Interning at Oldcastle Books - Weeks 3 & 4

Counting weeks three and four as two weeks feels a little bit like I'm cheating. You see, I've technically only worked six days, what with having two days off for my graduation and only working a four day week ordinarily anyway! However, short as it may have been, it was jam-packed with experience.

I've been working on a couple of projects; as I mentioned in my last post, I've written tweets to promote our #WWIhistory novels which are now scheduled to post over the month - follow @Oldcastlebooks for info and interesting #Onthisday1914 facts! I've also compiled tweets promoting our #Coffeeville Virtual Summer Road Trip which kicked off last week and got to relive some of the fun of arts & crafts at school by making a map to plot the locations of our blog tour stops:

Picture courtesy of Frances Teehan

Aside from drawing pretty coloured lines, I've been doing some hard-core marketing work i.e. contacting various editors and producers for reviews of our publications, and liaising with our distributors to get the books where they need to be.

I've also got a few tasks in the pipeline such as proofreading a new book we're publishing, thinking up ideas for press releases and, of course, more blogger research (which is essentially allowing me to do what I'd be doing at home...at work!)

Tomorrow I've been invited to attend a PPC meeting with Frances which I'm really excited about - I can't wait to meet more people in the industry and hopefully learn lots! It's in London at the new Foyles which I haven't been to yet (gah!) so I'm super excited for that.

Although I'd always thought my ideal job would be in editorial, I'm really enjoying the marketing and publicity work that I've been doing here. In fact Oldcastle really is a great first step in my career path as I've been able to dip my feet into so many publishing ponds. (I feel like I've mixed up that analogy somewhere but let's just go with it!)

Anyway, the internship was supposed to be just for the month of July however Oldcastle have kindly invited me to stay on as a paid intern throughout August which I'm delighted about - I certainly feel like the longer I stay, the more I'll learn and the more I'll be able to contribute. One week or two week placements here and there are of course fantastic opportunities, but its really nice to think I'll be able to see one or two projects through to their end :)