Hello! Today I’m going to briefly describe my publishing-adjacent job as an editorial production coordinator at the Infusion Nurses Society, a nonprofit that provides conferences and other ongoing education as well as credentialing to infusion nurses.
I’ve already been there over six months—which means I’ve been in charge of publishing three issues of INSider, the bimonthly membership benefit magazine. My supervisor and other coworkers have given me leads for some of the content, and I also try to find topics that would interest infusion nurses: I interviewed our members on their experiences during COVID, and I just published an essay from a hospital chaplain who I know from the writing world.
In addition to running the INSider, I edit (and sometimes write) documents for different departments—marketing, meetings, membership services, etc. Usually one document per day, sometimes two or three. These edits aren’t usually too technical, but I’m going to start editing one article in the bimonthly Journal of Infusion Nursing, which will be a more technical/scientific edit.
My salary is $48,000, which has been great for many practical and not-so-practical reasons, but especially to finally support some arts orgs and to travel to promote my novel (which comes out next week!) and also to buy promotional postcards, etc.
I haven’t been writing lately, but I remind myself that I also didn’t write during my first six months at Perseus Books. I hope to get back to it now that I’ve learned the job’s ropes. I often think of what Virginia Woolf wrote regarding art and life: “The difficulty is the usual one—how to adjust the two worlds. It is no good getting violently excited: one must combine.”
I hope you have a wonderful holiday season. Especially if you live in the Northwest, consider buying my novel for a gift and/or to celebrate the fifty-fifth anniversary of the 1967 Oregon Beach Bill. The novel recently received a great review in Kirkus, which called it “A revealing and contemplative tale about people tied to a wondrous, harsh landscape,” and the bookshop Annie Bloom’s offers an autographed option.
Also, I wanted to shout-out three book clubs that you might want to give as a gift to yourself or others:
Belt Publishing: Almost all nonfiction, sometimes but not always about the Rust Belt. I’ve enjoyed Standpipe, a memoir centered on the Flint water crisis and (Mis)Diagnosed, on mental health. Their books are always short: less than two hundred pages, often less than 150.
New York Review of Books Classics: They republish out-of-print classics (both fiction and nonfiction) from all over the world. Some of my favorites have been The Vet’s Daughter and Fair Play, but you can’t go wrong with anything on their list. When I’m frustrated with contemporary fiction, I simply read one of their books, and feel refreshed.
Malarkey Books: Alan Good, the proofreader at Ruminate and author of (among other books) the great essay collection Mere Malarkey, just started this book club, and I signed up. He’s publishing twelve books next year, all fiction. I’m interested to follow this ambitious project.
Sincerely,
Rachel