The Start of a Career: My First Six Weeks as an Editorial Assistant at Palgrave Macmillan

With a dry mouth, sweaty palms and shaking hands, I sat in the reception at Palgrave Macmillan, waiting to embark on my career in publishing. I had mixed emotions; from excitement and eager anticipation, to nervousness and a crippling fear.

What if I’d made the wrong decision? What if this industry wasn’t for me? What if I ended up hating the role?

That moment was six weeks ago. And those fears – those last minute shreds of doubt – they did not become a reality.

Instead, six weeks from that moment, I can now say that my decision to go into publishing and accept the role at Palgrave has been the best decision I’ve made in a long time. Choosing this career path may have meant completely going against what my parents wanted, but despite how agonising it was, I'm glad I made that choice because, finally, I made a decision – a decision that was right for me.

The past six weeks have been a HUGE learning curve. From meeting the editorial team and starting to build good working relationships, to being introduced to authors and becoming a part of the publishing process for their titles – I’m really surprised at how much I’ve learnt at Palgrave already. I now have a real appreciation for the work that goes into the publication of each and every book.

But just in case you’re wondering what my role as an Editorial Assistant actually involves, here are just a few of my main responsibilities which I’ve been getting to grips with during my first six weeks in the role:

• Managing the peer review process – As Palgrave is an academic publisher, their book proposals go through a peer review process in order to ensure that material is of a high quality and is suitable for publication. Managing this process involves approaching academics in the field to supply us with reviews of book proposals. I also organise payment for academics who provide us with reviews (either in cash or in books). This is a task I really enjoy; it’s interesting to read the feedback from academics and see whether a book idea is actually viable.

• Preparing manuscripts for handover to Production – This is probably the most important and time consuming task I’m responsible for. When a manuscript comes in from an author, it is my job to prepare it for handover to Production. This involves checking that all permissions have been correctly obtained (on images, tables and figures), preparing the handover forms for Design and Production (including the chosen cover image), checking the word count and that all chapters are present, assessing the quality of the language to allocate the correct level of copy-editing required, and putting together the prelims. This can be a lengthy process, but it’s so rewarding to hand a manuscript over to Production and then see the book slowly start to take shape.
• Cover image research – All of our standard monographs generally have an image-based front cover design and it is one of my responsibilities to carry out image research and get authors thinking about potential images for the cover of their book. I would say this is definitely one of the most fun parts of my job. It’s going to be so exciting to see a book published with a cover image I’ve researched and found myself – hopefully this moment won’t be too far away!

• Proofing, editing and finalising cover copy – Most of our authors write the cover blurb for their book themselves. Once we’ve received this, it is my job to proof and edit the cover copy, and then get it finalised by my line manager. The finalised cover copy is sent to Design to lay up on the cover proofs which I then have to check again one last time. As someone who’s always enjoyed proofreading and copy-editing, this is one of my favourite tasks. I find it extremely satisfying to correct book blurbs and make sure that cover proofs are error free.
  
  

As you can see, my responsibilities as an Editorial Assistant are extremely varied, but that’s what I enjoy most about my role. Although this does make it stressful at times, it’s rewarding to work so closely with authors on all aspects of their book and see it evolve into the final product.

If you are considering applying for an Editorial Assistant position, I hope this post has given you more of an insight into what a role like this would actually involve. Academic publishing is such a rewarding and fascinating industry, I really would encourage you to just go for it!