Case studies : Editorial assistant: Sophie Jaques

Sophie graduated in 2009 with a BA in Hispanic Studies with English from Queen Mary, University of London. She currently works as an editorial assistant in academic publishing.

During my final exams I did a six week internship as an editorial assistant at a small publishing company. I then started to apply for editorial assistant jobs, and after about 60 applications and one other interview, I had an interview with my current employer and got the job.

I studied Hispanic studies with English literature and I work with English language and linguistics books. My degree isn’t directly related to my job, although I did do some language and linguistic based studies while learning Spanish. I also have an A-level in English Language which is directly related and that gave me some basic background knowledge related to the books we publish.

Generally, my day-to-day tasks involve sending proposals out for review, clearing permission to use text or images from other sources in one of our books, emailing authors for updates on how their manuscript is coming along, sending requests for payments to the accounts department, drawing up contracts, writing blurbs, ordering books, updating the assistant editor and publisher on the status of our projects, sending letters to contributors and returning their contracts, checking the stock of our titles, and generally answering any other queries that come my way from authors or from the public.

One of my favourite parts of my job is when I send a published book to an author - the result of months, or even years of work for them. You can get to know some authors quite well while they work on their book, so working alongside them, then handing the project over to production and finally seeing the end product come out - knowing that your work has contributed to it - is a big reward.

The amount of work can be quite a challenge. I used to find it difficult, when I had first started, leaving things unfinished in my inbox at the end of the day but now I’ve learnt to manage the work load better, and prioritise things so I work more quickly.

As the first contact for many people, if there is a problem you can sometimes bear the brunt of it. However, it’s important to remember that there are other people working on your list there to help you. During university I worked in retail, and my customer service skills definitely come in useful at those times.

Working in publishing is ideal for a bookish person like me. The feeling when you walk into a bookshop and see a book you’ve worked on is quite exciting. Also, working in academic publishing means working with some really interesting people, who are writing about topics that I loved studying.

My advice for getting into the industry would be to read around and research the industry. Join the Society for Young Publishers and attend their meetings for more information. Experience is really important so do try to get some work experience in a publishing environment if you can. Alternatively other office experience can be useful. One thing when applying is not to give up - out of all the applications I sent in for jobs (about 60) I received two replies - and one of them was for the job I got.