Another Summer, Another Internship!

This is now my third summer in a row as an intern.

My last two were at DC Thomson in Dundee but this latest one takes me much further afield – to Leeds!

Peepal Tree Press Entrance

Over the next six weeks or so, I will be doing a new type of dissertation module which involves me doing a placement with Leeds publisher, Peepal Tree Press – yes it is very fancy, thank you.

Peepal Tree is a UK-based publisher which specialise is Caribbean and Black-British and South Asian in the UK. It publishes writers from both the UK and the Caribbean in Poetry, Fiction and Non-Fiction.

There are lots of different parts to this dissertation placement which I’ll explain as I go along and as I begin to understand better myself.

As for my first day…

It was great! I have already done a whole range of things I had never done before:

I looked at submitted manuscripts that were in Peepal Tree’s pile and read to see if they could be taken further. That’s right, I make the decisions around here.

I was given an introduction to things like Consonance, a software where publishers manage all their data for their titles.

And a look at Submittable from an organization’s point of view.

It was interesting to get a feel for working in-house at a publishers. Reading manuscripts and navigating around the software has already allowed me to use some of the skills I have picked up during my degree – so that’s a good sign!

There was plenty to do on this first day and, by the sounds of it, plenty of more great things to come.

Drop by later to find out how I get on!

Hamzah