hello and welcome back to my channel this week we're looking at audio rebecca is a
senior audio editor at harpercollins i hope you find her interview useful and enjoy
hi there i'm rebecca and i'm a senior audio editor at harpercollins publishers
and i look after the imprints hq stories mills and boone and farshall children's books
now as a senior audio editor i have a role that takes on many different parts of the publishing
industry i publish over 200 books into audio every year and i do everything from reading
stuff at submission with the editors to see if there's anything potentially that would work well
in audio i attend the acquisitions meetings i go to the marketing and sales meetings to
ensure that audio is part of the marketing campaign and that our digital sales team uh
has all the information they need to sell other titles to our online retailers i do casting i do
studio scheduling yeah a little bit of everything um and that's one of the things i really love
about audio is that no day is the same no week is the same some weeks i'm in the studio all week uh
some weeks i'm doing admin um there's another dual moment and i really love that variety in my role
so i have all the meetings um being in audio means you wear a lot of different hats
um and you have to be part of a lot of different processes so i attend acquisition meetings i
attend pitch meetings i don't attend the meetings are very specific to the book like cover art and
title and scheduling um but i do attend marketing meetings and sales meetings to make sure that
audio is part of the campaign and then this audio-specific meeting says the audio team meeting
there's meetings i have with individual editors to make sure that they're across
what i'm doing with their list and then there are sort of more audio and digital
sales based meetings that i attend as well so many many meetings many meetings indeed
advice i'd give for somebody who would be looking to work into audio is number one
listen to all the audio um and there is so many fantastic resources where you can get audio for
free you don't even have to spend money um i highly recommend listening to podcasts
that do new and fun and interesting things highly recommend seeing if your local library has a app
where you can borrow audio books which is again completely free look at the stuff that's trending
on the major retailers and yeah just listen to loads of audio because you're not going to have
these like amazing ideas and this sense of the industry unless you're listening um you don't
have to spend money to do so also recommend just going for it i think a lot of people
are held back by the fact that they don't apply for roles because they feel like they're under
qualified or they need to be perfect before they apply um go for it like the worst thing that can
happen in an interview is they say no and that's not a really bad thing at all and it's completely
worth it for the interview experience for getting a sense of what they're looking for um by the time
i interviewed for publishing i'd already done so many interviews for jobs i didn't care about
uh shop jobs and working in the kennels and all these jobs i was doing just to pay the way rather
than being a career i was particularly passionate about which gave me the advantage of when i did
apply for a job that i really really wanted i wasn't overwhelmed by the sort of mistakes i've
made previously because i'd already made them and i think a lot of people don't realize how
important interview skills are um because you could be perfect for the job but you
have to let them know and your cv and your cover lesson cannot do that for you
my favorite part of the job is being in the studio i love being in the studio
i'm a very creative person i love making things in the years where i was doing all sorts of japanese
jobs i was a film extra for a couple of films i always loved being on a film set
and just that energy and that magic of the behind the scenes and you'd think you know kind of ruins
the illusion seeing all the mechanics but for me it just made it so much more magical
and i get that same feeling every time i'm in a studio i love listening into different narrators
i love it when i'm in more of a directing role and i'm making suggestions i love
when it's something that i have spent a lot of time working on the casting and the adaptations
and seeing it all come to life i just i would spend all my time in the studio if i could
um because it's honestly my favorite part of the job and when i was an assistant in my first
role there was actually a recording studio in the building and it was such a cozy little studio and
it was just over there and if it got to like three o'clock and i was having a bit of like
that you know 3pm slump i would sneak down to the studio very quietly let
myself in and then just spend 15 minutes listening to whoever was recording that day
i think it's different for everyone i think everybody has a book out there
that they just connect with and it means something to them and it gives them a perspective that they
haven't seen before or they feel seen in a way that they haven't previously and i'm
quite lucky that i've always really enjoyed books but if you're somebody who maybe isn't
um a traditional reader in the sense of how publishing things readers are
my recommendation is to keep trying um if you read the first couple of chapters and you're not
interested don't force yourself through it um and remember that audiobooks are reading and ebooks
reading and comics are reading and graphic novels are reading there's such a stringent way about how
people should read and what people should read and i think it's absolute nonsense for me the
one book that i think had the biggest impact on my life is a book called house movement castle
um i read this in my early 20s and it's actually a children's book but it's my favorite book of
all time the protagonist at the time was very much in a similar position i was um she'd found herself
in a bit of a rut she was completely undervaluing her own powers and her own strengths uh and it's a
real book about finding yourself and having faith in yourself again after different circumstances
have brought your life to halt and for me that was the book i needed to read and i have two copies of
it um i have one very very dog-eared copy that i read in the bath and all the pages are warped and
then i have a second copy which isn't pristine in the sliders but it isn't as bad as the bath copy