From the beginning I’ve hoped that this internship would give me a better insight into the world of publishing. I began this internship with practically no knowledge of the field. And in that regard, my work here has been very fruitful. I have learned very broad strokes of what goes behind publishing, from looking into various distributors and printers to editing and developing the journal. I’ve even gotten more than I expected. Because of SPD suddenly going under, a lot got upset in the small press industry. I got to sit in on a meeting between Nicholas and Emily Cook where I got to see them trying to figure out how to get profits back to what they used to be before SPD failed. One of the most interesting tips I heard was to identify what your audience is and to try to keep that audience. Usually it helps for that audience to be regional, or, as in the case of Bordighera Press, the audience is Italian-American. Apparently, many small presses have tried to expand to a wider audience and have found that it actually hurts their profits. I also learned that various distributors are helpful for different size presses and that upgrading to a larger distributor, if you have larger output, can help to increase profits.

My aspirations have evolved with my time at Bordighera Press. I have begun paying more attention to minute details that at the beginning of my internship I couldn’t hold onto because I had to get the hang of being in the new environment. A dream of mine would be to start my own small press, but a shorter-term goal is to work as an editor at any press, whether it be large like Penguin or small. I want to do this to continue to grow in my knowledge of the publishing industry, since a few months is obviously not enough to learn all I need to know.