Yay! The semester ended just last week, and my final assignments were submitted January 7th. Yes, that means I was doing homework over the holiday break, but let’s not talk about that. Instead, here’s what I learned through doing these assignments:

Market research

My first assignment was to write a report on US and UK children’s literature and the trends in both, which were similar. This delved into top sales over the past year, the target audience and how they reacted to the books, trending genres, themes and book covers. It’s hard to break down a 19 page document into two sentences, but that’s essentially it!

The second market research assignment was to write a report on social media, specifically how other independent children’s publishers were using it and what they were successful at, to compare it to UCLan Publishing’s accounts. This mainly focused on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, since those were the platforms the publishers all used. This report looked at the type of engagement the posts received and what types of posts received the most engagement on each platform. Of course, audience was also analyzed for these. Then we had to use the information to create a social media plan for one of UCLan Publishing’s books, either not yet published, or one that is backlisted. (And in case you didn’t know, UCLan Publishing is the name of the children’s publishing company my university runs.)

Editing

We had classes with industry professionals on how to do structural, copy and line edits on manuscripts. Structural editing focuses on pacing of the story, the plot, and the characters. Copy and line editing is what you’re probably familiar with – fixing grammatical errors, misspellings and other fine-tuning aspects. But it also includes sticking to a style guide by the publishing house, paying attention to the tenses used, and making sure smaller details within the plot are consistent (like noticing that a character was first described to have white hair and then later with gray).

I felt that this class was the most familiar to me, because editing is probably the most well-known aspect of a publishing company, and it’s what I have the most experience with. But there were definitely a lot of things I learned from this particular course as well!

Learned skills

One of the practical skills we gained over the semester was how to use Adobe Audition. One of our assignments was to create a podcast episode, which required editing with Audition. I was surprised to learned that I really enjoyed this type of work, and might be inclined to even do this in the future.

We also learned a few things on Adobe Photoshop to create social media assets to go along with our second market report assignment. Although I manage the social media accounts for my current job, I’ve always used Canva to create the graphics, so it was interesting to see the more in-depth tools that were available on Photoshop.

Digital publishing

I also had a course on the digital aspect of publishing, which gave an overview of a little bit of everything that was considered a part of ‘digital.’ The most obvious would be ebooks, which includes interactive ebooks, but we also discussed audiobooks as well as self-publishing. We learned about how user data is used by publishers to target their audience better, metadata, blockchains, how to use Amazon to sell and market books and a few other things.

All in all, I definitely learned a lot in the first few short months of this program. But, as the start of the new semester was this week, things are already in full swing! Wish me luck during the coming busy months. Thanks for reading! Stay safe and stay happy.