Book Job Posts Round-Up

I am starting to run low on ideas for Publishing Career posts. Do you have questions I haven't answered yet? Please let me know! Meanwhile, here is a round-up of some related posts I've seen in the last few months.

Susan Orlean's New Yorker story about how Editors move around a lot. I've heard the average is 3 years. Funny story. More than 10 years ago when I was a buyer, I heard a story about the head of sales at one of my publishers. She had a reputation for moving every 3 years. A company wanted to offer her a job but they didn't like that rumor and they wanted her to stay with them longer. So they brought it up in an interview, and she promised if hired she wouldn't leave after three years. She was hired, and she left after two. Can't say she didn't keep her promise! Just goes to show, specificity and sentence structure can be crucial.

A pretty detailed post on How to make a children's book jacket. Starts off with some seminal ones from the designer's own youth that resonated, then shows different ideas in progress through to the finished product.

Canada's Globe and Mail discusses the importance of re-designs for backlist. Backlist pays the bills people, so you want it to sell, sell, sell. Redesigning book covers allows Sales to resolicit them in bookstores, remind bookstores about these books, hopefully they'll bring in a few more copies, maybe even display a few.

A former copyeditor at New York magazine explains the real life of a copyeditor including how to properly spell and punctuate some rather blue copy! (She even mentions Don Draper of Mad Men as an example!) I can be a copyeditor around the office for presentations and the like, but after taking my copyediting class at NYU, I know I'll never be able to do that professionally. It takes a certain personality. Not mine!

A bookseller describing books in 1 line. In my post about Reader's Reports for hopeful editors, I mention you only should devote one sentence to plot description. Some people find that difficult, so here's some help on how to do it. For more help, read the Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data in the front matter of your books. This also is vitally important for writers when developing your "elevator pitch." Short. Short short short. If you, who knows the work best, can't articulate your storyline cleanly and briefly, your listener will never believe you can be a concise and clear writer.

Jessica at Bookends (my favorite agency blog) recently posted a compilation of interview questions she's asked repeatedly, and they're pretty much all about having a Career as an agent.