finding your niche | how to establish yourself

Language, love of language and a feel and a natural skill, a writer or a poet’s eye – a rare thing – all of these things come into play when you look for a job and not just the first time, but I think every time. You have to ask yourself whether or not this job can offer you that love of words that you’re looking for or the love of the printed page if that’s what you want – but you have to sometimes compromise this to get to the next step in your career;

Here, the author says that your skills are transferable, but transferring yourself can be another matter and that publishing tends to pigeonhole people early in their careers.

I think this is true to some extent. You need to establish who you are – what you are going to BE with that big capital B. It’s scary because you don’t know until you’ve really tried and I’ve known many editors who have changed careers or moved to different areas, including myself…

I’ve worked in trade publishing- which means the books you see in Barnes and Noble or even now on Amazon or any number of stores or read about in PW for most of my career. This led me a long way, but I started out in fashion –because it was a foot in the door, but boy, those months I was in the Vogue Features department, working for Amy Gross and typing between those non-repro blue lines on an old IBM Selectric, even at fifteen, as nerve-wracking as it was (the pressure of no computer then, to not make a mistake, to type exactly between the lines – for I was essentially the proofreader and typesetter and reader of slush), but the pressure was great to get it Right, just as it would be anywhere only now, the technology is easier so it’s less of a deal if you make a typo because spell-check will likely catch it whereas we had to rely on our own eyes and the eye, in a way, visually corrects what is wrong – we skip over typos, we skip over errors and we ‘fix’ them in our mind so that they do not exist, hence, they do not exist for us, particularly if we ourselves wrote the piece or are editing the piece.

The salient factor here is that since then, it’s true that I’ve worked most of my life in Trade Publishing – both books and well-known magazines- because that’s where I started and got an established reputation.

Despite that, I have written entire web-sites for e-commerce sites, and books to go along with the product that they made. I have written to Mass General Hospital’s Neurology Department, and biggest of all, I was asked by Harvard University Publishing to write several main sections of www.intelihealth.com which was owned by Harvard and is now owned by Aetna, so that’s a huge client even though it does not really jibe with the bulk of my writing or what i really do and wish to do, as a writer or editor, you can or may take on jobs to learn, to pay the bills (because jobs like this tend to pay more than traditional publishing jobs, and more, it is more editing experience. Period.)

I’ve also done a lot of legal writing for Hill & Barlow, now part of Palmer and Dodge – which has had a literary agency for years. I freelanced for Hill and Barlow for ten years and for each of those ten years, and this is while I was working in publishing at Godine and then Lumen fulltime, so this was my ‘free time’ job, I would average just from the Hill Barlow work alone about 60-90 K on any average year and it was work that any of you could do already in this class, I strongly feel, using the skills from your InDesign class and your editing skills from here – you could do this because it is like a whole book, just in-depth.
It’s book-editing lite in a sense and for that, you don’t need a full-class (and we’re halfway through), so you’re already in a position to go after such work.

How do you get this work when you don’t have experience? Friends. Friends at law firms, other publishers, people you know, professors, speakers, anyone you can think of, tap into your resources – people sometimes think this sounds Machiavellian, but I’ve said this before, I think you can apply Machiavelli to bad or good and it’s all in how you go about it. I’m not saying slit the throat of the person in front of you to get what you want, but if you have to glad-hand a bit so get where you want to get, then you should not hesitate, unless it is really hurting someone else or their career. But to further advance your own career through hard work and through determination.... nobody can fault you for this. Drive is good.

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You can sneak in the back way, as I said above – start reviewing books in the niche you want to publish. Start copyediting. I know publishers and at least one agency that are always looking for good, cheap, labor. I’m not insulting you here. You need a way in: this is a way in. You get in the door, you prove yourself, and then you can raise your rate when the time comes.

For now, if you want to edit encyclopedias or reference works let’s say, my advice would be to contact the editor who handles this at a press that prints a fair amount of reference works like Blackwell Scientific or Continuum, which is a trade house but has done several TRADE encyclopedias which is a good cross-over market and doesn’t limit you – contact the head editor there or get to know the EA. Be persistent, and get yourself a copy editing job.

Now, after all that effort to get the job, once you get it, you’re not going to be able to turn down the job for what they want to pay you – which may or may not be fair… it will probably be fair enough, though if they suck, slightly less because they’re testing you for the first time.

Book reviews: so many places are dumped on with books that you can easily find a place to review books for if you are a good writer and have some clips and a good education, which I think you have. Also, you’ve had this class and I’ll write a letter of recommendation for those of you who need it for the right job or reviewing position.

To get into medical writing, I reviewed all of the technical and medical books for the Boston Globe Sunday Arts Section that nobody else wanted to review. I did the same thing for Publisher’s Weekly with the same tactic in mind which was that if a writing job opened up in biotech, or editing job – that I would take it and would be able to say I know something of the market.

It was not just that I had experience reading and reviewing med. tech. books. It’s that I also had experience at Harvard and Trade publishing and had done a few freelance jobs here and there for the money. As such, I became a sort of "expert" and began getting more work from more places as word spread - excellent income, even though it is or was not what I want to do in the final account.

You can establish yourself as an 'expert or known in the field.' This, again, is where you want to look at the editing that is being done at agents today, not at publishing houses ~ so you're better off being an editor, at least initially, at an agency.