Reflections on Two Weeks in Publishing Part 2

With the wisdom gained from my meeting with my boss out of the way, we'll now move on to wisdom gained from my meeting with an assistant editor who had just gotten an agent for his novel. I didn't learn quite as much new information as I'd hoped, but it was still great to talk to him and get his perspective on what seems, at first glance, like the obvious choice of trying to do both careers at once.

The answers to most of my questions were the ones I expected. His process was much the same as anyone else's. He researched which agents he might want to represent him and sent them query letters. The difference is that he had inside information--he knew what the agents were like personally, what they looked for, how they represented their authors, etc. That seemed to be, to him, the most useful part of working in publishing as it related to getting published. There are things that you pick up working in the industry that simply can't be conveyed without doing the work--it's like any job in that respect.

I was also glad to hear that nobody at the publishing house seemed to be bothered by the fact that he was working on publishing a novel. In fact, most people seemed to be pretty supportive of him. He said that he expected it would be the same pretty much anywhere, but that he could imagine that if someone was a pain in the ass about constantly reminding everyone that he (or she ;-p) was a writer, it would get pretty old pretty fast. Common sense, I suppose, but also worth remembering--being a good writer doesn't necessarily make you a good publisher, and vice versa.

I asked him whether he had mentioned the fact that he worked in publishing in his query letters. He said that he hadn't (he had actually been so worried that he had written to agents under a pseudonym), but that in retrospect it wouldn't have been a bad idea, so long as you avoided looking like you were trying to leverage your position somehow, and that mentioning that you had met people in a professional context before (something I personally would be leery about) wasn't a faux pas either.

Finally, I asked him whether or not working in publishing had affected his own writing---whether he had been distracted, or too tired to write after working with books all day, or had been affected unduly by what he was working on from 9-5 while he was writing.

He seemed quite sure that it hadn't affected him adversely, and said that he honestly wasn't sure he would want to write full-time anyway---that being in an office environment really helped him as far as creativity went, and if he had to be in an office it might as well be one that worked with books all the time. He also said that, for him, working in non-fiction (he is a fiction writer) was extremely helpful as well, as rather than saturating him with what was currently being done for his own genre, it exposed him a lot of new ideas that he would never have taken the time to research had it not been for his work.

It was a very interesting meeting for me, to say the least. I was reassured to hear that trying to write and publish at the same time wasn't looked down upon by people in the industry, and also that using your professional contacts in that manner was accepted, so long as you weren't a jerk about it. Tomorrow I'll finish up this series of posts with my conclusions about working in publishing, how it affected my own writing, and whether I think it's a good idea.