I get one or two requests per year from seniors graduating from my alma mater for advice on breaking into the publishing industry. I just got another one of these today from a young woman we’ll call Sarah.Sarah loves to read, and so she wants to go into publishing and get paid to read for the rest of her life. She’d also like to live in New York, and she saw that I once worked for a New York based agency, so how did I do that? She has an English degree and reads the New York Times Book Review every week.
So I popped off an quick e-mail to her and offered to answer any questions she had in the future, or, if she was interested, to sit down for a cup of coffee and chat about where she wanted to go next.
Then she asked me for a job. And I realized it is March. And those seniors who have been e-mailing me all year? They graduate in less than two months. And, as I recall, that is very, very scary.
So, in handy-dandy service-y list form, here is my advice to Sarah.
1. Read all you want on your own time - there’s a lot more to publishing than reading awesome books.
If you go into publishing, you will get the chance to read some interesting books. I remember the first time I received an ARC (advance reader’s copy) through a young publishing professionals group I belonged to. I felt so important! So literary! So powerful!
But there is publishing, and then there is publishing. Even when I worked as an assistant to a literary agent, which is as close as you are going to get to just reading for a living, you read a whole lot of crap. Maybe, if you’re lucky, you get to read one or two great books a year.
After the literary agency, I moved on to academic publishing. And although I loved the company and the people I worked with, the editorial side of academic publishing DOES NOT involve interesting reading. It actually doesn’t involve much reading at all.
2. Take whatever you can get. Have you ever read any of those really depressing figures about how many of the thousands of books written by desperate creatives across the country actually get published? Something like 1% (for interesting statistics on publishing, go here).
Getting a job in publishing isn’t quite that bad, but the chances of getting that perfect job at Random House wiling away the days reading up-and-coming fiction right out of college? Probably worse.
The good news is that there are a million publishing-related jobs out there to beef up your resume. I worked as a secretary for an Executive Search Firm that specialized in publishing for a year. After that year was up I had a great resume that paved the way for me to slide right in to an Editorial Assistant position.
3. It isn’t romantic, or glamorous, or literary. It’s hard work.
Of all my English major friends who went into publishing, I am the only one left (and, as we all know, I’m working on shifting to full-time writing and freelancing). Which is not to say you won’t love it – many people do. But this is a hard business. Today I spent eight hours haggling with authors over changes and inputting copyedits into PowerPoints until my eyes swam. In bad shoes.
As an EA I ran financials constantly and learned how to fix the company software. Yes, the English major who hadn’t taken a math course since high school was running the numbers. I actually found it pretty interesting, but it was certainly not reading a book in the park.
4. You better not be in it for the money.
Cause there isn’t any. At least not until you’ve climbed up many, many rungs on the corporate ladder, and that can take a very long time.
It is actually a very sad fact about publishing that to get much in the way of raises, you almost have to company-hop. I hate that.
5. New York, and Boston, are really, really, really expensive.
Combine number 5 with number four and toss in a few student loans, and it can get difficult to make ends meet very quickly.
Do you have to live in New York or Boston (or DC or Chicago) to work in publishing? Absolutely not. Does it help? Yes.
Publishing companies have been consolidating – buying each other and selling each other – like mad for the past few years, and all that consolidation means there are fewer branches of the big publishers left outside the main hubs. But there certainly are a few.
6. Keep reading the New York Times Book Review.
This is one thing Sarah was doing right, and it’s one thing you MUST keep doing to work in publishing. Even if you don’t read the Review, you have to find a way to remind yourself of why you got into this business. To stay up on literary theory and the conversations you’ve always wanted to be a part of. Because even if your job is nothing like what you expected – you’ll still be a part of an industry that brought you your favorite book, and that’s pretty cool. Sometimes you just need a reminder.
