Essay: Wait, This is Real? A look inside the Acquisitions Department

This was real. That was the first thing I was nervous about.  This wasn’t just a unit with a pass or fail grade, as a student and acquisitions associate for Elephant Page Publishing I was personally interacting with the writing and publishing community. My actions and decisions have real consequences. I could very well be the difference between people – readers – finding and liking the books we are publishing, and the catastrophe of no one knowing what we are doing and not caring about the books we send out to bookstores and the world.  

It is our job to reach out to communities with our books and to market them so thoroughly that people have no choice but to buy them. It is our job to network with bookstores to sell our books in their stores. Hopefully, browsers can see the colourful wonders of our front covers and feel the urge to have it. It is our job to go on social media and flaunt our books to find the people that are destined to read them. It is our job to comb through our manuscripts and edit them to perfection, to bring the author’s work and dreams to life. It is our job to make dreams come true by accepting manuscripts or to unfortunately delay them. It is our job to be a real professional working at a publishing house, something we’ve only ever aspired to be before. Now, it was real.    

It was all very daunting. My specific role in this complex network was to find the next story to share.   

But while the main goal is to find the next untold voice and fulfilling their dreams of authorhood, the reality of my day-to-day as an acquisitions associate usually starts with something much more distinct; an overflowing inbox of manuscripts and a very confusing email trail to sort through.  

The first lesson in being a “real” acquisitions associate came when I emailed a bookstore inquiring if they would hold and sell our new book Running Tracks. They responded to my personal email. This sent me into a flurry of emotions as they were asking questions about the publishing world no twenty-year-old knows the answers to – especially one barely two weeks into their first experience in a publishing house.  Through the ever so helpful guidance of our head publisher, Per, I was able to keep up with the communications myself and answer their questions concisely and, more importantly, correctly.    

This back and forth of emailing between the bookstore and Per overwhelmingly led me to travel half an hour to their store and drop off four copies of Running Tracks with a fully filled out consignment form. It was so worth it as I got to see the fruits of my emailing labour in the physical delivery of the books. The stress of making sure I got all the correct information to the bookstore was all-consuming and gave me my very first glimpse into publishing life. It was a sudden wake-up call to how just one individual can change how a publishing house is perceived by the industry and the community within it. In this moment, I was no longer a student participating in a unit to graduate, but officially a part of the industry I had always wanted to join, a real member of a real publishing house.   

Jessica Bull 

Acquisitions Associate