Institute For Career Research - Careers in the Book Publishing Business

BOOKSELLERS, PUBLICISTS,
AGENTS, EDITORS

• Editor: $20,000 to $55,000 annually
• Agents:$25,000 per year in salary with 10% to 20% commission
• Booksellers: minimum wage to $40,000 or more per year

• Thick skinned
• Demanding
• Detail-oriented
• Able to "Think Outside the Box"

• Agent
• Editor
• Publicist
• Bookseller
  

• Publishing houses anywhere in the world
• Bookstores anywhere in the world

• Bachelor's degree
• Master's degree is a worthy investment

• Supply the public with knowledge
• Work with interesting people
• Work in areas of interest to you

• Meet a lot of pretentious snobs
• You won't make very much money in the beginning
• The profession comes with a lot of baggage

Look closely at the things you like to do. It's no surprise to find out that successful athletes or musicians started to pursue their careers when they were young. If a big-time baseball player can get started in Little League, there's certainly no reason why you can't zoom in on a few favorite activities now while you are in high school. And if you can turn one of your favorite activities into a successful career, that would be ideal.

Do you like to read? You've probably learned much of what you know from reading books, either on your own or as part of your schoolwork. Reading is one of those fundamental activities that hasn't changed much in thousands of years, in spite of the progress of technology that has made other information media more popular, like television and the Internet. But you have to be able to read in order to get much of anything out of the Internet. And in poll after poll, people say they are more likely to believe what they read in newspapers than what they see on television. No medium has more credibility than the book.

Books are written by authors, but they are made available to the public by publishers. Book publishing is a huge industry and one that is vital to the good health of society as a whole. Well-informed people are well-informed voters and consumers. The choices they make at the polls and in the stores have a very real impact on everybody else. Think that's an overstatement? Shortly after he took power in Germany in the 1930s Adolf Hitler ordered books he didn't agree with to be burned so nobody could be influenced by the ideas in them. The saying is, "The pen is mightier than the sword."

The book publishing business is more exciting now than it has ever been. The advent of the Internet has forced conventional publishers to rethink the age-old process of printing, distributing and selling paper-and-ink books. Electronic books and downloadable books on demand have begun to change the publishing landscape, demonstrating that the process of publishing doesn't necessarily have to end with an old-fashioned book. The future looks bright.

Read on and learn about how to get into the book publishing business, what to expect at various points during your career and even how much you can expect to earn and where you should live. If you're still interested when you finish this report, keep going. There are many organizations and publications listed which are great sources of additional information. You can never know too much as you choose your lifetime occupation.

Bookstores are the last link in the publishing chain, but they're the only part that most people see. They're also the easiest to explore, so get to know them. Bookstores have always been filled with aficionados who fill the aisles on a regular basis, so don't be afraid to hang around, even if you don't buy anything most days. You'll learn a lot just by seeing how books are arranged for sale, how much certain types of books cost, how new books are promoted and how quickly books wind up on the sale table because nobody wants to buy them at full price.

During one of your trips to the bookstore make sure you pick up a few trade publications, like Publisher's Weekly and the New York Review of Books. There's no easier way to get to know an industry than by reading its trade publications, and that certainly holds true for an industry devoted to publishing! Read closely, learn the industry jargon and follow trends as they develop.

Spend as much time as possible on personal reading. Ultimately, book publishing is about the magic of passing knowledge from one person to another through books, the oldest and most reliable medium around. If you're not an enthusiastic reader you will never be an enthusiastic publisher. You're probably already an avid reader, or you wouldn't be reading this report. Enthusiasm counts for a lot in any endeavor. Don't lose your enthusiasm for the simple pleasure of reading.

Before there could be books, there had to be written languages. It seems obvious, but many cultures never made the leap from speaking a language to writing it down. The Navajo language, for example, didn't have a written form until US Department of Defense linguists gave it one in order to use the language as the basis of a secret code in World War II. The Sumerians, a culture that once flourished in the Middle East, had a written language as early as 3500 BC, however, and pressed letters into clay tablets that were then dried or fired in a kiln to be preserved. Although they were pretty crude, many scholars consider these tablets to be the first books.

The advent of publishing was tied to the development of paper. Ancient Egyptians pounded papyrus, a reed that grows along the Nile river, into sheets of paper-like material. The oldest known papyrus scroll has been dated to about 2400 BC. By about 100 BC, Chinese inventors had perfected a form of paper made out of silk, which worked well but was very expensive. By 105 AD, the Chinese had invented a much cheaper form of paper made from a combination of hemp, bark and old fishing nets. The resulting rag paper was inexpensive and easy to make, making it easier to share ideas by writing them down and passing them along to others. This certainly was publishing in its simplest sense.

The science of papermaking was steadily refined over the centuries, bringing down the cost of books and making them available to more people. Even the humblest of European parishes could afford a Bible, for example, even if most households couldn't. Still, this brought learning closer to more people than it had ever been before.

Publishing was still hampered by the lack of an efficient and economical means to print words on paper. Most books were transcribed by hand, one at a time, often by monks who toiled for years to turn out a single book. Religious orders in many cultures devoted themselves to transcribing important books so that they could reach as many people as possible. The upside to this system was that books were produced steadily, and they were often very beautiful. This process was known as the art of illumination - the word used to describe the practice of adding elaborate flourishes to printed text.

The downside was that decisions about what to publish were made almost exclusively by people with relatively narrow agendas. The books that were published helped to promote learning, but only the ideas that were approved by the publisher - usually church groups. Today, we would call such operations specialty publishers. Then, they were the only publishers.