Day in the Life (Remote): Hayley O’Brion
Assistant Managing Editor, Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group.
Day: Monday, October 7, 2024
8:30 AM: My morning begins with a meeting! (I work virtually from Wisconsin, and my time zone makes the day extra early for me!) The reprints team and I chat about titles that were called to reprint the previous week. When titles are reprinted, editors sometimes request that corrections be made, and our job is to facilitate those corrections. Some corrections need to be done by our reprints designer, while others can be handled by our production managers (and will be sent out-of-house); this meeting is for us to discuss who will do what!
9:15 AM: I receive an email saying that proofs are ready for one of the special sales projects I’m working on. Part of my job is to serve as a production editor on our special sales team, so I do a quick proofread of this set of proofs, making sure that the changes we requested last round look good, and then I approve them!
10:00 AM: I have a “production editor / managing editor check-in” with my department. This is a time when production editors go over titles that are running late, are extra complicated, and/or have tricky components; this lets the managing editors know what’s going on with their imprints’ titles! I bring up one title in the meeting that has been giving me a headache: a picture book that will have two editions—one standard edition and one special sales edition. At this point, we haven’t yet received confirmation that the special sales edition will be happening, but we need to release files by next week—yikes!
11:00 AM: Reprints production meeting! My department partner and I run a quick production meeting for the reprint titles we discussed earlier this morning. This is the main way we communicate with the reprints designer about the titles they’ll need to work on for the week!
12:00 PM: Lunchtime! I make myself a turkey sandwich and play with my cats before heading back to work.
1:00 PM: I meet with our department’s new intern to get help with a project. This is my first time chatting with the intern one-on-one, and it’s so fun to get to know them! After chatting, I walk them through how to do CIP (cataloging-in-publication) applications. For every title we publish, we submit cataloging-in-publication applications to the Library of Congress, and in turn, they provide data about our books, which are often used by librarians as a helpful reference. I organize the CIP applications process in our department, and the intern will help me submit them for this season!
2:30-5:30 PM: Meeting prep! A managing editor in our department is out of the office this week, and I was asked to run a production meeting on Tuesday in her stead! Production meetings are hour-long gatherings with all the departments involved in book production (design, production, managing editorial, editorial), and managing editors run the meeting! Since I’ll be stepping in, I review the seasons we’ll be discussing, then send out the production reports so people can follow along in the meeting the next day.
5:45 PM: I finish answering emails and log off for the day!
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