AMA: I work in book publishing

[booksandstories]

Recently advertised for a job joining the team I lead and received 200+ applications so I thought there might be interest in book publishing!

I work for one of the Big Five book publishers and have done for several years.

I work across fiction and non fiction.

Ask me anything!

Many thanks. Yes, some people just do it for the love of the job. Personally I have a love of fancy cheeses in my fridge. I've specialised in professional and legal publishing which pays quite well. So I'll contact LexisNexis et al directly, too.

Sadly, it depends on how much you're paid... Most copyediting and proofreading is done by freelancers, not in house, and publishers' rates are very low and their budgets for each book are small too. So often there just isn't time to research things if you want to get a decent pay. The Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) recommends MINIMUM hourly rates for copyediting and proofreading each year; right now it is £33.30 for copyediting and £28.65 for proofreading and I can assure you that most publishers pay about £6-8 less. For proofreading, after tax, it is often as low as £15 per hour... If you're not paid for many hours, you won't have time to go out of your way to research things that should have been solved before the proofreading stage (but then I don't judge the copyeditor because I don't know how many hours they were paid for!).

I think you got the wrong end of the stick there, @JustBooks - why would @Dibilnik be doing research on a thread in Mumsnet for a job she was working on? Sounds like she's doing research into the industry instead.

Oh, that's not what I meant - I did not mean that Dibilnik'd be doing research on Mumsnet for a job that she's working on. I might have quoted the wrong person, but I was trying to address the fact that so many errors slip through multiple rounds of copyediting and proofreading, including things that are factual errors and that could take a few seconds to look up using Google... But often editorial freelancers run out of the time to research yet another error and that does slip through to the final version. For each such error we don't know how many errors have been corrected by the copyeditor or proofreader.

Sorry, maybe I didn't express myself clearly in my post.

Look direct on their careers website. Worth trying to get a job with LN in SA and then transferring to the UK? There’s been a heck of a lot of in house editorial redundancies so the jobs are like gold dust.

Are there any genres or perhaps more specifically, topics, that might be shoved towards the rejections pile purely because of the subject matter - I'm thinking of anorexia recovery memoirs - I've read a lot but there seem to be mountains of them but I know what I'm writing is quite different to any that I've read for at least 5 significant reasons - surely you must be overrun with books on certain topics or in certain genres or themes.

Why are publishing salaries so low?

I was literally thinking of the Goldfinch when a poster asked that question!

I'm a translator who has done a few books and would live to do more. Do you work on translations at all and of so, how do you choose who to work with?

My DD loves Tom Fletchers books so I'm so happy to read this!

My question - a partner of a friend of mine is, I believe, totally deluded. I do think everyone thinks they could write a book and don't realise how much more there is to it than that, and she's one of them. Constantly submitting to agents. I'm an avid reader and in the nicest possible way... They suck. The writing, the plot, the characters.

Do you find aspiring writers will just submit and submit and you have to give them some harsh feedback?

I had to look up why the '.......freshly caught kippers' was incorrect 🙄

I hope you are still answering these.
but do you think selling short stories is more or less profitable than writing a book?

I've worked in book publishing, too, and I find it curious that you didn't mention your department. It's very different working in editorial vs. legal vs. publicity.

Also curious that you posted here, instead of the book forum. Or did you?

I have thought of and started working on self publishing my short thesis but stopped but thinking of picking up again - any idea if this something a publisher will be interested in and which of the publisher publishes works like this pls