Busy month has been extremely busy! I've been awfully quiet this December - but hard at work over here in Oxford. Our assignments have been ticked off one by one. Farewell editorial report and presentation, farewell design and production sample chapters and BLAD, farewell marketing plan. You were a hoot.

(I'm now nocturnal.)

We've officially proposed our Online Dating Guide for the Young Professional (Click Online Dating in the City), and although we didn't win the Pan Macmillan editorial prize (which went to the extremely deserving team who created Happy Hedgehogs a Gluten-free cookbook for kids with 'prickly tummies') we probably won with the world's most co-operative and peaceful team building experience. It was great working with you team 11!

Karly and I spent many an afternoon with wicked witches and dastardly devils trying to get to grips with the ins and outs of InDesign to redesign Monsters in the Movies into a new paperback format, with revised text and layout. Vampires and Werewolves, ghosts, fairytales and modern monsters were all scanned, edited and reformatted. And eventually we even figured out how to do the preflight checks (tip: do this as you go along and spot mistakes on the way!) My most successful accomplishment was learning how to do clipping paths on photoshop. I'll be reading my InDesign guide back to front this Christmas break to try and figure it all out at home.

And Beth and I have literally just this minute submitted our Marketing Plan for a series of four 'Living With...' titles under the Jessica Kingsley Publishers brand list. 

FREEDOM!

In other news I've managed to stumble my happy way into three upcoming internships in 2013. The first you already know about, David Fickling Books, which starts in January. I've been reading lots of wonderful DFB titles in preparation, and am particularly fond of Richard Coleridge's beautiful winter picturebook When it Snows. 

The second is a week in May with the sales and marketing department of an up and coming Childrens and Young Adult trade fiction imprint called Hot Key Books, who have signed Sally Gardner's fabulously trippy tale Maggot Moon, and one of my favourite American teen writers, Maureen Johnson. I'm hoping to build my dissertation/major project around the idea of social media and community building with marketing and PR in Young Adult markets, so am particularly excited at this amazing opportunity.

And finally I am incredibly happy to have been offered a month internship at Headline books immediately following my week at Hot Key. I can't wait to follow up the book signing event with Eowyn Ivey and Sam Eades with the chance to peek behind the scenes at the build up to such a campaign.

So I hope you all enjoy your winter holidays.

I shall be reading:

Snow Child - Eowyn Ivey (I'm half way through and it is beautiful, a definite must read!)
Divergent - Veronica Roth
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairytale Land In A Ship Of Her Own Making - Catherynne M. Valente
The Feathered Man - Jeremy de Quidt
A Discovery of Witches - Deborah Harkness 
Heart-Shaped Bruise - Tanya Byrne

It's week 8 of the OICPS publishing MA, and the assessment period is here. Following a marketing exam which went well - I think, we shall find out next week - we had a proofreading test this week. 

I definitely did not expect it to be quite so tough. We had to mark up three text pieces and answer ten questions in an hour and a half. I tried to pay so much attention to detail on the first piece that time ran away from me. This happened to a few of us from what I can gather, regardless of all that practice beforehand. And what seemed like a sweet children's story about fluffy bunnies evolved into an alarming tale of twisted cannibal critters! 

Our first assignment piece is also due in this week from digital product design. Together with my partner Karly, I came up with a digital app proposal that took elements from the book Monsters in the Movies, by John Landis, and turned it into an interactive media Monsters in Motion. The pictures from the book come to life in video clips and the information from the book is broken down into bitesize chunks. We also added a social media element with a photo manipulation platform that would allow users to transform their friends into vampires, werewolves and more. Perfect for those mourning the end of the Twilight trilogy (and even for those celebrating the franchise's demise!) Now we just have to work out how to format the proposal into a PDF and submit it. 

Fingers crossed.

My editorial group is off to a great start as well, with effective division of the tasks. My weekend will be spent writing a hypothetical online dating guide chapter, to compliment the current trend for the phenomenon. Our biggest dilemma is understanding why the gap in the market seems to be so vast. Even the Dummies guide is nearly a decade out of date!

I've also applied for a publicity internship with Princeton University Press which looks like a very exciting opportunity to learn about a vast spectrum of the publishing industry from marketing to rights. Now it's the waiting game to hear back from them.

Good luck to all my fellow MA students who are about to tumble down the rabbit hole into assessment wonderland. We're all mad here, after all!