role will suit.

I started out as a trainee reporter for Mirror Group Newspapers in Devon along with 11 other aspiring journalists, including Tony Blair's former spin doctor Alastair Campbell and his partner, Fiona Millar. We spent eight weeks studying shorthand, law, local government and writing techniques then we were dispatched to weekly newspapers across Devon and Cornwall to be real reporters! My first responsibilities included covering golden weddings, council planning meetings and village fetes not exactly glamorous!

(EMMA LEE-POTTER, JOURNALIST, AUTHOR AND FORMER PUBLISHER, UK).

5. Alternatively, study to prepare yourself for employment On the other hand, if you are unsure what to take, rather than studying a subject 'for the sake of it', why not look at something specifically designed to prepare you for your career? The rise of the vocational degree or training course has been recent, but is well doc.u.mented. Even so, as we researched this book, the sheer variety of media, journalism and publishing courses on offer took us by surprise.

6. Consider just how practical you want your course to be If you take on a 'hard core' practical course and find that your interests take you in other directions, you might feel you've wasted valuable time and money. On the other hand, if you're by nature a practical person with little patience for what you would consider pointless intellectual hot air and theory, then finding yourself in an environment with no real industry connections and exposure will be frustrating.

7. You are a valuable a.s.set to them, too Finally, while you're considering your options, it's worth reminding yourself that the universities and colleges are after you, too. Without students there is no university. So treat their claims seriously, but not unsceptically. Consider whether what you're impressed by is the course itself . . . or the quality of the university's marketing department. You need to satisfy yourself that the sausage is as good as the sizzle. Equally, some universities still don't match the high quality of their courses with the quality of their marketing, so don't write them off just because they haven't got a flashy brochure or bang-up-to-date website.

Postgraduate degrees in book and magazine publishing I studied English at Liverpool University and in my second year got stuck on the th.o.r.n.y question of what to do next. I didn't want to be a teacher like my dad, was too anxious to try journalism, and thought being a librarian would be dull. My ex-English teacher suggested publishing and I found out about a postgraduate course at the London College of Printing. It was four months, so not too long (though long enough when I could see my debts mounting), and three weeks after I'd finished I was lucky enough to get a job with Routledge as a production a.s.sistant.

(JULIA MOFFATT, FREELANCE EDITOR AND WRITER, UK).

Taking a postgraduate qualification is an increasingly popular route into publishing, and there are new courses springing up every year. What's happened has been a form of educational inflation. Once upon a time the traditional, and maybe even the best, route into getting a job in publishing was to take a secretarial course, put up with being someone's a.s.sistant for a year, and then you were on your way.

These days only the very senior staff have the luxury of their very own personal a.s.sistant, and you have to find some other way of differentiating your application from all the others. Hence the temptation to take a vocational Masters degree as a way of getting to the head of the pack.

We find those who arrive with a Publishing MA are well equipped for a starting job; they tend to hit the ground running. They are familiar with how things work; they understand the language of publishing and feel confident. Courses tend to equip them with a valuable bird's-eye view of the industry and I am sure the qualifications get them employed more quickly. Certainly an MA in Publishing shows motivation and commitment, and were we in the position of trying to choose between two identical candidates, one with one and one without, I am sure we would see the additional qualification as a benefit.

(HELEN FRASER, MANAGING DIRECTOR, PENGUIN UK).

Postgraduate courses are now available for magazine journalists, and some of the best newcomers I've employed have done just such courses.

(LINDA KELSEY, FORMER EDITOR OF COSMOPOLITAN AND SHE).

These days it's useful to have attended a course or courses on publishing, partly to gain the knowledge, and the piece of paper, but equally importantly to show the employer that you have a real commitment to the industry.

(PATRICK GALLAGHER, CHAIRMAN, ALLEN & UNWIN, AUSTRALIA).

And of course taking a postgraduate course gives you the chance to explore whether publishing is for you and lots of useful skills to take elsewhere if you decide it is not. (In addition to publishing, graduates end up working in PR, internal communications, museums, arts marketing and many other jobs that need the same skill set.) When I got my Postgraduate Diploma in Book Publishing at Oxford Polytechnic it gave me a detailed background to all aspects of book publishing, including the less 'fashionable' ones. I discovered that far from being c.o.c.ktails and literary discussions deep into the night, publishing was a real business and that things like production, marketing and subsidiary rights were as vital to the whole process as the editorial considerations. In effect it was like doing work experience with a publishing company for a year with people who actually had the time and the inclination to explain to you what they did and why they did it. It meant when I got my first job in publishing I was up and running within a few weeks, confident in my knowledge of how the really complex business of publishing a book happens.

(JEREMY TREVATHAM, PUBLISHING DIRECTOR, PAN MACMILLAN, UK).

Even so, you should bear in mind that the sudden availability of dozens of Publishing MA courses is market-rather than industry-driven. Taking one doesn't guarantee you a job in the business, and neither does the availability of all these courses imply that there are enough jobs for all the students taking them. What drives the courses is not the need for students with those degrees: on the contrary, it's the desire for students to have those degrees.

You should also consider how up to date the course you're considering really is. The media are1 evolving at a very fast rate, and although some traditional skills will always be needed (editing, writing, production), the ways in which those skills are used tomorrow will certainly be very different from the way they're being taught today. Be wary of courses, lecturers or universities that strike you as not having woken up to this fact.

Here are half-a-dozen tough, smart questions to ask when you're being sold hard by a university. Ask them of every inst.i.tution you're considering, and record the answers. Give each a score.