Part 6 (1/2)

* Sales managers Work with their reps to make sure the focus is right and to train them. Sales managers often travel a lot to spend days out calling with their reps. They also provide lots of input in the office to publis.h.i.+ng direction and company strategy. Sales managers have almost always done a few years of repping themselves.

* Sales director The boss at the top who ties it all together might have a number of regional sales managers working for them. Sometimes this role is combined with marketing director.

* Rights sales This is a specialised field selling foreign publication and translation rights. (The first is where someone takes your product and re-publishes it in their local market, possibly tweaking it a bit but still in English; the second is where you allow them to translate your product and publish in certain foreign language areas.) This is becoming a hugely important area for publishers, as securing print deals for several languages/different editions at the same time (rather than just for one market) can make the difference between printing being viable and non-viable.

Great rights sales people combine sales skills with excellent cultural awareness and an eye for detail; you'll be working with publis.h.i.+ng people all over the world, many with English as their second language, sometimes through translators. This role is mainly office-based with stints of international travel to your key contacts and to the major book fairs (Frankfurt in October, London in March, Bologna for children's books in April, Book Expo America in June). Increasingly though, international communications make time out of the office at book fairs the chance to confirm deals made in principle through electronic media.

In small companies this is handled by the sales or publis.h.i.+ng manager; it's only large companies that have a special person doing just this job.

Marketing Marketing is in many ways the public end of the company your work and words are what come to mind when people think about your organisation.

There are two types of marketing in publis.h.i.+ng companies (and indeed in most of the corporate world): * Where marketing drives communications Marketing primarily looks after communications, fulfilling the strategy and drive that come out of editorial and sales departments. In this type of company, the marketing department creates direct mail, publicity, advertising, websites, sales tools and other MarComms (Marketing Communications) functions.

* Where marketing drives strategy and product decisions, as well as communications In this type of company the marketing department works closely with authors, trains the sales team and has lots of input into publis.h.i.+ng decisions, as well as fulfilling the MarComms functions.

Either way, entry-level marketing roles tend to be about MarComms making brochures, making media releases and making tea, usually in reverse order but it's worth bearing in mind that a company where marketing is respected as a strategic function is likely to be a more dynamic and creative place to work if you're looking for a long-term career in this field.

Marketing suits people who are: 1. Creative and ideas-driven What's a great new way to get everyone's attention about this new book? What's a different, innovative, effective way to reach this audience? What copy style and design look will suit this brochure? How do I get people to wander into a bookshop, wander past the 50, 000 other books on shelf, pick up THIS book and then walk it to the till?

2. Happy in a fast-paced, demanding role Roll out a publicity campaign by tea-time please. As a marketing executive, you might be simultaneously creating a number of brochures for a direct mail shot, thinking about who to mail them to, letting the customer service and warehouse/inventory departments know that the campaign is about to go, talking to the designer about the latest corrections, liaising with the editor to make sure the copy is accurate, liaising with your manager to make sure the copy is stylish, innovative and hits your market, planning supporting point-of-sale material for bookshops, rea.s.suring an author that you're doing a great job with their book, planning a price rise for your list, reviewing compet.i.tor materials and campaigns, updating your website, rewriting a bunch of book blurbs for your next catalogue, costing a new campaign idea, taking calls from reps about product information, preparing sales tools for your upcoming rep conference, commenting on proposed front cover designs, reviewing a pile of book proposals to give feedback to the editor, planning a bookshop visit with your rep in Stockholm, proofing your colleague's new catalogue, answering a phone call asking for a suggested book list for a bookshop campaign that they need this afternoon, trying to get in a bit of lunch, and failing to do so (again). So if you fancy a quiet life, best look elsewhere ...

3. Confident Your work is often public, in the form of brochures, ads and campaigns that everyone can see, admire and critique, and boy can it get annoying when you create a huge campaign and the managing director notices the one thing you got wrong.

4. Interested in presentation, style and the written word Good promotion is all about hitting the right notes in the words you use and the image you create. If you've ever found yourself browsing dictionaries or books on language, if you have a favourite font, if you enjoy words and language for what they evoke, this could be the right job for you.

Good marketers need an eye for what looks good to other people's eyes; not as much as actually doing the design, but the capability to explain to designers how you want something to look and to work with them on a design that matches your message. Don't panic if this bit sounds foreign a lot of this is a learned skill and you pick up ideas on how good design works as you go along.

5. Good at detail This is often overlooked. But think about it: you've got to copy edit a 72-page catalogue while managing a $400,000 budget with expenditure allocations across 12 key areas and 15 types of promotions.

Marketing jobs include: * Marketing a.s.sistant/coordinator An entry-level graduate role, often involving support duties such as copying information, updating websites, events (conference and book fair) coordination, and perhaps some basic design. Many a.s.sistants work in this entry-level role for one or two years and then look to move up the chain. In a smaller company marketing a.s.sistant roles might be combined into sales and marketing a.s.sistant; in a larger company there will be a number of marketing a.s.sistants, each one working in a subject area (Literary Fiction, Secondary Schools and so on).

* Marketing executive/product manager Often graduate plus two or more years' work experience. These roles might include creating promotional plans for books, author or list support, copywriting, placing advertising, briefing sales reps, and creating campaigns in direct mail, e-mail, the Web or bookshops. Some marketing executives might also be specialists in job functions such as direct mail, e-marketing and the Web etc.

* Publicist/publicity manager A role found in large, trade-focused companies (in fact sometimes this area is so important it operates as a separate department alongside the marketing department). Publicists specialise in coordinating book and author press and public relations campaigns including media interviews, planning campaigns and writing press releases. Smaller or less trade-oriented companies often give this function to a marketing executive and hire freelance publicity when needed.

* Research manager Magazine publis.h.i.+ng houses need to be able to muster a lot of data to show advertisers why they should choose their magazine rather than anyone else's; and they also need to understand who their readers are, what they do and what makes them tick. Enter the research manager, a cross between a maths geek (like the bloke nicknamed 'Database' in the Simpsons); a cultural anthropologist, studying the strange habits and behaviour of readers; and scriptwriter, helping shape a great story for the advertising department to sell. To get a flavour for what this role is like, listen to one talking about one of his magazines: As a researcher, you need to spend as much time on your readers' values as you do on the content. So, readers of [Australian souped-up car magazine] Street Machine love a good joke, think well of themselves, wave their flags proudly, and play their favourite CDs loudly in between drooling over '69 Mustangs and cla.s.sic Aussie Monaros and Falcons. Capture the whole picture and they'll love you for it.

(TRAVIS G.o.dFREDSON, RESEARCH MANAGER, AUSTRALIAN CONSOLIDATED PRESS).

See? Travis is talking about his readers in a way that reveals he obviously knows them intimately, and sees them as a group that can be packaged together and sold to advertisers.

* Marketing manager/director In a small company, the marketing manager does all the work listed above ... and answers the phone, too. In a large company the marketing manager may have staff who look after the detail of product and campaigns, freeing them up to create campaigns and strategy and work with editors on publis.h.i.+ng direction.

In large companies the marketing director is the top banana, perhaps with a number of marketing managers reporting to them. They might be sales and marketing director, too.

Editorial 'Editorial' is a word that creates some confusion the difference between copy editors and commissioning editors is pretty major! For simplicity, we've split this wide field into editorial (meaning development and copy editors, who work in producing the book) and commissioning/ publishers (meaning commissioning, acquisitions editors and publishers people who find authors to write the books): see below. There's some crossover, and some companies start you in one and promote you to the other, but some don't; so if you're keen on going into editorial, make sure you know which it is you want.

In some ways editorial is the engine room of publis.h.i.+ng the people who create the words that make the books and the magazines.

Editorial suits people who are: 1. More than a little a.n.a.l Or 'with a keen eye for detail and precision' might be a more polite way of putting that. Taking a piece of writing, moving words about, making it completely consistent in layout, structure and style, and loving it; that's editorial.

Ever submitted an essay or report and then lay awake at night worried that your bullet points had inconsistent punctuation? You're a born editor. (You're also a bit scary which, come to think of it, a lot of good editors are.) Editing is not a vague open-to-interpretation kind of skill. It's a set of rules and principles; you're being trained as a professional editor with skills to do editing, to do mark-up, and there are fundamental skills in grammar and expression and feel for words that you need. To achieve a high editorial standard is hard there are only a few people who are going to be good editors I don't see that as something you can train a ma.s.s of people in, anyway. That might sound a bit elitist but you need a temperament, to be a.n.a.l, all those things.

(MANAGING DIRECTOR OF A SMALL CONSUMER PUBLIs.h.i.+NG HOUSE, AUSTRALIA).

2. Crazy about words and grammar And not just on a micro-level in terms of where the comma goes. A surprising amount of editorial is structural, for which your ability to grasp the whole direction and style of the story/piece/entire book you're working on and to apply your best efforts to reshaping the material is invaluable. Did you lose track of the end of that sentence? If you did, editorial might not be for you!

3. Happiest in the back room There's not much glory in editorial: best managed, your work is invisible to the untrained eye (because it's so harmonious). Only other editors are going to congratulate you on a beautifully (re)constructed sentence, and authors hate to have it pointed out to them how much you amended what they wrote; they just a.s.sume the seamless prose was theirs all along. In your career as an editor at some point you will almost certainly find yourself rewriting material to such an extent that you should really get a co-authoring credit, although of course you won't.

On the other hand, if you don't fancy the knocking-on-doors-getting-yourself-out-there-public-face-of-the-company that is sales and marketing, editorial could work out for you perfectly.

4. Clever, widely interested and tactful You're working with authors, after all, who are also clever, and giving them feedback about what they've written, so you'll need to have a mind quick enough to understand the structure and argument. And that applies to books about physics, life cycle of the earthworm and tractor parts, as well as the latest Zadie Smith (depending on where you work).

And authors are generally b.l.o.o.d.y touchy about someone messing with their precious words, so you'll need buckets of tact.

Editorial jobs include: * Copy editor Works with the author from ma.n.u.script in to book out, as the main point of contact. Has the sometimes dubious pleasure of reading the book word by word, looking for errors and inconsistencies, and going back and forth with the author over queries and new drafts of the ma.n.u.script. Copy editors may also do structural editing (see below) and prepare permission and artwork briefs.

If this is what you want to do, on top of your BA you'll need specialist training either in-house at a publishers, or (more commonly now) in a postgraduate editing course, and possibly then to get an entry-level job as an editorial a.s.sistant (see below).

* Structural editor This role usually occurs in trade/fiction publishers. Structural editors sort out the story make sure things are in the best possible order before the ma.n.u.script goes off to be tidied up by the copy editor. Structural editors don't need the eye for detail that copy editing demands but do need to understand how the story works and how it could work better. After a while they often graduate on to become commissioning/acquisitions editors.

It's worth noting that structural editors now also thrive in agencies offering their services directly to authors; helping them manage their material before it gets to the agent or publisher.

* Development editor/project editor This role is more common in educational/professional publis.h.i.+ng. They take on a structural role, and sometimes work in partners.h.i.+p with a commissioning editor (see below). So the commissioning editor might sign up the author to write the book, and the development editor then works closely with the author while they do the writing, to make sure the book does exactly what the publishers want it to do. They may also be responsible for market research such as investigating areas for publis.h.i.+ng a potential new list. They need editing skills, an eye for detail, and great structural understanding of what's needed the lot really.

* Proofreader At the end of the process, someone has to do it working through the page proofs. This is the absolutely very last no turning back final checking, looking for spelling, grammatical and typesetting errors, and probably spot-checking contents list, index and author's name (at least twice).

Most proofreaders are now freelancers, with just a few left as employees of publis.h.i.+ng houses.

* Managing editor Organises production and briefs copy editors. Depending on the size of the company, this job might run in combination with production manager (see 'Production', below).

* Desk editor This is an outdated term for a managing editor or copy editor.

Editor jobs come in two flavours: in-house and freelance. Most editors start out working in-house for a publisher and then at some point may choose to go freelance, working for themselves, once they have the experience and contacts (and guts or lifestyle requirements) to set up on their own.

Commissioning jobs These are also often confusingly called editing or publis.h.i.+ng jobs. They suit people who are: 1. Knowledgeable and in tune with society Publishers are product development engineers, creating products for ma.s.s or specific audiences. So you need to provide what those audiences want, or the magazines will sit in the newsagents and the books won't get bought. Commissioning publishers need to be up to date with the latest trends, half a step behind the zeitgeist, to create the books and magazines people want to read.

2. Strategic thinkers Magazine publishers are strategic thinkers, working out what the next big thing is going to be and getting a new magazine launched before anyone else is out of the starting blocks. You need to build a portfolio that blocks compet.i.tors without eating itself (ie one in which the magazines complement each other and don't steal advertising from one another).

Similarly, in book publis.h.i.+ng, building a list can take years of careful planning by the time you've figured out what you want to publish, found the author, signed them up, given them a year or two to write something and then got it out into bookshops and done it again and again to create a list of books with a specific style and focus. And you need to do it all years in advance to figure out what will be the hot topics by the time it all publishes.

In both areas, a highly developed sense of strategy is essential.

3. Able to see the 'big picture'

For the reasons mentioned above, you need to be able to see the forest, not just the leaves. Few people can do this well, and even fewer in publis.h.i.+ng. After all, if you've been in a job like editorial or sales where detail is king, it can be difficult to make the adjustment to a position where what really matters is not the comma, nor even the chapter (feature), nor even the book (magazine), but the range and the market. It's the difference between using a microscope and a telescope.