A Day at the Office Part III: Acquisitions

“What job can I have where I get paid to read?”

They say if you love your job, you never work a day in your life. Well, I love reading, so someone pay me to do it already!

There are many misconceptions when it comes to acquisitions and what an acquisition editor does. I knew a few things things about acquisitions and had met an acquisitions editor prior to my Hachette visit because of an editing course I took my last semester in college, but the more people you meet and stories you hear the more you learn.

Carrie Napolitano is an Assistant Editor at Basic Books and Skyped in to talk with us from New York. She explained that, like most of us with a liberal arts degree, finding jobs in editing after graduating was difficult, so she broadened her search and and accepted a position with Oxford Press as a Marketing Assistant before moving up to Associate. Her marketing experience later aided her when she went to apply for her current position at Basic Books.

Basic Books is an imprint of Perseus Books, a Hachette Book Group company, and publishes award-winning books in history, science, sociology, psychology, politics, and current affairs. These books are written by experts in their field and often contracted out to professors.

Carrie’s daily responsibilities sadly do not include reading all day. Though she does some reading, her day can be broken down into four sections, the first of which is data analysis. Carrie has to look for potential books in a variety of places. Some books come through literary agents, professional agents who act on behalf of an author dealing with publishers and others involved in promoting the author’s work. She will read solicited book proposals sent by agents and take notes to bring to her team meetings. Other times, she looks at courses being taught at colleges and universities and sees if there is a need for new textbooks or if an article written by a professor could be expanded into a book that would be of interest to a number of people.

Another part of acquisitions is paperwork. After auctions or purchasing of a book contracts will be written up between the author and the publishing house laying out the timeline for the book to be written, the rights for what is being granted to the publishing house by the author, an advance against royalties, any permissions, and or subsidiary rights. Part of Carrie’s job is not only to write up these documents but to edit them.

Acquisition editors also have chances to use their creativity outside of the research and legalese that is required in their job. One of these creative outlets is through structural edits with an author after acquiring a book. Carrie often gets to read sections of an author's work and do different types of editing. Her editing is very different from production editing, where every little detail is crucial. Instead Carrie’s edits are at the beginning of the process, some proofs and line edits, rather than an extensive copyedit.

Carrie’s favorite part of her job is marketing and sales. She explained that this is where her background in marketing really helped her when transitioning over into the editing side of things. Acquisitions editors often write the blurbs for the back of the book jackets, they help decide where to put the books in stores to market them best, and they send manuscripts and teasers to big names in the business so that they can use their “big mouths to sell.”

Carrie loves a bunch of different aspects of her job, from the creative side of marketing, getting to know a bunch of people in the industry and not only meet with but know authors on a personal level, oh yeah, and all the free books :) But there are always challenges to every job and for Carrie, publishing rides on passion; if an editor or author isn’t passionate about a project it’s really hard to find motivation. Another aspect Carrie struggles with is authors expectations. Similar to Michael’s struggle to gently suggest edits to an author, Carrie has to be realistic with authors; “not everyone can be Stephen King.” Then, of course, there is always the challenge of deadlines, but we’ve all heard that story before. When working in publishing getting multiple departments on the same schedule for one book is hard enough, try 1,500 books.

So, acquisitions. Is it what you’ve always dreamed or did I pop your bubble? I hope this was a bit insightful, if not the best thing you’ve read all week. Moving to New York anytime soon?

~M