As part of my job as an intern at the University Press of Florida, I have been instructed to start keeping a blog about what I do here as a way to support the UPF and also to increase my social media skills. I’ve tried blogging before. It usually doesn’t work for me. I get all into it for a couple of weeks and then I get sick or I go home for a long weekend or one of the millions of other things that just seem to constantly come up in life and boom I haven’t updated in two weeks and I just know that all of my followers have given up hope of ever hearing from me ever again.
But, I have an actual incentive for keeping this up. All of the marketing interns at the UPF are in this blogging contest and whoever has the most hits and best content by the end of the semester gets a prize. I think it’s a gift card of some sort. I don’t particularly care about the gift card, but I am an insanely competitive person. Not at sports necessarily. I love sports. I am the kind of die-hard fan who has an alarm set for ESPN College Gameday during football season and will watch four football games a Saturday if I don’t have a ticket. But having been born with little to no actual athletic ability, I am more competitive at things like board games and Words with Friends . (Tip: Don’t play that game with anyone who you actually consider a FRIEND. Things can get ugly when someone doubles your score. Friendships are ended. Plastic cups are thrown across rooms. True story.) So, being the insanely competitive person that I am, I love a good contest. Especially something that involves writing, because as a PR major I do a lot of that. And after four years at this school I should be pretty good at it by now.
So, here’s a little bit about the University Press of Florida
- The UPF began operations in 1945 as the University Presses of Florida, with 2 employees and a budget of $207,000
- It ranks 19th among the 114 members of the American Association of University Presses in terns of titles published per year
- It is the official academic press of the state of Florida, but people from other places publish their books here too.
I am a marketing intern, which means that I do lots of random things like creating databases of potential future reviewers and sending authors copies of their reviews. Some days are busier than others. Today is a bit slow since I was mostly just given the chance to finish up any existing projects. I’ve been working on copy for the next issue of our catalog. The book I’m writing about is pretty interesting. It’s about arrests and imprisonment during the Civil Rights Movement. The book is called Ain’t Scared of Your Jail and will be released in December of this year. I totally recommend it for any of my fellow history buffs. Put it on your Christmas list. And that’s not a shameless plug, I swear. I read most of the book while writing the catalog copy and it’s really good. Occasionally I’ll be given a topic to write about, but for the most part this will be all of my own thoughts and experiences about what actually goes on behind the scenes at a publishing company. Hopefully you’ll find it as interesting as I do!
Confessions of a Publishing Intern 