My last day!

In the home stretch here, trying to wrap up as much as I can before I leave so that my teammate, H., who’s survived a surprising number of defections, isn’t stuck with a whole lot of stuff that I could have gotten out of the way for her.

I’ve been thinking I should summarize what I’ve learned during my short stint in Big Publishing—and I’ve learned a lot. But it’s hard to put the big-picture stuff into words that don’t sound like a complaint. I don’t have any complaints about working here; just observations. I would have been happy to stay for a couple of years, if something better hadn’t come along. That was, in fact, the plan. But something better came along!

So. Some of what I’ve learned . . .

Detail stuff

You know, the work. The craft. The job. I used to cringe when I heard the word castoff. It was a mysterious process to me, something that other publishers did. It sounded tricky, and it sounded as if designing a book to fit a specific page count would be even more so.

It’s not, generally. At first I did it the way I had before, but with more hand-wringing. Since July, however, I’ve become more mathematical about designing my pages, more systematic. When I start a project now, the first thing I do, after I’ve coded the MS in Word and converted it to tagged Quark text, is try to calculate my leading, measure, and point size, based on the trim, number of characters per page I’m trying to hit, and whether the book needs to be shot down to a smaller size. If it’s a shoot, I have a cheat sheet to remind me of the constraints I need to observe.

The text block in a mass-market paperback cannot measure more than 21p wide or 36p6 high. The point size of the type can vary depending on the font and amount of leading, but the managing editor would rather not go below 10 points. Written out in words, this means that if, for example, I design a page that measures 41p5 high x 23p10 wide, including running heads, it will have to be reduced to 88% of the original size for the mass market edition. Furthermore, to get ≥10 point text in that MM version, I must use ≥11.3 point type.

If anything goes, my default leading is 14.5 points, and my target characters-per-line count is 65. I use the results of these calculations to set my margins and grid—the top margin always starts as five lines (three of head space, one for the running head, and a blank between the RH and the text). The side margins start at 3/4″, and if space permits, I increase the outside margin so that it’s larger than the gutter. I like the foot margin to also be larger than the head.

If I kept doing this for another six months, I’m sure I’d eventually build a template to match each of the options on the castoff sheet (3 tightness settings x 2 trim sizes). Then I could skip the calculations and go straight into designing chapter openers and such. But so far, I’ve kind of enjoyed doing the math from scratch every time. Call me weird.

I’ve also learned more about picking the fonts, as I mentioned last week. And I’ve learned what it’s like to work with an outside compositor, more or less.

I’m sure there’s more. I’ll add it as I think of it.

Bigger-picture stuff

About fifteen years ago, I discovered that the atmosphere of the place where I worked was more important than the work itself. I could be doing the same job in different locations (in that particular case, two branches of the same bookstore), and at one place I could be happy while at the other I was miserable. I was in different cities, in that case, and different climates, but it was the physical workplace, and the people, especially the management, that made the difference.

My happy place was small, with a warm, smart, involved manager who chose people he liked, people who liked the work they were doing. My sad place was about three times the size, with, first, a manager who was fired right after I started, and then a manager who was cool but had a degenerative illness and couldn’t be around much. She hadn’t hired most of my coworkers, and a lot of them had come to work there because they heard it was easier than in the related record store. Some didn’t read anything but comic books (not that there’s anything wrong with comic books! but that’s a small section in your typical bookstore, and this was before the graphic-novel boom). Some were systematic thieves, including senior people who’d been there for years. It was totally different, and after six or eight months, I reluctantly quit. For little more than minimum wage, it wasn’t worth the stress. I didn’t find another job in Seattle, and the day before my lease was up, I moved back East. I’m not in touch with anyone from that job or that city anymore, which is a very rare outcome for me.

If you’ve read Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series (and you should!), you know that an ongoing theme is what makes a happy ship versus an unhappy ship. An unhappy ship can be full of competent people who know their business, but it’ll also be full of saboteurs and sea lawyers. People will get sick and drink and fight more. They also tend to get flogged more, both with and without cause. The crew will always be on the edge of mutiny.

I’ve worked in some very unhappy ships, but also in enough happy ones to keep me pro-work. (I am one of those people who thinks that if she inherited ten million dollars tomorrow, she would still work. Try me! Let’s see if it’s true!) The place I’m leaving does not seem to be an unhappy ship at all, but for me it’s not a happy one. Maybe for some here it is; happiness is relative, and highly personal, duh. I’ve certainly been happier here than at my last three jobs, and until the Nextbook offer came along, I was planning to dig in and stay here for five or six years. Get to know people who seemed to know stuff, raise my hand to take on as many unusual projects as I could, learn as much as I could. Use the stability of corporate life as a base from which to deepen and broaden my understanding of my trade. Take advantage of the almost total lack of editorial input by experimenting with different styles of design. I didn’t think it’d be thrilling, but I thought I wouldn’t mind it, and that it’d be wholesome and good for me.

Five years ago, when I was laid off from my last happy job, I was given access to the services of an unfortunately dubious outplacement counselor. He administed a Meyers-Briggs test and went over the results with me on the phone. His conclusion? That I would do best in a large corporation with a lot of stability and clearly defined job functions. I had never worked in such a place—rather the opposite in every way—and could not imagine enjoying working in one. The lack of clearly defined job functions had been my ticket to success in my two prior jobs: I was hired to do one thing, took over other projects as they hatched or became orphaned, and ended up doing a totally different thing, or much more complex and challenging things, than whatever I had been hired to do. I’ve always considered that a feature, not a bug, and would often proselytize at career weekends at my college about the joys of working at nonprofits.

So, naturally, I thought this outplacement counselor was a crack fiend. Me, at a large company? In a stable, predictable job? I’d gnaw my foot off in a week!

But after my last three jobs, all of which were at small, relatively unstable places with vague and sometimes ridiculous job requirements (though, notably, two were not nonprofits), I thought maybe Mr. Crackhead was right, after all. So I came here. And?

I think he was mostly wrong. There are benefits to working in a large company, sure—most of them having to do with forms and procedures, 401Ks, insurance, office supplies and equipment, cleanliness, quiet, . . . but then there’s the fact that I still don’t know the names of most of the people on my floor, people I see every day in the hallway or by the water cooler. The water cooler around which, contrary to what I’d been led to believe by cartoons, people do not chat. I know, because I can see it from my desk, and there’s almost never any actual scuttlebutt being transmitted around our scuttlebutt. I also know this because people I work with pretty directly still didn’t know I was leaving until a few days ago. Some people, I’m sure, will find out I’ve left only when they see a new face behind this desk. Maybe there’s no standard Excel form for announcing staff changes to the rest of the department, so they don’t get announced.

I hope I’m wrong, but right now I don’t foresee staying in touch with anyone from here besides H. There are many people I like, but we just haven’t interacted in ways that turn coworkers into friends. That’s in sharp contrast to almost every other job I’ve had, including the ones I’ve hated. (In some ways, I’m closer to people from hateful jobs, because we had so much to commiserate about, and so many now hilarious war stories to retell.) I don’t think it says anything about the people here; it’s just the nature of the place. You don’t see anyone unless you’re delivering a stack of paper (and as a consequence, they’re rarely happy to see you).

At my new job, meanwhile, I have two preexisting friends, and I’m sure I’ll get to know everyone else quite well, on such a compact staff in an open-ish office. With all other things being equal, I suspect I’ll always prefer the small, rapidly changing place to the big, stable place. Maybe I’ll give bigness another try later on, but it’s probably not something I’ll go looking for.

Okay. Must get back to checking proofs.