hi my name's lily and i'm an editorial manager at
lady bird education which is a part of penguin random house
hello and welcome back to my channel this week we're looking at editorial again and
lily ross is going to tell us more about what it is to be an editorial manager
at penguin random house or the lady bird imprint i hope you find it useful and enjoy
so as an editorial manager my job is kind of split into three areas i would say so the first thing
is really detailed editorial work there are kind of two different types of editorial
they're not always two separate teams but they are in penguin random house children's so we
have the commissioning editorial team and their job probably more widely known outside publishing
they're looking at which books we should publish which authors we should commission and they
would then be working with the author to get the manuscript written they also deal with any kind of
wider issues of things like characterization or plot that kind of really fundamental to
the whole book once the manuscript is in a pretty good state it would then come over to
me and the managing editorial team to copy edit this really involves looking
at a slightly more detailed level things like grammar punctuation spelling consistency
throughout timeline and structure within educational publishing you might be looking to
make sure that the language is appropriate for the age level that any uh questions or exercises are
consistently worded throughout the book you also might be checking artwork briefs for an
illustrated book to make sure they you know make sense and are really clear for the illustrator
once the copy edit has finished it would then be up to me to resolve any queries that come
back from that so it'd normally be a freelance copy editor who's actually done the copy edit
themselves and i would kind of commission them and work with them and they would send me their
their finished work which would normally be kind of track changes in a word document
and i would answer as many queries as possible sometimes if they have spotted something a bit
bigger or more fundamental i would go back to the commissioning editor and maybe the author to get
that resolved and then we would kind of prepare the manuscript for design so this might be making
sure that particularly for educational books that have you know really specific layouts specific
design instructions and artwork briefs making sure all of that is really clearly laid out artworks
are numbered correctly all that sort of stuff so once the manuscript's in a really clean stay
there's no comments no unresolved track changes we would then pass it over to the design team once
design have laid it all out they produce a pdf and it circulates amongst the teams normally for me in
education it goes to the commissioning editor to me the editorial manager and also to the designer
and there might also be kind of more senior people like the publisher or the editorial director
and also the art director who's kind of the head of the design team who also look at the layouts
and kind of add their comments to it we're all looking for slightly different things sometimes we
might be picking up on the same sort of stuff but but for me it's really kind of the first layouts
comparing them against the manuscript making sure that all the text has been set exactly how it
should be you know italics fold everything like that but no text has been missed out
making sure that all the design instructions have been followed and all the artwork briefs
have been realized into you know proper artwork and normally at that first layer it would just
be pencil sketches rather than a final artwork so there are some things that you just don't
realize that copy edit because they kind of don't exist until layout you might just have
too many words on a page which we call over mata so we might be looking to cut back some text or
you might rejig the layout if the artwork just isn't working alongside the text um the designer
then takes in all the corrections one of my jobs is to clay everybody's comments together
and to make sure all the queries answered so that when designed to take in all the corrections it's
just a really clean set of instructions for them designer takes in all the corrections
and then the next layouts would be produced and when i'm looking at those my first job
is to check that all the previous corrections were all taken in completely accurately and
that nothing was missed and i would also normally send out those layouts to a freelance proofreader
so proofreader is looking similar things to a copy editor in terms of grammar punctuation
spelling they're also looking for any design errors or mistakes and they're really kind of
looking very very detailed into the very minute details of kind of everything on the page checking
page numbers contents the imprint page that has all the copyright information and kind of
everything goes through a really really thorough check and that process kind of continues really
uh the layouts gradually get more and more refined and clean until we get to the files that we're
happy to send on to production and it'll be my job as well as the designers to sign off those files
to print which i find the scariest part of my job i'm always terrified there's going to be a mistake
in there that i've i've missed that's the kind of editorial side of things the second aspect of my
day-to-day job is project management the layouts and the manuscripts and the layouts
going through all those rounds there are a lot of different stakeholders particularly in educational
publishing you might have all sorts of freelance consultants or subject experts who are also
reviewing things for you and there's a lot of kind of timing that needs to be gotten right you know
we we work in series i've never worked on just one book at a time it normally tends to be
10 20 sometimes 70 or 100 books they're all publishing on the exact same day
so it takes a lot of project management to make sure all the books get to where they need to be at
the right time those are beginning of the project i'm involved in scheduling which is a really big
collaboration with other teams sales team advising on pub day you know when customers want it when
they're likely to need to buy the books production team so how long they need to print the books and
get them into the warehouse and to ship them and everything commissioning team to make sure they've
got enough time to write for the author to write the book and then for them to edit the manuscript
and also of course the design team in terms of how long they need for each layout stage and for the
illustrators to create the artwork so there's a lot of different components to take into account
with the scheduling um we schedule in kind of big batches and we try and make sure the batches don't
overlap too much it's a bit of a jigsaw puzzle and it involves quite a lot of negotiation throughout
the project it would be my job to keep the schedule up to date to kind of tweak it or flex
it if anything goes wrong or comes in late and to kind of hopefully have built in some contingency
in case that happens and also the other side would be budgeting so as i mentioned we tend
to use freelance copy editors and proofreaders also sometimes freelance project managers or fact
checkers or other people at the beginning of a project it's really important that i estimate how
much each of those freelancers is going to cost us that gets accounted for when the commissioning
editor is looking for financial sign off for the project the third aspect of my role is the sort
of list management being an editorial manager i don't just work on any one project i look across
the ladybird education list and i line manage two people who are also managing their own projects at
the same time my job with the help of my manager who's the head of the editorial management team
to look at resourcing project allocation looking at that kind of strategy of when we
might use freelancers where we might do things in-house managing kind of workload um looking
at workflows and processes a lot of editorial management is slightly more kind of operations-y
what stage is a book needs to go through how we can make sure it's the best possible quality
how we can make things really efficient the ways we can use to shave off time off of a schedule
so there's a lot of kind of logistics and planning that goes into looking on a far
broader level across the list and across the whole year and then how we're going to kind of achieve
the publication of as many books as we have that yeah and obviously in with that is the line
management side of it which is a really important part of the role as well might not be included in
all editorial manager roles but that is in simon obviously um that takes really careful thought
and consideration as well on a day-to-day basis it's it's really a mix of all three i could be
doing anything from really hands-on proofreading to catching up with people having meetings solving
problems seems to be a big thing so some things come in late or someone can't deliver on time and
trying to kind of flex the schedule or helping one of my line reports you know problem solve on
one of their projects um yeah a lot of meetings a lot of kind of collaboration and talking to people
um but there is a lot of kind of hands-on editorial work still and i really enjoy the mix
of those two sides of things i might also be doing kind of planning so scheduling for an individual
project or planning for the kind of year ahead looking at resourcing and things like that
and yeah that would be my kind of day-to-day work
there are the kind of technical skills copy editing and proofreading are things that you
can train to do and there are lots of different courses run by companies like the publishing
training center where you can learn those kind of basic skills then it really is just
about practicing and developing them over time brief reading i would say it's about the bsi
proofreading marks which is a kind of language of symbols that we use to mark up similarly copy
editing tends to be done kind of on word using track changes so word skills are probably quite
important and the technical side of things you know the editorial eye is really about having
a very very good eye for detail being willing to spend kind of hours poring over something
obviously really strong grammar is important knowledge of kind of how punctuation works
but also how to bend the rules you know it's not just about learning all the rules off by
heart and then forcing every single author to write in the same way you know you have
to have a real understanding of an author's voice and how to edit to be conscious of that
organization is huge not just being organized but loving organisation having an awareness of
the market is really important and the final thing i'd say is communication and relationship
building so i think reading really really widely and paying attention to grammar structures to
vocabulary and to kind of how an author chooses their words is really important if you can you
might want to attend training sessions on things like copy editing or proofreading you could also
have a look online at the bsi proofreading symbols and just kind of teach yourself
what each of the symbols means really get to grips with market that you want to go into so if you're
interested in educational publishing you know look at the websites of educational publishers
look at the types of series that they publish take opportunities to develop your organizational
skills i think if i was interviewing somebody for an entry level position
then them having experience of having organized something
in an extracurricular sense even if it was something like an event
maybe a newspaper publication or something at university or at school i think would reflect
really really well on their ability to kind of juggle different things and to manage projects
the one book that i think everybody should read is actually this one here um it's called low born and
it's by kerry hudson it tells the story of her growing up in poverty throughout the book she
kind of goes back to to visit some of the places that she grew up as a child she moved around a
lot between kind of different council flats and bnbs and also attended lots of different schools
and it's about her kind of processing the trauma of her childhood and trying to kind
of come to an understanding of what she'd been through i think it's a really really powerful
book a really important book for understanding poverty in in the uk you know in in the modern day
this is a really kind of eye-opening and really moving book uh talking about it it's also just
really really brilliantly and beautifully written so yeah i would definitely recommend
thanks so much for watching and remember i post new videos new interviews every wednesday with
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