before i start this video i just need to put a disclaimer out there that everything i'm about
to cover does not include any confidential information i have spoken to the right people
and i have confirmation that everything i'm about to talk about will be fine and that is allowed to
be used and shared with you things do different different publishing houses as well such as the
marketing publicity teams at bloomsbury might be completely different to penguin man and house
similarly they can be different even just between divisions so if you're working in
children's or if you're working in academic hello and good morning excuse the absolute
state of me it's about half past seven and i need to get ready for the day
so i joined production at bloomsbury in october 2019 and before that i didn't really know what the
job entails and so i'm hoping that this video will help any publishing hopefuls for example
know a bit more about what production do as a department and more specifically what a production
assistant is likely to do on a day-to-day basis i just want to add as well that of course this
is specific to my experience at bloomsbury so production assistance in other areas and
even divisions will differ production assistant at hachette for example might be completely different
obviously there's going to be some main similarities there but this is basically
just yet taking you on my journey of what i do on a day-to-day basis so one thing that i need
to mention just in case you're not already aware the difference between backlist and front list
so front list titles for example are any new titles any titles that haven't come out yet
all have come out in normally the last year and then backlist titles are all the older titles
so anything from 10 years ago or even just like one year ago like as soon as it is normally one
year and then anything yeah basically from a year ago that's then classed as backlist
so i am in the office today because it's a working day i'm lucky enough because i still
live with my parents and so um because my mother works predominantly from home she has
a dedicated office in which there's a spare desk which is quite messy won't lie
i mean i would tidy it and be like yeah i'm super organized and it's always this tidy but
realistically it's not you can tell it's serious business when the glasses come out
and so this is one of the first stages is when you need to create the pnl
luckily the system that we use does that for us
and then you can see here for this title it's got all the costs in detail and that's just basically
pulled through from the system so i've just been sent the print instruction from the inventory
manager i've got all the costs on that and sent off the p l and then once that's approved i'll
get on to the next stage of processing the reprint and type setting and getting the cover designed
so i actually have two screens now um i like to have my emails on this big monitor
and then predominantly work on this computer just because the keyboard's here as well
and so it's a lot easier to look at that screen and then type at the same
time i generally don't know how i survived without two screens before
um so yes this morning i've basically just been working on reprints so yeah i was sending stuff
to the printers like booking in is what we call it when we basically tell printers that
you know they've got files coming in the next week or so and we want them printed
that's gonna be glory i had to put a jacket on because i'm freezing about to update the design
team as well to say like here are the new spine whips and the edition numbers and so like ready
for the covers to be made yes i've just kind of been spending some time catching up with my
reprints it's a bit of a weird time because i've had some urgent ones come through so that kind
of throws off the usual schedule so for example mondays for typesetting thursdays for booking in
fridays for sending to press we also do buy-in sometimes as well so i've just been contacting
a university that hold um like the fire was for a reprint that we needed so i've just put an order
for that i haven't really got anything urgent today to do so we'll just be catching up with like
invoices so yeah that's the update i'm probably gonna need a cup of tea soon to wake me up a bit
and move on to a bit of pod pod print on demand in a second and to catch up some of that before
christmas
one of the key parts of my job is working on print-on-demand titles and this is basically where
it's not necessarily a very popular book and so we don't want to order loads of copies to just sit in
the warehouse and never get sold and so it's basically getting print ready files for ready
for like small quantities and so basically my job in production is to get the text files together
to make sure design have done the the covers so i normally have to do like the cover templates for
this pod like reprints also requires typesetting metadata is really important with pod because
our pod printers will tell us when the metadata is wrong like if if you submitted it at 234 by 156
millimeters and the metadata is actually like 216 by 140 millimeters like they're going to pick that
up and they can't print the book until obviously it's correct so that's what we call weight specs
when it just basically means errors so it can be you know there's a problem with the cover
or it can be the metadata so yeah so sometimes i have to deal with weight specs with pod as well
obviously that's that's only quite rare because you normally do the job properly
and but you know some things are like out of your control another key thing with print on
demand at the moment as well is what's called destructive scanning and this is like it says
it's you scan a book destructively so you order a hard copy of the book and then you'll go through
each page and scan it and then like throw it away whatever like they rip out the page scan it etc
and so this we normally have to do if we don't have any books left so if we don't have any files
this normally means we have to like buy back our own book like off someone off amazon for example
and then get it destructively scanned so that we can have digital files of this we used to do
that more in the office because we could order books to the office package them all up and
then send them to the scanners but now it's been tricky because a lot of the scanners are closed
there's like a lot of delays and actually getting the books in the first place so that's been a
little bit annoying at the moment similarly to pod i also work on nipods so this is new in paperback
print on demand these are a little bit more strict i suppose than um pod because they're technically
new publications so they have like pub dates and they have certain key dates that you have to stick
to and i suppose there's more corrections with these as well because they're kind of
new books new publications so i suppose i'm liaising liaising with editorial a bit more about
like them telling me what corrections need to be made so i don't find the corrections myself it's
normally editorial that tell me you know there's a mistake on this page can you incorporate it i have
done a little bit of frontless work as well so this is like new publications and that's normally
um there's more key dates to stick to and i suppose you're working a lot closer like
the project managers i think this there's a lot more proof of that as well as opposed to reprints
because reprints you're basically just reprinting the book it was correct in the beginning whereas
front list titles compared to backlist titles they're new publications so the book hasn't
actually come out yet another thing i do is i manage the author project management survey so
this is after the so because normally for new publications we hire external project managers
we ask the authors their feedback on that whole production process so this is like the
copy editing the proofreading indexing overall communication etc and this is just like a simple
survey for them to complete and i'm the one that sends it out to them collections of the results
etc and it can obviously be really interesting because i mean some authors are so appreciative
and they have so much to say and you know they want to praise certain people for their help
i mean you do get obviously the authors that are a little bit more difficult i suppose and it's kind
of like managing their expectations that's another one of the roles that i do and the reason behind
that as well is because they are in our contracts with the project managers um like in our sla we
have like a rule of thumb if they consistently get low scores and you know they're performing
quite badly then we're going to end our contract with them and just basically yeah just to keep on
top of how they're doing because they're external we won't be kind of like managing them as such
i'm just going to go upstairs to get myself changed because it's our christmas party
this afternoon um so i'm gonna get something a bit more festive so bring red instead of black
just generally as a production assistant i don't really attend a lot of meetings there is a reprint
meeting every monday that the inventory managers go to and it's not compulsory for us production
assistants to go to that however i have been to one before just out of curiosity because like
sometimes they discuss your titles that you're working on so if you want a bit more insight
context and updating what's happened on that title then going to the reprint meeting will help that
because they basically decide on any decisions do we need to change the recommended retail price or
do we need the reprint quantity to go up a bit more to make the unit cost lower et cetera since
lockdown as well we've also started a backless meeting and this is usually once a week where we
talk to where we talk to the head of our academic production the other production assistants and
the art workers too so it's kind of a nice way to get in touch with them a bit more and
as the art workers are the ones that are working on our reprint titles we can just sort of say hey
is there any update with this etc and as i said we only started that in lockdown so sort of march
april time and i think it has actually been like really useful and it obviously gives us that set
time each week that we think okay if i'm not quite sure on something or what an update on something
you know that that meeting's going to come so you can bring up there i also just want to mention
that even between my division we do different things as production assistants so for example
my colleague does ebook conversions and i don't really know much about that at all so although we
work as production assistants and although we work at bloomsbury and although we work in academic our
roles still do differ and it's basically just like splitting the responsibilities between
us so the author survey that i manage for example my colleagues don't do that so it's kind of
yeah as i said like splitting those responsibilities between us as a team
i'm also planning another video in the near future on what it's like to be a production assistant in
academic as opposed to children's where i've spoken to some people at bloomsbury who work
in the children's production team and then yeah just um adding on to this so we do work as a team
but you are expected to manage your workload on your own quite a lot so that's one of the
things that shocked me quite a lot about joining my role as well it's quite independently led so
you're basically given your processes you're given your title and your lists and you know you get on
with it obviously the support is there if you need it but you're kind of trusted enough to
get on with your work and you know you're soon to know if you're behind on something and having said
that yeah we do work as a team so if anyone's got any questions you know we're all happy to
answer each other and we have like a group chat now with us production assistant so we can like
share any experiences you know have you come across this before does anyone know the answer
to this yeah and then as production assistants we just have other kind of general admin roles
sometimes for example if the production editors who are slightly above us if they've got um quite
like a heavy workload and need just a little bit of an extra hand that's a possibility yeah any
other admin tasks to support the team yeah so the things about being in production i would say it's
very self-managed as i mentioned and you know you are expected to kind of need your own workload i
would say as well there are a lot of spreadsheets involved in my role i think a lot of the tasks you
do naturally just have to use a spreadsheet and sometimes i just have started using spreadsheets
for ease so i would say as well like using excel for example is such a good skill to have and
knowing the tips and tricks for that for example um i recently went to like an advanced training
workshop and that was really really helpful just to know those kind of like little tips and tricks
that are going to make your work a bit more efficient and just a general skill i think you
need to have to be a production assistant is just be quite organized you're dealing with a lot of
different things a lot of different titles at once being organized will obviously help you massively
so thank you so much for watching my video of a day in the life as a production assistant
and i hope it was kind of interesting to you obviously like any job it's going to vary
day to day and you know i get some days that are busier than others and yeah i hope you learn a
little bit more about what you can expect if you're a production assistant at bloomsbury
as i said it will differ from publishing house to publishing house and even just across divisions
so you also watch out for my next video on being a production assistant in academic versus children's
and seeing what the differences are there also thank you so much to all the publishing employees
that have got in touch with me so far already about what i posted on my twitter if you haven't
already seen that go look at my twitter i'll leave the link of my socials in the description below so
yeah so thank you so much please keep emailing me because i'm really excited to get you all involved