My First Day

Today marks my official start at Berrett-Koehler's newest intern. I arrived promptly at 9:30, totally clueless as to how I was to engage myself that day.

My immediate supervisor, Jeevan Sivasubramaniam, is in DC this week--instead of delaying my start date a whole week, however, we decided I should come in today and get started with helping out the marketing team. I met with Bonnie Kaufman who got me started on my first project.

The Berrett-Koehler website (www.bkconnection.com) serves as a catalogue for all of BK's publications. In an effort to increase site traffic and specific books' prominence on Google, I am creating spreadsheets for the books including Title, Author, ISBN, Meta Description, and 10 Key Words. To do this, I examine the copy written about the books on book jackets, in the BK catalogues, and on the website to create a one sentence description and 10 specific, but not unsearchable key words.

Obviously, this is a very large (somewhat tedious) task. The basic plan is to start with the most recent books--those that actually are not published yet--and work backwards, focusing on BK Bestsellers. To make things even more complicated, some books have multiple editions, and most books come in Hardcover, Paperback, and a PDF E-Book format, each of which has a different ISBN.

Bonnie assures me, however, that this will not be my only assignment. Once Jeevan returns I'll have other tasks. I offered my services as a web developer and graphic artist, so we'll see if they have any use for those skills.

I would very much like to help develop book jacket designs--BK usually outsources these jobs to independent designers, but I contributed a little bit to my dad's book cover. Before my dad's book, Effective Apology, was designed, he asked me to create a mock-up of a book cover to place on his website. I made a very simple design, and was surprised when a few months later I was invited to participate in a phone conference with Diane Platner, a Senior Manager for Design and Production, my dad, and the designer they had hired to do the job. Obviously my design was not the one chosen for publication, but the process is really interesting and I think it's something I would be good at.