Shelley Diaz: How I Got into Publishing

Guest post by associate editor at School Library Journal

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I decided I wanted to work in children’s publishing in sixth grade. I had devoured all of the Anne of Green Gables books by this time, and I was convinced that I could be the Dominican Lucy Maud Montgomery. I kept writing through middle school and high school, and pondered over different career paths (should I be a literary agent, an editor?), and even momentarily thought about being a cultural anthropologist instead.

The fact remained: I was fascinated by stories—all people’s stories.

I declared my English Lit/Latino Studies double-major freshman year at Columbia University, and was lucky enough to snag an editorial internship with Dell Publishing (a crossword puzzle publisher) through my Hispanic Scholarship Fund mentor. That summer internship cemented my desire to work in publishing, while at the same time reinforced the fact that it had to be with work that I cared about (crossword puzzles, were just not that interesting), and at a place that gave me the opportunity to advocate for diverse literature.

Jean Naggar: How I Got into Publishing

Guest post by a literary agent, author, and founder of the prominent Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency, Inc.

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Jean Naggar

I was the reader who read voraciously at night under the bedclothes with a flashlight, the reader always in trouble as a teenager for not participating in the spin of family interactions because I “had my head in a book”.

So it came as a huge surprise and caused much mirth in my family when my first paid work after I moved to America, was - in fact - reading.
 

I always knew I wanted to work with books, and the publishing world seemed a good place to start. My deep secret desire was to be a writer myself, one day. I dreamed of joining the ranks of those magical people whose words and stories I so admired.
 

Determined to find a place in the world of books, I began by ignoring the fear that sent butterflies fluttering about my stomach. I put through a phone call to the sole contact I had in the publishing world, an elderly literary agent, the only publishing person my own literary agent in London knew in the US.
 

A senior agent in a venerable literary agency, she was polite but unequivocally discouraging. She was the first to recite a mantra I was to hear again and again for the next six months, as I grabbed at names reluctantly proffered and made my cold calls, hand and voice shaking: “Well,” they said, one after another, “you can't get into publishing if you've never had a publishing job before.”

Wendy Lamb: How I Got Into Publishing

My fourth grade teacher wasn’t surprised that I wound up reading for a living, because I gave 250 book reports that year.  All I wanted to do was read. I had a terrific fake cough and would use that to stay home from school with a pile of books. 

I grew up in New Canaan, Connecticut and my family was close to the family of Maxwell Perkins, the great editor at Scribner’s. Max had died before I was born, but I grew up knowing what an editor was. Max’s daughter, Bertha Perkins Frothingham, shared my passion for books and encouraged my reading in every way. One of my favorite books was A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline  L’Engle, which led me to take physics in college. I struggled with that course, but when I botched a lab my professor let me write a story related to physics, which became my first published story. As a creative writing major, a job in publishing seemed like the right path.  

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.

Liz Waniewski: How I Got into Publishing

While at Boston College and trying to decide what I wanted to do with my English major degree, my parents asked me, pre-Avenue Q, “What do you do with a BA in English? Because you are not moving home.” (Well, this is how my 20-year-old brain interpreted a very loving conversation about the importance of being able to support yourself and not needing to depend on anyone else to live the life you want to live.) 

And I realized that I wanted to get paid to read. Actually, I wanted to get paid to read books for kids because the books I read growing up shaped me and touched me in ways that nothing else could. Diana Wynne Jones, Lloyd Alexander, Beverly Cleary, Judy Blume – these were authors who didn’t know me but somehow understood me. They made me feel connected to people, places, and ideas that were new, different, and bigger than my own world. To be part of the process of bringing a book to life for someone else to connect with, well, that was my dream job. 

Adriana Dominguez: How I Got into Publishing

Guest post by a literary agent, professional translator, online book reviewer, and Latino children's book expert

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Adriana Dominguez

English is not my first language, though this statement doesn’t ring quite as true now that I have spent most of my life living in the United States, speaking and working in English. But the fact is, when I arrived in the US at age 12, I did not speak a single word of it. I quickly learned to say the phrase “I don’t speak English” so fluidly, that folks often seemed to question the legitimacy of my assertion. Learning a language anytime after the age of twelve is difficult—as difficult as it is to be twelve in the first place! And so I believe that my fascination with reading and language emanates first from the fact that my mother read to me constantly from a very early age, and secondly, that I mostly developed my English language skills by reading lots and lots of books, often with a dictionary on hand to prevent me from getting “stuck” when I came across a term or phrase I did not understand.

Linette Kim: How I Got into Publishing

Guest post by a NYC transplant from California working in School & Library Marketing at Bloomsbury Children’s Books

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Linette Kim

I got into publishing through the back door, so to speak.

Like just about everybody who works in publishing, books were a huge part of my childhood. It amazes me still that my parents, who were not well-to-do at all and had just moved to the States from Korea, somehow managed to mail-order picture books for me before I was even old enough to talk. Even more amazing, English isn’t their first language, so read-alouds weren’t exactly a part of our daily routine. Instead, when I was old enough, I would sit with these books strewn about the room, thumbing through the pages, making up stories based on the pictures.

Not surprisingly, middle grade was the most formative time in my literary life. More specifically, middle school was when I discovered Ann M. Martin’s The Baby-Sitters Club. This series did everything to ignite in me a passion for writing and reading, as well as a love of grammar!, that has only grown since. I am also amazed in retrospect at the diversity of the BSC cast—Look, minorities! On the jackets! As a reader, it didn’t occur to me to even think twice about this, nor did I appreciate it as much as I do now. I mention all this especially because I got to meet Ann M. Martin this very weekend at a Books of Wonder event, where both she, as well as Bloomsbury author and one of my favorite people in the world, Shannon Hale, were panelists. I didn’t think it was possible to get that emotional upon meeting a writer. I was wrong. And when I asked Ann for an autograph, the Newbery Honor winning author wrote, “BSC 4-ever!” Yes. I could have died.

Shirin Bridges: How I Got into Publishing

Guest post by Ezra Jack Keats award-winning author — and now Publisher of Goosebottom Books

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Shirin Bridges
Head Goose

I come from a family of storytellers. When I was growing up in Asia, the stories that my great-grandfather, my grandparents, and my parents told wove to form a matrix, a context for my life. Through stories I understood who I was and where I’d come from, and also where I could go.

One of those stories became my first picture book, Ruby’s Wish. It’s the tale of a girl in Old China who wants to go to university, even though girls weren’t taught how to read or write. The Umbrella Queen followed, about a girl from a Thai village where everyone paints umbrellas the same way. Of course, our heroine wants to paint hers differently.

So you see, my stories were about girls who found ways to do and be more than expected. Imagine my reaction, then, when I watched my niece disappear into a pink princess haze.

“Do you know there were real princesses who didn’t sit around waiting for a prince?” I asked her. There were princesses who changed their own worlds; ones too busy and too empowered to worry about being pretty or popular.

Joseph Monti: How I Got into Publishing

Guest post by a once bookstore buyer, editor, and now prominent literary agent at Barry Goldblatt Literary.

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I grew up thinking that no one in publishing ever came from where I grew up, Yonkers, NY. I had the kind of high school experience that smothered dreams, said you weren’t smart enough to have what you wanted. I grew up with a limited perspective and a small idea of what the world of publishing was like, that it was elite. And it is an elite environment because it is a intimate field, not because:

You need an ivy league degree.

You need to be financially well off.

You need to have an upper middle class background, minimum, and the worldliness that life presumed.

I was a lower middle class kid from a mixed-race immigrant background, whose guidance counselor recommended I abandon my goals of either becoming an editor or a professor of English and take a look at a solid trade like sanitation management. Fortunately I have a personality that is a combination of old fashioned romanticism, which came from reading, and a deep sense of practicality, that comes from the way I grew up, being sickly, and poor enough to know I could not have everything I wanted. Then something wonderful happened: I stayed home one Saturday afternoon and watched T.V.

PBS on channel 13 was playing a marathon of The Power of Myth interview series by Bill Moyers with Joseph Campbell. It changed my life. It fulfilled my romantic idealism with a plan: Follow your bliss. So I thought about a way to get what I wanted, a life in words. I was working already, part-time, at a local B. Dalton Bookseller (#321), so that was my back-up plan: Be a full-time bookseller; rise in rank, and run a store. Then I lied.

Andrea Davis Pinkney: How I Got Into Publishing

Guest post by the Vice President, Executive Editor at Scholastic. She has been named one of the "25 Most Influential Black Women in Business" by the Network Journal and is one of the "25 Most Influential People in our Children's Lives" cited by Children's Health Magazine.

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Andrea Davis Pinkney

I fell into bookmaking completely by accident. After graduating from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications, where I majored in journalism, I pursued my one big career dream, which was to work at a high-profile magazine. Fortunately, that dream came true ― and it led me to children’s publishing!

Soon after my last day of college, I went straight to midtown Manhattan, and got a job in the editorial offices of Mechanix Illustrated magazine. It didn’t matter to me that the magazine was all-things-automotive. In my mind, I’d “made it”. I was working in publishing and living in New York. There was an unexpected bonus to the job. I met my husband, children’s book illustrator Brian Pinkney, who worked in the art department of Field & Stream magazine, across the hall. 

Learning to generate new ideas constantly, and looking for ways to pitch and position these ideas [...] would help me become a book editor.

In addition to meeting Brian, two important things happened around this time.

While I was at Mechanix Illustrated, I was also writing for several major women’s magazines and the New York Times. One of the gifts of being a magazine editor and writer is learning to generate new ideas constantly, and looking for ways to pitch and position these ideas, in the hope that a magazine wants to publish your articles. I didn’t know it then, but this practice would help me become a book editor.

Stacey Barney: How I Got into Publishing

I began my professional life as a teacher and have taught the gamut: from preschool to high school. What I found most frustrating was the lack of compelling outside reading available, especially for my students of color. While teaching in Boston, I was also pursuing my MFA at Emerson College. It was there that I discovered Book Publishing as a career option. On a lark I took my first publishing class as a way to build-up the pre-requisite credits I needed in order to take my fiction workshops. I never expected to find myself so taken and invested in the material and the industry. In fact, before my book publishing courses at Emerson, I thought books were a gift from some mythical book fairy that I conveniently picked up at my local bookstore on a weekly basis. I never gave much thought to the industry behind the books I consumed so compulsively. But I caught the publishing bug quickly and left the teaching profession soon thereafter with my sights set on publishing those books that felt missing to me and to my former students.

My first job in publishing was a lucky and invaluable internship at Lee & Low, an independent multicultural children's book publisher in New York. I learned a great deal about editing, acquisitions as well as marketing and publicity from this experience. While working at Lee & Low, I contacted quite a few publishing professionals requesting informational interviews. I knocked on a lot of doors and was told the same thing over and again: you seem great, but I don’t have a job for you. I was starting to feel a little hopeless, though the truth is I’d spent only a summer looking for a permanent position and that wasn’t very long at all.

Antonio Gonzalez: How I Got into Publishing

Like many who work in publishing, books have always played a vital role in my life. No matter what stage of my life I’m in — I’ve always been drawn to books.

My publishing journey began at the age of 14. I was hired on as a page for the Dallas Public Library. Every weekday afterschool from 4 to 10 at night I shelved oversize reference books, aerial photographs, yellowing newspaper clippings, old-timey magazines, journals, small-town phone books, and even micro-fiche (!!). This was the dawning of the internet era; in between shelving, I’d teach patrons how to “surf the internet,” how to send email, and how to download Netscape Navigator and AOL.

During my breaks, however, I’d sneak away to the most secluded niches of the building to read my favorite books like Kate Chopin’s The Awakening or Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.

Cheryl Klein: How I Got Into Publishing

My how-I-got-into-publishing story is the oldest and most commonplace of them all:  Girl falls in love with books, decides to devote life to reading and making them. The only distinction I bring to this story is that I truly started making authorial connections very, very young . . . at about six months of age, in fact. My grandfather, Philip Sadler, was a professor of children’s literature at Central Missouri State University in Warrensburg, Missouri, not far from where I grew up. He founded and organized one of the nation’s very first children’s literature festivals, where dozens of authors would come and meet hundreds of children for a few days every spring. In March of 1979, when I was about six months old, my mother went to pick up Barbara Robinson (author of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever), Gertrude Bell (Where Runs the River), and Clyde Robert Bulla (The Ghost of Windy Hill) at the Kansas City Airport, and as Mom tells it, I cried and cried as long as I was in my car seat. Thus Barbara held me for the next two hours -- and my career collaborating with children's authors began.

Connie Hsu: How I Got into Publishing

I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the Sweet Valley Twins series. When I was a young girl in Alabama, I was put into a remedial reading group, which was pretty discouraging. I didn’t want to love reading, since I was told I wasn’t good at it. But then I discovered the Sweet Valley Twins, and oh boy did my life change. I couldn’t stop reading those, and when that series was exhausted, I bounced onto more. I challenged myself to read at higher levels, sometimes horrifying myself when I dipped into something too sophisticated for me. *spoiler alert!* When Ginger died in Black Beauty, so did my innocence!

By the end of high school, I had done poorly enough on the math portion of the SATs to know that my path lay in something English-related. But I was afraid to major in English—what was I going to be, a writer? I might as well have gone into art! I ended up majoring in advertising, after switching from psychology, which involved more math than I could stomach. However, upon graduation, I had a Say Anything moment, during which I realized I didn't want to sell anything. So I went to grad school for a Masters in journalism. After internships at Chicago and Atlanta magazines, I was ready for the world, and I moved to New York City, the city of big dreams. My first job was at Starbucks!

Stacy Whitman: How I Got into Publishing

I grew up outside a small town in Illinois, on a small farm where we raised horses, pigs, cows, and rabbits (which were my 4-H project). We were pretty poor, but we also made do with a huge garden and clothes from yard sales and generally living off the land. I loved being involved in 4-H and FFA.

My first major in college was actually animal science pre-vet. I wanted to be an equine veterinarian. What else would a girl who grew up on a horse and pig farm want to do? But I worked my way through college in publishing jobs, first because they were “easy” jobs—not as much physical labor as working on the dairy farm at school, and not as many allergic reactions, either—and then because my experience and skills kept leading me to more jobs in the same field. I typeset college textbooks in Unix/LaTeX, I reported and took pictures for a local newspaper, I edited phone books—yes, phone books—I transcribed 19th-century journals and proofread them. Eventually, after changing my major and floundering with a human development and family studies major (I loved the child development classes, but didn’t like any of the expected career tracks from the major), I realized in the midst of an elective children’s literature class that I could combine my work skills and my interests. It only took me about six years of undergrad to figure out what I wanted to do.

From there, it was just a matter of figuring out how to get a job in children's publishing. But as an independent student who was paying my way through college with part-time jobs and major student loans, I was leery of moving to New York City. Not to mention it was a LONG way from home.

Caroline Sun: How I Got into Publishing

I graduated from Colgate University with a BA in English Lit, a severe lack of motivation, and the typical post-collegiate contrarian belief that I would never EVER work for “The Man.” I thought I wanted to be a writer, so I signed up for some writing workshops and quickly learned that I had little talent, less patience, and a somewhat violent reaction to “constructive criticism.”

National Book Award Winner,
Newbery Honor, and New York Times Bestseller

I was living with my parents rent-free in Brooklyn which gave me a bit of time to “figure things out” so I took the opportunity to buff up my “life experience” category by getting various restaurant jobs in the city, hoping to meet some cool characters while also earning pretty decent cash. I juggled 3-4 jobs at a time: hostessing at a high-end sushi restaurant, bartending in the east village, cater waiter-ing at fashion events, “Evian Girl”-ing at the US Open, and the like. I was nocturnal for a solid two years and knew I wouldn’t last long on that schedule. Taking a break, I embarked on a backpacking adventure through SE Asia for a month or so, thinking that my travel journal would provide a solid springboard for a novel (this was pre-EAT, PRAY, LOVE, mind you). It was an exhilarating experience, but in the end I came home to my restaurant positions, threw in the towel on the writing, and a few months later my parents gave me the old “Hey, maybe it’s time you got a job with, you know, health insurance or something. You should also probably start paying rent.” I still had no idea what I wanted to do, so I applied to a host of random positions: a line-cook on the traveling train for Ringling Bros. Circus, a sales rep for a boutique high-brow greeting card company, a marketing assistant at Turner Sports, all to no avail. Knowing that I was in a bad spot (I had zero qualifications or applicable experience for anything really), I decided to tap my college alumni network for some leads.

Namrata Tripathi: How I Got into Publishing

I'm from India, but I grew up in the Soviet Union, Afghanistan, India, Canada, Pakistan, Germany, and Poland so stories from diverse traditions and with diverse characters have been interesting and important to me. I went to Columbia University in New York City and studied English literature. When it came time to graduate, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, but I knew I wanted to work with literature--read it, talk about it, analyze it. I thought perhaps academia was the right path for me. But not wanting to go into a six year commitment simply out of momentum, I decided I should take a year away from school and get "a real job." That's when I learned about the Columbia Publishing Course (a summer graduate course on all aspects of publishing). Unfortunately, I learned about the course the day after the application was due! Fortunately, however, a very kind graduate of the course could tell that publishing might be a good fit for me and she persuaded the admissions board to consider my (late) application.

I attended the course, learned about various parts of the industry, and realized that I only wanted to work in children's books. The people who worked in the field were smart, interesting, and driven. And I wanted to be a part of it. Plus, with children's books, you get to work not only with text, but also with visual storytelling (if you work on picture books) and that was very appealing to me.

Daniel Nayeri: How I Got into Publishing

When I came to the United States at the age of eight, I spent a lot of time in the library because I needed to learn English, and because none of the neighborhood kids knew yet how awesome I was at Nintendo.

We arrived in Oklahoma in the summertime, and I was terrified that I would show up to school unable to speak with the other kids. We were refugees from Iran who had spent several years bouncing from country to country, so I had a smattering of a few languages. My English, however, was a bit like Apu from the Simpsons. 

And so, my mom took me to the library, checking out 35 picture books at a time, determined to get us ready. At the time, I remember being dumbfounded by the likes of Dr. Seuss or Laura Ingalls Wilder (an Oklahoma favorite that I came to appreciate in due time). The language had too much slang, too many words I couldn't look up in the dictionary ("Vat is a sneetches?"). I ended up gravitating toward the Great Illustrated Classics--simple sentences, written in the Queen's English. I read abridged (perhaps abridged too far?) versions of The Three Musketeers, Treasure Island, Robin Hood, and Robinson Crusoe--I fell in love with all of them.

Alvina Ling: How I Got into Publishing

My father tells this story about me as a little girl and swears it's true. I don't remember it myself, but I choose to believe him. He said that one night, after he read a selection of books to me at bedtime, I asked him, "Daddy, why does everyone have yellow hair in the books?" He struggled a bit on how to answer, and said something about how that was the way the author and artist decided to make them. "Well," I said, "When I grow up, I'm going to change that!"
 

Flash forward: after graduating with a degree in Mass Communication from UC Berkeley, and still not knowing what I wanted to be "when I grew up," I decided to move temporarily to Taiwan (where my parents are from originally) to study Mandarin Chinese and teach English. Really, I was stalling for time while doing something productive. After about a year, I started thinking about what I would do when I returned to the U.S. Some of my friends were thinking about going into consulting (that was big back then!) or graduate school, but neither option appealed to me. Then one of my friends said to me, “Well, you’re always reading books. Have you ever considered book publishing?” There was (is) very little book publishing on the West Coast, and so I hadn't really seen it as a viable career option. But when he suggested it, something clicked. I had always loved books and reading, so I decided to look into it.

Nancy Mercado: How I Got into Publishing

Everyone always thinks that you need to know someone to get into publishing, but I knew no one when I moved back to New York after college. I like to think that I got into publishing through bookselling. In college I worked in a small chain bookstore called Lauriat’s and my favorite part of the job was talking to customers about books and recommending the perfect title for them. I discovered that I had a very good memory for book titles and author’s names, and once I saw the cover of a book, I would always remember it. I was especially drawn to the children’s book section of the store, and I found myself making elaborate displays for the end caps, organizing and re-organizing the shelves so that the section was perfect.