What I Have Learned: Nicole Yeager
Publishing Associate, Random House Children’s Books
During my almost-three years working in the Publishing Office at Random House Children’s Books, the main thing I’ve learned is how beneficial and valuable it can be to question everything!
In the pub office, which often serves as a central hub for our division, we work with a lot of different departments and teams (something I love about my team and my job!). My role, specifically, often involves creating and implementing systems of processes (SOPs) for other departments to use, as well as communicating questions and requests between other departments. And, of course, we manage the launch process every season. Questioning things has helped me go above and beyond when executing all of these responsibilities and projects. Here are a few examples:
For each publishing season (spring, summer, and fall), my team gets the privilege of helping editors and designers put together the slides for List Launch, where editors present their upcoming titles to marketing, publicity, sales, sub rights, and all the bookmaking teams. There are established processes and norms for how this process goes each time, but my team always questions how things went last time and how we could further improve going forward. One specific thing that we challenged a bit for this upcoming season is a pre-Launch meeting we have with editorial and design teams to essentially “run through” all the slides so they can see the presentation as a whole, how their titles fit in, and what materials they need to add or change before Launch. This meeting was initially started when we went remote and everyone had to learn how to adjust to the new iteration of such a big and important meeting; editors were practicing how they would unmute and present their titles, and both teams would see what the presentations would look like through a Teams meeting.
Recently, we questioned if the purpose of this meeting still makes sense, given that we’re now all accustomed to remote and hybrid work styles. We asked ourselves: Is this meeting still needed? Are folks still getting what they need out of this meeting? What might folks want the purpose to be now? We ended up rebranding the meeting to be a “Fun-Through,” and adjusted the purpose of the meeting to more-so be an opportunity for our creative teams to celebrate each other’s work, while also previewing the presentation. For this upcoming season, we’re further questioning how the past two seasons went and challenging ourselves to make more small tweaks to make it worthwhile and valuable for all involved. We’re considering what logistics could make the new hybrid meeting, with in-person and remote attendees, work for everyone and how to make it fun (i.e. not stressful).
Another one of my regular responsibilities is managing design material requests from sales and sub rights—this means collecting covers, interior images, and other files created and owned by our design team for sales presentations to accounts, the rights guides for Bologna and Frankfurt, etc. These tasks used to be separate, but we merged them so they would all fall under me to streamline the requests for designers and make it as simple yet efficient as possible. When I was first asked to help manage these requests, I met with a handful of other folks involved—sales assistants and associates, sub rights assistants, and design leads—to ask questions like What exactly do you use these materials for and why? What is the general timing of these requests? How can we improve the organization of these materials? I feel this helped not only me, but also the other teams involved, to better understand what these requests are for and why it’s so important to share these materials. We now have an SOP for this process that includes a general timeline of when these requests happen each year, a standard report template to pull the list of titles and files requested, and a digital Box folder where all the materials are organized to reduce any duplicate work. Since our standard process is more efficient, we’re also better able to handle special requests like expedited deadlines. And, even now, I check in with each team every so often to make sure everyone feels good about their role in the process.
And, for a simpler example: I’ve found that, now that I am a few years into the job and have a better understanding of things, I ask more questions to my own team when I get assigned small projects so I can think of ways to deliver above and beyond. For example, my colleagues in the pub office recently asked me to put together a report on how TV and movie adaptations affect book sales. Instead of just asking the basic questions, like when it was due, I asked where the question came from and what the end-goal was. This allowed me to better select the series I included in my research and even came up with some of my own takeaways.
I also love when my colleagues ask me questions and challenge the way I have been doing things because it leads to improved ways of working and growth. All in all, I think it’s important to ask questions—Who is involved? What is this for? Why do we do things this way?—so you’re able to better understand what you’re working on or helping with, and to challenge current ways of working and thinking when you may be able to improve them. More importantly, digging deeper into the who, what, and why, gives you more of an opportunity to learn and understand the bigger picture!
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