CPC magazine workshop

Although most of the students at the Columbia Publishing Course want careers in book publishing, we do have a fair number who want to go into magazines. Weeks 5 and 6 of the course focus entirely on magazine production and sales, culminating in a 5-day workshop in which groups of 10 people are assigned a magazine genre and given the task of putting together a prospectus for a new magazine.

I was lucky enough to get my first choice genre, men's magazines. I knew most of the men in the course wanted that as their first choice, but I saw it this way: I spent years of my life as a percussionist, which meant hours a day in the company of men (and perhaps not the most mature men you've met). This couldn't be any worse than college. My group was 7 men and 3 women, and my job was Circulation Director. Magazine circulation isn't a career I want to pursue, but I found the lessons beneficial. There's so much to know and understand about the business side of book and magazine publishing, things I never learned as a librarian but are crucial to know even if you want a career in editorial. Over the week, I learned that it's circulation's job to work out the numbers in terms of newsstand versus subscription sales, the magazine's demographic, who your major competitors are (which has more to do with the content of your magazine and less with the genre, surprisingly), and how much it's going to cost you to get readers. It's kind of a scary economic model, really. Despite my lack of knowledge and experience in magazine business, I had a great time during the week. My group found its voice early and even when we stumbled in terms of content, we still believed that we had a great potential product. I think one of the hardest things was separating ourselves from what's already in the market. Sure, we all like GQ and Esquire, but what could we do in our content and advertising to get new readers who wouldn't say, "I don't need this magazine because I can read about this content in magazines I already get?"

Today is the last day of the CPC, so as of Monday Librarilly Blonde will return to its regularly scheduled book reviews and library discussions. Hmm, what to write about first...?

Bright future in sales

At the writing of this post, I have slept about 9 hours in the past 2 days. Such is the way of life during book prospectus week at the Columbia Publishing Course. During this week, the class is split into ten groups, which must, by the end of the week, put together a prospectus for their publishing company. They elect a CEO/Publisher and nine executives, each responsible for a different aspect of the company's overall plan. As I mentioned before, I took the role of Director of Trade and Special Sales, a role that I wouldn't have necessarily chosen for myself but I'm glad I got. Learning about returns, profit and loss margins (though putting together the actual p&l for each book was someone else's job), how print runs are decided, and how books get into consumers' hands was really interesting. Book workshop week also meant a string of 18-hour-days, and I think I am not the only one in the program who, after the last long night of the program, was considering a career as a bus driver.

One thing I found very useful in my sales position was my booktalking experience. It's the job of the sales director to pitch the company's list to buyers, which means working with the editorial department on coming up with just the perfect hook for each title. In this case, I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to pitch my (just for school, not real) imprint's titles to Sessalee Hensley, who is the fiction buyer for Barnes & Noble. Can I say that I totally want to be this woman when I grow up? There is no one who knows more about selling books than she does. Naturally, everyone was nervous about the sales meeting, but I used this line of logic: For years a big part of my job was pitching books to middle-school students. Not only could I pitch six books in ten minutes instead of our allotted twenty if I had to, nothing Sessalee could do or say would be worse than anything any eighth-grader has done or said during any of my booktalking sessions. With this knowledge in hand, I have to say I had a great time doing the pitches.

Sales pitches done, it was time to rework some numbers, because you know that when Barnes and Noble wants to buy 30% of your first print run, you're probably going to end up printing and selling more books than you'd planned. Long nights in tutoring sessions plus lots of help from our awesome visiting professional staff means that I think I have a basic understanding of how sales departments work, knowledge I didn't have a week ago.

I'm still a little fuzzy from the week, but with my newfound understanding of the numbers side of publishing, I have some blog and journal entries to respond to. That's coming after I finish editing an article for SLJ.

We all use math every day

In the words of a famous television math professor:

We all use math every day. To predict weather. To tell time. To handle money. Math is more than formulas and equations. It's logic. It's rationality. It's using your mind to solve the biggest mysteries we know.

Math is the reason I've been away for a few days. We're now on Day 3 of the book workshop. Basically, during the workshop, we split up into groups, form a publishing company, and buy and sell and market titles. My job within the company? Trade Sales Manager. That's right. I, who became a librarian because I was told there was no math, am now Numbers Girl. It's the job of the sales manager to predict sales based on numbers of comparable titles, to know the market and what's selling now. Sales has to know where the gaps are on our lists and how we can fill them. It's not the job I would have chosen for myself and it's not making me love math and calculations, but I find I'm learning a great new skill set, which is what I came to the course for in the first place. Sales is, as Charlie Eppes might say, using your mind to solve the biggest mystery in publishing, that is, how many copies of a book we can sell.

Like math, sales is not a job you always have to build from the ground up. There are formulas and precedents, and you use existing books to try to predict how well your book will do. Today there will be an auction for a book, and later this week I'm going to pitch our books to a buyer. (Which, for my fellow librarians, is pretty much booktalking, but to grownups, with much higher stakes.) I think of it as learning a new language. Though I still can't remember what F&G stands for.

Columbia Publishing Course, Days 5-9

Days 6-7 were free. Next!

I continue to be absolutely floored by the speakers. Highlights of the past few days have included:

• Megan Tingley (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers). Megan's presentation was on children's publishing, and as someone who doesn't know as much about picture books as I ought to, I was happy to hear her talk about authors and artists like Todd Parr and Darren Shan. (Let's not forget that from approximately 2001 to 2007, Darren Shan positively owned the YA horror market.)
  
• Chip Kidd (Knopf) had us all in stitches. My seat partner laughed so hard during Kidd's presentation that she cried. Besides the funny, we got to see a montage of the process of some of the book covers Kidd has done. He also talked about the production of the cover art of his own book, The Learners. (It's about the Milgram Behavioral experiments, for those who are interested. I am!) I have all the artistic ability of a toddler, but Kidd made me want to work in book design.
• Carolyn Pittis (HarperCollins) talked about global marketing strategies. Wow. Just. Wow. She crammed a phenomenal amount of information on sales, tracking, marketing, and new technologies into that two-hour presentation. It was quite energizing, and you know, I think there's actually a lot that fits into where public libraries can go in the future.

Tomorrow we have our meetings with individual editors, who will be looking over our reader's reports on the unbound manuscripts we all received. Many different kinds of crazy awesome this week there will be, says Yoda.

Columbia Publishing Course, Day 4

Lectures: 9 a.m.-noon, from Peter DeGiglio (Bloomsbury) about the math of publishing. This was incredibly intense and also fascinating. He crammed about six months' worth of learning into three hours. Profits, losses, printing, costs, royalties, cuts...amazing. Actually, the most amazing part is that he explained everything in words even I, who became a librarian because I was told there was no math, could understand.

2-4:30 p.m.: Agents' panel, with Scott Moyers (Wylie), Ira Silverberg (Sterling Lord) and Amy Williams (McCormick & Williams). When you're moving from librarianship to publishing, something I see much more in reverse, the obvious thing is to go into school and library marketing. I am not opposed to this, but what I think I really want to do is agent. These three speakers were very inspiring, knowledgeable and funny but also serious about their business. Listening to Amy Williams talk during the sherry hour after the session was enlightening and reinforced my want to agent. But I'm not applying for her assistantship because her agency doesn't sell YA or MG.

7:30-9:15 p.m.: Sloane Crosley, publicist for Vintage Books and author of I Was Told There'd Be Cake. She read from her book and talked about publicity versus marketing, and what it takes to be part of a great publicity department. Very funny, relaxed, and I would love to spend a day just following her around at her job.

Thoughts from today's lessonss:

- I am rethinking book bloggers. Not in terms of publicity but in terms of math, and in terms of how important bloggers think they are versus how important they actually are, which is a question that has two different answers depending on whether you're discussing children's or adult literature. But the thing is, I might not ever get around to actually blogging about this because, well, I'd rather blog about books than blog about blogging about books.

- I might be the only person here who has no desire to ever write a book. I find I am only passionate about other people's books. But I suppose that's what makes for a good editor or agent, right?

Some math I forgot to mention: Given the number of titles published in a year, it would still take Harriet Klausner quite a number of years just to read all the books published in 2009 alone. Makes me feel a little better to know that "so many books, so little time" is scientific fact.

Columbia Publishing Course, Days 1 & 2

No, I do not plan on blogging the entire thing.

Days one and two of the Columbia Publishing Course have been both exhilarating and exhausting. So far, I've heard lectures from Michael Pietsch (Little, Brown), John Fagan (Viking), and Bob Gottlieb (Knopf). The one thing I've really taken away from their lectures is that you must be enthusiastic in publishing. If you can't love editing and the industry, you need to get out and you need to get out immediately. Being an editor is a 24/7 job. It's not just about reading, it's about selling and believing in what you publish. Individually:

• I was personally dying to hear Pietsch talk because I am fascinated by Little, Brown's publishing model. Ounce for ounce, they are the most successful out there. Their secret? Discretion. Mostly. It was nice to hear, also, that SOMEONE out there besides me doesn't believe that publishing is dying. Please. Hasn't publishing died like 50 times already?
  
• Fagan's speech was about paperback publishing, both paperback reprinting and original paperbacks. He talked about the different lives books can lead in hardcover and paperback and the very delicate balance that always must be achieved in marketing, shipping, etc. in order to maintain profit.
• Gottleib's lecture was wonderfully funny and wise. He, too, exemplified the enthusiasm we all have to show if we want to be editors, talking about editing as a service profession.
  

Also, there's some pretty good chocolate cake in the cafeteria.

I've met a few people who want to work with children's and YA books, and I'm sure when Megan Tingley comes to lecture we'll have a fascinating discussion on Twilight and YA.

I have classes every day at 9 a.m., 2 p.m., and 7 p.m. These people don't fool around, yo. Most of my classmates want to work in book publishing, but there are a few magazine enthusiasts as well. I haven't met anyone else who wants to be a literary agent, but I haven't met everyone in the course, either.

Tomorrow's lecturers include two authors and the president of Grove/Atlantic. As Neil Gaiman would say, "Whee! Thump."

All summer in a day

What's a librarian to do with no job, no job prospects, and years of experience in librarianship?

Change professions.

This summer, I'm very excited (and very scared) to be taking the Columbia Publishing Course, formerly the Radcliffe Publishing Course, which includes one of my heroes, Arthur A. Levine, among its alumni. Since I've had some questions as to what the CPC is, I'll explain as best I can.

The CPC is publishing industry boot camp. They cram a year's worth of information on book, magazine, and new media publishing into six weeks. It's not the only publishing graduate course in the country; similar programs are offered at NYU and the University of Denver (see more on those here). They accept 100 people per year, most of whom are recent college graduates. Lecturers include current industry professionals; the opening day lecturer is David Young, Chairman of Hachette Book Group. There are also two hands-on workshops for book and magazine publishing. Part of me is absolutely dying to do the magazine workshop at Lucky but alas, I am only stylish when it comes to beauty products and jewelry. (Also I'm short and curvy, two more strikes against working at a fashion magazine.) Anyway, this is more than just "how to edit," it's "how to edit, agent, market, promote, distribute, and generally survive." In preparation for this course I've been reading a lot of industry blogs and completing the advance assignments, which cover marketing and acquisitions.

All of this means I'll be on hiatus, save for possibly blogging about the CPC, for the rest of June and all of July. If I'm lucky enough to have spare time to read, I'll be reading books for Kirkus and re-reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. And also The Ask and the Answer, which I was beyond thrilled to receive last week.

Will I come back to libraries? I don't know. I'm certainly not opposed to it, but right now I'm going to pursue this publishing thing and see how it turns out. Right now I'm most interested in agenting, but perhaps Columbia will show me that I have a talent for an aspect of publishing I never even considered. Stay tuned for future revelations.