Career path: Cate Blake

Cate Blake began her publishing career at Penguin Random House Australia as an editorial assistant. In 2018 she was nominated for the inaugural ABIA Rising Star Award for her role as commissioning editor. Blake is now publisher at Pan Macmillan; here she shares her career journey.

Not long after I started working in publishing, and without even really meaning to, I started collecting books about books—about editing and publishing and the people behind the scenes. This was, I suppose, the equivalent of rounding up the backlist of a new favourite author, or scrolling down through the social feeds of a new crush. I hadn’t studied publishing in any meaningful way and, before I got my first job as editorial assistant at Penguin, I hadn’t really considered it as a career. As soon as I started though, I loved it—it felt like where I was meant to be. So, the books.

Some were purely instructional—a thesaurus I stole from my dad; a Macquarie Dictionary I bought when I studied copyediting a year into my career; a Modern Australian Usage I nicked from a discard pile when we moved offices. Some came from colleague recommendations. A senior editor I admired beyond words and who generously guided me on my earliest training-wheels edits put me on to A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel Spark, which has some of the best publishing soundbites of any book ever written. ‘Books don’t wriggle, authors do. They take everything personally.’ Another colleague, an editorial assistant and friend, told me about a movie starring Sarah Michelle Gellar as a young editor and Alec Baldwin as, perplexingly, her love interest—the movie is appalling but the book it’s based on, A Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank, is wonderful.

I picked them up in all kinds of curious places. There was a secondhand bookshop in Elizabeth Street in Melbourne that I loved—I’d stopped off there on the way to my first ever publishing job interview and bought a copy of The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe (that’s not a publishing book—not even one of Spark’s pisseur de copies would draw an analogy between launching into space and launching a book). When the shop closed down a few years later, they unceremoniously dumped all of their excess stock into a skip out the front. I fished out a hardback copy of The Truth About Publishing by Sir Stanley Unwin (yes, that Unwin), first published 1926, this edition 1960. On the first page we learn ‘it is easy to become a publisher, but difficult to remain one; the mortality in infancy is higher than in any other trade or profession.’ Tough love, I guess—I wanted nothing more than to become and remain a publisher.

As I stretched my legs into different but similar roles—editorial assistant to publishing assistant to associate editor—some of the books were important for more external reasons. I loved Sloane Crosley’s I Was Told There’d Be Cake not just for her sparkling prose (although it’s great and you should read it), but also because one of my editorial colleagues had made a typo on the cover, which made me feel better when I made a typo on the cover of one of the first books I sent to print (it’s Edgar Allan Poe not Edgar Allen Poe, for the record, and always double check all proper names).

I’d been lucky enough to start commissioning quite early in my career, and if there’s one thing you learn as a very junior commissioning person it’s to hunt for opportunities and ideas everywhere. On a holiday to New York I wrangled a day in the Penguin US office, sitting in meetings and talking to colleagues, and picking up a beautiful clothbound edition of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style illustrated by Maira Kalman. When I spent a week in New Haven for the Yale University course, I met peers from around the world, and came home with practical ideas and books on how to make publishing smarter, faster, better, including Blockbusters by Anita Elberse. On an Australia Council trip to India, I enjoyed the colour and fire of the Jaipur Literary Festival, went to a book launch at Kolkata’s oldest racecourse, and quite genuinely snatched a copy of The Seagull Salmagundi of Publishing Terms out of a colleague’s hands because it was so beautiful (sorry, Steph, I think you got one too in the end?).

Like in all good love affairs, there have been some rocky times in my publishing life—retailers collapsing, businesses merging, people I love moving out of and around the industry, auctions lost, books missing the mark. Merchants of Culture by John B Thompson is the book that, for me, best navigates these vagaries; realistically, though, cheap wine and hot chips and good friends have helped more.

The year before last, I moved to Sydney and put a copy of The Macmillan Story on my shelf, stepping into a role as publisher at Pan Macmillan. This was a dream job, but I knew, from practical and literary experience, there’s no endpoint to the learning in publishing. Last year, in the middle of a global pandemic that threw everything right up in the air again, and more than a decade into my career, I found a book in a Little Library near my house, titled Bluff Your Way in Publishing. At last, I thought.

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Category: Features