What does it take to get a book published?
A copyeditor? Definitely. A cover designer? Absolutely. A marketer? Yes, of course, obviously. If someone tries to think about what roles are essential to publishing, they can probably come up with the same ones I did when I first started at Ooligan Press. But what about when someone just can’t find a document detailing notes from a meeting held three months ago? Who handles that? The person who ends up dealing with all the loose bits and bops is the Publisher’s Assistant, also known as the Operations Manager—my role.
Turns out that there’s a lot more that goes into making a book than one first thinks. Even now, it’s hard for me to fully articulate everything that my role entails.
So for those curious, what does a typical day look like for me?
For starters, I wake up and see five to ten new emails in my inbox. Seeing that every day definitely took some getting used to.
These emails are not usually from humans, but rather, they’re alerts that let me know that a new web page has mentioned a keyword related to our press. Maybe someone has written an article about our recent title Thorn City. Or maybe someone has made an event page detailing a talk with one of our authors. Anything like that. And it’s my job to add links to these pages into our metadata database so that we have some influence in making sure people who look up those web pages can stumble across our books.
The day is just beginning. Next comes inventory and sales, where I update how many books we have in our storage room and our display shelves. Were books purchased this week? Were any borrowed or removed from our shelves? If so, I make sure to record any changes in our spreadsheet.
What’s next? A couple people say that the books we mailed to them are missing. A quick trip to the mailing room or a deep dive into the Gmail archive may yield tracking numbers of past shipments. Could be a quick fix, or it could be a week-long endeavor.
Our document of shared notes from a meeting is missing—now I’ll need to find it in our shared drive and upload it to our shared workspace.
Now, I get an email about a direct order of ninety books that someone wants shipped to their business. No problem, I have to get that done before the mailroom closes.
2:00 p.m. Time for lunch.
Afterwards, more looking for those tracking numbers.
Someone can’t get back into their email account and needs a password reset. Get that dealt with, and call it a day. Maybe I’ll keep hunting for those tracking numbers, or maybe it’s time to call it quits until tomorrow.
It’s a lot to deal with, but it’s also fun to go around hunting for answers to things; it’s kind of like a scavenger hunt. Turns out that there’s a lot more that goes into publishing a book than people think. The publication ship keeps sailing, and every manager works to keep an eye out for leaks—my role is to plug them back up.
Blog written by Kara Herrera.