After launching a Web site last year designed to promote the book industry as a career choice, the Association of American Publishers is now launching an outreach program to attract college graduates to the industry. The campaign, called Book Yourself a Career, is intended to attract both minority graduates and students from a wide range of personal and academic backgrounds to entry-level jobs in book publishing.
"We want students of all backgrounds," explained Bridget Marmion, v-p, marketing director at Houghton Mifflin and chair of the Diversity/Recruit and Retain committee. "We'll be reaching out to majors in history, business, art and science as well as literature and journalism."
The AAP's Diversity/Recruit and Retain committee launched the bookjobs.com site, which offers a listing of entry-level jobs, in 2003. According to the AAP's Katie Blough, the outreach initiative will include mailings to 2,000 college newspapers about bookjobs.com as well as personal calls to career centers at a number of colleges. Blough said the program is targeting colleges "with diverse student bodies and high academic standards."
The campaign will also include visits to colleges by subcommittee members of the AAP Diversity panel to promote the initiative. Blough noted that AAP's members are also spreading the word about bookjobs.com when they make their own recruiting trips around the country.
Blough told PW that there were about 260 jobs listed on the site from about 270 publishers, in addition to more than 33 internships.
