Final for 99H

The speaker, Julia Kluge, shares her experience working in the marketing department of the University of Nebraska Press. She highlights the lengthy process of publishing a book and the importance of marketing in the final stages. She discusses the role of publicists in promoting books and generating reviews. Julia also mentions her tasks of sending out books for review, researching venues for author events, and creating social media posts. She emphasizes the value of networking and learning to ask clarifying questions to avoid mistakes. Overall, her time at the press has solidified her desire to pursue a career in the publishing industry. Hello and welcome to A Day in the Life of a UNP Marketing Student. My name is Julia Kluge and I have been working at the University of Nebraska Press three days a week for the last three months. This has given me a lot of insight in regards to the publishing industry, which is a field I'm interested in pursuing. The funny thing about publishing is that marketing is really only when a book is in the last developmental stages before it gets sent to a printer and out to a bookstore. Books typically take anywhere from one to three years to get ready for publishing. At the University of Nebraska Press, we typically print around 80 books a season. The Press has two seasons, fall and winter, and the second season being spring and summer. This means that we are producing 160 academic books in a year, which is a lot to keep track of. So when we are in the marketing department, we have to keep track of hundreds upon hundreds of books and authors. Some authors have interviews on television, others do written interviews, and some people just write reviews on the book and post it to their blog. All of these things are important because it can help generate numbers for how well a book might be doing. One of the things that I was able to learn about was how people communicate in the publishing industry. A lot of emails and phone calls occur in the marketing department. The publicists are in charge of interacting with the authors about how they will be promoting their books. They also reach out to people that are going to review their author's books. The publicists also have to do research for which articles do ultimately come out reviewing the book. This can be used as praise for future books or in use of promoting the book that is being reviewed in a later marketing message. This occasionally leads to issues where we as the Press have to reach out to publications of articles because they don't always offer them for free. Typically we get the articles about books from our Press for free, seeing as we typically send them a book for them to review for free. I think the last time I checked, I am pretty sure that in February, March, and April I had archived over 180 reviews per month, which is a lot of reviews, especially for a smaller publishing house. Another interesting task that I am required to do is that I am supposed to send out books for the publicists to people in order for them to review the book. Or sometimes for the book to be submitted to awards. If I can't find a book in-house, which means a book on a bookshelf that is designated to be sent out, we then have to go through and create an Excel document to send to the printer we are contracted with. They will then print and send the book we ask them to, which does require specific instructions. The shipping address can't exceed three lines, and each of those lines can't be more than 35 characters long. Outside of the sending of books and getting in contact with various people, the publicists will also often ask me to help them with research on venues or platforms that would be good places to host events for the authors. This also includes looking for podcasts, as well as looking for different media personnel who might be able to pull some strings for people to get an interview or something of the like. Overall, this experience was able to teach me a lot about networking, both with my coworkers and with people I've never talked to before. This will help me down the line because I know how to cold email people, asking for help and or advice. That honestly feels like the hardest challenge, being able to reach out to people and not knowing how they might respond. But I guess this opportunity has helped show me that if I never try, I might never know. Another thing that I have been asked to help with on the job is creating social media posts for our University of Nebraska Press social media accounts. I help draft posts that will be scheduled to be published during our baseball sales board stand at this month. But it was really interesting to see how to format posts that are meant to draw people to our website and to check out the books that we offer. This is going to be helpful in the future because there is an extremely good chance that this will be the future of marketing. I have thought about starting a craft business that I could run on the site as a source of extra income. I have thought about making an e-commerce shop in order to reach the most people possible. But one of the biggest things that I will have to start learning is how to make interesting content and how to draw people into my store. So knowing how to grab people's attention with social media posts and advertisements will be an extremely helpful skill in the future. Throughout this process, I have been constantly learning new tasks and expectations of my role at the press. With each new task, I tend to ask a lot of clarifying questions, especially since I don't want to make a mistake out of ignorance, which is a really good thing to have within the publishing industry because everything that is happening tends to be fairly permanent once we send it out. So being able to ask lots of questions and clarifying tasks before completing them, especially if there has been a mistake that could have been prevented by just asking a question, we are able to move forward and meet our deadlines on time. Sometimes I do feel like I'm being annoying, but I would rather come off as annoying than wasting time doing something wrong and then having to go back and fix it. This is a skill I have worked on developing over the last few years. So while it can be scary to keep asking questions of people, I feel as if they would rather have me ask than have me do a project wrong, especially when there are tight deadlines and have to fix it when we are trying to do things as quickly as possible in the publishing industry. My time at the University of Nebraska Press has been an enlightening experience and has helped me to confirm the fact that I do really want to pursue this industry and to keep working towards my goal of becoming a novel editor. So while I am in the marketing department, it never hurts to have more skills to sound or appealing on the job market. I hope you have enjoyed learning about what it is I do at my job for the University of Nebraska Press. I thank you for your time and I hope that you have a wonderful day and will be excited to read the next book on your list.