Dan Ehrenhaft: How I Got into Publishing

Nearly twenty years after the fact, I still can’t believe this really happened.

It was May 1993, and I was a senior at Columbia College. Like many of my friends, I had nothing concrete planned for post-graduation. I knew that I wanted to work in children’s publishing, only because I still loved reading “children’s books” at age 22 (everything from Jon Scieszka’s recently published Stinky Cheese Man to S.E. Hinton and Lois Duncan) and I also knew that I’d like to write a book for kids someday.  But I hadn’t interned at a children’s publisher; I hadn’t reached out to potential mentors; there weren’t even any children’s bookstores on the Upper West Side.

Three days before graduation, I panicked. This was pre-Internet. There were no listservs or search engines; my only choice was to go where all the uninformed and desperate went...The Columbia Job Board.  (I’ve since written about The Columbia Job Board in a novel because it still seems too strange to have truly existed: A giant length of cork smothered in alphabetized post-its.)  The only listing under PUBLISHING, CHILDREN’S read: Write cover copy for Sweet Valley High novels!  There was more—involving the actual nature of the job—but to this day, that’s all I remember.