First Day

Just completed my first day as an editorial assistant at A K Peters. It was a good day with good people, and I think I’m going to learn a lot here. I expect to get good experience with the entire publishing process and gain a broad perspective of editing. I also expect I'll learn a lot more discipline doing the nitty gritty hands-on of editing.

The day started with 3 meetings:

1. Editorial meeting, where we discussed all the projects currently in editing and made assignments. I was assigned to my first three projects.
2. Company meeting, where every department discussed status updates on their work. Because the company is so small, I got to hear from acquisitions, production, design, marketing, and sales, which was fascinating. I’m looking forward to learning through experience about every stage of publishing.
3. Covers meeting, where we discussed some cover possibilities for a new publication. No surprise, this was much more subdued than the Candlewick covers meeting I attended.

I spent most of the rest of the day starting to learn LaTex (“tech”), the math-oriented typesetting program we use, which involves quite a bit of coding. It will take some work, but I think I’ll really like having so much direct control over the text, as I did while editing in WordPerfect for a professor years ago.

Camber and I celebrated the day with dinner at Not Your Average Joe’s where we had a delicious dinner that made up for the terrible one she had at Joe’s American Food during her first week at A K Peters.