The Mini Intern - Acquisitions Days #6, 7

More observations from my interning @ Flux.

Day #6 - Non-Fiction Tips

I spent time transmitting a non-fiction project, this time for a Llewellyn Acquisitions Editor, Carrie. I had to flip through the entire book and make sure that we had permissions requests from all of the people whose stories are cited in it. I learned that transmittals for non-fiction projects can be extremely difficult, especially if the author doesn’t take the time to provide all of the necessary materials for the project (particularly permissions requests, as they should be organized and clearly identified to make the editor’s job easier).

(I still love working with fiction more than I like working with non-fiction, but the opportunity to experience the more in-depth transmittals has been a very positive aspect of my time at Llewellyn—if I ever have to work in a non-fiction department, I’ll know that I’ll have to take on projects I care about intensely. Today was a very educational day, in many degrees.)

Day #7 - Responsibilities

Today I finally finished the last of the PCSs that Elysia asked me to do two weeks ago. Afterward, I read more Flux submissions and finished two reader reports plus sent Brian some suggestions for a project that caught my interest a few weeks ago. At the end, I researched some of the most recent titles published by Flux through two programs—Lex (which tracks books within Llewellyn) and BookScan (which tracks books nationally) and I compared the amount of titles shipped by Flux and the amount of copies sold through national distributors, etc., in an Excel spreadsheet.

Sometimes editors just have to let a project sit before they can put the best effort into it—for a while, I wasn’t sure how to approach the PCS, but today I sat down and did the entire thing in one hour. I also realized that last week I made a mistake with a transmittal, forgetting to include the actual parts of the manuscript being transmitted (how I made this mistake, I’m still not completely sure). Additionally, it’s sometimes incredible how many books are returned to a publisher, falling below expectations.

(I still love it—more than I did originally, if that’s possible, even though I’ve made some mistakes and not known how to approach particular issues. Today sped by incredibly quickly, but that’s probably because I knew what I was doing from the get-go, and I liked doing all of it.)

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