9am: My commute to Bloomsbury HQ is reasonably long (from Reading) so first stop once I’m in the office is to Rosa, the Bloomsbury barista, who keeps us all caffeinated. On the way up to my floor I tend to have a bit of a potter round to see who is in – our office is a maze of little rooms across multiple Georgian buildings, with people from different teams scattered all around, so it’s nice to see who is about and make plans for after work.
9.15am: First thing at my desk is always checking emails – we have authors, reviewers and readers based in all different time zones around the world so even if the inbox is looking fairly manageable at the end of the day, there is usually a new influx by morning. Ideally there aren’t too many **URGENT** emails with the exclamation mark of doom…
10am: Read through new book proposals – the most fun bit of the process, seeing what new ideas are coming in and how they might fit within my list. The projects that come in can be really varied and it’s a case of matching up our remits and audiences with what authors want to write about. One of the most amazing proposals I ever saw was for a pop-up academic book, but sadly that would have really been pushing our excellent Production team slightly past their limit. The worst was when I commissioned photography books and someone posted us a bound set of “artistic” monochrome, very personal photographs that they wanted to publish…
11am: Send a summary of progress to series editors. The Drawing In series focuses on scholarly discussions around drawing and travels across disciplinary boundaries. In my summary for the series editors, I run through where in the process the various projects are, as well as providing a quick outline of how published books have sold and forthcoming plans. This is also used as a trigger to give delayed authors a gentle prod about progress!
12pm: Film a Reel for Instagram. Our editorial team runs the Bloomsbury Design Books Instagram page which means we get to enjoy the ever-changing social media algorithms. But really we mainly use it for great shots of our beautiful books, and sometimes also feature pieces about our authors (also beautiful). Lots of the downstairs office rooms have recently been redecorated with loads of lovely furnishings and textures – ideal for the background of photos and Reels. (You can see some of these in the Principles and Processes of Interactive Design 2nd edition post.)
12.30pm: lunch – a couple of friends and I realised we were being very boring with our lunches when we have the benefit of being in central London two days a week as part of our hybrid working, so have set ourselves a challenge to have Thursday £10 global lunches, trying to cover as many different cuisines as possible over the year for under a tenner. Bloomsbury Farmers’ Market is a favourite to tick off some of the more unusual options (and the pasta stall is incredible!).
2pm: Meet with Production and Cover Design colleagues to go through our scheduling. We also take this opportunity to talk about progress of forthcoming covers – one of the ones we’ve just approved is for a new typography title Giving Type Meaning. Our designer Lou created lots of different style options for us, and we and the author chatted through the ones we liked and didn’t, then our author Mia (who is a designer herself) suggested some different colourways for us to consider. Lou tried a few of these out for us, and we finally all agreed on this fab version. Cover design was actually the reason I wanted to get into publishing in the first place, but realising I probably didn’t have the skills required (my excellent welding for A Level art could only get me so far), I decided editorial was going to be the route for me.
3pm: Meet with colleagues from our Bloomsbury Design Library (BDL) digital team. BDL has recently joined several of our other Visual Arts platforms to create a ‘hub’ which allows users to cross-search across the different subject resources their institution is subscribed to. Libby (our Commissioning Editor in Design) is in charge of writing featured content where she pulls together material from all around the site on a topic we pick – this time she’s working her way through coverage of ‘outdoor wonders’.
4pm: Meet with our Open Access (OA) Champions. Though it’s not a new area (in fact, Bloomsbury Academic was one of the first publishers to publish OA books), it’s an ever-evolving area, so we have regular meetings across the division to keep on top of what’s happening so we can explain all things OA to our team and authors.
5.30pm: home time (or, if I have any say in it, pub time!)
I hope you enjoyed this insight into my day – sadly you may have noticed a total lack of sitting in a lovely, aged leather armchair beside a fireplace reading a book. On other days I might have author meetings, conferences, training, chats with partner organisations, writing of textbook sales tools, meetings with Marketing and Sales, and a myriad of other tasks (still no armchair-sitting). And that’s without mentioning the many, many spreadsheets…
Louise Baird-Smith is Publisher for Design books within the Bloomsbury Visual Arts imprint.
Contact details for Bloomsbury Academic’s editorial staff can be found on the Contacts for Authors page of the website. Find out more about submitting a book proposal to us and contact the relevant editor.
