How did you become an editor?

[SJB]

Here's a question for those of you with editing experience (and for anyone else who wants to pipe up, of course!): how did you get into editing?

Although this is a unlikely career path for me (Ms. Aspiring Courtroom Shark), I'd love to know how you did it. This post has partly been prompted by Mad Max Perkins's most recent post at BookAngst 101 (http://bookangst.blogspot.com/2005/03/what-makes-it-all-worth-while.html)- inspiring stuff!

[TashaGoddard]

Here's a question for those of you with editing experience (and for anyone else who wants to pipe up, of course!): how did you get into editing?

General disclaimer: I am based in the UK so this might not be relevant to those in the US and elsewhere.

When I finished my A Levels, I decided to take some time out before going to university. I spent about six months on the dole, applying to every entry-level job in the local area and in London that came up, as well as sending out speculative letters to all the publishers in the area.

I was starting to get disheartened and considering just taking any old office job that was available, when I spotted an ad in a newsagent window:




Are you unemployed? Do you want to work in publishing? Call us.







This seemed like some kind of heavenly intervention, and felt as though it were calling out to me and me alone (which, of course, it wasn't, but...).




The position was a one-year employment training scheme, whereby you worked for the company and went to college one day a week to get an NVQ in Administration. You continued to get your dole, but also got an extra £10 a week on top of it.

The NVQ did not interest me at all, to be honest (and I never actually completed it), but the chance to work in a publishing company was something that just could not be passed up.

I started out as an Editorial/Office Assistant, working on the reception desk and doing a variety of administrative and editorial tasks. Because the publishing company was so small (there were less than 10 of us working in the offices), I was able to get experience in a wide variety of areas of publishing - editorial, design, marketing and publicity.

The experienced staff there were all wonderful in providing help and advice and letting me try out lots of different things. During the year, I moved into my own office and became a Publicity Assistant, writing press releases, mail-outs and making lots of calls to radio and TV stations to persuade them to review the books.

At the end of the year, I was taken on full-time (although officially freelance, as were all the other 'staff') and was Project Co-ordinator for a large catalogue spin-off of one of the books. I did this for about three months before going off to university.

I had originally planned to study English Literature at university, however, during my year at Gaia, I decided instead to study publishing.

I went to Oxford Brookes University and did a four-year Joint Honours course in Publishing with French Language and Literature.

I used my first student loan to buy a computer and sent out 200 speculative letters to try to get some freelance page layout work (my editing was not yet really up to freelancing standard, but I had a lot of experience with PageMaker). From those speculative letters I got one positive response and was able to supplement my student loans and grants with sporadic, but very well paid (for a student) freelance work.

On the publishing course we learnt a lot of general background and information about the publishing industry, but were also able to specialise in the later years. I took the editorial and electronic publishing route, with some additional modules in the culture and history of publishing.

As well as the freelance work, I also did some temp work for Oxford University Press. This was mostly administrative, but still provided lots of useful pointers.

I started applying for jobs about three months before the final exams. I was fortunate to be offered a job as a Desk Editor at Heinemann Educational Publishers (also in Oxford) and started there the week after my final exams.

I worked at Heinemann for about two and a half years, being promoted to Managing Editor during that time. While we did learn a considerable amount about editing on the publishing course, the actual experience of editing and managing freelance editors probably provided me with the majority of my skills and knowledge.

Electronic publishing hadn't really caught on yet at Heinemann while I was there, although I was able to take some responsibility for a couple of electronic products.

After about two years, I started looking into the possibility of moving on. I applied for a number of jobs and even got some calls from headhunters, but I came to realise that what I really wanted to do was work for myself.

In November 1999 I left Heinemann to set up my own business. At the start, I was mostly doing editing and proofreading (a huge amount of it for Heinemann) and almost immediately I was earning twice as much as I had in-house. After a while, I started doing some electronic development (producing CD-ROMs to accompany teacher's resource packs) and this gradually became the main focus of the business.

My husband (who also has considerable publishing experience) joined the company a few years ago and we now both work from home and so get to spend lots of time together (not for everyone, I'm sure, but it suits us).

While the main focus of our business is electronic development, we still do a fair amount of editing and proofreading.

So that's my story. Probably a lot longer than you were anticipating!

[Rose]

Wow, TashaGoddard, thanks for sharing! What a wild and circuitious route to editorness. It sounds like chance or serendipity also lead BookCoverDesigner into editing. Coincidence?

[mistri]

I don't have that much editing experience, but here goes anyway...

I too live in the UK, and decided while I was at Uni that I wanted to work in book publishing, and that I should get as much experience as I could. I worked as Books editor/reviewer on my student paper, which probably didn't help much, but gave me experience with working with publishers (asking for free books), working with contributors and using Macs (which many publishers don't use in editorial, but some do).

I also got a part-time job in a bookshop, as I wanted to learn more about the industry (and get a discount on books and earn money for studenty nights out, etc). Looking back, I may have been better off getting an office job, as I think that is valued by employers (I knew my way around computers - but found it hard to prove it without experience), while some of the snobbier ones (in my experience) see bookselling as just 'working in a shop'.

When I got out of Uni, I didn't fall into a 'proper job' (as my parents would say) straight away. Instead I worked in bookselling fulltime, while I applied to publishing jobs. Unfortunately, it is a very competitive environment, and there are so many graduates with an English degree, for example, that you really need to try and stand out from the crowd. I bought lots of books on publishing, and ones including proof-reading info, in an attempt to prepare myself. I had lots of interviews, but it wasn't until a year had passed that I found a job.

I applied to (Harlequin) Mills & Boon out of desperation - I knew it meant a long commute but I really wanted to leave retail at this point. I got an interview and was honest about what books I read. I said I'd read romance, but that my real love was fantasy fiction. Luckily, they employed me anyway - it turned out that they were launching a new fantasy line, and it didn't hurt that I did well in the proofing test they made me do.

I was there for two years-ish, and was an editorial assistant. Not a particularly lofty position, but the good thing about M&B was that I learned a lot in a short time. Even as an editorial assistant, I got to manage my own set of authors, and take books through every stage of the editing process. At other publishers I may have spent most of my time filing (which I still had to do, naturally).

I really enjoyed reading 'slush' manuscripts, and was pretty successful at finding new authors while I was there - I found four, including one fantasy author. It was a real buzz to phone an author up and tell them you were going to publish them. The hard thing about slush, is that there was always something else to do that was a higher priority - so it often built up into incredibly high piles. I tried to write letters whenever I could, as I sympathised with writers getting rejections, but I couldn't write to everyone, and yes, I did get angry letters/phone calls about that. On the other hand, I had unpublished writers ringing me up to say how sorry they were to see me go, when I was leaving.

In the end, I learned a lot about editing, and I can now apply that information to my own writing. It wasn't the perfect job - I'm not a fan of office politics, which can be bad in publishing (especially when you're working with a London, New York and Toronto office), and I found it hard to do my own writing when I'd been reading other people's work all day. Plus, I was always taking home manuscripts to read, and I have to admit to getting a little fed up of reading romance.

In the end I had to leave as I moved to another part of the country. I miss some aspects of book publishing, but I find myself a lot less stressed now that I'm out of it. I did a bit of freelance work for M&B for a bit, and now do a tiny bit of freelance outside of the company, but I prefer to concentrate on my own writing for the time being.

Too much information?

[aboyd]

I'm very small-potatoes compared to the people who have already responded. But nonetheless... here's my story.

In high school, I opened my locker one day and a photocopied piece of paper fell out. It was an underground newspaper. It fascinated me. I wanted to do one, too. I got some friends together, and started writing. Eventually, I ended up in the principal's office, teachers were fired, I won some awards, and I ended up as the editor of the official student newspaper.

During college, I was an editor on the Sonoma Mandala. Maybe some of the poets here have sent work to that publication. In any case, I was the grunt, the first-round guy who sifted wheat from chaff.

After college, I published Whisper magazine for a while, until about 1995. I published poetry, short stories, essays, lots of artwork, got one of my covers featured in Poet's Market. Eventually I started publishing on the Web. I made a good impression on some people, and was offered a job as a Webmaster. When I heard how much it paid, that was it, I was out of the editing business. :)

[SJB]

Wow! Thanks, you guys. What fantastic responses. :D

What I love about all your stories is exactly what Rose noted- that it was one chance or lucky break that led to you finding yourselves working in an editorial-type job; Tasha's "heavenly intervention" (it really did sound as though that sign were talking to you :)), Cathi's pregnancy, Mistri's interview with M&B just as they were about to open up a fantasy line, aboyd's having an underground newspaper flutter from his locker. Good stuff!

It's all incredibly interesting. Thanks again for sharing!