As part of our careers in publishing series, we spoke to Anastasia Boama-Aboagye about her role as Marketing & Publicity Assistant. Find out what skills she uses on a day-to-day basis at Bloomsbury Publishing below.
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1. Hi Anastasia, can you tell us how you came to be in your current role?
I was a pharmacist and decided to make a career change and joined the LDN publishing apprentice scheme as a marketing and publicity apprentice in the Special interest department and 8 months into the apprenticeship I applied for the assistant role and secured it.
2. Could you take us through the sort of responsibilities that you manage in your role?
My role includes managing my own marketing and publicity campaigns whilst supporting others in their campaigns and doing the general admin for the team.
3. What is the first skill you need for your role?
Organisational skills. This is a big part of the role. We publish a lot of books, very close together and my role includes creating my campaigns, but also supporting others with their campaigns. This is alongside managing all our team meetings and admin, therefore the role requires organisation and time management to stay on top of all tasks.
4. What is the second skill you need?
Creativity. The main part of marketing and publicity is to creatively reach your target audience and my role requires me to come up with design ideas and campaign concepts, that express the books to the target demographics. This includes creating proof copies of books and social media and website content. Therefore a large part of this role is having a creative mind and coming up with different concepts and options for campaigns and then executing them.
5. Finally, what is the third skill you need?
Being able to handle critiques. Marketing and publicity is a creative department, therefore everyone has their own creative process and vision and at times they won’t see or agree with yours and you need to be ok with this. The role requires an understanding of when to pivot and change your ideas, but also when to stand by your ideas and not take people's opinions as personal, but just as their own creative vision.
6. What advice do you have for publishing hopefuls looking to develop these skills?
It takes time to develop any skill and therefore you need to give yourself the grace to understand that you won’t have all of these skills from the jump and be ok with making mistakes and learning from them.
Anastasia is from London and is a qualified practising pharmacist with a love for creating content, reading books and going to the theatre. She's passionate about the world of publishing because she truly believes books are windows into other worlds and a beautiful way to truly understand life and all of its experiences.
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