By the time you read this, always assuming someone is reading this, of course, I’ll be on a train en route for London for a meeting of an organisation called Women in Publishing. Why do these things always seem to happen on a Wednesday evening? I won’t be back at base till the wee small hours of Thursday, far too late to be firing up the computer and posting my Dead Guy contribution, and by next Wednesday it’ll be history.
Ah well, I’ll just have to imagine how it will be.
Despite the obvious connection, I’m not a member of Women in Publishing. Since I live three hours from the place they hold their meetings, it wouldn’t be practical; and since most of British publishing happens in London I don’t think they have what’s euphemistically called country members.
I’m going because I’ve been invited to speak at the meeting, which is flattering and scary in equal parts. The scary part isn’t the actual speaking; I’ve run enough writers’ workshops and done enough conference sessions not to be fazed by standing up in front of a bunch of people. It’s just that when I set out to put together a half-hour talk on being a crime fiction publisher, I realised, as I occasionally do, that everyone else in the room, however lowly their position, will probably know an awful lot more about the publishing business than I do.
Preparing a talk really concentrates the mind. Not to mention making you aware of things you don’t think about on a day to day basis. Like, how much you don’t know.
The meeting is focusing on crime publishing, which presumably is why they decided to ask me. But I don’t see how there can be much difference between crime publishing and any other kind, except the books themselves. The process is surely much the same: reading manuscripts, commissioning the brilliant ones, editing, getting a cover designed, typesetting, proofreading, printing, promoting.
But I could be completely wrong. Having come into the business from a point of no knowledge and learned everything I know on the hoof, I could be wrong about every little thing.
That’s what’s scary about giving this talk.
Then again…
A young graduate with aspirations to work in publishing has been coming into the office one day a week for the past few months. In exchange for a few hours’ envelope stuffing or hunting down information on the web (both equally useful), I’ve been introducing her to the finer points of running a small publishing company, and now she’s applying to big companies for more substantial and, ahem, paid work. Mainly she’s applying for temporary internships, and she’s finding that the bigger the company, the narrower the scope of the available opportunities. The application forms all ask her to specify which area of the operation she wants to work in: editorial, distribution, marketing, finance and design have all been offered.
I’ve never worked in a big publishing company, but long, long ago I did work for several large organisations; and I found that once you begun to carve a particular groove, it’s not often easy to get out of it and into something which might be more the kind of thing you imagined when you signed up. So maybe something I’m going to find tonight is that the people in the audience will know a great deal about a small part of publishing.
Now, is that more useful or less than knowing a little about the whole shooting match?
