RRP? ASP? WTF?

Day one working in the publishing industry complete, and man does it feel good to finally say that. I even got to write some rejection letters! Somehow it feels a little different when your name follows the "Sincerely" instead of the "Dear" on those ;-p.

At any rate, I learned a lot of things, one of which was that the publishing trade magazines would have been an invaluable tool for gaining knowledge about the industry before I got there. You hear these mentioned every once in awhile under the "advice for aspiring authors" sections of websites, but not too often and not nearly in bold enough terms. To be perfectly honest, I can't even remember an American one off the top of my head.

But reading through The Bookseller, a British trade magazine, while waiting for my IT account to be set up today taught me much more about the publishing industry than I expected to learn in an hour or so. Not only did I get a sense for what sales figures are right now, and in general, and what constitutes success (#50 on the bestsellers list had sold, I believe, around 7,000 copies last week), but I was exposed to terms I had never heard before, like RRP (I think the suggested retail price of a book) and ASP (stands for Average Sale Price, and usually around half of the RRP...one goal for tomorrow is to track my boss down and ask why there's such a discrepancy).

My first day at work very much humanized the publishing industry for me as well. I was fortunate enough to start on the day that the company I'm interning for published its quarterly newsletter, in which you could clearly see the different departments laying out what they were proud of accomplishing over the last quarter. It was strange and somewhat touching to realize that the people behind the rigamarole of the submissions process and all the rejection letters, who hold such power over so many people's dreams, are at some level insecure enough that they hold up their accomplishments (some of them quite humble compared to others) for others to see and hopefully appreciate.

I also made my second big mistake in planning the next step in my career today (the first being a grammatical error in my resume that persisted through the first 8 or so applications for summer internships I sent out. Oddly enough, the company I'm going to wind up working for this summer was the first one that got the error-free resume. Go figure ;-p). I have been informed that I missed the deadline for applying for my school's internship funding by a week. Meaning that I'll begin starving for the pursuit of my career slightly earlier than anticipated. Oh well...at least I like ramen noodles.