Welcome to The Write Conference (Summer 2016) here on Wattpad. The event is aimed at motivating writers in the Wattpad community who aspire to walk the career path of writing, providing advice on the craft of writing from a professional point of vie...
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University
It began, as these things so often do, with an email. I was in my flat in Bath, getting ready for an early morning business lecture, when I saw it on my phone. Penguin would be giving a talk exclusively for business students at the University of Bath. I usually ignored these emails as I received them all the time, but this time it intrigued me.
Publishing was a career choice I had never really considered. I had dreams of being an author, true, but working in publishing had always seemed like something other people did; a mystical industry that was reserved for the most literary minded. In my mind, publishers were made up of people for whom James Joyce was light, bedtime reading.
In any case, several weeks later, I sat down in a small classroom and the Penguin Digital Sales Director told us about all the changes that were happening to the industry: the rise of Wattpad and the way it was revolutionising how young people read; that the way books were marketed and sold now changed every few months; how we lived in a new world of phenomena: Twilight, The Hunger Games, Fifty Shades of Grey.
In that short half an hour, I knew that I wanted to be part of it. An industry where I loved the product I was selling. Where every book was different, with a campaign tailored to each. Where massive changes were happening and they were looking for people with new ideas, new perspectives. Most importantly, they were recruiting business students for a paid internship in the summer of 2013. I knew that paid internships in publishing were virtually unheard of, such was the demand for the experience alone. It was definitely worth applying.
I went up to the speaker after he had finished and introduced myself, casually mentioning that I was an aspiring writer (at that time, I was working on a book that I had started at the age of fourteen, with no end in sight). He immediately told me that I should put it up on Wattpad, naming three different authors who had been discovered that way. At the time, I didn't think that much of it. After all, there were millions of users on the site. Surely it couldn't happen to me.
My Internship at Penguin
The next day, I applied for the internship. I didn't hear from them for months. So it was a great surprise when they called me up and asked me to come in for an interview and give them a five-minute presentation about Penguin Classics ebooks. Armed with a PowerPoint presentation containing several dozen pie charts and graphs, I managed to cram everything I had learned into five minutes.
At the end, we had an informal chat where my writing was brought up again as one of my hobbies. Again, Wattpad was mentioned. This time, I took it seriously.
When they called me to tell me I had got the job, I was informed that over five thousand people had applied for four internships. Somehow, I was one of the four interns chosen.
A few months later, I arrived at Penguin on the first day of their merger with Random House, which made them the biggest publisher in the world. After several speeches and fascinating meetings where the business of predicting book sales was discussed, I began my main project - an overview of the market, namely the rise of the ebook, relations with retailers, where the industry was heading and what strategy publishers needed to take.
