Entry into the world of NY publishing

Nicole Sawa was an Abernethy fellow for MANOA during the 2009–2010 academic year. She received her master's degree in May and moved to NY in August. Here is a report on her first week at a major publishing house.

My first week at Norton went really well. On one hand, it was overwhelming because of new people (and the resulting super-politeness + new procedures + lack of supplies. On the other, everyone is friendly and helpful, the procedures are things I am familiar with because of MANOA but are just larger in scale + I got my official @wwnorton.com email address on Wednesday and my office on Friday!

In case I haven't said this enough: you are doing a really good job of training people for jobs in publishing. I get the sense that the people training me keep expecting me to ask more questions, but I feel like I have a good grasp of the essential elements.

I mean things like the importance of tracking, being responsible, putting files and notes in a shared location, keeping coworkers informed, following procedure, and most importantly, understanding why every step is important. Even though this had been explained to me by teachers, other employers, and of course my first days at MANOA, I felt like I really only understood how essential they were when applying them at work, and sometimes suffering the consequences if I or someone else had overlooked steps!

I was thinking about this because Norton people are telling me the exact same things, so MANOA's professional standards are a match for any big publisher. All that is different are the details. (However, I've assured them I'll have to ask a lot of questions once I actually start doing things like contracts and invoices and payments.)

The things I've done this week are things I first learned at MANOA: intranets, file sharing, tracking manuscripts, and checking blues. Their intranet is huge (they have to use intranets as well as FTPs like Cyberduck, and my team uses a lot of Google docs and Basecamp within our own projects), and my big project this week was making sure the pages (tables, pictures, chapters, etc.) for an upcoming ebook textbook matched the already-published print version. I could've used the MANOA checklist for page proofs!

Instead of being with the science department, as I orginally thought, I'm in the digital media department on the college side. I'll work mainly with the science ebook editor (where applicable, a discipline will have an editor for the print textbook and an editor for the ebook), but also with the sociology and music ebook editors. However, I'll also work with the print editors and EAs for those disciplines, since the print textbooks are still the primary foundation, and the ebooks and ancillaries like study guides, DVDs, videos, CDs, digital flashcards stem from it.

I'm still not sure if I understand it accurately, but I'm looking forward to it. It seems like I'll be working with a lot of different disciplines and media.

I like that Norton is somewhat big but still independent, and I can learn a lot working in digital media. Plus, having my own office is a big creature comfort for me, and it's only 35 minutes away by subway. So I love where I am.

And the whole point of this long email is to tell you how this week has been and to say thank you. I couldn't be where I am now without you, and MANOA. All of my job interviews centered on my experiences at MANOA. So if you have any students interested in working for MANOA and/or eventually working in New York publishing, feel free to have them contact me: I will vouch for the power of MANOA!

Opportunities for Students at UHM Publications

I was talking to some of the people that work with the KaLeo, Kalamakua, and Hawai'i Review the other day. They mentioned to me that they were in some serious need of people that know how to edit, write, or both. Pretty much what I got from this is that there is a serious need for people that can add quality content to either of these publications. The Board of Publications (BOP) is the overseeing board for the publications that we have on campus and have a list explaining what some of these publications are about. Also, on the "Publications" tab on the BOP website navigation menu, there are all of the publication's open positions.

Not as good as Samantha's

I fear my post isn't as good as Samantha's, which quoted a passage in which Thanksgiving, eating, flying, and misbehavior are connected.

Joel Bradshaw, the head of the journals department at UH Press, wrote a conference paper some years ago, and I recently asked him for a copy of it. He said he'd posted it at UHP's blog. Here is part of it:

Cultural Evolutions

In many ways, the digital era has been very, very good for academic journals. Their authors have acquired many more readers, all across campuses and all around the globe. Their publishers have implemented more efficient means of production and dissemination, and often found very significant new streams of revenue. But there have been some difficult cultural adjustments.

Subscriber counts are becoming less important as a metric for assessing readership than actual counts of article views online. And those online readers are much less likely to be subscribers, much less likely to be able to evaluate the reputation of the journal, and much less interested in anything but the disembodied article they found via an all-purpose search engine. This has led to an identity crisis for many journals. Are they a place for scholarly dialogue, or just a warehouse of articles awaiting consumers who may or may not care about which brand they buy?

Journal articles become harder to distinguish from chapters in multiauthor books, and senior scholars in the humanities tend to contribute less and less to journals because they tend to be overcommitted to editors who have solicited their contributions to more highly valued books. As journals become more and more specialized, those with broader—and often more prestigious—coverage, tend to attract less of the cutting-edge research that makes people feel the need to subscribe as individuals.

Finally, in an era of fast food, online communities, and instant feedback, ambitious scholars have less patience with the languid cycles of journal review and publication.

That dwindling patience no doubt extends to careful editing as well.