So you want to be an editorial assistant...

I recently wrote a knol with the title 'How to Get into Publishing', and in it I suggested that one common way to gain industry experience was to become an editorial assistant.

Personally, I didn't go down that path – but what does it take to be an editorial assistant? A clue can be found in the 'About me' section of the Editorial Ass blog, which reads as follows:

I'm a recovering editorial assistant. I'm like most of my kind: impoverished coffee-and-gin survivalists, underpaid but ambitious, bitter but hopeful. Painfully self-conscious, woefully self-congratulatory, willfully self-indulgent.

I like that, even though it reminds me of Alanis Morissette lyrics. And so my question to you is: how would you characterise the people that do your job do the same sort of job as you?


Editorial assistant: job description and activities
Knol: how to get into publishing

Knol: 'How to get into publishing'

I was going to write a Friday roundup but really I only have one thing to tell you about.

Recently my father asked me to give some advice to an acquaintance of his who was interested in getting into publishing. So I wrote her a long email (probably too long) detailing how I started in magazine publishing and what I thought were some key points to bear in mind.

For the previous few weeks I'd been meaning to play around with Blogger's new "web authoring tool", called Knol, but hadn't been able to decide on a theme for my first knol (a knol supposedly being "an authoritative article on a single topic").

Then it struck me: why not turn the email I'd written into a knol on how to get into publishing? So I did.

How to get into publishing

I hope it's helpful to a few people. If you feel so inclined, please do rate the knol and leave comments. But be kind: it's my first attempt. And no sniggering at the photo of me, either.