Welcome to my new blog series – UCLPUB2015! Every Sunday I’ll be posting a roundup of my week as a student on the UCL MA Publishing course, talking about my experiences and passing along any handy tips I pick up along the way. I’m so excited to share my journey with you and hope that maybe these posts will help other aspiring publishers too!
Week 6: 9th Nov – 13th Nov
With no lectures during Reading Week, I wasn’t originally planning on writing a post to cover Week 6. I spent all my free time frantically finishing off my first assignment for the course and my usual three days at HarperCollins. I can’t believe that I’m over half way through the compulsory 20 day internship now; it’s absolutely flown by!
Even though I had to go into work on my birthday (welcome to the real world, sigh) I still managed to have a great time. All staff were invited to the HarperCollins Summer 2016 Highlights meeting, so I got a sneak peek at what each imprint is publishing next year and saw how each division works within the company umbrella. I marked off quite a few upcoming books in my guide that I’m excited for – I can’t wait for the Bondi Harvest cookbook (me, cooking? I know right) and there’s some seriously dark YA fiction that’s caught my eye too.
There was more than a little competition for the best presentation. Each imprint brought along prizes, specially filmed videos and even free cookies from Bake Off contestant Martha, but it was Collins, the education imprint, which really stole the show. Bringing in some beautiful animal helpers definitely brightened up my birthday. Just look at this gorgeous little thing!
Week 7: 16th Nov – 20th Nov
Back to working hard this week has me pretty worn out. The content has all been quite heavy-going but I’m trying my best to get through everything from both my internship and my course. I’ve not had much chance to update my book reviews this month but I’ve still been doing plenty of reading!
My group now knows which book we’ll be bringing to life for our Publishing Project module – our mythology collection! We’re so excited to create this for real so we took the opportunity on Tuesday to really get started on our schedule. We’ve been playing around with a few ideas for a name to fit our target market too; once we’ve decided there will be a Twitter and WordPress set up so please do keep an eye out for our open submissions. We’ll be looking for short stories and artwork/illustrations based on myths from all different cultures – I’d love to see as many of your ideas as possible!
On Tuesday we also had a lecture on metadata from possibly the best named man in the business, Dr. Merlin Fox. It might not sound like the most thrilling of topics, but understanding how to search for, collate and handle data is such an important aspect of becoming a well-rounded publisher. As well as discussing ONIX, XML and BIC, we also chatted about book piracy. Before this week, I didn’t even realise that piracy was really an issue for publishers and authors, as it’s something I’ve only ever encountered in the music and film industries.
Thursday morning we learnt about how publishing contracts are written, the law they are based on and the premise of negotiation from both the author and the publisher’s point of view. It’s definitely interesting to see what’s important depending on which corner you’re fighting in! I feel a lot more confident with my contract knowledge after a couple of sessions and my internship in rights – I’m finding the law surrounding publishing and copyright a lot more interesting than I ever anticipated I would!
We finished up this week with some casual critical editing of early modern texts. As hopeless as I am at reading handwritten letters from the 1800s, learning about the process of transcribing, editing and presenting these old texts turned out to be pretty enjoyable. A good high-octane action tale about the race to LE MORTE D’ARTHUR manuscript always helps too! (Wait. Arthur… Merlin… Owls…?! 😳)
Charlotte x
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