Hi, guys, it's Mabel, and welcome to MTV Cribs.
Is that a show that's still on?
Hi, I'm Mabel.
Welcome to Office Hours.
This is what I do at HarperCollins.
I am a children's book editor at HarperCollins at the imprint
Katherine Tegen Books.
I get to work on everything from picture books, chapter books,
graphic novels, middle grade novels, and young adult books.
And I love it, it's a great job.
For someone who doesn't know anything about publishing,
I would describe it as a marathon of books.
I think a lot of people assume that children's book editing means that I sit
at my desk all day and read kids' books.
And if that were a job, I would love it.
So [LAUGH] whoever is recruiting for that job,
please feel free to find me on LinkedIn.
So I thought I'd show you some of the books that I've worked on.
This one's beautiful.
I have a book called Does Earth Feel?
And it's always fun to see what's underneath the jacket.
We've got chapter books.
So this one is written by Corey Ann Haydu.
And we have YA books, too.
So this one is I'll Be the One by Lyla Lee, and it's all about a K-pop star.
And we had a cover model actually who is a K-pop dancer.
A normal day involves a lot of meetings.
I'm writing flap copy during the day, responding to agent's questions.
We look at everything from how the color is
printing onto the type of paper we've chosen for the project.
So for example, for picture books,
we often think should this go on a matte paper, should this go on a glossy paper?
Weighing in on a million different matters.
Other days involve a lot of just sitting there and editing a manuscript, and
writing up notes, and thinking a lot about plot, voice, tone, characters.
We get pulled into all sorts of places and no day is the same.
You're always thinking about your readership and trying to make sure,
first of all, that you're not doing any harm in regards to representation.
That you're not going to get anything incorrect
in a way that would harm your reader.
And that's why we also see more content warnings now for books.
Especially if it's dealing with something that might trigger someone's eating
disorder or something else.
So we are always very careful about what we're putting out into the world.
And making sure that not only is it a compelling read, but
one that is going to do right by our readers.
So because we're working from home right now, all the proofs
that we normally review in the office together, we have to do from home now.
This one is Are You a Cheeseburger?
We got a fifth neon color to print, which is this beautiful bright green.
The cover is Are You a Cheeseburger?
And the back has a little seed butt, and it says, maybe!
And there's something special about children's books too.
When you're a kid and able to read a piece of fiction,
and be able to truly fall into it.
To believe in dragons, or wizards, or whatever else, and think that there
is something out there and have it mean something important to you.
And influence your life and how you grow up in a way that adult literature doesn't,
because you're not a kid anymore.
One of the books that had a big impact on me growing up was
Barbara Cooney's Miss Rumphius.
And it's a picture book all about a woman who is told that she needs to leave
the world a more beautiful place than she found it.
And she does this by planting beautiful blue and purple lupines around the world.
My mother loved flowers and we would spend the weekends gardening together.
And this was really our special time, one-on-one together,
because my mom had six kids, and that's a huge family for a single mother.
And she would be gardening, I'd be pulling up weeds.
And in half Chinese, half English, I would try and
summarize the books that I had read for her that week.
And then I got home one day after school and
I had found that she had went out of her way to buy those flowers from the story,
and had planted two of them in front of my bedroom window.
I think it's such a good example of the ways in which books
can provide unexpected moments for you.
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My path to publishing involved going to UC San Diego, where I studied political
science and public law, because I thought that was the path I needed to go on.
But by my fourth year in college I realized, my gosh,
I hate everyone in my class.
Everyone just wants to speak louder than the other person,
and those weren't my people.
So I ended up thinking about what else I really loved, and
I thought back to children's literature and how much it had influenced my life.
So I was able to find an internship with Writers House,
a literary agent named Steve Malk.
After eight months with Steve, he said if you wanted to make it in publishing,
you have to move to New York.
So I packed my bags, came out here,
got a job with Harper on a completely different side, more on the business end.
And stayed there for a few months before I moved around a bit.
And then finally got a chance to break into children's editorial at
Katherine Tegen Books.
One of the harder parts about being an editor is that as a woman of color,
as an Asian American, it can be difficult sometimes to move
through a place that is predominantly white.
Even within very liberal, well-meaning circles,
which is what publishing often is, you have mistakes that are made.
There are microaggressions.
There are books that shouldn't have been signed up.
There are uncomfortable conversations.
So you are both someone who's just trying to move through the industry as best
you can and protect yourself, which is important, but also
help make things better for your other POC and other marginalized identities.
You're trying to make it a better workplace for everyone, right?
But you're also trying to do right by your authors and
bring in more diverse literature.
So it's three different buckets, yourself, your colleagues, and your books and
authors.
To be a small part of this industry now and
creating stories is really important to me because I get to play a part in helping to
shape the stories that hopefully will influence kids in the same way today.
Common misconceptions about the job is that they think that the books you're
working on aren't real books.
Kids books are real books.
They are just as important and critical to our culture as any other sort of book.
There's a lot of reasons why I think people disregard children's literature,
especially YA books.
And that's because they think it's for teenage girls.
And so as a result, they think it's somehow not worth their time.
This idea that YA literature is somehow less than something else
because of its audience,
I think is speaking larger to how we have degraded teenage girls for too long.
They are so smart.
They are the next generation of leaders.
And so to assume that somehow YA literature isn't worth our time is silly.
Thanks for watching.
Make sure to check out our other Office Hours videos.
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