It’s no surprise that here at Kill Your Darlings we love books and everywhere they pile up. We visit bookstores, hibernate in libraries and stack our to-read piles high. But these books don’t arrive the way we receive them – there are hundreds of small tasks and different skill sets that take each book from a writer’s manuscript to the copy in our hands. This podcast touches on just a few of them.

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Hello and welcome back to the Kill Your Darlings Podcast. I’m Meaghan Dew, and instead of interviewing authors today, we’re going to do something a bit different. Today is a day in the life of the book industry. We’ll start a bit before 9am.

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Hi, my name is Meghan Cummins, and I’m the inventory coordinator at Pan Macmillan Australia. As the inventory coordinator, my role is mainly concerned with making sure that we have enough stock to support demand, without having overstocks, and it’s not a role that exists in every publishing company in Australia – even as a company as large as Pan Macmillan, I’m the only team member who sort of exclusively deals with stock management. My days are pretty varied, and while looking after inventory probably takes up around two thirds of my time, I also spend a lot of time liaising with various internal and external stakeholders. Because I am sort of the go-to person on stock levels, sales reps will usually come to me if they have a question about availability of stock, and these are the sorts of queries I am answering every day. I also talk a lot to our key account managers in regards to the stock that they need for their major DDS and chain accounts, and often they will check with me in regards to stock availability or give us a heads-up before they confirm which titles will be catalogued or part of a sale. I’m often emailing our colleagues at Pan Macmillan UK and US about new titles and stock that we order from them, and then I also spend a bit of time in contact with our production and publicity departments up in our Sydney office. Managing stock, it’s the kind of job that needs monitoring all day every day, it’s not something that can be done for two or three days a week and then left for a few days and just sort of forgot about. So often this means I am ordering stock from the UK or the US every day, or I am emailing our printer or production department to get quotes for reprints and to get reprints going, so this sort of thing, we are constantly monitoring to make sure we don’t go out of stock of major titles. And while everyone I talk to is important, I do have a particularly good relationship with our warehouse, they usually come to us with a really varied list of queries, it can be anything from their customer service department or from the shipping coordinator or inventory or logistics, and these can range from anything like a question about title availability, to damaged stock or shipping information. And on top of all this I am also responsible for uploading and managing ebook metadata, so I do that every month, and we have a fair amount of interaction with the digital department because of that, so that’s really interesting too. So I guess as you can see, it is a really varied role, and a lot of my responsibilities, like stock ordering, are weekly tasks – things like ebook metadata are monthly tasks. So it took me a bit of time to really get a sense for how the process runs on a weekly and on a monthly basis. And it can be a pretty full on role at times, which I like, having a bit more of a full on role, and I work with a real