How do I get into Publishing? A SYP and PublishED 6x6 Event


Bookish People Talking About Bookish Things


By Chiara Hampton and Karolina Zentrichova


“How do I get into publishing?”: if you are an aspiring editor, illustrator, or simply an English student desperately hoping that your humanities degree will pay off, this question has likely crossed your mind. In order to shed some light on the topic, PublishED and Society of Young Publishers Scotland invited six professionals to speak about what happens behind the mysterious walls of the publishing house. If you couldn’t attend, fear not, we’ve got you covered. Here’s what you missed:


You get to read for a living!

Speaker: Ross Stewart – Project Leader at Prepress Projects on Editorial

Job Description:
  • Editing is a bit of a catch all: saying you work ‘in editing’ is a very vague statement.
  • Editing jobs can broadly be divided into light edits, generally similar to proofreading for errors, and heavy editing, a more involved approach, closer to rewriting than editing at its most extreme.
  • Since you will be devoting most of your time to reading works, often the same one over and over again, make sure you pick the right publishing area. Otherwise, you’ll accidentally end up editing for a scientific journal focusing on technical chemistry, when what you really wanted to do was edit the next Hunger Games.

Top Tips:
  • You don’t need to be able to explain the inner workings of syntax to know when something just doesn’t sound right – you can, and will, pick up the fancy grammatical terms as you go along, so don’t let them scare you away from giving editing a go!
  • If you get your energy from being in close contact with other humans, this might not be the right job for you; many days are spent at your desk staring at a manuscript for hours at a time.
  • However, if you consider this a blessing and not a curse it can be pretty fantastic: you get to spend most of your time reading and you are in close contact with those who matter most, the authors themselves.

“It helps if you really like books….”

Speaker: Richard Wainman, Designer at Floris Books

Job Description:
  • Designers are the wizards of publishing; They take manuscripts and transform them into the books we know and love.
  • Lots of visual elements are unified in design: think covers, typesets, illustrations (if there any), etc.
  • Contrary to our romantic visions, designers do not just live in the studio planning their next masterpiece. Communication with other departments is necessary if the project is to keep from failing spectacularly (hint: interpersonal skills just might be a theme in publishing)
Top tips:
  • You don’t need a background in fine arts to be a designer (although if you have one, wonderful). Just keep cultivating an eye for detail and you will be golden.
  • Flexibility is key, especially since print dates change constantly. In Richard’s words, “reprints [are] parachuted in from nowhere”.  

Production is the glue (literally) that holds the operation together

Speaker: Farzana Khan, Production Assistant at Canongate

Job description:
  • Production is essentially scheduling and costs. This is the department which keeps the others from falling into chaos.
  • As a member of the team, you will likely divide your time between frantically hunting down individuals (both inside and outside the publishing house) who aren’t on schedule and saving the day with your organizational genius.
  • You’ll also need to juggle a ridiculously long list of variable costs and keep the project within budget.
Top Tips:
  • Organizational and communication skills are musts: acquire them.
  • Biblio is your friend; become one with the software and it will help you conserve your precious time and energy.
Extra fun fact (for all you bookish people): the number of pages in a book will always be divisible by sixteen because printing is done on large sheets of sixteen pages each.

Networking AKA Drinking


“Every campaign is different… maybe their wife left them to protest badger culling or maybe they ran away to join the circus”

Speaker: Ceris Jones, Marketing and Publicity Officer at Sandstone Press

Job description:
  • Marketers are there to make sure the public cares about a new release. Simply put, if readers don’t know about it, they’re not going to buy it.
  • Day to day tasks include: contacting reviewers and press outlets, as well as running social media accounts.
  • ‘Author writes book’ is not breaking news. Campaigns must sell the work’s backstory in a way the media finds compelling (yes, the badger culling incident did happen. Yes, that is unspeakably glorious.)
Top tips:
  • Don’t ignore cultural knowledge: understanding current trends and the audiences they speak to is crucial.
  • Be creative. Marketing is not just networking (although that is important too). You must work to find an in and make a project stand out.

 “Get friendly with excel”

Speaker: Sarah Barnard – Sales Account Manager at Black & White Publishing

Job Description:
  • As Sales Manager, you get the ultimate bragging rights – few things sound as impressive as telling a friend you sold Waterstones 10,000 copies of a book today.
  • Alongside negotiating with large companies, you will also spend a fair amount of time zipping around the country to visit smaller, independent booksellers in person.
  • Ultimately, you get the joy of walking into a bookshop, looking at a book and knowing you can answer the question of how it got there with a simple, but immensely satisfying “Me, I did that!”.

Top Tips:
  • Excel and a calculator will very quickly assume central positions in your life, helping you stay organized despite pesky changes to the production schedule.
  • Speaking of pesky production changes, make sure you coordinate closely with the other publishing departments or get used to getting yourself out of sticky situations -   Explaining to a confused bookseller that they haven’t received the order of books they were expecting because you forgot to tell them the release date was pushed back is probably not a conversation you want to have.

“Always look on the Rights side of Life”

Speaker: Kirstin Lamb – PR and Rights Manager at Barrington Stoke

Job Description:
  • A rights manager is responsible for communicating with foreign publishers, with the aim of selling author’s rights in different territories.
  • Tends to always be overlooked, actually a vast area: translations, audio books, TV & film… the list goes on!
  • One day is never the same, you can be selling the rights of an upcoming book in the morning, and in the afternoon be campaigning to have a book written ten years ago become an audio book.
  • Book Fairs: The glue that hold together the rights world - think ice cream in Bologna, pretzels in Frankfurt, and world cuisine in London. You get to travel the world to try and sell your author’s work. This can happen in talks, through more formal events, or even in the elevator in between talks - you’ll be on the hustle.

Top Tips:

  • Negotiation: learn how to do it, be organised, and accept that spreadsheets and excel will become your life.
  • Contacts: make them, these are your bread and butter, and arguably the most important part of your job. You don’t need to be extroverted, you just need to be able to make friends.
  • “Do you like people, spreadsheets and travelling? Consider rights!”


People and books - both things we should appreciate. While only one name may appear on the cover, there is a group of lovely humans behind each book, who literally put it together and brought it into our hands.
 Now that you’ve had a taste of what working in publishing can be like, you may find yourself hungry for more. If so, you have come to just the right place: PublishEd has got plenty of events in the planning to satisfy your bookish appetites, with pub quizzes, writing workshops and the launch of the new edition of our publication, The Inkwell, all coming up soon.

Also, if this didn’t tempt you enough, most of the time we end up in a pub afterwards, complete with all the aesthetic you could ask for. You can literally sit with some of the most awesome people (and totally network). It’s a no brainer really.


Aesthetic Networking in Action
All Photo Credits to Stephanie Jin