A couple weeks back, I did a short pair of interviews with Tim Ward (author and host of the AudioTim podcast) for Adventures in Sci Fi Publishing.
Part one is up now, focusing on my professional path toward my job at Angry Robot.
It’s been very cool to give more interviews from the POV of my work in publishing, especially as people ask about how my day job helps me and can help other authors. I’m thinking about how to help authors all the time for work, but trying to adapt my experience to make it applicable for all types of authors has been a great mental exercise. For Angry Robot, I have one set of resources and expectations. I use the work experiences to be a better-informed author, but having an interviewing prompt is great, as it provides a framework for me to push my knowledge and try to come up with even more and smarter ways of thinking and talking about succeeding in this crazy-but-awesome time in the industry.
Thanks to Tim for the cool interviews, and to the AISFP folks for hosting the chat. Keep your podcatchers tuned for part two sometime soon.
I’m thankful for your hour of time, and have a feeling these interviews will be very helpful.
In our first part, you talked about getting your start at Barnes and Noble. Do you have any other ideas for how someone could get their foot in the door toward getting a job like yours? You mentioned the benefit of experiencing customer service from the employee end, but also said that you moved on to find a better paying position. Are there any ways in which you would alter your path, if you could, maybe considering how publishing has changed since?
Well, if you know that you want to get into publishing early on, doing an internship in the industry during college could be quite handy. That usually requires a decent financial base, since most college internships I know of aren’t paid.
Other than that, I think that working in PR, marketing, copy writing, or the like could help prepare someone to move into publishing. I also know a number of people who have worked in journalism and then get into publishing.
I should add, the reason why I mentioned the customer service sentence, is that entry level position might not pay enough for someone changing careers later in life, and with a family to support. Maybe that is one of the best ways, and one should make that an extra, part-time job until they could get a promotion like yours, but I also wonder what the future if B&N is, as well as the risk of investing years of employment in a company that may not be selling books for much longer.