Let the Work Experience Commence!

Goal #3 for the year (and arguably the most important) - Take my first steps in getting a job in publishing. Last Thursday I made some progress on this front when I begun a work experience placement at Black & White Publishing in Leith, Edinburgh. This is my second work experience placement (I spent two weeks at Luath Press, also in Edinburgh, last March) and I was eager to get started and gain a further insight into the publishing world.

This placement is part of my MSc Publishing course, although I organised it myself. After a speculative email, I was answered almost immediately and luckily there was an opening which I gladly seized upon. A few people on my course had already been to Black & White and they all had seemed to have enjoyed it, so I looked them up and discovered they have quite a varied and exciting list. As well as many non-fiction titles, they also publish crime and mystery fiction, romance fiction and even (to my delight) a couple of young adult titles. Having discovered this I was excited for my first day.

Based on Ocean Drive, Black & White are a simple bus journey from Edinburgh city centre. I've not been to Leith too often (apart from one horrible interview/assessment with a recruitment company) but armed with Google maps I soon found my way to the office. It is a lovely, bright, airy office, and I even have my own intern desk, complete with stationary and Mac. My first impression when I walked in was one of wonderment. There are so many bookcases and so many books; I felt like a child in a candy shop. I probably came across as a little over-enthusiastic!


Everyone was welcoming and they are all very nice. They are a small team (there are four members of staff and two directors) which helped ease my nerves and within an hour I felt as if I had been there forever. I had a lovely chat with Kristen, the publishing assistant, and we discovered a mutual love of The Vampire Diaries and YA. We were told to go out to placement with a list of things we wanted to learn and skills to build upon, and Kristen was great when I presented her with my list. There was a marketing project for me to get started on right away, which I was excited about because I want to gain more marketing experience. It involved researching wool and craft shops and turned out to be a lot of fun. Firstly, I never realised just how many wool shops there are out there, and secondly, some of the names are amazing. My personal favourites were 'Just For Ewe' and 'The Crafty Moggie'.

I was also lucky enough to be set loose on the slush pile. One of my favourite things about my work experience at Luath was reading the submissions, so I was more than happy to go through those at Black & White. It always fascinates me to see what stories other people come up with, and also to see how badly written some of them are! As someone who has written all her life and contemplates every now and again the idea of attempting to get published in the future, it never fails to amaze me that some people can call themselves a writer and have such poor standards. The spelling, the grammar and the punctuation can be truly shocking (or maybe I'm just too much of a perfectionist). I had a lot of fun reading through the pile, but so far there have been no hidden gems. There was one I really wanted to work - a vampire story - but alas, it was distinctly average and offered nothing original in the sample pages (although a part of me hopes it gets better as the story progresses).

My first two days were really enjoyable and I am looking forward to the rest of my time on placement. Thank you so much to everyone at Black & White for giving me the opportunity to come along. I will be there until the first week of August, and once I've completed my time there I will give you a further update on how I got on. In the meantime, watch out for my review of Dreams and Tide by one of Black & White's authors, Daniela Sacerdoti. They are books one and two in a young adult fantasy trilogy and having read the first 5 chapters of Dreams they are shaping up to be a fab read. The same author also wrote Watch Over Me, which has been storming up the ebook bestseller charts. If you're a fan of emotional stories with a dash of romance, then it may be worth a read. I will definitely be checking it out in the near future. My 'To Read' pile just got a whole lot bigger, but I'm not going to complain about that! :)