So I am back after Christmas and there is lots to catch up on. I had so much spare time that I have raced through a few books that I will tell you about soon. But despite my reading frenzy I still haven't got my reading to buying ratio right yet as I read 4 books but got given/bought myself 11.... I also enjoyed a break from work but I am back and ready for round (semester 2) and will be spending much of this week in the library reading around my dissertation topic - open access - which it turns out is now something I have got my dad interested in. I don't know if that's because he's genuinely interested though or whether I just bang on about it a lot and he's just had to get interested to survive. Either way I'm ready to go so get ready for another semester of work placement worries, interesting talks and seminars and assignments (boo).

My year starts with a 2 week work experience placement with TQMI management consultants beginning on the 7th so get ready to hear all about it.

I'm sorry this has taken so long but I have had a pretty busy week and between deadlines and Christmas shopping/baking I haven't had a chance to post anything.

So last Friday was my last day at Wiley-Blackwells. It started like any other with me reviewing new submissions and then moving onto compiling monthly stats reports for a few journals. But then after lunch it got very last-day-of-term-y. I had mentioned to my supervisor that I was interested in Open Access and she very kindly managed to find a load of presentations from an Open Access day they had had recently, to explain to the staff the details of OA and how Wiley was going to adapt to it. She printed the slides off for me and talked me through them which was incredibly kind of her as well as being very interesting.

As a big thank you for everything, which was definitely necessary because I have learnt so much on this placement, I brought everyone a box of chocolates and a Christmas card. This obviously meant that we needed to take an extra long tea break to eat the chocolates so I was late to the closing HR meeting because we had got chatting.

But I did make it, tea in hand, and I was glad I did because as well as the general thank-yous we also got a certificate! This is now up on my wall as my pride and joy.

So that's it. The end of a great 9 weeks at Wiley and a stressful first 12 weeks at uni. I'm going to go and take a well earned break so all that's l

Today was a good day as we finished and printed out one of the three big assignments we have to hand in before Christmas. That's two down and one to go as earlier this week we handed in our mock new title proposal and presented it to the class. So the last one to go is a marketing report due in next week and then we are free until next year, hooray!

But it was also a good day because we had our last guest speaker of the semester in the form of Ruth Killick, Publicity Director at Profile Books. She gave us an insight into the life of a publicist and some good hints and tips for a good publicity campaign. Basically it seems it all comes down to planning and timing and making sure your information is up to date. And despite all the exciting new publicity opportunities opening up with new technologies and new markets it doesn't mean a thing if you don't generate any sales.

So even though the semester is coming to an end, things aren't winding down yet and I'm looking forward to next year.

Penultimate day at Wiley and this picture sort of sums it all up really.

Day began as ever with the JSAP submissions then I moved onto finishing collating the results to the open access nursing survey.

Then I moved onto something new. I had to write an application to get the journal Zoonoses and Public Health classified under an additional category on the ISI database. I had to write up the aims of the journal and show how they align with the definition of the category and then include tables showing the citations in and of the journal. These tables show related journals and if they are categorised in the same category this would help the case for getting the journal into the new category. However, the data I brought up wasn't particularly convincing but my supervisor said that was ok.

I finished the day by finding referral information for a couple of health science

Yet another guest speaker, oh Brookes you do spoil us.

This time it was publishing marketing and sales consultant Ruth Readshaw. She came to talk to us about 'Getting the Right Sales and Marketing Mix' in education publishing particularly.

Ruth began her career as a teacher and then moved into educational and academic publishing using her experiences to really engage with her market. This seems like a great idea as sales is a sector of publishing where personal relationships are so important so if you can relate to the people you are selling to, teachers and headmasters, then you are going to do pretty well.

We were also told about the importance of using all the marketing tools at your disposal but making sure they are using them correctly for your target market. She also touched on some of the big concerns such as the importance of relevant and up-to-date data, the role of digital in marketing and the tipping point when all direct mail is done online.

So another great speaker who has really given us an insight into the actual industry. It's so useful to see how the things we learn in lectures are applied to the real world and makes me feel that I could actually survive in publishing. We'll see how that turns out.

Today we had another guest speaker, Eve White the literary agent and her assistant. She runs a small independent literary agency from her London flat with only two permanent staff and a rotation of two interns. It's a small scale operation but this adds to the personal feeling of the company that makes it so successful with their clients.

It was a really great talk that covered all the basics of being a literary agent and how Eve got into the industry. I enjoyed learning more about this much discussed aspect of the publishing industry but I don't think it's for me. The idea of becoming close with authors and building up great working relationships appeals but a lot of their time is spent sifting through emails and reading manuscripts - something which doesn't appeal to me because I have always intended on keeping reading fiction and working in publishing separate, which is why I want to work in non-fiction.

So another day, another great guest speaker. I'm pretty sure there are now an extra 20 odd aspiring literary agents thanks to Eve's speech today.

Bit of a belated post but don't fear, day 7 is here now.

So the day began as usual with sorting out submissions to the Journal of Small Animal Practice. Then I moved on to a brand new task for this week only. I uploaded the articles to the new issue of Nurse Author & Editor Newsletter. This involved making sure the articles were in the right format and uploading them to the site. I then had a look on Scholarly Kitchen for possible articles that Wiley could follow up and possibly use in some of their internal newsletters.

Again these weren't the most exciting of tasks but I could see how important they are and I actually found Scholarly Kitchen very interesting and have pegged it as a possible source of much dissertation research. There are a lot of great articles on open access including different angles on it such as what authors want from it. To finish the day I did some envelope stuffing and carried on organising the results of the nursing survey and making some pretty graphs.

But I didn't just spend the whole day at the computer. My lovely supervisor had organised a meeting for me with one of the commissioning editors in the books section of the health sciences department. We had a nice informal chat in an empty office about the role and duties of a commissioning editor, how journals and books work together, how she got into the industry and a bit about the course at Brookes. It was a really great chat and I learnt a lot.

But it doesn't stop there because in response to my meeting, one of the interns working in the books section was having a meeting with one of the people from the journals team, my team if you will, and I was invited along. Again it was a nice informal chat about what her role as journals project manager (or a similar title, the terminology is a bit interchangeable), how she got into the field, the big issues in journals publishing and how she felt about and is preparing for open access. Again, great talk.

So another day at Wiley and a lot more learnt. Only two more days left to go now.