Category Archives: intern duties

>The Reader Report

>10/31/08

I was given my first big project this week. One of the senior editors asked me to read an unpublished manuscript and tell him what I thought. Of course, I had no idea how the format for such a thing should be, so I wrote down this, like, running commentary covering all my thoughts about the manuscript. It was pages and pages long by the time I finished the first two or three chapters and I emailed it to the senior editor. When he didn’t get back to me gushing with admiration and pride at what a good job I did, I began to worry. When he finally returned my email, he wasn’t very happy about the job I did. Evidently, there is an exact formula for writing what is called a reader’s report. It goes like this:

1 or 2 sentence sales handle. What is this and who is it for?
1 or 2 sentence overall description. What happens, briefly?
2 or 3 paragraph plot description.
2 or 3 paragraph analysis. Strengths? Weaknesses?
Most importantly – is it publishable?

Had the editor told me this to begin with, I would have saved myself so much time and worry. I think he wanted to see what I would do with his request. He was probably not surprised by the outcome. I had no idea what he wanted, and I probably should have said as much instead of attempting to wing it and imress him. Anyway, so I had to read all 534 pages of this awful monstrosity written by a psychopathic lawyer from Texas. I kept thinking, Why me? What did I do to deserve this? As I wrote my short synopsis of each chapter, I fantasized about printing out the manuscript – all of it – slamming it down on the editor’s desk and shouting, “You read it!” with a defiant hair toss. But no. I do have some control. I took my satisfaction from letting the editor know how incredibly offended I was by this manuscript. And I was offended. The pages contained more cheesy, trashy sex than I’m comfortable thinking about, more mean, gasp-provoking racial epithets than I’ve ever heard, and more stereotypical, chauvinistic images of women with large, perky breasts who just love to constantly have sex. One of the characters is named for her breasts. I’m not joking. It was absolutely the most dirty, offensive, trashy piece of fiction I have ever read. I had my husband read part of it. I chose him because he watches plenty of late night shows on television and funny videos on the Internet – the more irreverent it is, the more uproariously he guffaws. He was disgusted and he, in a very docile and traumatized voice, asked me never to mention it again. Then he hung his head and slunk out of the room. So now I couldn’t even discuss my work day, which consists entirely of me sitting at my desk with an expression of aghast horror on my face, reading this smut, with my husband. Wonderful.

>First Tasks in Publishing

>10/23/08

Evidently, I have proven to TF that my skill set exceeds that of a chimp, because this week I have taken a siesta from the deliciously mundane and tedious book-like tasks that used to be my only purpose here. The reader might think I’m speaking in oxymorons, but truly, I love the mundane work of this industry: photo-copying, emailing, mailing, logging submissions, filing, etc. These tasks are those that take little skill, so they allow my already-overworked brain to relax. Brain vacation, you might say.
But I’ve been allowed, beginning this week, to take on more important tasks. Now, the editors and assistants are commandeering me for “projects”. These projects are fascinating to me, the dork who finds such things fascinating, because I’ve been imagining for a long time now what my day-to-day experience in the publishing world will be like. For me to finally see the day-to-day workings here is comparable to one of those people who read Star actually seeing one. Giddy hysteria. I try to remain calm.
Shawna, Zach’s editorial assistant, started it all with a request to conduct some investigative work on a potential author. Basically, I just googled the author’s name, absorbed all of the information and spit it back out at Shawna in an email. She said thanks and that was that.
Apparently my skills as a private eye pleased her, because yesterday, Zach approached me with not one, but three projects. Sitting in his cushy office overlooking one of Rockefeller Center’s rooftop gardens, Zach asked me about my goals, how I landed myself at TF, blah, blah, blah. The first project was to find out information about Sig Hansen and his brothers, who are ship captains on the enormously popular reality TV show, Deadliest Catch. There was an awful lot of information and I made certain he got as much as I could give – even MySpace friend-counts. The second project was much like the first, with a different person, someone uninteresting and not famous.
Finishing those two jobs, Michelle, another senior editor approached with a new project. Maybe Zach told her I did a good job, maybe it was just a coincidence. I like to stay hopeful, though. Michelle is editing a baby-name book, which, by its very nature, has few selling points aside from the actual count of baby names. Expectant mothers will choose the book with the most names so they don’t miss the perfect name. Makes sense. Unfortunately, the book is almost finished and no one bothered to count the names. This is what I’m here for – the crappy task net. Anyway, Michelle took pity on me and suggested that instead of hand-counting all of the names in this three-hundred-page book, I could simply take a sample of pages, say 30, count all the names and multiply that by 10. Then, she would conservatively make an estimate. Smart lady. Unfortunately, I have this ridiculous tendency to open my mouth when it belongs wired shut – in the shape of nice, compliant smile. But since I’m a complete fool, I suggested back to Michelle that, since she had a count of all the base names (not variations, which are many), we could count the variations of each base name in a sample and average it. Then, we could multiply that average number by the number of base names. She looked very confused and after attempting to seriously consider my idiocy, she said very diplomatically and gracefully, “Well, let’s give this a try. If it’s not working and you feel there’s a better way, I would love to hear it.” At least then I had the sense to shut up. Her way was much easier anyway.
To make up for acting so crazy, I placed my results as neatly and comprehensively in an Excel spreadsheet, totaled it into subtotals and a grand total and emailed it to her with a smiley face. She thanked me both in person and in an email. Yay!
It went downhill from there, however. As his third project, Zach asked me to “take a look at a manuscript.” I didn’t really know what that meant and I didn’t want to ask, so I decided to wing it. I read the first three chapters of the manuscript, which were absolutely awful, and wrote down all my thoughts. Then, I emailed them to Zach. He has yet to get back to me. But, now that I’m reading further into the manuscript, I realize that some of my initial thoughts are set to rest by further information. Next time, I’ll wait until I’ve read the whole thing. Maybe that’s what the problem was. Or maybe he just wanted a simple, “I like it” or “I hate it” instead of three typed pages of the intern’s inexperienced, jumbled thoughts on a manuscript. I guess we shall see. At the moment , I’m completing yet another of Zach’s projects. I’m trying to log into BookScan and can’t. Fabulous. Now I have to show him how incompetent I can be and email him this problem. More next week.

>Logging Submissions in FileMaker

>10/06/08

My job here at Touchstone/Fireside is incredibly boring – to the normal, social, book hating college student. To me, it is so stimulating and so satisfying that I smile when I wake up on an interning day. Sure, I basically read all day long, but to a person like me, who would do that anyway if I didn’t need to make money or go to school, that’s a dream come true. A prayer for the impossible, answered! But I’ll assume that many people reading this, perhaps most, are the normal sort of people. You know, those who have lives and interests that don’t involve paper, those who come to work in order to make money, in other words, instead of showing up anyway, knowing full well there will be no check.
One part of my job that I do all day long would be particularly mind-numbing to someone who isn’t me. I get emails from the editorial assistants (who have gotten the emails from the editors they work for) to log submissions. This function can be performed by a well-trained chimpanzee, I am sure. I enter the information – name of potential book, name of author, name of literary agent and agency, date and editor’s initials. You might be thinking, “But you have to go digging up that information, right? You have to dig through piles and piles of archived submissions, right?” No. I wasn’t being sarcastic about the chimp. All the information is right in the email. The editor could have done it herself if she didn’t have a bzillion things to do. The editorial assistant could have done it herself, if she didn’t have a bzillion of the editor’s things to do. The task has been relegated to lowly little me, because the universe is always trying to depress and cut-down her poor, human inhabitants. Interns are no one, so why should they have interesting tasks to complete? But, alas! The universe has overlooked one tiny little factor: I like logging the submissions. Yup, I said it. I even look forward to it.
You see, lodged in the bland covering of sugarless and flavorless chocolate that is the log-submissions task, is a little nugget of yummy, yummy caramel: attached to each of the emails of information from the editorial assistants is the actual submission. Just one click, and I get to read proposals of very exciting new projects, first chapters of books written by famous people’s ghostwriters and I get to hear about, in depth, idea after interesting and intriguing idea. So what, I have to eat the bland stuff to get to the gold? Big deal. I get to be mentally and intellectually stimulated – all day long. Who says I don’t get paid?
Today, I read a proposal for a book about all of the disasters and mishaps in the past that have the potential to or have almost caused the apocalypse. It’s a humorous book, but under the humor are all well-researched, actual facts. The sample chapters included the megatsunami that is scientifically proven to happen to New York City in the near future, killing everyone, the little nanorobots that are designed to do nothing more than self-replicate all over the place, ripping apart everything (including us) to make more of themselves, man-made tornadoes that run out of control and so on. The book would be hilarious except for the Colbert-report type realism underlying the humor. I’m laughing out loud at the jokes and the Halloween-haunted-house tone, but I’m actually a terrified, screaming little girl inside ready to run for my life. I mean, this is like, actual-factual.
Another great proposal (I thought) was one for a book about the menopausal mom, which sounds like such a drag just from the title but is actually a great idea. There are so many more babies born today to moms over thirty-five, and there have been books written on early parenting, infertility and other support topics for just this set, but nothing of real substance has been written for women who are going through menopause while trying to bring up teenagers. No one has given much thought to the mom who has a sarcastic teenager with an attitude, parents she might be parenting and all of the tiring, depressing symptoms associated with menopause. Doesn’t this woman need a book much like What to Expect When You’re Expecting? Absolutely. Everyone does, in this day and age. Unfortunately, the tone of the book’s writing is reminiscent of a mom wagging her finger in your face during a lecture. The tone here, in my own ridiculously inexperienced opinion, needs to be light-hearted, candid and funny. It should remind the poor menopausal mom of a snappy, funny, somewhat bitchy dialogue between girlfriends, not her grandmother come to rearrange her life. There are millions of parenting books out there. What these moms truly need is a book that teaches them a thing or two while providing support in a you’re-not-alone way. Not easily accomplished, I know, but what venture of value is?
Also, the writers of this book went into great detail about how to speak to your children. They had sample dialogues which read like an episode of Full House: way, way too sweet to be real, boring and just impossible. That was contradictory to me. The authors claimed to provide a book for moms who were going through menopause, bringing up kids and parenting their own parents, yet didn’t allow for the chaos factor in the lives of these same women. They need real approaches to modern-day parenting, not June Cleaver come to make them feel inferior.
These proposals were agented by real agencies with clientele exceeding one. But, as I’ve learned, that does not mean that they are perfect and all-set for publication, let’s go design the cover. They’re flawed. Sometimes, badly. Sometimes they are not even written yet. Amazingly, sometimes these proposals have spelling errors and errors of syntax and glaring, howling errors that would have been caught had the proposal been proofread before it was emailed. It appears that the editors here don’t care. That actually makes sense because those kinds of errors can be weeded out by a copy editor, who is, by the way, sometimes someone who works from home and is not even on Simon and Schuster’s payroll. But it grates on me. I want to rip the proposal from my computer screen and mark it all up with my pen. I want to chastise the agent for allowing this. I mean, any editor will notice these mistakes and any editor will be at least a little annoyed. Wouldn’t the agent want the editor to be completely enthralled by the proposal? But, again, the editors care more about the bigger picture which I’m absolutely sure is the best way. They know what they are doing and I am just a little intern who thinks she can spell better than anyone else.

>The Slush Pile

>10/09/08

The slush pile, the bottom of any publishing house’s boot (or that of any literary agency, come to think of it) is just what you might think it is: a huge pile of slush – submissions from authors who can’t write well enough to get published but whose mothers were cruel enough to praise them. Very rarely, you can find some actual good writing in the slush pile by authors who are unaware that you really do need an agent in this business. Here at Touchstone/Fireside, the Slush Pile isn’t very large. Anymore. I tackled it, sending polite notes of rejection to the authors.
Generally, if the author has no agent, I send a form letter that says something to the effect of “We’re sorry, but we only accept agented submissions, due to the overwhelming quantity of submissions we receive.” If the submission did happen to be agented, but it still became slush because no one has heard of the agency and the proposal was unprofessional, we generally send a short note on an editor’s letterhead thanking the agent and gently declining. I write these polite little notes while snickering. Some of this stuff is truly awful. I know, I shouldn’t be this mean, but just hear me out!
One of the very first pieces of slush was an expensively prepared folder/binder with professional graphics. Inside was a professional proposal, first chapter and table of contents, just as there should have been. The front was a photograph, blown up and set in nostalgic tones of sepia, of a little girl in an old-fashioned white frock. Yes, it was a frock. I think the little girl was the author. The text over the photograph read If I Only Had a—and the last word was covered by a slip of paper that read CENSORED: US POSTAL SERVICE. My first impression was that this was the story of a girl who always felt like a guy and so eventually, after years of inner turmoil, had a sex change. Possibly, I have seen too much daytime television. I’ve also recently read Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides, so that might have something to with it.
The story this author wanted to tell was actually the story of how men are treated better than women and still have a superiority complex. The author then went into great detail about how her own father had stalked home from the hospital and not spoken to her mother because she had borne him a girl, the author, instead of a boy. Had this been a professional and unique exploration of gender roles in our uber-modern society, I might have read on. But I have a distinct feeling that this author wanted simply to tattle on her dad for being sub-par. Not exactly a venture this (or perhaps any) publishing house would be willing to take. So I sent the professional package back to the author with the same ol’ form letter everyone else gets.
I find the slush pile to be a muted, boring version of American Idol. Each submission is sent in by someone who honestly believes that a person on the receiving end of their writing will get back to them immediately and enthusiastically, just as each bad singer truly believes that Simon Cowell will give them a thumbs-up. In both cases, rarely does it happen.
It is an old piece of advice to writers the world over – write what you know. Unfortunately, most people know little beyond their own lives. Therefore, the magnitude of their life story is exaggeratedly large – to them. Quite frankly, to a publishing house, their life story means nothing. Even if they have survived life-threatening illnesses and managed to stay optimistic. Even if they are a good mom who started a business so she could spend time with her kids. Even if they’ve written 98,000 words already. It just simply doesn’t matter. If the submission is not agented, no one but an intern is likely to give it a glance. And if the intern doesn’t want to learn or is a little lazy, (I swear, this is not a self-description!) even she might chuck it in the trash. Who would notice?
However, there does happen to exist a related industry called self-publishing which is a near, less accomplished cousin of the book publishing industry. Self-publishing can be done online, with little or no help from an agent or an editor. Sound too good to be true? That’s because it is. No one at the self-publishing house will market, sell or edit any book, unless the author pays for these optional services. The self-publishing establishment will never, ever take responsibility for any book. So why read it? They simply print it the way an author specifies and ship it out. They are a giant copy machine in a tie. This is where a few of the submissions that cross my desk belong. The autobiography of Grandma Sara who’s on her death bed and wanted to see her story put to paper belongs at AuthorHouse or one of several other self-publishing companies with a print-on-demand feature, not at a major publishing house who is interested primarily in making money from an author’s ideas. (Don’t worry, ideally, the author benefits greatly as well.)
I have seen, in the past couple of weeks, more candidates for self-publishing than I’d like to think about, most of them autobiographical accounts that would interest no one but the children of the authors. Sad but true, undeniably. That doesn’t mean they aren’t interesting, occasionally, but only that they don’t seem very lucrative.
Trends seem to filter through every branch of the media and that doesn’t exclude even the Slush Pile of a publishing house. A testament to our monkey-see, monkey-do tendencies if ever there was one. As I’ve mentioned, there is a group of people out there that seem to think everyone in the world will be interested in their life story. These people can be seen on a park bench, when all you meant to say was, “Hello,” and, “How ‘bout this weather,” and got stuck in a sob story. They can be seen at work, when they actually respond with a truthful answer to the question, “How are you?” and they can be seen in a publishing house’s Slush Pile. What they don’t realize is that no one wants to hear a sad, melodramatic story unless the main character is a celebrity of some kind or if the person has done something astronomically huge that no one else has done. Both instances are rare and, accordingly, so is the publication of this type of book.
A second trend I’ve noticed is the prison mail. America’s prisons and jails are chock full of prisoners just itching to tell their own stories. I think many of them have so much time on their hands that just as Malcolm X decided to copy down the dictionary, these men and women write down their own lives. Many wish to tell their story of innocence despite the fact that they’re serving life sentences. The truth is, frankly, it is difficult for readers to sympathize with the bad guy. For all our sinning, we humans are self-righteous as can be. We want to see the bad guy stuck in jail, not having his story published. The nice guy finishes last isn’t really a feel-good scenario. So, sales on that type of book would probably be a little lacking. Next!
The most disturbing prison mail I’ve received so far was from a sex offender who felt that the New Hampshire state law was allowing people to be hateful toward him. He wanted to write a book about acceptance of all people and how sex offenders should not be ostracized and publicly humiliated daily. Granted, the New Hampshire state law requires that all sex offenders’ faces, descriptions of cars, workplaces and other personal information be published on the Internet for all to see. Pretty much the modern age’s answer to a good ol’ fashioned lynchin’. But when this man has raped someone, it’s hard to feel bad for him. The fact is, we as a society don’t accept him. His whole existence has become unacceptable, hence the prison address. Not a salable topic, to be sure. But, I must guiltily admit, that I enjoyed the proposal. I enjoyed the argument the inmate has made because it was an excellent illustration of human selfishness. The man did not, and never will care that he ruined someone’s life. He cared only about himself and had the New Hampshire laws not placed him under the lens of public scrutiny, he’d be perfectly content. A defense of New Hampshire’s law, to be sure.
Not all unagented submissions are so bad, though. I have found exactly three that made it through the first cut, and even then someone told me I was being generous! I handed all three off to the assistant editor. I do not know what eventually became of them, but I haven’t heard anything so I imagine nothing.
The first was a joke-type book which was full of obituaries. I know, I know – just hear me out, ok? They were obituaries of fictional characters that have become like friends and family members to us. We identify with these ultra-popular characters and they are pretty much “out” – or dead. The author had included some examples of his obituaries to be included in the book. Snow White had died at, like, 50 years old. The obituary read – It Finally Worked! Pat the Bunny had died of a rare skin disease caused by excessive amounts of infant drool. They were all similarly hilarious. I enjoyed them immensely. Had the author gotten an agent first, someone might have taken a closer look. I know I did.
Another piece of (technically) slush was a proposal for romance novels for the elderly set. I thought this idea was great. Written by a woman in her eighties (!), this series of novels would be about finding love – again. As an old person. Old women have time on their hands – tons of it – and what they often choose to do with this plethora of time is read – romance novels. But I’m sure they’d enjoy a romance novel about someone in their own shoes. However, the author chose to name the series something like “Never Too Old” or “Young Enough” or something equally condescending. In my New Jersey town, there is a nursing home that runs a pick-up and drop-off service for the people attending only during the day. The bus they use for this is plastered all over with the name of the nursing home – Young at Heart. Personally, I would not want one of those white-haired heads bouncing up and down in that bus’s windows to be mine. I might as well wear a sign that says, “Hey, everybody, look at me! I’m old and obsolete riding on a short bus!” It would make me feel like a child or an invalid. How embarrassing! The series names the author picked reminded me of exactly this situation. A person reading a book that said in bold on the front, “Never Too Old…” might as well wear a sign that says, “Hey, everybody, look at me! I’m too old for real romance, so they made this to pacify me!”
I thought it needed to be a series without a name. Just a bunch of romance novels that were marketed in places where the elderly would see the ads. The author was an elderly person, so maybe she had a better handle on how to market to her own group, but I felt that no older person would want to read something that was pretty much engineered for them. Much like most teens don’t want to read “teen fiction” which is often read by kids much younger than their teens.
I wanted to see a sample chapter because I felt that the whole idea was pivotal on the author’s ability to write, not just think up a good idea. I let the assistant editor know this and my ideas about the name, but I never heard another word, so I assume this proposal ended up where the previous one did – in publishing ether. I don’t know if there is such a thing, I’m just saying I never saw it again.
The third and last proposal that has caught my eye did so because of the author’s actual ability to write. I was amazed, reading his sample chapter, that he could string sentences along like that! And from the Slush Pile! It was a crime thriller, not unlike C.S.I, and I thought it was pretty good. Not good enough, apparently, because I never heard boo about that one either.
The Slush Pile has now disappeared. It will fill up again, and it’ll disappear again as long as there is an intern to hack through it. I wonder what aspiring authors would say if they knew that the person deciding their fate, deciding whether or not their book actually crosses an editor’s desk, is just an intern with no experience whatsoever?
I don’t believe publishing houses are nasty or mean exactly in their choosing of who gets published and who does not, but most are in this game to win. They want to collect on an idea, not just marvel at how unique it is. Although, when an editor gets to enjoy both is a happy, happy day. Publishing people are still book worms. They love a good book, one with dense, three-dimensional characters and unique plot twists. But if that book they love so much won’t sell much to the general public, a good editor knows when to say no. And a good editor knows when to pick up that very salable but immature book and sing its praises. Because, at the end of the day, we all want to go home and eat dinner. Not live in a cardboard box, sleeping under the manuscript pages of a really great book we can’t sell.

>First Day in Publishing!

>10/02/08

My first official day of work at Simon and Schuster’s Touchstone/Fireside imprint began in the waiting room of the HR department. A fellow intern, Adriel, and I exchanged small talk and some pretty scant industry knowledge while we perused through catalogs and waited for the human resources coordinator to arrive. It was 9:05 AM, and both Adriel and I were itching to start our careers in book publishing, his in marketing, mine in editorial.
Orientation sounded more like an auction than an introduction to an industry and a company. I must have heard over twenty different policies, related to just as many different topics, in maybe eight to ten minutes. It was in written form in front of me, but I tried to follow what the coordinator was saying anyway. Internships at the Big Ten of the book publishing world (McGraw Hill, Random House, Harcourt, Holtzbrinck, Scholastic, Pearson, Houghton Mifflin, Harper Collins, John Wiley and Simon and Schuster, as of 2001) don’t necessarily come along easily, and I wanted to have all the tools and resources to make it worth my while.
S&S has a business casual dress code, which can be ambiguous without clarification. For men, it’s easy: wear a suit. You can’t go wrong. Khakis and a dress shirt work too, though. For women, it’s a minefield. You can’t go wrong with a dress shirt and slacks or skirt, but I’ve seen so many different variations on the people at S&S that it’s difficult to articulate an actual policy. For example, a skirt is almost inarguably dressy. But what if it’s denim? Dress code flexibility appears to come with seniority. To be certain I wasn’t violating an unwritten political rules, I usually wore dress pants and button-down, collared shirt. However, I did commit my share of dress-code transgressions. I wore open-toed shoes, once. They were very dressy and quite conservative, saving for the toes. Everyone stared at my feet all day. I became so self-conscious that I made an effort to stay behind my desk all day. While I suspect their staring was a subconscious awareness (two of these things are not like the other ones!) my paranoid and overworked mind kept screaming that they were doing it deliberately to punish me for violating the dress code. Yikes. But I digress.
I was pleased, half-an-hour after orientation, to be seated at my new desk, in my little corner of S&S. I was even more pleased to learn the desk was dedicated to me, the intern (or “slave” if you prefer). I had a name plate (okay, so it was a paper one) just like all the real employees. I took a picture with my BlackBerry and hoped no one would notice. I had voicemail, which I promptly set up, making sure I sounded like I really worked at S&S. I also had an email address – and email messages! One was from Irene in IT, informing me that my ID to Rockefeller Center was ready for pick up. Already, I was important enough to have email.
I was astounded. I was relatively new to the city and did not know that 1230 Avenue of the Americas was the address to one of the Rockefeller Center buildings until I opened that email. In fact, I hadn’t even recognized the buildings on sight, or noticed the advertisements for Top of the Rock. When I’d visited S&S the first couple of times, I had been too busy gazing longingly at the Random House skyscraper, which is in the opposite direction, but essentially right across the street. So, Simon and Schuster had a great view of the back of my head. As if it cared. Like every other publishing industry hopeful, I had read that feature in BookNews about Random House being the best possible workplace in book publishing. And it hadn’t been retired to the back of my mind with all the information I acquire from reading so much.
When I returned from picking up my ID for the Rock (already I’ve picked up the lingo. Does that make me a progressive, or a dork?) I was very pleasantly greeted by every single person I work with. It was as if they all waited until I officially had an ID. Each person, from the lowly assistants to the publisher of Touchstone/Fireside himself, told me they were happy to have me, asked what school I attended, commented on Pace and wished me luck. I was impressed by this show of kindness by nearly all of the people for whom I’d be working two days a week. It suddenly seemed very unimportant that I was working for nothing, when I had the joy of working with these kind and sparkly-eyed literati!
Until they returned to their desks and promptly proceeded to ignore me. Had I done something wrong? I’ve always been a bit shy and introverted. Perhaps I’d been overwhelmed by all the attention and didn’t smile when I should’ve, or nod at the right moments when editor so-and-so recanted her own internship experience. Had I somehow committed a social faux-pas, miraculously insulting all my coworkers at once and thereby ruining my career in book publishing before it had even begun? To salvage my career and popularity in the business, I began to grin toothily at each passerby. The result, each time, was a polite, tight-lipped smile and quickly diverted eyes. Eventually, they stopped making eye contact. Fabulous. They probably thought I was Pace University’s class idiot come to pester them…or worse, someone with poor social skills! [enter maniacal, blood-curdling scream].
Oh, stop it! I scolded, giving myself the equivalent of the cinematic slap-across-the-crazy-girl’s-face. They think you’re weird, because you are being weird. You’re trying too hard. No one else is running the I-can-impress-the-world marathon, so why are you? Just chill out, for goodness’ sake. Stop the constant worrying and trying to impress these people with your knowledge. Besides, do you really have that much knowledge? I resolved to focus on my work and be myself…not a blithering, grinning idiot. That’s right, work. The stuff I’m here to do. Now, if only I could figure out where they kept the work. My co-workers were all typing away with intelligent and well-read expressions on their faces, or chatting on the phone with literary agents. Oh, how I longed for their jobs.

And then, after working pretty hard to become a sophomore in college, I was sitting just outside the door to a senior editor’s office and listening to her business. It was a wonderful experience to be able to learn from what she said in her conversations, even if it is technically eavesdropping. For example, I now know that in a galley (a pre-print of a book used for final editing before it goes to the press) the table of contents might not necessarily match up with the actual page numbers in the book. I know that a series page goes in the front matter of a book along with the title and copyright pages. I know that if some book only sells 10,000 copies it could be considered a loss. I also know that it is extremely rare for a proposal or manuscript to make it all the way to publication if its point of entry is a publishing house’s Slush Pile which is a pile of submissions from people who think they can write but don’t have an agent. Generally, if they can’t get an agent, they can’t write. And no one, to an agent’s dismay, can be taught to write.

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