Eradicating Legacy Thinking

Before joining Book Business last year, I was the director of graduate publishing programs at Rosemont College. In that job, it was my primary responsibility to develop courses, hire instructors and help shape the curriculum that would allow our students to gain the skills needed for a successful publishing career.

Now, enmeshed as I am in developing sessions and finding speakers for our Publishing Business Conference & Expo (which kicks off around the time you will be receiving this issue), and engaged as I have been in the last 15 months in creating quality content for Book Business and our other publications, I am struck by how similar my new job is to my former job, even though they seem so different on the surface. If I had to distill their similarity into one word, I would call the overlap: training.

Whether I am assigning, writing or editing an article, shaping course curricula, or developing programming for an event, I am creating methods of training people to acquire and utilize new skills. We all, at least periodically, need to build new skills in order to succeed, and training is how we obtain these skills. And since we need to learn them, that means that someone needs to teach them to us.

I was a professor at Rosemont, and I still teach at Drexel University. I am an editor here at NAPCO, and an editor is what I have been throughout my career. In a way, editors are teachers, too. By carefully choosing the content we present, we hope to inform, instruct and enlighten you. We want to contribute to your knowledge base; we want to help shape what you learn. That is the essence and the goal of the content we acquire and present: in our publications and at our events.