20 March 2023

I won a Printing Charity Rising Star Award in 2019 whilst working at a small publishing company in Lancaster. As a Publishing and Book Design Assistant, I worked closely with authors to develop their manuscripts into professionally produced books. And as it was a small company, I had the opportunity to work on all aspects of the publishing process like marketing, editorial, sales, and production.

Publishing has historically been quite London-centric (especially pre-pandemic); working tucked away in the north of England, there were few opportunities to fund professional development. I had recently graduated from Lancaster University with a degree in English Literature and Creative Writing, but I was new to the publishing world, with my experience limited to the role I was already in.

One goal was to improve my project-management skills so that I could take on and lead individual projects of my own. I found a course run by the Publishing Training Centre (PTC) in London, that would help me discover more about project management, working with authors and suppliers, learning about budgeting, scheduling and dealing with delays and problems. This course would help me understand the editorial process in depth, making me better at my job. However, the cost of travel, a night’s stay in London and the course fees made it difficult to fund. Then I came across the Printing Charity and their Rising Star Awards (previously the Print Futures Awards).

Applying for an award

The application process was straightforward, with a written submission followed by an in-person interview with the judges. The questions were about what I wanted to fund with the award money and why it would be important to progressing my career. The interview similarly was about me and my ambitions and how the Printing Charity funding would help me with my professional and personal-development skills.

The award ceremony at the House of Lords was the highlight of the whole experience. The opportunity to interact with other award winners and members of the industry was something I hadn’t had before then.

The course I enrolled on with the award was the PTC’s Editorial Project Management – two days covering how to plan a project, budgeting, estimating costs, working with authors and suppliers to develop realistic expectations, and many other interesting skills associated with print and digital project management. Doing this course helped me identify areas to improve on in my working life and boosted my confidence when creating estimates and working closely with authors.

The benefits of the course

One of the unexpected benefits of taking this course was the interaction with others in the publishing industry who worked at bigger publishing houses. It gave me an opportunity to network and learn how a big publisher like Penguin Random House or Oxford University Press operates compared to a small independent publishing company. I also realised the importance of having a rounded understanding of the whole process from start to finish, as many people working in large publishing companies tend to get caught up in the day-to-day nuances of their own work, and never get a glimpse at what it’s like in another department. Having this overview of the editorial process was especially important to me when I started working at Taylor and Francis (T&F) in 2020.

Even though the course I took focused on editorial project management, I learnt many transferable skills that I still use in my current job (Procurement Controller at T&F) working closely with internal production teams and external suppliers to ensure our books are printed and available globally. These skills have helped me manage and lead internal projects on supplier selection, and improve processes.

Having an understanding of editorial schedules, estimating and budgeting helps me manage manufacturing schedules, and work out costs so that we keep to the agreed margin. The skills I’ve learned on negotiating with printers, and dealing with problems and delays, have definitely come in handy – allowing me to understand the bigger picture and see how different departments work together to produce books on time and to budget.

If you are at a stage where you want to progress in your career and know what courses or help you need to get there, then the Rising Star Awards is an opportunity you absolutely cannot miss. Investing in your own professional and personal development is really important to having a satisfying career, and I cannot recommend the Printing Charity enough!

Srishti Kadu is a Procurement Controller in the Books Publishing Services Department at Taylor & Francis. 

You can find full details about the 2023 Rising Star Awards, including FAQs and an application form, on the Printing Charity's website. The closing date for applications is 2 April 2023.

The Society of Young Publishers (SYP) was established in 1949 and is run fully by volunteers. Anyone who is in the first ten years of their publishing career can join the Society and serve on one of the committees.

The SYP helps people to get into and progress within the publishing industry through a range of events, conferences, partnerships, and schemes, such as the mentorship scheme. As an SYP member, you will be able to access various discounts from our partners, website job board and InPrint magazine.

With six national branches – in London, Oxford, the North (Leeds/Manchester), Scotland, the Southwest and newly launched in Wales – the SYP is a truly UK-wide organisation, with one more office in Ireland (Dublin).

The SYP mentorship scheme

Our mentorship scheme is a great opportunity to receive guidance, insights and personalised feedback from publishing experts. You don’t need to be an SYP member to apply. Last year, we had applicants from many different backgrounds, with candidates working across small independent publishers and the ‘big five’. If you think you could benefit from the mentorship scheme and have specific goals in mind, I would encourage you to apply.

Depending on the SYP branch, there are three mentorship schemes to apply for – Into, Ahead and Launch.

• SYPInto is designed for those searching for their first job in the publishing industry

• SYPAhead is aimed at anyone who is already working in the industry and looking to progress their career, and

• SYPLaunch is for freelancers, those looking to start their company or progress in the industry in a less traditional way. Run by SYP UK, applications are welcomed from anyone based in England, Wales, Ireland and Northern Ireland.

Check the SYP mentorship page for information on which scheme is available in your area.

Reshape your career in six months

The mentorship scheme lasts around six months and consists of a minimum of four one-on-one meetings between a mentee and a mentor, often held virtually. The exact structure is up to you and your mentor, but we suggest using the first meeting to further explore your goals and objectives and establish the structure for the remainder of the scheme.

SYP is also organising a virtual social event to meet mentors and mentees from the other schemes. This is a great networking opportunity, especially if you’re trying to break into the publishing industry, or have just moved to a new area for a job.

How to apply

SYP uses a blind application process to avoid any bias. Applicants indicate two publishing areas of interest, so we can match them with publishing experts with relevant experience and skills. Other questions are specific to the scheme but generally consider your motivations for applying and your specific goals and objectives. While we try to match as many applicants as we can, it very much depends on the availability of mentors in specific areas of the publishing industry.

My top tip is to make your objectives as clear and realistic as possible. This will emphasise that you know what you want to achieve from your mentorship and how it will benefit you. Those objectives are also a great starting point for the first meeting with your mentor.

Applications will open in May 2023 (to be confirmed) and successful applicants will be notified shortly after. The number of applicants varies by scheme and SYP branch, but last year we had over 100 applications for SYPInto in London.

Learn from inspiring mentors

To get the most of your mentorship scheme, remember that mentors are volunteering their time and knowledge, and are happy to answer your questions and offer their personal and unique insights. On SYPInto, for example, we were lucky to have mentors from publishing-recruitment agency Inspired Selection, who offered invaluable insights and tips for writing CVs and cover letters.

This year, both our schemes in London included professionals from trade and academic publishing, working across a broad range of departments – from editorial and marketing, to rights and agenting. We had mentors from publishers such as Penguin Random House (PRH) and Hachette, as well as many others.

While, unsurprisingly, there has been a huge interest in editorial from the applicants, we have seen numerous people interested in marketing and publicity and a significant increase in interest in rights, scouting and agenting. With physical book fairs returning after the pandemic, rights are more visible than ever.

My personal experience

I completed the SYPAhead mentorship scheme a while ago, when I was working in my first publishing job and looking to move into a different area of publishing. My mentor, a Rights Executive at PRH, was brilliant in explaining her role in greater detail and offering useful guidance and tips – from job-specific advice to working on my CV. By the end of my mentorship, I managed to land a job in rights.

Alicja Baranowska is Foreign Rights Sales Executive at Welbeck Publishing and Co-Chair of the SYP. Follow her on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram.

Follow the SYP on Twitter. Full details of how to apply for a place on the SYP’s 2023 mentorship scheme will be available in the upcoming months on the SYP website.

20 February 2023

World Book Day (WBD) is a charity that changes lives through reading. Every year, and year-round, it creates a national conversation about the enjoyment of books and reading. Through its annual event in March – with its joy, celebration and fun – we encourage more children to read, and raise awareness of the difference reading makes to their lives. Through our year-round activities we support families, schools, libraries, bookshops and the wider community to help children develop a life-long love of reading.

Our aim is to improve life chances for more children, particularly those growing up faced with disadvantage and inequality. Whether we like to measure success as educational attainment or well-being, reading for pleasure matters more than a child’s family circumstances, their parents’ educational background or their income.

But reading for pleasure is in decline. Evidence from the National Literacy Trust (NLT) shows that in 2022 just 48% of children said they enjoyed reading, a figure which – when we look just at children and young people growing up with disadvantage and inequality – drops to 44%.

So, with reading for pleasure is at its lowest level since 2005, and a cost-of-living crisis combined with deepening educational and social inequality, WBD is a celebration that matters, and makes a difference.

The importance of reading

There’s no question that WBD is a huge presence in children’s lives. We know that 97% of children have heard of it, and that when children take part in a WBD event, 55% go on to read more books as a result.

We know that many children aren’t confident in saying ‘I am a reader’, despite its vital importance to their development. That’s why at WBD we have looked at the evidence to understand what factors are at play, and use our annual celebration to provide routes to reading enjoyment.

We’ve defined ‘reading for pleasure’ as ‘feeling [a] sense of satisfaction or pleasure by engaging with chosen reading material in their free time’. And we have absorbed and analysed the evidence to present six elements that enable a child to read in this way:

• Being read to regularly
• Access to books at home
• The ability for children to choose what they want to read
• Having trusted adults and peers sharing and recommending books
• Time to read
• The reading experience being enjoyable

Our resources, activities, events and the celebration itself are all based on encouraging these six behaviours, and finding ways to overcome barriers to reading.

The NLT also found that 1 in 10 children from disadvantaged backgrounds said that they don’t own a single book of their own at home. It’s important that, through an exceptional collaboration between publishers and booksellers, WBD is able to offer every child and young person the chance to experience choosing and owning a book – for free.

An industry collaboration

Every year WBD works with publishers and booksellers to make a range of £1/ €1.50 books available for children, who can access them for free when exchanged with the £1/ €1.50 token they receive in school or at nursery. 1 in 5 school children who receive free meals say the first book they have owned is a WBD book.

WBD’s charitable work has been supported by the industry from its earliest days, over 25 years ago. The first WBD in the UK and Ireland took place in 1997 to encourage young people to discover the pleasure of reading. As one of its founders, Baroness Gail Rebuck, recalled, “We wanted to do something to reposition reading and our message is the same today as it was then – that reading is fun, relevant, accessible, exciting, and has the power to transform lives.”

Now, in 2023, our headline sponsor is still National Book Tokens, and we receive funding from over 40 publishers. This year over 4,000 bookshops are taking part, making the WBD books available to children across the UK and Ireland.

We know WBD has more to do. We want to make sure the charity, our event and our year-round work helps to improve engagement with reading, and reach more diverse communities to support life-changing reading habits with children and families experiencing disadvantage and inequality.

Working together with publishers and booksellers, WBD is helping to reverse the decline in children choosing to read. As an industry, in supporting WBD publishers and booksellers are helping to improve life chances for all children.

Cassie Chadderton is Chief Executive of World Book Day. This year’s WBD takes place on 2 March 2023. Find out more – including ways to fundraise – at www.worldbookday.com.

Cassie Chadderton is Chief Executive of World Book Day. This year’s WBD takes place on 2 March 2023. Find out more – including ways to fundraise – at www.worldbookday.com.

You can also follow WBD on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

15 December 2022

There are certain things that everyone who rewrites for a living, or who calls themselves a substantive editor (I’m not sure that anyone does, mind you), does so instinctively that they can’t see the need to tell anyone about them. As somebody who runs the PTC’s Rewriting and Substantive Editing course, there are four that stand out for me. (I’ve conflated writing and rewriting here, but I think these four apply to both.)

1. If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough

The first is Albert Einstein’s famous saying: ‘If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.’ This should be written in bold outside every university or all those other establishments that routinely produce documents in which the simplicity of the idea has been buried under the complexity of the utterance. If you’re an editor asked to work on any text written by someone who’s not absorbed Einstein’s doctrine, the correct riposte to any attempt on their part to intimidate you with their intellectual sophistication should be ‘It’s not big and it’s not clever’.

2. Don’t put anything on your screen until your thoughts are clear

The second is, for anyone who’s producing the writing rather than working on it, think about how long you spend preparing to write, and then treble, quadruple that time. Writing – and editing too, in fact pretty much anything else – is unaccountably better the more time you spend thinking about what you want to write before you actually put finger to keyboard. You don’t want anything on your screen before your thoughts are clear; even the tritest sentence, when there on your screen, becomes the starting point for the rest of your writing – and sorting that out can be a nightmare.

3. Focus on your reader, not your knowledge

The third is, what you want to say about something is neither here nor there. The important thing is what your reader needs or wants to know about it. So forget about parading all your voluminous knowledge on a subject; just think about what the person who’s picking up your document/paper/book wants to know. As with any relationship, the more you think about what the other person wants to get out of it, the richer the relationship will be for both of you.

4. Take a break, then review your writing

And the fourth is twofold. You need to review your writing. But you need to review it in a way that is not just rubber-stamping. You need to be as critical of your own writing as you would be of any other writer whose work you’re editing. What are you actually saying here? Does the reader really need to know that? Is that the clearest way to express what you’re on about? Is that the order in which they need to receive the information? These can’t be idle questions: they bring the possibility that you tear up everything you’ve written to that point and start again.

That’s the first part of the twofold. And the second is, don’t ever hope to get any sensible idea of how good your rewriting or writing has been by looking at it immediately after you’ve completed it. If you do, guess what? It’ll look just brilliant – because all the thought processes that led you to write it in that way are still present in your mind, and all they’re doing is standing up and applauding what you’ve done.

Look at it the next day, however, or after you’ve gone for a walk or skived off to watch a bit of tele, and you will suddenly notice things that acutely embarrass you. Did I really write that? I can’t honestly have thought that was an improvement on the original, can I? We all rail against time, but time, as in the sense of time elapsed, is a brilliant editor in its own right, shyly pointing its finger at embarrassing repetitions, really unfortunate choices of phrase, constructions that are laboured and heavy-handed.

Yes, of course, your manager’s looking over your shoulder and saying, ‘Well? Well? When will this be ready?’ But you just need to have the courage to say to them, ‘Well, you can have it now, if you’re so keen to – but it won’t be anything like as good as it will be if I give it to you tomorrow midday when I’ll have had the chance to look at it after a good night’s sleep. Your choice.’

Okay, that last advice about responding to your manager? Maybe hold fire a bit. You might need to be sure of your ground before you take it to that level. I don’t want anyone to be shown the door as a result of following this advice . . .

Andrew Steeds is Director of Simply Put Ltd and Founder of The Writing Clinic. He runs the PTC course Rewriting and Substantive Editing (Non-Fiction). Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.