Day 70-- First day working at a publishing company

Today I read a book not yet released to the public.  I'm loving this internship.

It was my first day and I arrived a little too early, dressed a little too fancy, but I had that sense of calm you get when you know you're doing the right thing in life.

Today's assignments were fairly simple: browse through the top sellers to get a feel of the company (local cookbooks, local legends, local biographies, local children's book authors, ect), relearn some HTML for adding events to the events page of our website, and reading the files of two upcoming books--including the entire manuscript for a book launching this week.

I felt positively giddy as I read the files, which included rough drafts of the back cover summary, the blurbs, the reviews, the design dimensions, the entire marketing plan of how many initial copies will go to print, what the competitor books are, what places are best to sell the book at, and a huge list of newspapers+radio stations+websites that interview authors or promote genre-related books.  

When I was in high school and people wanted to become Harry Potter or JK Rowling, I wanted to be JK Rowling's editor, and in looking in those files today I got a glimpse of what a childhood dream looks like.

But.  

But I don't know if it's enough to live on.  Look, I've read dozens and dozens of articles and salary indicators that book editors don't make shit and that independent publishing houses are often in the red.  One of the women working there make a point of telling me that there isn't money to be made in publishing.  I know.  And realistically it's one of the biggest reasons I still want to try out magazine writing and maybe, in the far distant future, pursue a masters or a PhD to teach publishing and media.  But that's getting ahead of myself.

I like the people I work with.  It's a 7 person team, with two of those people being the owners and one of them being the shipping/warehouse guy.  There's a twinge of Office Space, but for the most part they seem to get along well.  The biggest compliant is that I don't really have a boss so it's kinda a free for all about my tasks.  At this point it seems like I'll be doing some social media promotion and bitch work the whole time I'm there, and mainly working under the youngest one there (by 20 years) who was fairly nice to me, but I wonder if she might see me as either a rival or unnecessary.  We'll see.

Overall I good day working at a publishing house.  I'm treating this whole thing as a learning experience and a resume builder.

On the job front: I have a phone interview scheduled for next week (seriously) for an upscale apartment complex front desk.  No word on my other job applications and no search progress today.  I've applied to every hotel front desk position in the area, I'm leery about applying to more leasing offices at apartments, tutoring companies are too fickle to apply to, and I've done one application for hotel record keeping, and one for editing.  Tomorrow or Thursday I'll apply back at Starbucks for shift lead position.  By Friday or Saturday I'll start looking for a restaurant job. And by Monday or Wednesday I'll succumb to a temp agency.  

Working to making dreams come true: No salary. Working for shelter and sustenance: being degraded to the food industry. [laughs] What a mad mad world.