Alumni - Louise Butler, MA Publishing

The MA in Publishing at Brookes equipped me ideally for my career – not only did it provide me with the strong practical knowledge base and skills I needed early on, it helped me to build connections with the industry (I gained my first role before the course had finished after making contact with a guest speaker at a lecture and hearing about the opportunity!). The MA exposed me to the range of different publishing jobs out there and ultimately helped me to determine my own career path. I also made some fantastic friends!

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I came to the Brookes Publishing MA in 2005 straight from a BA in English and knew that although publishing really interested me as a career, it was vital I did something to differentiate my skills and experience from all those other English graduates out there looking to get into the industry! What I didn’t realise was the huge amount of variety within publishing – from not really being aware of academic publishing or what it involved, before my time on the MA was up I was quite certain that it was academic publishing and editorial that I was most interested in and where I wanted to progress my career. And Oxford was the ideal place for this!  

After previous roles at Wiley Blackwell and small independent Berg in editorial assistant and development editor roles, I now work as Commissioning Editor at Bloomsbury in London in the company’s academic division. Bloomsbury’s growing academic programme publishes over 1000 books per year across the humanities, social sciences and visual arts and is highly regarded for its innovative digital strategy, winning the IPG Award in 2013 for Academic and Professional Publisher of the Year. My role is really rewarding and I have spent the last few years building up a new books list in the burgeoning area of Food Studies. I also manage the Anthropology programme. My responsibilities include commissioning new books in these subject areas, from research-based monographs and collections to textbooks, reference and digital products as well as managing the backlists of each programme. Central to my role is developing strong relationships with key authors and editors around the world, immersing myself in my subject areas and keeping on top of new research and learning and teaching trends. I also have the opportunity to travel overseas regularly as part of my role.

 

Posted on 04 Apr 2014 around 2pm