So just from that, if someone is listening and they like the sound of what you've said and they want to move into production, what advice and skills would you give and recommend that they have? Maybe if they've had a previous job or internship or experience or maybe nothing at all in publishing? what would you say to them?

I think one of the main other skills other than being a good communicator is problem solving and time management because As the production person, you are overseeing the title as its own project.

And there might be issues that come up that you don't expect and that could derail the production schedule.

Like an author just disappearing for months on end or just not deciding to do their copyediting and proofreading, which has happened before.

So it's just showing that you're able to work calmly under pressure and... deal with issues as they arise and can sort of think outside the box to see how best to manage the situation to be able to get the title back on track because there might be times where it's gone completely off course and it's no longer on its original production schedule and you have to figure out can it still meet the original publication date or will this have to move on what's realistically possible for the title and when will the stock come in if it does have a print run.

So I think for any job that you're moving from, if you've got skills that show that regardless of what it's in, if it's working in a shop or anything, any other admin job, then I think that's a really good one to highlight.

But if you're moving from a different publishing department into production, I think having experience in a different department alone is a really good skill to have because in production you do need to have an awareness of what the other departments do and you need to know things like when they have their deadlines or what they need from you as the production person, when that's needed by so that the title can stay on track.

Absolutely I know as I say I know we're a bit biased because we're on the SYP podcast but we would encourage anyone listening towards the end of the year whenever you're listening to this to just have a look at your sort of local branch and see what's available and you know we've we're both volunteers but we can say positively you know it does have a massive impact and it does expose you to all sorts of corners of publishing that you might not otherwise know about so yeah i'm glad we're glad we both agreed on that i suppose this is slightly out of left field question but um obviously you're in publishing you work with lots of different departments if somebody listening to this is in another department but regularly works with production What best practices should people in other departments be following to make your life easier?