Teaser Tuesdays -- November 9, 2010 --Careers for Bookworms

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR lists if they like your teasers! 

Michael believes that one of the reasons you go to college is to find out what you're not good at.  He discovered that he was not good at novel writing, which had been his career goal.

~ McGraw-Hill's Careers for Bookworms and Other Literary Types (4th edition) by Marjorie Eberts & Margaret Gisler

I find this quote really thought-provoking.  I went to a liberal arts college for five years.  I had difficulty choosing a major.  I thought a lot about social work but eventually chose elementary education, later adding early childhood education as a second major and TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) as a minor.  I feel as though I majored in something I was fairly good at, but, perhaps, not the exact right choice -- though I'm also willing to consider the possibility that it was just right for me at the time.  So much else is changing in my life right now that job and career stuff seem very up-for-grabs as well.

Other majors that appeal to me (though I don't have any concrete plans to go back to school):

• Linguistics 
• English (which is key to many careers discussed in this book)
• Spanish
• History
• Literature
• Behavioral Economics

Some of the career options discussed in this book make me drool, to be quite frank. 

• Editorial Assistant -- while I think that being an editor or executive editor would possibly be too high-pressure for me and would certainly require more experience/education than I have at this point, I think I could thrive as an editorial assistant.
• Assistant Editor/Copyeditor/Proofreader -- I already do this internally when I'm reading -- so why not put it down on paper?
• Indexer -- this is the second time in the past few months that I've heard about this specific job (something I'd never thought about before -- "Oh, right -- somebody must do the index...")  From the little I've learned, it seems like indexing might be a skill that is somewhat easier to acquire at this stage of my life and I think it's something I could enjoy -- also something you can do as a freelancer. The idea of having a job that I could continue even were I to change geographic locations seems handy.  You can take correspondence classes to be trained as an indexer.  Of course, spending the entire day at a computer terminal might be physically taxing.
• Assistant at a literary agency -- ". . . could include reading manuscripts and writing reviews; typing and filing correspondence to authors and publishers; and scheduling meetings among authors, agents, and publishers" (49).
• Book club selector -- select books to be offered in Book-of-the-Month Club, Quality Paperback Book Club, etc.  I would enjoy reading and evaluating books that I think others would enjoy.
• Editorial Assistant (Magazine Staff) -- Oooh, what if I could work at The Sun?
• Letters Department Manager (Magazine Staff)
• Consumer Relations
• Obviously, I'd also be happy working in a library (again), a bookstore, or to be involved in literacy in some way.

This book is full of all sorts of career options in addition to the ones I've listed here as well as concrete advice as to what steps to take to find a book-related job you'll love.