For those who are passionate about books and have impeccable grammar skills, publishing can be a viable career choice. Offered as postgraduate certificate or diploma courses in several universities across the country, there has been a steady increase in people’s interest in taking up publishing as a career.
Publishing course administrators say that while the course attracts many freshers, many people opt for publishing when looking for a change in their careers.
“There has been a gradual rise in people’s interest in pursuing publishing. Many of our students happened to come across our course while scouring the Internet for publishing courses. We look for candidates with a very good grasp of English for the editing course while for the designing skill, we look for candidates with very good creative and aesthetic senses,” says spokesperson of Seagull School of Publishing, Smita Abraham.
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Located in Kolkata, the Seagull School of Publishing — an initiative of the Seagull Foundation for the Arts, Kolkata, in association with Seagull Books and supported by the Royal Norwegian Embassy, New Delhi — offers three-month certificate courses twice a year in editing and book designing. Run by professionals, besides lessons taught in classrooms, students are given a tour of a printing press. While placements are not guaranteed, their students are now working for various renowned publishing houses across the country, says Abraham.
The postgraduate diploma in book publishing at IGNOU offers a year-long course, and students get the opportunity of undergoing a month-long apprenticeship at a publishing house. The training is supported by the Federation of Indian Publishers, with whom IGNOU has a tie-up and successful students receive a joint degree from IGNOU and the Federation.
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Similar one-year postgraduate diploma courses are offered by the Calcutta University in Kolkata (in collaboration with the National Book Trust and Publishers and Booksellers Guild, Kolkata) and the Ambedkar University in Delhi (in collaboration with the National Book Trust).
Describing the interest in publishing from college freshers as ‘encouraging’, Ratnesh Kumar Jha, MD, Cambridge University Press, South Asia, says there has been an increasing rise in young employees from colleges like Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, Kolkata’s Jadavpur University, etc. College freshers are given the opportunity to work on specific projects, for example, working on science textbooks.
Despite the rapid spread of digitisation, the appeal of printed books has not dimmed which is why the interest in publishing has not faded. Although the pay is relatively less in the publishing industry, people opt for it for the love of books, says Abraham, adding that publishing offers an individual the liberty to freelance and work from home.