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.

http://gawker.com/5004651/six-space+saving-ideas-for-bibliophiles

Amazing.

And then my head exploded.

Novel pages written: 1

New clients: 3

Dollars earned: $2,250

It’s true – I have not written my pages, I have not launched the website, I have not launched Bostonologist, and I have barely posted here and over at The Starter Kitchen. I have six freelance writing opportunity e-mails languishing and growing cold in my inbox.

Freelance editing is strange. Ads posted last month? Over twenty. Freelance jobs landed last month? One. Ads posted this week? Zero. Prospective new clients requesting sample evals? SEVEN. Clients now on the schedule for the next three weeks: three.

The lesson here is that you can plan and organize all you want, but when you freelance, you have to be ready to throw that plan out the window.

How to Waste an Entire Day Getting Organized

So I figured, if I am going to pull off this huge overhall of my life as I know it, I’m going to need a little organization. And then the day was gone. Here’s what happened in the meantime:

10:00am: Hmmm…there are several things that I really need to do every single day to make sure I succeed. Like, actually write. And market myself. And post to my blogs. And comment on other people’s blogs so they will come read mine. I need an online To-Do list!

Tada! www.toodledo.com. This free website lets you add as many to-dos as you need, then organize them by priority, deadline date, and subject. It also allows you to create a list of short-term, long-term, and lifelong goals so you can keep track of pretty much everything. I set this up, with repeating tasks such as 500 words for BMOH, 500 words for Bostonologist.com, query one business about copyediting, and place one craigslist ad.

But then…off on the left we find a link to “Widgets & Gadgets.” I have never in my life been able to resist a Gadget. This is why I own a Garmin GPS Forerunner even though I do not, ever, under any circumstance, run. This is also why I own an AlphaSmart Dana, even though I almost never write in a place where I cannot use my laptop. I also have a Hammacher Schlemmer ambient light, sound, and aromatherapy alarm clock even though I only use the beeping function. You know, the one a $5 alarm clock from Target can accomplish.

So I click on the Gadgets button and discover, lo and behold, I can plug my toodledo list into my Google Home Page! I do not have a Google Home Page! I need one!

11:00 am: I have, for years, refused to change e-mail addresses from my passé hotmail to the hip gmail. But iGoogle, the personal Google homepage setup, is just too tempting. They have thousands of plug-in gadgets to personalize your homepage. Thousands! So I get started. I got rid of all of the presets except for the weather (because at my current job I work in the basement, and it’s nice to know if the sun is shining or not) and gmail.

I set up a gmail account, because now I have an igoogle homepage, and it would be nice to be able to forward all freelance-related e-mails to one handy account. So then I have to go into my hosting service to forward my mail from my current freelance business to my gmail account. But while I’m there I look into buying the domains for my new business and for this and my other blog. Only $10 a pop – not bad!

But I should check my budget, so I head over to my bank’s website. Verdict: we’re going to wait a week or two. Because we are poor. Very, very, very poor. But look! They have a new tool! You can ask all of the horrible companies that bill you every month for things like credit and heat and water to send the bills right to the banking site so everything depressing is all in one place!

While I’m at it, I draw up a rough budget for the next month so I can see if I can go grocery shopping today. I can. Yay!

LUNCH BREAK

1:00pm: Back to igoogle. I add the Sticky Note gadget, which essentially is just a little yellow box that you can type on and it saves whatever you typed to your home page. I make three: one with the budget I had scrawled on a real-life post-it, one with my new domain names to be purchased, and one to keep track of what I’m spending. Very responsible.

Then, simply because the toodledo gadget isn’t quite as simple as it could be, I add google’s no-frills ToDo List. And oooo….they have a Bookmarks ap. I heart bookmarks. I make a list of all of the websites I visit daily and all of the websites and blogs I’m going to visit daily in order to make my freelance life a success. Now yes, I already have most of these on my Internet Explorer Favorites List, but now I’ll have it anywhere I go! Worth it. While I’m at it, I check out each of the websites. Good stuff. I also add my bank website, so I can continuously check on my financial situation. I put that at the bottom.

I add Google Notebook, although I still haven’t figured out what it does. It sounds like a writer should have it. I add Google Calendar, so I’ll know what day it is. I add Google Maps, because I am perpetually lost, and Google Maps is a very dear, semi-retarded friend.

I add Google Reader. I don’t think I entirely understand how to use this ap, but I’ll work on it. In the meantime, I add the Boston Globe feed and my favorite Boston blog, Universal Hub. These will come in handy when I start writing my humor blog, Bostonologist.com.

Finally, I add Google Docs, which appears to have improved markedly since I last used it to write my first novel manuscript. But I don’t have anything in the folders, so I decide to write the intro to both blogs and one entry for each. Which includes the insanely long post you are currently reading. Crazy.

2:24pm. Here is the problem with me and To Do Lists. I may have a touch of OCD. Once the list has been created I want to GET IT ALL DONE RIGHT NOW. So I go back into the To Do list to figure out what I can do today and tonight to make all of this happen, and I came to the conclusion that the top three priorities right now are (a) writing posts for the blogs, (b) completing the design for my copywriting website, and (c) getting another editing freelance job RIGHT NOW so that I can afford to launch everything.

So we’re off to craigslist to search for wayward writers in need of help. This makes me a little nervous, because I actually have three authors on the back burner right now, and I know the instant I find a new client, all three of the back-burner folks are going to send me their manuscripts and want them done within two weeks, and I will not be allowed to sleep for 336 hours.

I decide to update my tracking sheet. This has all of my contacts, every agent and editor I’ve worked with/sent queries to, and a list of all ongoing and possible projects.

And then I realize I can upload all of this into my Google Docs account! And I can also upload my list of magazines I will write for and all of the agents I’ll be submitting my manuscript to! (Note: at this point in the process I have approximately two pages of said book written.)

3:00pm: Training Meeting for real job. Fifteen minutes into this particular meeting, I realize I have already been to this training. So I make more lists of things to do.

4:00pm:  I realized in the meeting that GoogleDocs did not save my comments on a preliminary edit I had completed for a client. Insert Comments is the single most important function I need in a Word Processor. So I decide I’ll e-mail a copy to myself. But where? Personal hotmail? New gmail? Editorial business mail? I don’t know, so I send it to all three.

Now that I have uploaded everything, I delete everything personal from my work hard drive. Cause, yanno, I really need this job right now.

While I was in the meeting I came up with a new weekly feature idea: Things I Will Not Miss About Corporate Life. Also: Janitor Wisdom. So I had to write a little down about each of those, because brilliant ideas I don’t write down quickly become brilliant ideas I will never ever remember.

Finally, I make a list of things I need to do tonight. Mostly freelance editorial e-mails in hopes someone will pay me to do something.

So! What have we learned? Well, it takes about a day to get everything organized and filed away in one beautiful little place. Also, most of this organizing can be done from the comfort of your office without any of your co-workers being the wiser. Cheers and Good Luck!

This is the story of how I got a wrote a bestselling novel and landed a publishing contract, quit Corporate America and joined the leagues of happy freelancers, and started living the way I’ve always wanted to live, in one very busy year. 

Okay, so I haven’t actually dont any of those things. Really I work for a publishing firm editing textbooks for a living and barely scraping by on my publishing salary.

But by this time next year, things will be different.