Career path: Johannes Jakob
Johannes Jakob began his publishing career as an editor at Express Media’s Voiceworks magazine. He is now an editor at Penguin Random House Australia, and won the 2021 IPEd Rosie Award for his work on The Bluffs (Kyle Perry, Michael Joseph); here he shares his career journey, including ‘botching things catastrophically’ along the way.
I realise now that much of my career has been a by-product of trying to impress people smarter, funnier and more beautiful than myself. Before I even recognised ‘editor’ as a possible vocation, I was trying to make members of the Voiceworks editorial committee laugh at the afternoon drinks that preceded their weekly meetings, which I was not part of. I would then slink home, somewhat pathetically, while they got on with their work, which I understood only as esoteric, arcane and very cool. (This was at a time when the key to enter the buzzerless Ross House was lowered down into an alley by means of an empty six-pack container and a long piece of string.)
Eventually, they let me stick around for the meetings. Not long after that, we moved to the Wheeler Centre and made the selection process far more egalitarian. I’d just about snuck in on no merit.
What I found at Voiceworks was a culture that was equal parts nurturing and exacting. Through forthright discussions about the pieces submitted to the magazine, I learned how to articulate in concrete terms the loosey-goosey feelpinions I had as a reader, and then again how to interpolate that for authors. I still think the best advice for any aspiring writers or editors is developing that vocabulary by surrounding yourself with like-minded people. I never did a publishing or editing degree—everything I profess to know has come from hunkering around tables in meeting rooms, cafes and pubs with mentors and peers. I can never thank those people enough for giving me that knowledge and direction in life, so instead I aspire to be similarly generous with my time (humble brag).
Eighteen months later, I was given the opportunity to become the editor of the magazine and lead the editorial team I’d just been part of. It’s during that time that I really, properly began to understand how to work collaboratively—mainly by botching things catastrophically. The grace of those I hurt joins the long list of undeserved good fortune I’ve had along the way.
Working on the entire magazine, rather than just pieces I had an immediate and obvious affinity with, helped me understand why, apart from being a Virgo, I seemed to be good at being an editor: intense curiosity. I’ve found that many editors share this—they’re always on the precipice of obsession, but with no great fidelity to a particular subject. In job interviews, when a candidate is doing well and I’m feeling mean, I ask them what gives them the confidence to suggest the changes they suggest. My own answer would be that I fall into the thrall of pretty much any book I’m working on. It’s a kind of emotional credulity (gullibility) that, as with the eagerness to please and impress I’ve already outlined, would otherwise be pathological but, in this context, is productive. I hope this genuine engagement forms the basis of authentic relationships with my authors, as well as undergirding the actual editorial interventions I make.
At the end of my tenure as Voiceworks editor, I happily tumbled into a number of other roles, including fiction editor at The Lifted Brow and editor of Writers Victoria’s member magazine The Victorian Writer. I joined the boards of Express Media and the Small Press Network (then still in its seminal condition, as it were, and named SPUNC), finding them replete with even more people willing to teach me fascinating obscura.
With Australia Council funding, I started a mini imprint called Hologram, publishing two novellas. This was a wonderful exercise in exposing how clueless I was about trivial things like production, distribution, sales, marketing and publicity. I recall asking a baffled bookseller at Readings SLV to try scanning the barcode I’d just generated on a dodgy-seeming website. I put a Magic Eye puzzle on the reverse of our press releases (we didn’t get a lot of media requests).
While I was proud of those novellas, by this point I was desperate to know how this stuff was actually done. I joined Penguin Random House as an editorial assistant, and I could not have chosen a better way to serve an apprenticeship in trade publishing. The breadth of that role revealed to me things like the minutiae of publishing agreements and the statistical wonkery of BookScan, but it also gave me an extended-coffee-break familiarity with colleagues in other departments, all of which continues to serve me well in my current role.
Within the publishing team at PRH, I found yet another set of smart, funny, beautiful people who held themselves to intimidatingly high standards. I was in awe of not just their experience but their rigour, and in particular the way they worked to bend an institution the size of PRH to always put authors and books above everything else. PRH instilled in me a respect for the integrity not just of the author’s work but the editor’s. All editing is compromise—you have to draw the line somewhere and print the damn thing, after all—but conscientious editorial work is the best way to respect that authors and their books are at the heart of our business. If you lose sight of that, you’re screwed.
These days, one of my greatest pleasures is working with authors who were finding their feet at the same time as I was, and who have gone on to produce remarkable work across a range of genres and forms. A decade ago, when I was first meeting those writers, I would have told them that all I wanted to do was work on literary novels. Now I fear that working on the same thing all the time would make my brain turn smooth with boredom. Apart from earning a pitying chuckle from one of my colleagues, my favourite part of the job is the variety of books I get to work on. That’s a quirky function of Australia’s major publishers having Goldilocks-sized lists—neither so small nor so big that we editors have to specialise. A year’s work might include experimental autofiction about early motherhood, a Brownlow winner’s autobiography, a crime thriller, a literary debut, a heavyweight of the canon, a cookbook, historical romance, gonzo journalism, political analysis and a guide to dog training. That’s more than enough to arrest my busy mind and stop it from wandering where it really shouldn’t. Which includes, of course, thinking too closely about how I got here.
For more career inspiration, see previous instalments in our series here.
Tags: career path
Category: Features
