1. Are your lecturers full-time or part-time?
The ideal is lecturers who are also doers, and who are thus continually refreshing their knowledge; thus if the course is delivered by part-time staff who are active within the industry, it"s probably a good sign. What you want are lecturers who are active in the market they teach. This means they"ll be fully up to date with what is happening in publishing right now, rather than what went on in 1980.
2. Who arranges work placements?
Some universities boast about their work placement programme as a key part of the course . . . and then leave you to organise it.
3. What activities/facilities do you get access to?
Are there programmes of guest speakers to which students from across the faculty are invited? What about trips and opportunities to see relevant organisations?
4. What is the employment history of previous students?
How many had a placement? What percentage of these opportunities turned into full-time jobs?
5. Is there a buzz?
Do the staff you meet ask about you and your aspirations? Do they talk about the course and students with enthusiasm? Or do you, perhaps, get the distinct impression you"re helping them make up the quota of students they are required to recruit?
6. When was the course put together?
Long-established doesn"t necessarily mean well-organised. Newer courses must necessarily have been put together more recently; older inst.i.tutions may be trading on their reputation rather than the good experience they offer. Ask questions, and switch on your antennae.
If you have your heart set on working for a particular employer or type of publisher, of course don"t a.s.sume that the best way in is to stay well away from them and spend years and years and piles of money studying. Some publishers, especially those in the magazine world, really don"t see the value in postgraduate degrees. Nose around the section of the industry that you"re keen on first, ask other employees how they got there, take the temperature of your (hopeful) employers to be. If the consensus is that an undergraduate degree and a bit of editing your student newspaper won"t do the trick, and you quite fancy finding out more about the different roles in the industry through some more study, then a postgraduate degree might well be a great option.
But if your favoured section of the industry universally sneers at postgraduate degrees, and you feel happy with your skills and experience base, consider saving yourself some time and money and jumping straight in.
Work experience For every publishing job there are so very many people. How are you going to make your CV stand out? One thing that certainly helps is to have made your mark already. Having been around magazines or books and got into print already shows you"re serious.
What kind of work do you need to have behind you? That actually matters much less than the fact that you have some. Experience is vital, says Debbie Baron, who looks after cadet/starter job applications on the Melbourne Herald Sun. Each year she gets about 120 applications for just two to six positions. Being involved in street press, says Debbie, or your school or community newspaper is an excellent sign that you"re really committed to journalism. (By the way, she also makes the pertinent point that, since you"re applying to work at a business built on news, you"ll want to ensure your knowledge of current affairs is bang up to date.) Still in Australia, Jacqui Cheng at Fairfax Newspapers paints a similar picture although, strictly speaking, there are no cadetships there, since you need a tertiary education to get in. With its business t.i.tles, BRW and the Australian Financial Review, there are certainly opportunities if you"re from a business background. But in any case, you"d better be a news junkie. Fairfax attracts more than 800 applicants for about 20 positions, and once again it"s a process of applying and, if you get that far, sitting an exam and then getting through the interviews.
"The exam"s pretty tough, " says Julia Medew, one of 2005"s trainee intake, "it expects you to have a wide knowledge of current affairs, and it quickly weeds those out who don"t". Julia is a good example of what persistence can achieve. With so many people and so few opportunities, talent by itself simply isn"t enough. Starting out as a "copy kid" at 18 and then working in various departments in different roles while she did her Arts degree at Monash, she was able to build up her experience and contacts so much so that, when she faced the editorial panel, she knew them all, including the editor-in-chief. And she had a stack of published stories to show, too.
When we spoke to her she was not long back from interviewing film stars at the AFI Awards but this, she was keen to stress, was hardly typical. Her advice, not surprisingly, is that experience beats all. "It"s changed a lot in recent years, I think, " she says. "An arts or a journalism degree is not enough by itself. You need work, work, work, whether it"s on the local paper, on a website, on your university paper any hands-on real-life experience in a workplace that means you"re pumping out copy and having it published regularly."
Here"s the way to get ahead: 1. Get involved as early as you can If you"re at school, edit the school magazine. If you"re at uni, get involved in as much of the media activity (newspaper, radio, TV) as you can. Not only is this terrific experience a deadline is a deadline, and a crisis a crisis! it proves that you really are keen.
2. Get a job in publishing, or as near to it as you can get, in your holidays and weekends If it"s not at all related, find out if you can bring in some publishing-related ideas. Would the firm like a staff newsletter or a blog for their website? If you"re working in a shop on your days off from uni, make sure it"s a newsagent or a bookshop, not the local bakery.
3. Make yourself available for as long as you can Since it"ll take you a while to pick up anything but the simplest job, it"s unlikely that anyone is going to find it worth their while to train you if you"re only going to be around for a week or two. If, though, you"re able to commit to a month or longer, and you"re ready, keen and cheap, then you become an attractive proposition.
Internships Internships are the best way to see if you like publishing, meet the right people and find the right job for you. Not surprisingly, they"re screamingly compet.i.tive.
Here are a couple of stories from people who got their break in publishing through internships: I did work experience with Kogan Page and Bloomsbury, both arranged by my tutor from the MA programme. After I had finished, I left my CV with both firms and both subsequently came back to me when job opportunities occurred. I like to think it was because I made a good impression, but to be honest both firms admitted that when you need to find someone it tends to be a in a rush, and if you have already found an intern who meets your needs and you know fits in well, it saves huge amounts of time and money to opt for them. In fact the job I eventually took was with Wiley, and I am about to start as their rights and licensing coordinator.
(NATALIE MEYLAN, STUDENT ON THE 20067 PUBLISHING MA PROGRAMME AT KINGSTON UNIVERSITY, UK) My first job was at a small publishing house in Reading. I had just left university and was staying with my parents, so I wrote to any publishers I could find within easy commuting distance and offered myself for work experience. They originally took me on for a few days a week, inputting editorial corrections, then gave me more hours working on reception and running the post room. The best thing about it was probably the office subscription to The Bookseller, where I found the advert for my next job editorial a.s.sistant on Quality Paperbacks Direct, a direct mail book club that"s part of BCA. I stayed for five years and worked my way up to Editor/Buyer, then moved to Waterstone"s Head Office as their fiction buyer. (SUZIE DOORe, SENIOR EDITOR, HODDER & STOUGHTON, UK) How internships work * No-one pays you If you"re lucky, you may get expenses.
* Most internships are at least two weeks If you"re lucky, you might get up to six months of full- or part-time work.
* You get a desk and a mentor in the company to guide you If you"re lucky, you"ll get some meaningful projects to work on. That gives you a taste for the job, and the company a chance to get work done which wouldn"t happen otherwise.
* You get the taste of the company If you"re lucky, managers find out how ace you are and get accustomed to seeing you around; and you"re first on the spot when a paid role comes up.
What will you be doing?
Often companies get interns working on things they"ve wanted to do for ages but haven"t had the resources. That can lead to some really juicy and interesting projects that might include, for example, researching potential new publishing markets, reviewing editorial systems and streamlining existing processes. You might cover a junior position during a recruitment freeze or maternity leave vacancy (and hopefully be offered the job yourself).
Don"t leave this to chance, though. If you don"t work on the manager to define a solid project for your time there, you can end up doing the filing and photocopying. You"ll still get to know people and see if you like the company, but you won"t get a chance to show off your ingenuity and brainpower. So do your best to structure the internship to suit you.
How to set it up and make it benefit you For an internship to work for you, you need half-a-dozen things, which we talk about below. Most of all, though, before you go any further, you need cash. Since you"re not going to get paid for your work, how are you going to keep body and soul together? Maybe you could be an intern for three days a week and work the other two, or work in the evenings/at weekends? Maybe you have supportive parents or partner, or funds saved up?
Find out about your ent.i.tlement to benefits and whether it is compromised by taking an internship it may be that if it improves your long-term employability, and you are still available for paid work should it arise, your ent.i.tlement may not be reduced. Don"t, for goodness sake, take our word for it. Get the story, in black and white (in writing), before you jump.
Here"s how to do it: 1. Outline your goals Do you simply want to see if publishing is for you? To check out a company where you want to work? To try a few different areas of publishing? To make contacts? To get a job? Once you know what you want, you can make sure the internship is structured to maximise your chances of getting it.
2. Work out where you want to go Internships don"t grow on trees. They do, however, grow on the lists in trade directories. Talk to friends and relatives. Research the Web (Google "publishing internship" for a start). Try your university course/university careers service/writers" centre/ careers counsellor/a.s.sociation (such as for women in publishing or young publishers, etc). Make lists. Follow up leads. Become obsessed: this is going to take a lot of work.
3. Get in touch!
If you know which department (marketing/editorial/production etc) you want to work in, start with the department manager they"re the person you"ll be working for, so if they can"t see the opportunity, it"s probably not going to work out. If you"re looking for general experience or to work across a range of departments, the HR (Human Resources) manager or (in a small company) general manager will probably work best.
Large publishers work by divisions. So, for example, McGraw-Hill in the UK has School Education, Higher Education and Professional/Medical divisions. These divisions often have parallel roles, but the management structure only joins together at the top. So if you want to try the marketing department in three separate divisions, you"ll probably need to do this organising three times over, or find an energetic HR person who will do it for you.
4. Make your approach by phone (not e-mail or letter) Yes, we mean it. It increases your chances of success tenfold, for the very simple reason that it"s very easy to tip a letter into the too-hard basket, and far harder to do the same with someone on the phone. It takes a bit of nerve to do this, but believe us, it pays off, big time.
Try something like this: I"m a graduate looking for a career in publishing, and I particularly want to complete a voluntary, unpaid internship position with your company. I wondered if we could meet to discuss how this might work, please?
Make it clear right from the start that you"re proposing an unpaid internship, and that you"re a university graduate (if you are) you don"t want them getting you confused with 16-year-old work experience candidates!
They may have a few questions for you on the phone, but if they are within travelling distance, trying to set up a meeting is always a good idea. (And if they"re not in travelling distance, why do you want to work there?) If they pa.s.s you on to someone else such as HR, then pursue the lead with them. This is a good thing, by the way: you"ve just been referred, which means you already come carrying a little credibility.
Remember, too, that you"re talking to someone who"s almost certainly over worked and you"re offering to work for free. There"s a real chance this could go somewhere.
5. Be creative The best internship is one that interests you, and if you suggest a project (based on your understanding of what they do), you"re more likely to get it. You could suggest, for example, one of the following: * A new, growing area of publishing that particularly interests you and looking into who publishes within it, which books have been hits, who the top authors are, whether there is export potential everything they might need to start publishing in that area?
* A marketing project such as a frequent buyer scheme, website/e-mail voucher campaign or bookshop window dressing compet.i.tion . . . think of schemes you"ve seen that work well and how they might be adapted for your chosen publisher * Research on how the firm"s compet.i.tors are approaching their market and the image they are promoting in the process You"re probably thinking that you"re unlikely to hit the spot. And, frankly, you"re right: you won"t. But most potential employers will appreciate the time and effort you"ve put into researching their business certainly we would.
6. Make sure the company respects you and your skills You"re working for free, but you"re not worthless. Ideally, you"re looking for a company/manager to: * Provide you with a proper works.p.a.ce of your own, including desk, phone, computer * Take the time to discover your interests and skills and a.s.sign you to projects that use your expertise, as well as giving you opportunities to stretch yourself * Provide you with at least one mentor/manager you can work with closely and who shows you where the loo and the kettle are * Treat you like a regular employee, include you in departmental treats and pay for work-related expenses Not surprisingly, we don"t recommend handing over a list of these requirements before you start. Instead it"s probably best to try to establish the answers to these questions in a general meeting, before you start (can you call in the week before to find out how things work; or perhaps they can put you in touch with someone else who has done work experience so you can chat about how it went?). The bottom line is that you are doing work for nothing, and if they don"t treat you with respect, it"s probably not somewhere you"d like to work anyway.
How good interns behave You"re trying to make a good impression so that you can get a job. So it"s not surprising that mostly your behaviour should be as if you were already working there. Here"s some pithy advice for interns and employees alike: Take the time to know what you"re talking about. There are few things worse than being told insightlessly about your mag/paper/site by some faux-knowledgeable character who has spent all of three google-nanoseconds researching you . . . Consume media, voraciously. And if you can"t do it voraciously, do it vicariously: read the media pages of the nationals; read The Week; see how the same story can be treated differently by different papers.
(GREG INGHAM, CHIEF EXECUTIVE, MEDIACLASH AND FORMER CHIEF EXECUTIVE OF FUTURE PLC, UK).
Be cheerful, be low-maintenance, tackle anything, but ask for rewards when you really deserve them. In the meantime, learn the basics of the culture, the software, photography and sound. And most importantly learn how the business operates.
(GUY ALLEN, PUBLISHER OF GUIDOMEDIA.COM, AUSTRALIA).
Seven Top Dos and Don"ts For Being An Intern 1. DO treat this like a permanent job (and maybe it will become one). Remember, you"re on show here. Always get to work on time, and call if you are running late. Dress like the other employees. Take the same amount of time as everyone else for lunch and breaks.
2. DO keep a positive att.i.tude. Never, ever, ever let resentment at how they are getting your services for nothing get in the way of doing the job to the best of your abilities. Even if you feel this way, do not share your feelings with those you are working for they work for the host company and that is where their first loyalty lies. Don"t forget that they will view how you do the job in the context of how the previous intern performed.
3. DO be great! This sounds so obvious that it shouldn"t even need saying. But it does, believe us it does. Be outstanding and you may well get asked back: be a pain and you won"t. A mate of Steve"s has this little gem stuck just below his monitor: "Go the extra mile. It"s much less crowded there." So: be helpful, be thorough, be friendly and cheerful, be willing to do anything and everything that needs doing. Make yourself useful. Follow directions. And don"t be afraid to say that you haven"t understood what"s been said to you. That"s much better than struggling through for a while hoping you"ve got the hang of it, and then finding out that you haven"t. All this can be hard when you feel like a spare wheel, or don"t feel like you"re getting much feedback. But don"t give up, and don"t let the smile fade.
4. DO make an effort to meet the key people general manager, editorial, sales, marketing directors and managers, HR. If you"re worried you might not be able to think of something to say, have a stock sentence up your sleeve in case you get introduced to someone important when you"re not expecting it. "I love the new campaign on . . ." or "I"ve just been reading your new publication x.x.x" is fine. Avoid "Rubbish weather".
5. DO come up with useful and interesting ideas, and run them by your line manager before anyone else. They will get very suspicious if you start pa.s.sing your bright ideas to the departmental head before they have heard of them.
6. DO, when you"re leaving, thank anyone and everyone who helped organise the project (card/gift such as bottle of wine or book), and remind them you"d love to work with them again when something comes up. Call every few months while you are still job hunting too. Oh, and if you plan to list them on your CV as a reference (which you should), remember to ask permission.
7. DON"T get carried away at the pub or the office Christmas party. You"ve worked hard to create a solid image of professionalism, and a single slip of the tongue (as in a slip of the tongue into someone else"s mouth) can undo all that work in five minutes.
If there is any opportunity to demonstrate your reliability, then take it. Publishing is about deadlines, so if you are able to show that you can do what you say you can, and in the time you promise, then you"ll go far. I b.u.mped into a script editor years after I had written some one-liners for his programme. Not thinking he would remember me, he clapped me on the back and asked how I"d been. "You were our best contributor, " he said, "every week, rain or shine we knew you"d come up with the goods. Brilliant reliability. Not that funny, mind you, but very reliable." OK, you can"t win them all. (STEPHEN HANc.o.c.kS, CO-OWNER, OUTLAW THEATRE LIMITED, UK) I"d love to give sound advice to people wanting the exact route into publishing, but the way I got into it was quite haphazard. Having applied to any publishers who offered a graduate recruitment scheme on leaving university, and heard nothing, I was fortunate enough to get a fortnight"s work experience placement with Ebury in the very department I am working in now. As luck would have it, an a.s.sistant post cropped up while I was there, and I was asked if I"d be interested. I had an interview when I returned from my summer holiday a few weeks later, and the job was mine.
The message is to never ever underestimate the usefulness of work experience. Even though it is inevitably mundane and only really consists of stuffing endless envelopes, battling endlessly with temperamental photocopiers, and endlessly feeling as if you"re ha.s.sling people, it really does pay to try your hardest to be the ultimate example of that shiny new addition to the team that even they didn"t realise they needed.
While you may feel completely redundant in the office, people are, more often than not, more grateful for your presence and a.s.sistance than you think, and I"m saying this having had experience from the other side now. Be the most efficient, dynamic and smiley person despite the rubbish jobs and get them done too and you will be noticed for it.
(SARAH TOWNSEND, PUBLICITY a.s.sISTANT, RANDOM HOUSE UK).
More reading Lowe, Networking All in One Desk Reference for Dummies, Hungry Minds, 2005
Lindenfield, Confident Networking for Career Success and Satisfaction, Piatkus Books, 2005.
Timperley, Network Your Way to Success, Piatkus Books, 2002.
Peterson, Peterson"s Internships, Petersons, 2005.
1 If "media are" sounds odd to you, see media in the glossary.
Chapter Nine.
What kind of publishing
job is right for you?
It"s a great start to be aware that you"d like a career in publishing in fact, without that you"re unlikely to get any further. By itself, however, it"s not enough. To find the right job for you, you need to understand what kind of roles exist and what will suit your particular skills and attributes. You can do this the hard way, by finding out through experience what you"re not good at or you can read the next couple of pages. Having done the former ourselves, we recommend the latter.
Everyone can teach you something ask if you can shadow different people for a day to get an understanding of how actions in one department affect those in another.
(SARAH Ca.s.sIE, MARCOMMS MANAGER, MCGRAW-HILL EUROPE).
Sales The sales team is the driving force of any publishing organisation. In popular myth your typical sales person is money-driven, highly compet.i.tive and a lone wolf. In reality, your typical sales person is, in fact, money-driven, highly compet.i.tive and a lone wolf. So if you are money-driven, highly compet.i.tive and a lone wolf, then perhaps sales is for you.
Sales suits people who are: 1. Confident and a.s.sertive You"re up for knocking on a door and getting told "Not now!" and then knocking on the next door. And the next. And the next. And ringing for appointments, getting told "Don"t bother" ... and going anyway.
2. Organised You"re together enough to manage a sales territory with 200 bookshop buyers or 500 advertisers or 2, 000 teachers, to know who is who, what they want, to learn a bagful of product and remember what"s different about each and why. (This isn"t about memory, by the way it really is organisation.) You have great relationships with key decision-makers. You network easily and effectively (see Chapter 13 on this).
Actually, even if you"ve not thought of yourself as particularly organised before, if you"re driven enough by results and sales bonuses (ie cash), then you"ll find you learn some tricks and gain a fabulous grasp of the required detail.
3. Self-sufficient You could enjoy working alone for much of the day, driving around or out on campus/at schools or at the premises of your advertisers, and stick to the job when for all anyone knows you could be playing golf instead.1 4. Up for it You love meeting new people, travelling to remote parts of your territory and to sales conferences. You get really quite strangely turned on hitting targets, being under ridiculous amounts of pressure and achieving against apparently impossible odds. When you hit target and your next target is shifted sharply upwards as a result, your response is not "That"s not fair!" but "I"ll show you b.u.g.g.e.rs".
Sound like you? Then read on. Next are a couple of characteristics that aren"t exactly essential, and indeed don"t always apply, but may mark you out as potential sales material: 5. Interested in a publishing career Sales can be a great way to get to know the market and the business in detail, before moving up in the company. It"s common for senior managers within publishing to go out and spend a day visiting with the reps, and you can get some good contacts in this way. In magazine publishing, publishers often, if not most often, come from a sales background: spending your time wheeling and dealing in cash is a great way to show you can hack it as a commercially-minded business manager. (But don"t, however, make the mistake of getting into sales in a magazine company and thinking you"ll get the chance to transfer to editorial later on. You won"t.) I was looking for a "school hours only" job to do after my youngest child started school and responded to a position in the local paper. My first position in publishing was working as a commission sales rep selling books direct to primary schools. It was a great introduction to the world of publishing. I learnt how important it is to consider the target market when publishing books. While it was hard work lugging suitcases of books into schools during lunch hours, I was frequently surprised by how envious teachers were of my job. Most had a very romantic picture of book publishing. I always valued that experience later on it was excellent training to start from the coalface and work my way up as a publisher.
(AVERILL CHASE, DIRECTOR, THE AUTHORS" AGENT, AUSTRALIA) How did I get my first job in publishing? I wrote to lots of literary agents, thinking that this was the profession for me. They all replied saying, "Don"t be so stupid. You can"t just become a literary agent. You need wider experience the media, publishing or bookselling first." One sent me the ads page of that week"s Bookseller with a job ad for a Fontana Sales Trainee circled. I applied and got the job. I was given a Ford Cortina with packs of Agatha Christie in the back and off I went.
(CHARLES NETTLETON, MANAGING DIRECTOR, WORKING PARTNERS TWO, UK).
6. Based in non-central locations In some branches of publishing, reps can be based all over the country looking after the local area. If you want to get a start in publishing and want to live somewhere other than London/Oxford/Sydney/ Melbourne/other cities, repping is a great career option. (Reps are based in the big cities as well, of course.) In both magazines and books this may work to start with, by the way, but if you"re interested in moving up the ladder, the odds are you"ll need to move to a head office location to make your mark.
Sales jobs include: * Sales a.s.sistants Support sales reps and managers with research, arranging appointments, organising sales tools. In a smaller company, marketing a.s.sistant roles might be combined as sales and marketing a.s.sistant. This might be a graduate-level job where people spend a year or so, or it can be a longer-term option for a non-graduate or someone who wants a less demanding job.
* Field/territory sales reps/consultants Sales reps tend to have a company car, phone and laptop, and be on the road at least four days a week, sometimes five, meeting customers and talking about product.
In magazine publishing, reps sell advertising s.p.a.ce to whoever is relevant for the magazines they are working on furniture, make-up, tourism providers and so on. The most successful ones actually become part of industry themselves, or come from it in the first place they drive the cars (if it"s a car magazine), sail the boats (if it"s a boat magazine), wear the designer clothes (if it"s a fashion magazine) and generally live the life. That way, they"re perceived as an ally to the advertiser, rather than a bloodsucking parasite it"s a handy advantage!
In trade publishing (fiction/non-fiction/scholarly/medical), reps meet with bookshop buyers and persuade them to take stock of new releases and top up on old ones, and perhaps chat about merchandising and promotional options. This is usually a speedy process you might get literally a second or two per book before the bookshop buyer moves on and you would visit key bookshops once a month, two months, or quarterly, depending on your product.
In schools and higher education repping, sales reps visit teachers and lecturers and persuade them to recommend ("adopt") OUR book, not THEIR book. Reps might zip through schools/ universities a few times each year, and also spend time in bookshops, making sure the books are available.
Some repping jobs can be quite physically demanding. Susannah once counted the flights of stairs she climbed in one day: 42, while carrying a large bag with manuals of book information and book samples.
Most rep jobs are graduate-entry, or graduate plus a few years" work experience, preferably in a relevant field. Schools publishers tend to hire ex-teachers to do the repping.
* Inside/telesales reps Work from within the office, ringing up customers to promote products. Telesales works well in publishing when there"s a big geographical distance between customers. This is a fun role for someone who doesn"t want to be out and about as much, and for people who like working the phone. For everyone else, it"s h.e.l.l on earth. It"s bad enough getting rejected or abused in person: somehow it"s even worse on the phone.
* Business development/senior sales reps Might have the most important customers, or might combine their territory-repping roles with sales training for other sales reps.