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Stephanie Woolley Assistant Editor |
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Tuesday, 26 May 2009 14:42 |
A day in the life of an Assistant Editor as told by Andersen's Stephanie Woolley 
After negotiating my way through the London transport system, and finding myself at least within walking distance of the office, my day begins.
Like most people who work in publishing, or indeed in any office, the first hour or so of my day is spent working my way through all the emails that have accumulated overnight (from overseas authors and printers). I also manage the general editorial enquiries, the majority of which are requests for submission guidelines.
I work mainly on our picture book list, working closely with the Editorial Director and our Designer. I monitor the progress of all the titles on our picture book list via the production schedule, check the artwork, work on the texts and deal with any problems and last-minute panics that may have arisen.
Once the finished text for a title has been delivered, I use it to write the first draft of the blurb for the back cover, which is then amended or approved by the Editorial Director. This is one of the more creative aspects of my job – it must be engaging, exciting, and make the book stand out from the competition. Space is obviously limited so brevity is the watchword here, and it can be more difficult than you think to successfully summarize a picture book in less than one hundred words without giving the ending away.
I assist the Editorial Director in copy-editing and proof-reading all our picture book texts. This involves many a laboured discussion over a wayward comma here, an ‘ize’ spelling there, etc. This is an ongoing process, which needs to be undertaken at every stage of a book’s development, so a text is often checked up to ten times before the finished book is printed. In a typical day I will proof-read one or two plotter proofs, (sent from our printers for approval before printing), plus PDFs of whichever titles we are still in the process of designing in-house. A large part of my job involves liaising with authors and printers over any changes we are proposing to make.
Like all publishing houses, we are constantly on the lookout for new and exciting authors and illustrators, and as part of my job I oversee our Submissions Department. We deal with all of the unsolicited manuscripts. As one of the few publishers still accepting unsolicited work, we receive a lot – in a typical week it’s not unusual for us to receive more than seventy, so reading through them all is time-consuming and requires concentration. Unfortunately most of them don’t make it onto our list, but we do find the odd masterpiece from an unknown author, which is very exciting. The type of manuscripts we receive is very much trend-driven – inevitably we still get quite a few Potter-esque wizard boarding school stories, and there has been a recent influx of teen-vampire titles.
I also read many of the submissions we receive from agents, both for picture books and older fiction. This is one of the most enjoyable aspects of my job – we get some fantastic manuscripts, and I often take them home with me at the end of the day.
Steph |
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 23 June 2009 13:19 )
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