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

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Gah! This post is giving me flashbacks to the days when I earned my doctorate in photocopying. I was also so hopelessly incompetent at keeping track of the dates on which various piles of paper went back and forth between the editors and the designers that I'm sure they would be amazed to this day to learn that I can actually tie my own shoes in the morning.

las vegas entrepreneurs said...

With the number of companies who hire writers nowadays, one can easily pass these kinds of tests.