Thursdays with Amanda: How to Get a Publishing Job

Amanda Luedeke is a literary agent with MacGregor Literary. Every Thursday, she posts about growing your author platform. You can follow her on Twitter @amandaluedeke or join her Facebook group to stay current with her wheelings and dealings as an agent. Her author marketing book, The Extroverted Writer, is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

I’m going to deviate from talking marketing this week and instead will address a question that I get asked A LOT.

I look quite young (okay, I guess you could say that I AM young, but 30 is also considered middle age, so…). Because I look young, I’m always fielding questions as to how I got in the business, how one becomes an agent, whether or not this is an internship (yes, I’ve heard that one), etc.

Though I must admit these questions are coming at me less and less (probably indicative of me looking older and older), they still pop up, and I can see the wheels turning as folk try and figure out how a 24-year-old (this is the age they typically give me) could possibly be an agent AND have been in the industry for five years AND have held a marketing career before that AND worked in higher ed AND be married.

Fact is, there are lots of people in the business who are much younger than I. I once talked with an editor at Penguin who was 24 at the time. 24!!! 

Me with fellow youngsters in publishing!

So HOW does one get a publishing job? There are a few different tracks.

1. THE COLLEGIATE TRACK. Many young people are getting into the business these days by pursing publishing or editing or writing or marketing or design (or pretty much any kind of program that would be useful in a publishing setting) in college and then doing internships. The internships then lead to jobs or at the very least, recommendations. The 24-year-old Penguin editor I mentioned had done an internship at a major agency. She got a recommendation that landed her the spot at Penguin.

2. THE NETWORKING TRACK. In this instance, people get into publishing because they know someone who makes it happen or at the very least whose name gets them an interview. This business is very much about who you know, and it can be a tight-knit group with editors jumping from house to house and very little room for names to be pulled from the endless HR file. If your plan is to apply to a publishing job and sit back and wait, it’s probably not going to happen. You need to be able to name drop to get noticed.

3. THE “I FELL INTO IT” TRACK. You’ll many times hear publishing professionals say that they weren’t planning on a career in publishing. It just happened. Maybe they happened to be sitting by an agent on a plane and one thing led to another. Maybe they started in the warehouse and worked their way up. Maybe they sent a note about a book to a publisher that resulted in the publisher hiring them as a freelance editor (haha, not sure that has ever happened, but hey!). This track is hard to force, because it’s all a matter of being in the right place at the right time and then saying YES to the doors that open. (That last part is key…so many people say no because they feel they don’t have the time…or they don’t want to work for free for awhile, etc).

My journey was an “I Fell Into It” example. I was happily working in higher education when I met Chip, who happened to be serving as a visiting professor. He took an interest in me, gave me some side projects to do, and it grew from there. It wasn’t easy, though! For THREE YEARS I maintained a full time job while spending my evenings and weekends doing work for Chip and building an agent list. I finally got to a point where my side job could no longer be a side job if it were going to grow. It was then that I went full time as an agent. Fall of 2011.

Did you catch that? I juggled two jobs for three years. But I knew what I wanted and so it was worth it.

PURSUING YOUR DREAMS CAN BE HARD WORK

Me with my first agented book!

Many times, we want the path to be easy. We want to be able to fill out an application, get interviewed, and then get the job. But gosh, if it were that easy then everyone would be chosen! And these jobs wouldn’t have value.

If you’re wanting a career in publishing and if you’re still in school, I highly urge you to do as many internships as possible! Go out to New York. Get in with the big houses. It may cost money and it may be out of your comfort zone, but the collegiate track is where it’s at for young people.

If you’re wanting a career in publishing and you’re out of school, then I recommend surrounding yourself with industry professionals. Attend conferences. Make connections. Be polite, give space, but figure out a way to keep the conversation going.

Get a head start on author marketing!

What was YOUR road to publishing? Or what questions do you have in terms of how to get there? Let me know!