Ultimately, the best tool I’ve found for coping with burnout has been therapy. In Molly McGhee’s open letter, she said something like “this isn’t a Macmillan issue,” and I really related to that even when everyone above you on your team means well and is trying their best to help you, it’s hard to evade burnout when there aren’t good systemic employee protections in place. That seems to be a recurring theme in these discussions. Looking back, I see it as a sign that there wasn’t a place to voice concerns formally that we felt comfortable using. In retrospect, though, we shouldn’t have had to do that for each other. We started this text thread where we would cheer each other on, and I think we all relied on it a lot to get us through. One thing that helped me cope at the time was having great relationships with my fellow junior colleagues.

It was a combination of factors, including the total dissolution of the line between work life and personal life, and then some exhausting and time-consuming infighting about how the company should respond to the George Floyd protests. I was approaching burnout even before the onset of the pandemic, but the early days of the COVID work-from-home situation really tipped me over the edge. My last job was in part of a very small team at a small company, so the workload was high-at all levels-because there just weren’t many editors on hand to share the work. Oof, yes, the current conversations about burnout among junior and mid-level publishing professionals are long overdue, and I’ve absolutely experienced burnout myself. Do you have experiences with burnout? How do you cope? There is a lot of discussion about the burnout amongst publishing professionals, editors in particular. Most broadly, I love voicey and fresh-feeling contemporary realism, historical fiction with unusual settings, and soft-speculative fiction drawn from mythologies based outside of Western Europe.

I can’t emphasize enough how frustrating it is that so few of the submissions I’ve received so far have come from BIPOC creators. I’m also generally interested in publishing more stories by and about people previously excluded from representation in kidlit publishing. I get to hire and coordinate with translators, edit and route Spanish editions slated for publication, and look through our backlist for books that might work in Spanish.Īs an acquiring editor, then, I’m very much looking for MG and YA manuscripts with Spanish translation potential, by which I mean books with characters, settings, or themes that are relevant to the Latine community. I’m also working on developing Holiday House’s Spanish language publishing program-I’m a native Spanish speaker and very dedicated to improving the quality and availability of Spanish-language books for kids in the US, so this part of my job is really important to me. I get to acquire and edit manuscripts for the Holiday House frontlist, and my focus in that capacity is on middle grade and YA fiction in prose and graphic novel form. I really love my current job because it has a lot of scope. Kidlit publishing seemed like a good place to do that.Ĭan you tell us a little bit about what you do as an editor and what books you’re looking for? So I’ve grown really passionate about working with people who are invested in nurturing future generations of readers and fostering a love of reading early on. Not all kids have that, for all sorts of different reasons.

So I’ve always known I wanted to work in a job that involves a lot of reading and writing.Īs an adult, I’ve come to realize that while this was partly just my personality, it also had to do with the environment I grew up in: we always had a lot of books at home, and both of my parents are big readers. I was absolutely that kid who just wanted to stay in and read or scribble out weird short stories in my notebook while all the other kids were playing outside. Like most people who go into publishing, I’ve always been a huge bookworm, even from a very young age. Why did you decide to work in book publishing?

Voicey contemporary