Interviews

July 2018 - Interview with ShelleyBurbank

Mysteries and (far) more, this month's interview is with ShelleyBurbank, who is well on her way in the world of traditional publishing. Actually, she is working for a publisher! Hang on, hold those queries! :-) Shelley won't be able to help you there. Read on and find out what it is she does.

Adultfiction: To stop you from getting bombarded by desperate fellow authors. What is your profession exactly?

Shelley : Hi, and thank you for inviting me to talk about writing and Wattpad and all the things. So, yeah. A year ago I was working as a legal assistant, was stressed and feeling I wasn't in a field I really cared about, and decided to look for a new job. I had four areas of interest: writing, publishing, education, and books. I planned on taking the summer off to enjoy the best season in Maine and hopefully get a job in the fall. However, I skimmed through job postings every day just to see what appealed to me, what sort of job I might want to apply for in September.

One morning just a few weeks after my legal job ended, I saw a posting for a publishing assistant for a start-up academic press specializing in education research, part time, in a Maine town half an hour from my house. I couldn't believe it--all four criteria in one job! Publishing jobs just don't come along that often in Maine. I had to apply.

So, I met with Chris Myers, publisher/president of Myers Education Press, a man who'd been a long-time managing editor for Peter Lang--a huge, well-known, multinational academic press. He'd decided to go out on his own after decades working for someone else. We met in a coffee shop in Gorham, Maine because he hadn't even acquired office space yet. He hired me. We got office space.

From April 2017- April 2018 Myers Education Press published eight books. We were expected to publish zero books that first year. We had those books ready to exhibit/sell at the National Education Research Association conference in New York City in April where over 16,000 educators congregated for symposiums, workshops, meetings, and panels. Basically we nailed it!

My job title is publishing assistant. My biggest role is production manager. This means I contact and schedule the vendors that make the book possible: copy editors, composition (typesetting), proofreaders, and printing. I then create a production schedule and move the manuscript through that process, which ends with books being printed, warehoused, and out for order fulfillment. I'm also in charge of collecting author information, assigning ISBNs, gathering and sorting and storing each book's metadata, inputting that data into a database that goes out to our website, our distributor's website, and vendors like Amazon and Baker & Taylor. And then there's the regular office management stuff like tracking expenses and filing receipts and ordering paper clips.

I love the thought that what I'm doing might actually be part of something that improves public education in the U.S. and the world. Our authors are education researchers, PhDs most of them, and they are professors teaching the next generations of educators. Our press is progressive, publishing research in literacy, gender studies, LBGTQU studies, indigeneity, urban studies, critical pedagogy, social justice and education, qualitative research, and more.

I could go on about this, but really how it relates to my own personal writing life is that I've learned how a book goes from proposal to finished product, why publishers are picky (it's expensive to produce a book and pay for office space and marketing and expenses and payroll), and about buying ISBNs, working with a distributor, warehousing, and how metadata goes out to Amazon. It's been a real eye-opener, and I think I could, if I wanted, self-publish with confidence, though I don't intend to do that.

Adultfiction: Fascinating, thank you so much for this detailed insight. Okay, so we have covered the publishing part, now let's talk about you as an author. I found you via the cozy mystery "Finding Penny", but you really write in various genres?