Working in book publishing and magazine publishing: Rosalind Moody interview

Rosalind Moody

Rosalind Moody is Editorial Assistant at Colchester-based publishing company Aceville Publications. Here Stephanie Cox interviews Rosalind about her career so far, and the differences between working in book publishing and magazine publishing,

1. Please introduce yourself and describe your background and your career.

I’m a graduate from the University of Hull and since my second year of university, I’ve completed unpaid internships at Endeavour Press, Simon & Schuster UK, Hodder and Stoughton and Just Imagine, a specialist children’s bookseller in Chelmsford. Last Christmas I was offered a job as Editorial Assistant at Colchester-based publishing company Aceville Publications who own a lot of major craft magazines, as well as other well-known titles such as Great British Food, Your Fitness and Natural Health. Make it Today is a new title I’m helping to develop but actually I’ve just been transferred to a more established magazine called Homemaker. I’m really enjoying myself and I’m constantly learning!

2. Having worked as an intern in books publishing and now as an Editorial Assistant for a magazine, what would you say is the biggest culture difference between the two types of publishing?

The biggest culture difference is who pays the bottom line. With books it’s just the reader to make the profit for the publisher, so no wonder the book is vulnerable at the moment. With magazines it’s the readers and the advertisers who all pay their way. So, although that means we as the magazine publishers have lots of people to please, money comes from two different directions – sales, and how well we direct our readers to our advertisers’ networks. Things work at different paces too – in magazines, you have to be prepared for things to change, and quickly. Rightly so, I think: if we see a trend, we can jump on it straight away and capitalise on the excitement, such as the recent surge in sewing after The Great British Sewing Bee became so big. I do quite like the quickened pace though – my first magazine comes out every six weeks, and the one I now work on is every four weeks. Publication dates for books are announced a year or 18 months in advance. I like it because I get to see results of my work within weeks, which is always really satisfying, and there’s more of an instant feedback with our readers too; there’s a lot more conversation between our team and our readers than there is between book editor and reader, whose job it is to be virtually invisible and let the author’s voice come through the best it can. Social media has helped to cement this kind of relationship, but our names and headshots are all over the magazine anyway! I enjoy this kind of relationship, and I always have the reader in mind when I’m ordering in any product, writing introductions to projects or interviewing a person who’s popular in the craft industry – what would the reader most like to read?

A big similarity between magazine and book publishing, however, is that they are just two types of effective editorial, which in my book is an idea being communicated in the most creative way, from one person to a page. In buying a book or a magazine, the reader is buying into escapism, an inspiration: a book and a craft magazine both give the feeling the reader can go anywhere or do anything in their mind. The reader is still buying an idea or an ideal of themselves. Finishing a pattern from one of dressmaking issues is like making it to the end of the book. Satisfying, and the better we’ve made our product, the more likely it is they’ll finish it!

To read more of the interview, head over to Stephanie’s blog: Words are my Craft.

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