The Centre for Youth Literature has picked the brains of Australia’s YA publishers to gain insight into their work, and their titles.  For the next few weeks we will be featuring interviews with a number of individuals on their work in YA publishing.

My name is Mary Verney and I am an editor at Walker Books Australia, a subsidiary to the world-renowned English publisher of children’s books. The Walker office is based in Newtown, Sydney and we publish everything from board books to YA fiction. It is my job to work with authors to make their manuscript the best it can be before it goes to print and enters the world. It is a wonderful job and I consider myself very luck to be part of such a great industry. I started out in retail, managing a book department for Myer in Brisbane. After completing a Diploma of Editing and Publishing, I moved to Sydney to work for Pan Macmillan as an editorial assistant. I’ve been working at Walker Books for three years, first as a junior editor, now as an editor.

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The Centre for Youth Literature has picked the brains of Australia’s YA publishers to gain insight into their work, and their titles.  For the next few weeks we will be featuring interviews with a number of individuals on their work in YA publishing.

Why hello, I’m Stephanie Stepan, Children’s and YA publicist over at Text Publishing. You may not know me, but I’m certain you know our authors!

We publish children’s and YA authors such as Rebecca Stead, Paula Weston, David Levithan, John Green, Sally Rippin and Vikki Wakefield. Now, we publicists are a tricky breed to pin down. A large part of our job goes on behind the scenes where we organise things like interviews and reviews that later appear in magazines, newspapers, online and on radio and TV. You can also find us with authors at events and writers’ festivals around the country.

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The Centre for Youth Literature has picked the brains of Australia’s YA publishers to gain insight into their work, and their titles. For the next few weeks we will be featuring interviews with a number of individuals on their work in YA publishing.  Join us every Tuesday as we gain insight into the Australian YA publishing industry.

My name is Jennifer Kean and I’m the Publicity Manager at Hardie Grant Egmont. There is a lot of variety in my role, particularly because of the way our company is structured. I am working across a variety of titles from picture books, junior fiction series through to stand alone YA fiction. These lists are both local and UK originated releases, so the publicity requirements for these books and their authors and illustrators differ greatly.

My job description involves tailoring publicity plans or campaigns to best suit the title that I’m working on. I look after publicity for our books across Australia and New Zealand.

I work with a variety of media – newspapers, magazines, teacher and librarian journals, industry publications, as well as TV and radio – to get review coverage, media coverage and interviews.

I also work with contacts at many bookstores, schools and libraries as well as a number of writing festival committees and publishing industry groups to organise book launches, book signing events and author/illustrator appearances.

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