First Week Recap

Just finished up my first week of interning at Alice James Books, a cooperative poetry press in the little college town of Farmington, Maine. The first week mainly consisted of organizing all the manuscripts recently submitted for one of AJB's contests, the Beatrice Hawley Award. Instead of accepting unsolicited manuscripts, AJB has various contests where the winners get to have their book published. The authors get to be very involved in the process- they all pick their own cover art, and work closely with AJB on designing and editing their book. It's one of the perks of publishing with such a small press. My job mainly consisted of entering data into the GiftWorks program, which keeps a log of each manuscript submitted and the fee the authors paid in order to submit. Having to check the GiftWorks list with the actual manuscripts definitely took some time and brought to light some discrepancies which had to be worked out-- we even thought we had lost one manuscript, causing some panic, but in the end we found it in time to send off a final list to the AJB board by the end of the week. Keeping track of and organizing about 750 manuscripts was such a big task that I wondered how the big publishing houses are able to keep track of everything!