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Within the walls of an academic publishing house, trade house, or magazine, you will find one person in common: the essential editorial assistant or intern. Not only is this a coveted role for the daring college-student or freshly-graduated over-achiever... this is the bottom of the ladder. This role is the foundation that most every editor started with. The intern/editorial assistant is especially important in academic publishing.
Disclaimer: This post's description of an editorial intern or editorial assistant will be limited to my experience within the role of an editorial assistant at a textbook packager. I wholeheartedly recommend a starting role at one of these textbook packagers too, and will explain why in a future blog.
The Competitive Nature of the Roles
Even programs that specialize in literature and publishing do not guarantee a "skip the line" pass for the intern and editorial assistant roles in publishing. These roles are crucial and are both considered essential to the process of raising your ranking within the industry. In many cases, publishing internships are completely unpaid. Some of them are even as much as 20 hours a week, and often will not give you more than travel expenses. However, assuming that you do well in the position, these internships can lead into the editorial assistant position--likely the most competitive role in publishing. Most of the larger publishing houses have very few these positions at a given time, if at all. However, across the board, whether at a publisher or a packager, this is an essential supportive role to the higher editorial staff.
Day-to-day
Editorial assistants and interns may not differ too much in their day-to-day tasks. That said, interns typically are not given the same level of trust and accountability as an editorial assistant. I've listed below a few tasks you may encounter within academic publishing's ground level.
Administrative tasks These are the tasks that need to get done, and no one wants to do them. Examples of these types of tasks follow: transmitting a piece of manuscript from one team to another, taking notes at meetings, confirming that pages have come in when they are supposed to according to various schedules.
Hands-on publishing training Within a starting role, supervisors should be providing you with training regarding the academic publishing world. Here are some potential topics for training editorial software, editorial services tasks (copyediting, or how to write alternative text for handicapable students), what a permissions staff does, the role of production staff, what project management does, and much more. If you have landed an internship or EA role, check in with your supervisor to make sure training is part of their game plan.
Editorial-adjacent work These are tasks that may still feel administrative, but contribute directly to the editorial team. These are the tasks most editorial managers, or lead editors, don't have the time to do. For example bookmap creation and management (bookmaps are page layouts for a given book), front and end matter MS creation/management (table of contents, glossary, index, credits), and art speccing (When an editor wants to place an image it goes to the art staff in the form of an art spec. This spec is a description of the art, and it must often be formatted in a particular fashion.)
Actual Editorial Actual editorial tasks do come around frequently enough, especially after you have been doing well in your position for a few months. This may mean that a typical 2-3 month intern will not experience these tasks. What I refer to as "actual" editorial are tasks like proofreading, light copyediting, printer reviews, and more. Although it's unlikely you will do much in the way of developmental editing, or even line editing, these tasks are ones that real live editors do on a daily basis. These are the exciting tasks.
These jobs are very difficult to get ahold of, but are very important to the success of any starry-eyed editor-in-training. Are there other components to the roles you would like to hear more about? Tweet me here: https://twitter.com/TextbookAuthor1.
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