So as most people who follow me on Facebook will know, about a month and a half ago, I received the news that I was going to be the new intern for a start-up publishing company based out of Chicago. Although it was virtual, it was a paid opportunity, and I was seeing stars since I had spent roughly the past 10 months searching high and low for an internship in publishing that would work for me logistically where the employers would also be interested in, y’know, hiring me. A lot of people were very excited and happy for me when I got the news, and I appreciated the praise and congratulations I received, but part of me felt like I didn’t totally deserve some of it. Although I did work really hard (and still do!) to prove that I was the best candidate for the internship I have now, my road to Internship World was far from smooth and uneventful.

What I mean by that is that in those 10 months I searched off and on for an internship I…well, I made a lot of mistakes. I had no idea what I was doing, had never taken a class on applying for anything in the publishing/professional world, wrote (and as it turned out, re-wrote and re-wrote) my own resume with no outside input and, other than a few articles I read on the topic of applying for publishing internships and how best to go about it, I was pretty much swinging blind. I learned from my mistakes and honed my understanding with some good old-fashioned trial and error, but in the end, I did walk away with what I consider to be some pretty solid advice on applying for publishing internships. Obviously these pieces of advice are shaped by my own experiences and I am certainly still not an expert, but I figured, why not? I’ll tell the tale of my internship woes and victories and maybe help out the next English/Publishing major who walks that twisted trail.

The Beginning of the Search: Dream Meets Reality

My first questionable move came right out of the gate when I decided to start looking and applying for internships. My search began by researching how in the world one even found them (answer in my case: spending endless hours meticulously scrolling through bookjobs.com and internships.com) and how to go about applying for them when you did. Obviously, when I got started on my quest I had some private and fantastical dream of getting a spot in an internship program at one of the Big Five of publishing (i.e. Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, etc.) but even then at my most idealistic about the whole process, I knew the chances of that dream being realized were slim to none. That’s not meant to be particularly self-deprecating, just realistic. I have a great GPA and academic record and some solid skills, but I was also inexperienced and aware that there had to be hundreds of applicants with similar or perhaps better skills lining up to get those same coveted spots. With that in mind, I actually tended to avoid postings about big publishing houses and headed more for independent and smaller presses. Whether or not that was strictly a “good call” is up for interpretation I guess, but needless to say I did apply for a couple really selective internship programs and received the expected rejections.

My first potential faux pas really came when I was deciding how to approach the internship hunt. I got a good jump on it and started looking and researching early (I really recommend this) but for some reason I was determined to do the whole thing completely on my own, without using any resources at my school, such as the College of Liberal Arts career advisors who could have helped in the search, given me extra resource and helped form resumes and cover letters. Why did I do this? Basically, I wanted to make sure I had earned it on my own merit. I somehow felt that getting this extra help was some kind of cheating, as though I was misrepresenting my skill set by presenting a perhaps more polished resume or cover letter than I actually knew how to craft on my own. I’m going to go ahead and say here: this was a dumb way to think. Use as many resources as you can to help smooth the process cause it’s a huge endeavor and you will get bogged down if you’re totally on your own.

There’s nothing wrong with doing things by trial and error, so if that’s really what you want to do too, you can go for it. But as far as I was concerned, I definitely made it harder on myself. On the one hand I still see the value of just going for it and forging your own path, but also… it would have been nice to have some help. Because I had no clue at the beginning what I was getting into.

What I Was Getting Into: I Make It Work… By Making a Lot of Mistakes

So I started applying. First things first, you should know that I ended up applying to close to thirty internships in total, maybe more. This is actually a fairly conservative number for some. People aren’t lying when they say it’s hard to get an internship in the publishing industry. First came the endless sorting through posts about potential internships. I think I made another slight faux pau here by narrowing my search too much. At first, I was determined to stick to only editorial internships since that’s the side of publishing I’m interested in. Later, I would end up expanding my search to include social media internships (that were still affiliated with the literary community) and internships at literary agencies, but at the start I was editorial all the way, no exceptions. Although I ultimately did end up with an editorial internship (with some social media stuff thrown in there too), I probably missed out on some opportunities to apply for a wider variety right at the start, so that’s worth noting.

I also stuck a little too close to home, searching mostly Book Jobs instead of expanding my search to other sites. Book Jobs can be great (there are a ton of internships in the literary community listed there) and it’s easy to use, but there are some hang ups too. There are a lot of “dead” posts on there, posts that are years old or left up after deadlines have closed or hiring has finished. Unless you read carefully (or in some cases, use your detective skills) you’d never know, and it was so disappointing to see an interesting internship and click it only to find out the deadline to apply was marked as say, March 13^th, 2012. In the end, I ended up finding my internship on Internships.com, a website I underutilized initially. I think I thought there were so many postings on Book Jobs I’d never work through all the relevant ones without finding something or getting hired, but that, as it turned out, was pretty untrue.

A stupid misconception I had going in to this search was that I’d receive a lot of rejections. That was true in a sense because I definitely received my fair share (I’ll share my most brutal one at the end of this post just for the cringing fun of it) but there was also a good amount of applications I sent out that never received any reply at all, even if I queried. I can imagine there are a range of reasons for that, some of which were explained to me by people who eventually did get back to me (“so many applicants” “work took priority over finding someone to bring us coffee” etc.) but it surprised me a little after I sent my first round of applications out to only receive a smattering of replies after a good amount of time had gone by. It was strangely demoralizing. I’ve been submitting my writing since I was thirteen and acquired so many rejection letters I’m fairly immune to their sting now, but not hearing anything felt like a deliberate slap in the face, as though they’d looked at the name on my application and then immediately chucked it in the trash. Obviously I took it way too personally, but the fact remains, as much as I told myself not to get my hopes up, they did indeed get up, and not hearing a word from some of my top picks was pretty heartbreaking.

So why was I getting all these rejection letters? I’m sure there was more than one reason, but I definitely know of one in particular that might have swayed a few people. My freaking cover letter.

Oh, yes, you read that correctly. My cover letter. Singular. As in, I only wrote one.

Let’s be real here, I knew this was a rookie mistake as I was making it. But, unless the posting specifically mentioned something they wanted in the cover letter (i.e. “tell us about your six favorite childhood books!” or something like that) I had one go-to letter that I sent along with every application and resume I sent in. Why? Well, to be frank, I wasn’t sure I needed to make that extra effort. It was a lot of work just finding these internships, and keep in mind, I wrote a little specific note to each one in the body of my email, so I let myself imagine maybe they didn’t notice this document I was attaching was written for the generic purpose of being The Cover Letter. I did spend a lot of time crafting it and putting in pertinent details, but it definitely wasn’t a good fit for every company I sent it to. So why did I send it? I’m not sure. Quantity over quality? Writing an individual cover letter for each application seemed like an impossible task? Because I’ve always been bad at writing cover letters and was insecure about the process anyway? Yeah, probably all of those are decent guesses.

Here is my advice: I’m not an expert, so maybe writing one cover letter template and then making changes to it to make it work for every application is something you can pull off just fine. But don’t make the mistake I did, of making the greeting generic. I don’t remember what I put, but it was definitely something worthy of a cringe. Not “to whom it may concern” but something similar and just as vague. If you’re going to do what I did and copy and paste your way to success, figure out as best you can whose inbox this letter is going to end up in and address it formally to them. If you can’t find a specific name anywhere on the application, the publishing company’s name will do in a pinch. You want to stand out, and generic greetings are not the way to go about that. I eventually realized that this was a major concern and made some changes to how I was going about applying, but I spent way too long making that same mistake over and over, even though I knew it was a mistake.

Speaking of sticking out, I made another questionable decision early on, in that I crafted what I thought of as a more “visual” resume. What does that mean? Well it means instead of using a Word or Microsoft template to form my resume, I thought it would be better to go online to the graphic design website I use and craft a more graphically inspired resume to “catch the eye.” This idea had some logic behind it. I wanted to show I had the ability to make something visually pleasing and be creative with an old idea, and I thought this was one way to go about it. This resume included a colored background, a small picture of me on it (as close to a headshot as I could make a non-professional photo look), some minor decorative stuff, and of course all of the information that would go on a “normal” resume. It wasn’t anything super fancy, but it was different. Honestly, I’m still not sure if this did me more harm than good or the other way around. No one every commented on it one way or the other, and it wasn’t as though everyone rejected me out of hand, so maybe it wasn’t a huge concern. I would be wary though, personally, of following in my footsteps here. Eventually I started including a more traditional written resume as well in case they couldn’t open or download what was obviously a larger file or found the design elements distracting. I think the danger here was looking like a kid decorating their folders for school or something, as though I was trying to gussy up a business document (which I guess is what I was doing). I don’t know, like I said, I’m no expert, but I had my reasons at the time. For what it’s worth, I did not include the visual resume in my application for the internship I eventually got, so that’s something to think about.

Another misconception I had about applying for publishing internships is that I would need letters of recommendation. With this in mind, I asked three professors at my school early on if they could write some for me and was very lucky to receive three positive answers. As it happened, however, none of those professors ever actually ended up getting these letters of recommendation to me for internship purposes. Two of them graciously wrote recommendations for my scholarship application instead (a scholarship I was eventually awarded!) and the other professor retired at the end of the semester (possibly simply to avoid any more of my requests for letters of recommendation). However, even before then, I didn’t stay on top of them about it. That was partially because I’m the type of person who hates asking people for things, and so the very idea of asking for letters of recommendation makes me shiver, and reminding people that they’ve agreed to say nice things about me in letter form so I can get things I want seems even worse, but it was also because I had begun to realize I wouldn’t really need them.

I honestly think in all my searching for publishing internships, I came across maybe one or two postings that actually required letters of recommendation at the start. A couple of them required them if I was moved on to the first round of the hiring process, but not before then, and most didn’t even want them at that juncture. For some reason, I had been thinking this would be a pivotal part of the hiring process and… it just didn’t appear to be. Granted, on most of my applications I wrote I could provide up to three if they were needed, but I didn’t bother backing that up and no ever asked me to.

This uncertain beginning was definitely one of the rougher periods of this journey, but not the roughest, as that lay just ahead in the awkward middle portion. I’ll get to that next week in the next installment of this series, but for now I’d like to leave you with this.

One thing I haven’t spoken much about in this article is how truly awful the rejections were. Some of them were nicer than others, but many seemed to be written by busy, impatient, angry people I had accidentally bothered. As much as I’ve reiterated in this article that rejection letters don’t bother me like they used to, I still pored over the ones I received that had a personal touch, rejoiced when I received ones that “urged me to reapply next year” and prided myself on those that had any kind of complimentary take on what I had sent them.

And then there were the really bad ones. My worst experience with a rejection letter was later in the process but I’m including it here because it perfectly sums up how crushing this experience can be. I once spent close to an hour putting together the application materials to send to a literary agency that was hiring for what was, if my memory serves, an unpaid internship.

Less than an hour after I sent it, in less time than it had taken me to carefully send it off, I received this back:

Dear Applicant:

I am currently only hiring a few of the very top candidates, so I will not be able to hire you. Thank you for your interest in [Name of Literary Agency Redacted Because I’m Scared of Them].

Ouch. That one was a hit. Not only the phrasing, which I translated to mean, “We’re hiring the best of the best, not you” but also the speed of the rejection indicated they’d barely looked at my application materials, if they’d glanced at them at all. I remember reading the email aloud to my boyfriend and laughing about how brutal it was, but I genuinely felt like giving up. I was about to write here that I still wrote them a simple thank you note as I always did when I got a response about a position I’d applied for, but I just went and looked at the email again and I can see I didn’t. I guess not receiving a couple of phrases detailing my appreciation for their consideration was the best punishment I had on hand for them. Oops. Guess I wasn’t as saintly as I thought.

So how did I bounce back? All that and more to come in the next installment, Minor Successes and Endless Frustrations: I Can’t Afford to Have a Publishing Internship!