Moving from publishing to a comms role – with Jo Butler

Jo Butler: There’s something really special about living inside a manuscript for months and helping an author shape it into the best version of itself. That editorial relationship and that trust you build with someone is really hard to replicate, I think, in any other job.

Rachel Smith: Hello and welcome to The Content Byte, a podcast for freelancers who use their words to make money. I’m Rachel Smith, a freelance journalist, copywriter, and content producer. I’m also the founder of Rachel’s List, a jobs board and community for Australian writers and other creatives.

Lynne Testoni: I’m Lynne Testoni! I’m a journalist and content writer as well. Rachel and I are your weekly co-hosts, and every week we bring you all kinds of tips, tricks, and some fabulous guests to help you make the most of your freelance business.

Rachel:  Lynne, I don’t know about you, but I’m always intrigued to hear career switch stories, and we’ve had a few on the podcast now, even recently. I think it’s really good to see people bringing their skills to a whole new job or industry, isn’t it?

Lynne: I agree. I think it’s really interesting because sometimes you feel you get stuck in one particular niche or one particular job. It’s great to see.

I think a lot of writers are surprised how transferable their skills are.  So, I think it’s really good and we are talking to Jo Butler today. Many of our audience will know from her book publishing days. For over 30 years, she worked as a book editor, publisher and literary agent, both in-house and freelance, helping shape author’s career and now she’s moved into marketing and comms in the university sector, which is so interesting, isn’t it?

Rachel: It is such an interesting move. I’ve actually known Jo most of my life as she’s my sister’s bestie. Hi Nat, if you’re listening! And we went to the same school.

Lynne: Oh, fantastic.

Rachel: The same high school. So, I’ve followed her career forever and, what I think is great is she now has a day job in comms at Sydney Uni, but she also teaches in the Masters of Publishing program. So, she’s really still got a foot in both worlds.

Lynne: That’s so interesting. I think it’s also great to get a bit of a behind the scenes look at the world of books because she knows a lot about that and I know that’s a huge interest for the many authors that tune into us.

Rachel: Absolutely. Well, without further ado, welcome Jo. We are really happy to have you on the podcast!

Jo: Oh, thank you for having me.

Lynne: It’s great.

Rachel: I know you’ve had a long and winding career in book publishing, and you even wrote a blog post for Rachel’s List about becoming a book editor, but was there a moment where you realised that you wanted out, or was it just time to try new things?

How did that all come about?

Jo: I don’t think there was one dramatic – I’m done moment; it was more a slow dawning realisation that I was curious about what else I could do with the skills I’d built over the three decades I’d been in book publishing.

I still loved books and I still loved working with authors and definitely my publishing colleagues, but I’d reached a point where I’d done most versions of the job that I’d wanted to do. I’d been an in-house editor for many years and then I was also a fiction publisher. After some freelancing when my son was really little, I moved over to becoming a literary agent. And then when my son was about to finish high school, just so I was a bit more flexible, I went back to editing and freelance for his last two years of high school.

I think as he kind of left home and went to uni, I felt more like I wanted a change as well, and that I wanted kind of out of what I was doing and also wanted to grow in another direction. I guess I just didn’t want to stagnate in what I was doing and I wanted to test myself in a new environment.

Lynne:  Oh, that makes sense. Because from the outside book publishing does look a bit glamorous, but I think it’s changed a lot, hasn’t it? And you were, was it three decades? So, it would’ve changed a lot the years you are in it.

Jo: It’s making me feel old.

Lynne: Oh, no, no. Oh gosh.

Jo: No, no, no. You are not making me feel old. But realistically, yes, it’s been almost 30 years. But publishing and it was really from the time I finished uni in the mid-nineties, and I’d been a bookseller and then moved into legal publishing and then trade publishing, which is sort of the fiction non-fiction normal book.

I agree, publishing absolutely looks glamorous from the outside. You’ve got the book launches and the festivals, and the beautiful covers and those things are real and joyful. The industry has really always run on tight margins and long hours. I guess what’s changed most over the years that I’ve been in publishing is the pace. Everything is much faster now, so acquisitions and production schedules are tighter and marketing cycles to get those books promoted and out there and social media has shifted the burden of promotion onto authors in ways we didn’t see twenty years ago.

Lynne: That’s interesting. We see a lot of that.

Jo: And that puts so much pressure on authors, and they can feel quite hard done by justifiably because they’ve written this great book and then I guess they’re expecting to have their books marketed and publicised, but often they do have to do a lot of the work themselves just because people within publishing are so stretched and there’s definitely so much pressure on editors and production staff and so much commercial pressure on publishers. So, that’s definitely, I think has changed and got harder over those twenty or thirty years. But I guess what hasn’t changed really are those fundamentals of book publishing.

You still need that compelling idea, and you still need strong writing and a clear readership. And most of all, you need a passionate team behind the book and the authors passion. You want that passionate team behind that author. I guess the magic and the stress co-exist and they always have so that that hasn’t changed.

Rachel: Wow. What do you miss about working full-time as a book editor?

Jo: There’s a lot that I miss. I really miss that deep immersion into a book or the world that somebody’s created, whether it’s non-fiction or fiction. I really miss that deep dive into a topic that I may not have known anything about, but you almost have to pick it up by osmosis, and you almost need to become an expert yourself. So, I think that’s really enjoyable and there’s something really special about living inside a manuscript for months and helping an author shape it into the best version of itself. That editorial relationship and that trust you build with someone is really hard to replicate, I think, in any other job.

I guess I almost miss that moment when the finished copy lands on your desk and you think, we made this. And I guess that tangible outcome is incredibly satisfying and rewarding, and you can see that book on your shelf for years to come and you kind of forget any of the bad stuff that might’ve been associated with that book, like with the tight deadlines and you just see the finished product and I think you feel almost as proud of it as probably the author does.

Rachel: That’s lovely.

Lynne: So interesting. I’d love to know, now you’ve stepped out of book publishing, has it changed how you view the industry? Are you, can you be a reader now or do you always think about the behind-the-scenes stuff?

Jo: I definitely am enjoying being a reader and I’m probably reading more widely now than I was before. I didn’t always have the time I wanted to read. You have to read to be a publisher or an editor. But there’s so little time often when you are working on unpublished manuscripts to go and read a finished product of someone else’s. So, I guess after spending three decades editing manuscripts, I guess you kind of realise that hidden labour is quite enormous and the book might start as a spark of an idea, but from there it’s proposals and acquisitions meetings and the kind of profit and loss projections and the contract negotiations and the structural edits, line edits, copy edits, all that kind of stuff. There’s just so much that goes on behind a book and then the proofreading, cover design briefs.

Sorry, I’m going on. I know.

Lynne: No, no, not at all.

Jo: Then there’s sales reps pitching to retailers, and now there’s metadata that you have to be across and distribution logistics. That’s a lot.

Rachel: It’s really interesting what you said about how you had limited time to read what you wanted though and that changed when you were out of it. It’s really interesting because it made me think of when I was a movie reviewer and I was doing that for ten years as a job, right? But then when I stopped doing that, I used to just fall asleep in movies immediately. But the minute a movie was on, or I was in a cinema or something, it was like my brain went, nope, you don’t do this anymore.

Jo: It’s so interesting.

Rachel: Up down. I’m much better now though.

Jo: I’ve found an interesting thing that I’ve always had to read really quickly, and I’ve always been a fast reader, but I’ve noticed that I’m slowing down a lot in my reading now and really savouring each line, which I kind of never had the luxury of doing in my own reading time. I really love that now.

Lynne: You can probably read something that’s a bit quirky or something you might not have picked up now.

Jo: Yes, exactly. I guess having worked in publishing it does make me pick up things that I might not think I would’ve been attracted to. It’s kind of given me that as well. I read a lot of non-fiction now and I’ve mainly worked in fiction and it’s just, it’s fun.

Rachel: That’s nice. Well, you mentioned that authors find that they have to do a lot of the legwork in marketing their books. We talked a little bit about that earlier. What are the other things that you wish authors knew about the book publishing industry? Because we know a lot of them will be hanging on your answer to this one.

Jo: Oh, it’s really tough. I know as an agent I really saw that kind of rejection authors have to deal with all the time and not feeling good enough because, it might just not be the right time for their book, but they’re really talented writers.

So, I guess I really wish that authors understood how commercial the industry is and that it’s not necessarily enough to be an artist or to write really well, or to be creative. But I guess, publishing is, and writing is so creative, but publishing is a business when it gets down to it, and a great manuscript isn’t always enough.

I guess what I wish authors knew or really took to heart is that timing and market fit and positioning and the publisher’s list strategy – all of that matters and they might not see that and that’s difficult for them and it’s really difficult if you haven’t been inside the publishing business to really see what’s going on and understand that it’s not personal.

I just wish that writers knew that rejection isn’t necessarily a verdict on quality and that publishers are all about risk and budgets, or how a book sits within a list at a particular moment. It’s also timing based and such a speculative business.

Rachel:  I love that. Well, let’s move on and talk about your move to comms.  Does it feel like for you, you are still helping to tell stories, but in a different way?

Jo: I definitely agree with that. I think stepping out of book publishing has given me perspective or a new perspective, I guess.

So, when you are inside book publishing, it can feel all-consuming because you’re often working out of hours and you can’t just drop a project at five o’clock. You really sometimes need to keep working on it to maintain momentum and to really get inside the author’s voice and the characters.

So, from the outside, now that I’m out of publishing, I can see or really feel both its strengths and its blind spots more clearly. I can really see how passionate it is still, and I admire that so much. The passion that people carry and the authors they carry that. But there’s just what I see now with the clearer perspective are the structural pressures and, in a way, I think maybe it’s just that I’m getting old and cranky, but I think I’m more outraged now about how stretched everyone is and perhaps under-appreciated sometimes. Or that people like, especially editors and production people, their value isn’t really recognised by everyone. I think they’re just pushed a lot, and I found stepping into a comms role, I find our skills are much more appreciated because we’re kind of dealing with everyday people and getting messages out every day.

The people that I work with, and I work in a university with a lot of researchers and academics, they’re so grateful for those skills on a daily basis and that’s something you don’t always get in publishing. You don’t get the, I’m not saying you need praise every day, but it’s just.

Lynne: Appreciation

Jo: Appreciation, that’s the right word. Yes.

Lynne: I find that same with magazines because I worked in magazines and people still working there don’t understand how good they are and the pressure that they have.

Jo: Exactly.

Lynne: It’s a lot.

Rachel: It’s the same when you’re dealing with clients as well, who don’t have those writing skills or marketing skills, and you suddenly say, have you thought about this? And they’re blown away and they suddenly, the wheels start turning as they think about a different part of their business that perhaps they haven’t thought about and I really love that, that side of it too.

Jo: You do sort of recognise in those moments, what your skill is, and you don’t always think about that.

Rachel: It’s really true.

Lynne: It’s true. So how did your comms job come up? Were you already teaching the Masters of Publishing course? Or was it a very deliberate take stock moment when you looked where your skills might fit and decided to head in that direction.

Jo: The comms job kind of came up at a moment when I was already reflecting on what might be next? So, I think, as I said, my son had just left school and he was moving away for uni and I’d been freelancing and I really missed working with colleagues, and I just thought I’d done a lot in publishing already and I’d been teaching in the Masters of Publishing program on and off.

So that had kept me connected to the industry as well as the freelancing. But I just felt I was ready for a bigger shift. And part of that was financial. I did probably need to earn a more regular income where you can live better in Sydney. So, it definitely wasn’t impulsive, I kind of did have to sit down and map out my skills and think what editorial judgment, stakeholder management, and all that kind of messaging could lead me to.

I guess comms made sense in that sense. When I kind of reframed my experience and thought, what jobs can I go for that are a little bit outside of publishing. I just kind of had to believe that my skills were transferable and try to sell them in such a way that everybody could tell that they definitely are, and I think often book editors don’t realise that you can work outside of that book publishing industry and use those skills. Often, it’s crisis handling and diplomacy and all of that that you can use every day in a high-pressure environment, in a kind of university or a corporate setting.

Rachel: Wow. It’s interesting because we see lots of journos, thinking about going in that direction, I suppose if they’re coming out of magazines and wondering what’s next. What do you think the skills, now that you’ve been in the job for a while, what are the skills you really think you need to work in comms?

Jo: I think you definitely need clarity and I think you need diplomacy, which is a massive skill that editors have and that they’ve developed. Dealing with so many different authors, you definitely need speed. So, things turn over a lot quicker in this comms environment maybe than they do when you’re working on a really big book.

I guess the work that you’re doing on a book, you are working quickly, but because it’s such a massive project, people don’t necessarily see. Or they don’t really understand the pace at which you’re working. They think, oh, that’s going to take ages, but really, you’re working very quickly.

So, adapting that to an everyday environment where you need to get things out in a day or in a week is something that’s pretty easy to do. I found that pretty easy and I guess you need to understand audiences quite deeply and adapt your tone instantly. And I think editors learn that, or book editors learn that dealing with different authors voices. So, I think you get a good sense of voice and tone, and authors can be really difficult, so that kind of makes dealing with senior leaders in organisations a lot easier. So, editors might not realise they’ve got that skill or journalists that’s something that it’s really inbuilt after a couple of years of working as an editor or a journalist. And so, I think for editors or journalists thinking about transitioning, it can be a really natural pivot, and you’re already trained to distil complexity and find the core message. So, I think you’ve really got those skills there.

Rachel: That’s good to know.

Lynne: But there’s some skills you weren’t expecting. I mean, for me, when I moved into corporate after being a journalist, I was quite surprised how rare it is to be able to write and dispel. Which, because I presume some of the academics, they’re quite articulate in their own areas of expertise, but not the actual writing part.

Jo: I totally agree, Lynne. I’ve been really surprised by spelling there. Not everyone who’s brilliant can spell and, and those skills are really valued, especially in the university environment and I’m sure in corporate communications. So, I think, I mean that’s massive. Just to be able to write and to know grammar and to have a sense of house style or whatever and just editorial. Discipline is really incredibly valuable. So just being able to structure information and anticipate what people might want to read and, and to cut like ruthlessly, I guess, like peoples.

Rachel: Long winded things.

Lynne: Academics do love to write a lot.

Jo: They do indeed. So, sometimes just getting to the core of that message is such a skill.

Rachel: What happens when you’ve done that and you give it back to them and they say, you’ve taken all the good stuff out.

Jo: Oh, again, it’s a negotiation. And I guess that’s what you learn in publishing when you’re dealing with an author whose words are so close to their heart and they don’t want to kill their darlings. You’ve got to kill your darlings. And I think academics are quite open to people. Like not necessarily understanding them and knowing that they need to distil their words. I’ve actually found academics a little bit easier to work with than some of the more creative temperament people.

Rachel: I think smart writers know that they should have a kill my darlings folder, and so you just move everything into there and then you can look at it lovingly, but it doesn’t have to actually see the light of day.

Jo: That’s so true. You can strike that folder.

Lynne: Or the genius undiscovered.

Rachel: Exactly. Exactly.

Jo: Right.

Rachel: Well, I think before Christmas you and I sat down, we had a cup of tea and I said, what does your job entail? So, I thought it was your answer made me really think, and I thought, wow, she does all those things. So, tell us what, what a typical week looks like in a control out of universe.

Jo: I can’t quite remember what I said before Christmas, and I’m sure it’s quite different now. But it’s my business-as-usual sort of stuff. I write newsletters for the faculty, so I write staff newsletters and student newsletters. A couple of weekly newsletters and a monthly one.

We are writing for different audiences with those, so I’ve got to adapt my style there. What else? There’s a lot of strategy work, so there’s a lot of strategy documents we do at universities about how the university can be better and how we can work towards shared goals. So definitely this year we’ve had a month of intensive work preparing a strategy document. It’s only thirty-two pages, but so much work went into that with consulting different people and a lot of that, a lot of stuff that I didn’t do in book publishing was design work. I’ve got kind of a counterpart who works with me. He’s also a comms person, but he does more the design, and I do more of the words. We’re a bit of a team like that.

If I had to do that on my own, I’d be really struggling. I think they’re skills that I need to build up. Definitely my design skills aren’t as great as his, and his word skills aren’t as great as mine. But together, we’re sort of managing it. But we do, sometimes I have to write a speech for the Dean or something, or I sometimes just check people’s documents. I check features they might be giving, or I check letters that they’re sending, or I write blurbs. I kind of do so many different things, so it’s never the same. And we work quite closely with Taronga Zoo and so I had to write stuff for promoting our courses with Taronga Zoo.

Sometimes we do positioning statements for Eureka prizes when our scientists are going for those. So, there’s a lot of different things, just responding to issues and writing news articles as well. I forgot about that. We do write some internal news articles just to let staff know what everyone else is doing in the faculty. There’s also an external comms team, so I’m internal comms. So, I communicate more with the people who are within the university. And then we’ve got an external comms team. Their comms go obviously outside the university. So, we all do kind of different things.

Rachel: Would that external team be the team that might hire freelancers, for example?

Jo: Yes, they’re more likely to hire the freelancers. We don’t actually do freelancers internally with comms as far as I know. I’m not sure what other faculties do, but I think we have a lot of content management systems here that we have to be trained up into. So, that’s a little bit of a complexity with getting freelancers in because that training can take a while. I’m not quite sure how it’s positioned, but I think the external comms probably do get people in to do more freelancing.

Rachel: Interesting.

Lynne: Was there a bit of a steep learning curve? Is there anything about the role surprise you?

Jo: There was definitely a learning curve. I think just adapting to the university systems and the content management systems, that was a big adjustment for me. And I had worked at another university and that was different again. I think every university has their unique systems, but I think it’s really the same when you enter any job. Every workplace has its own systems that you need to have that steep learning curve kind of into.

I think the biggest adjustment was the short timelines, getting used to the work, just turning over. And I guess it’s kind of nice because I don’t have these projects hanging over my head for months at a time. I can just get something out of the way in a week and that’s kind of nice.

In comms, I guess something can be conceived and executed within hours, whereas in publishing it takes months, sometimes years.

Rachel: That’s a real shift in how you work.

Jo: It’s definitely dynamic and I’ve found the pace to be really kind of energising. I definitely don’t have time to sit and, I don’t know ruminate.

Rachel: Doom scroll.

Jo: Exactly. Exactly. 

Lynne: So, tell us a bit about the Masters of Publishing course. What does that involve and is it a big-time commitment?

Jo: Just on top of my full-time work, it is a bit of a time commitment. I have taught it at a time when I was freelancing and that was a bit easier to manage.

The last semester I was just doing it one night a week and it was a three-hour class for post-graduate students and a lot of those people want to enter book publishing – not magazine publishing, but there’s not a lot of magazine publishing anymore, but probably mainly book publishing.

I was teaching three hours a night, but there was a lot of preparation going into the lessons. Just keeping up with the changing pace of things because AI is a big factor now in how the publishing industry is changing and because I haven’t really been working in the publishing industry inside while AI has been around, it’s quite a learning curve for me to understand how that impacts the industry.

But really the Master of Publishing course is just focused on giving students that kind of realistic, holistic, understanding of the industry. So that’s like editorial marketing rights contracts and just the business side. So, we kind of look at case studies and trends and practical skills that they might develop. I guess it really is for people who are seriously wanting to work in and around books.

I try to make it as honest as possible and sometimes, it was hard for me because I’ve stepped outside and so to kind of encourage people to stay within the industry, that was a bit of a challenge. Because I can see the benefits of also moving outside of the industry.

Rachel: What are some of the hard truths that you feel like you have to share with your students? Or do you keep it a bit like rainbows and unicorns?

Jo: No, I think that’s sort of what I was getting at, just with what I was just saying. I have told my students, and I don’t want to dim their light or their hope and their anticipation of entering publishing. But I guess the hard truth is that publishing is very competitive, and I guess the hardest truth is it’s not well paid, especially at entry level.

So, I guess passion is necessary, but not always sufficient because as a worker, you need resilience because there’s a lot of creative temperaments in there that can sometimes be a little bit toxic and that’s not necessarily the authors; it can be the people that you work with. There’s definitely not the HR practices in book publishing that I’m used to now at the university.

So, it’s a luxury to have HR that, and training and ongoing training opportunities that are easy to access. The hard truth I want to tell students who are interested in book publishing is, I guess what we’re talking about today, that there isn’t just one path and that your skills are very transferable and that publishing can just be a chapter in a broader career and I kind of wish that that’s what I’d known back when I was a student.

Lynne: Do you think the book publishing industry here is different from that in the US or the UK? You talked a little bit about AI. I thought that book editors were particularly struggling with it, but also, I’ve read that publishers are getting so much AI generated manuscripts as well.

Jo: I’ve heard that too. But I guess compared to the UK or the US, our local industry is obviously smaller. I guess that means fewer roles, especially for graduates and tighter budgets. I guess the great thing about having a smaller industry in terms of the difference that we have here is that you can have closer relationships and sometimes you can have more breadth in a single job that you’re doing more than maybe if you had a huge workplace in New York or something.

I guess for AI, it’s just anecdotally, from what I’ve heard of editor, from what I’ve heard from editor friends, is it’s definitely entering the workflow, and I think people are using at the early-stage copy editing now. So, they might run a manuscript through AI.

Lynne: It might pick up typos and things like that.

Jo: Which I guess you’re always doing with spell check, but it’s almost picking up a bit more and suggesting things. But from what I’ve done, like for one thing, it’s really unethical to put a manuscript through AI because you don’t really know where it’s going and it’s someone’s intellectual property.

That’s one thing we had to tell our students not to put manuscripts through AI. They didn’t always listen, but we don’t kind of know where all that info’s going, but I guess you can use it as a tool, and I’m interested in ways that editors will use AI as a tool to help them.

Because developmental editing, which is a more big picture, structural editing, that requires emotional intelligence and nuance. So, I think that remains deeply human. And so, I hope that AI can assist that, but I don’t think it will replace that editorial judgment. Or maybe I’m being naive, but that’s what I hope anyway, that we are not totally irreplaceable in that.

I just worry that AI could flatten out somebody’s tone or their voice or that sometimes, as an editor, I once read a book without any punctuation, and it worked. So, I can’t imagine AI letting that through.

Lynne: So bad luck for James Joyce.

Jo: Exactly. Imagine what they do to James Joyce.

Rachel: Well, I suppose people could put their manuscript into AI and, and ask for an assessment, but that’s something that you do as well as your day job, isn’t it? You still take on manuscript assessments. How many do you do?

Jo: No, I actually don’t do.

Rachel: Oh, you don’t do that?

Jo: No, not at the moment. The only manuscript I’m looking at, at the moment is my father-in-law’s sort of memoir. So, I’m not just because of the volume of my work at the moment and my teaching, I haven’t actually taken on much freelance editing. Later this year I’m mentoring for the Australian Publishing Association; they do a residential editorial week where mid-career editors get mentorship from more senior editors. So, I’m participating in that.

Rachel: So cool.

Jo: That’s where we’re workshopping and manuscript. So that’s how I’m keeping my foot in this year at least. So, I’d definitely be open to freelancing again when I move towards working less full time. But I’m not sure how far off that is. I probably need to work for a good few years still.

Rachel: For sure.

Lynne: Makes sense.

Jo: Editing is definitely something that’s hard to let go of and I hope that I can still do it in the future.

Rachel: I’m sure you can.

We are ending off the podcast with something new. It’s actually not that new now, because we’ve done quite a few of them, haven’t we, Lynne?

Lynne: We’ve done three. We’ve done three.

Rachel: It’s not that new, but it’s called The Fast Three Questions.

Jo: Oh, okay.

Rachel: Bit catchy. So yes, we will kick off. First question – favourite tools you can’t live without, and this could be anything.

Jo: Oh, okay.

Rachel: We’ve had some weird ones.

Jo: Oh, okay. Well, I guess if we’re talking about editing, probably I like to have a notebook still and a pen, so I carry everywhere. I don’t necessarily use them, but I find jotting down things. I tend to remember them a little bit better than putting them in notes on my phone.

If I was talking about tools for editing, and this is very boring, I’m going back to that, but I often teach students this is to have a really good style sheet and a style guide, and I love a notebook myself.

Lynne: Oh, that’s nice. We love old school.

Rachel: I love a notebook.

Lynne: Yes. So, what’s one, the second question is a habit that genuinely saves you time.

Jo: I think. If someone’s telling me about something they want me to write, I think it’s just trying to write that key message first, and that’s what I would be doing with a pen and paper. Before I draft anything, I really try to force myself to articulate the core point in one or two sentences.

And I think that’s probably something I learned being an agent, that all authors need to have that kind of one line, one paragraph, one page pitch. But you kind of need to get your pitch down to one or two lines so you can tell it to someone really quickly. I guess that’s really helped in comms just to kind of distil writing down into the key message.

And look, I think AI does this now and look, I’ve used AI sometimes to put something in and go, what do you think the key message is? But it’s kind of helping me as well to hone things in my own mind.

Lynne: Interesting.

Rachel: All right. Final question. One thing you wish you’d done sooner in your career.

Jo: Oh, I’m going to sound really jaded now, but I just, and we touched on it before, but I really wish that I’d confronted that kind of financial reality of book publishing much sooner as a worker in book publishing. 

I was so passionate about working in books and I was a bookworm as a kid. I guess that passion can often blur the fact that you are pretty criminally underpaid for the level of skill and responsibility and emotional labour involved. So, I think most people I know give away a lot of labour because of how much they love the work and how they feel lucky to be there. But I think you’re often reminded of how lucky you are to be there, and I think.

Lynne: A million girls would die for this job or something.

Jo: Exactly.

Rachel: Like magazines.

Jo: I know you’re told that all the time in magazines and in TV, but you’re also told that in publishing, so I was definitely seduced by that whole glamour thing and the cultural cache. But it doesn’t pay the mortgage, and it doesn’t fund school fees or long-term security. I think an important line that I wrote down, I think it’s just recognising that valuing books doesn’t mean, shouldn’t mean undervaluing yourself. So that’s something I’d like to tell students

I think moving into comms forced me to acknowledge that my skills had real market value and that’s what I’d want to tell young people who are thinking about the book publishing industry just to know when to leave, I guess. And not everyone like, I mean, you can move up to executive level, but there’s just so few positions that I think it’s just important to know the market worth of your skills and talents.

Lynne: I think that’s true.

Rachel: Love that. It’s a really good message.

Lynne: Oh, my goodness, Jo, thank you so much. It’s been such a good chat and so inspiring. Oh, and I think it’s really interesting about moving into comms and all those transferable skills. I think our readers will take a lot from that.

Jo: That’s great. No, thank you. It’s my pleasure to talk to you.

Rachel: Well, we’ll put all the links on where to find you on LinkedIn, and we’ll also pop that blog post that you wrote about editing into the show notes for anyone who wants to revisit it. But thank you, it’s just been fabulous.

Lynne: So lovely.

Jo: Thanks Rach and Lynne.

Lynne: Thank you it was great.

Thanks for listening and we’ll see everyone next week. And don’t forget to check out the show notes.

Rachel: Okay. Bye!

Lynne: Bye!

Credits:

Connect with Jo via LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jo-butler-bishops/ 

Find Lynne www.lynnetestoni.com

Find Rachel www.rachelsmith.com.au

Rachel’s List www.rachelslist.com.au

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Episode edited by Marker Creative Co www.markercreative.co