It’s the final countdown

I was shocked and appalled when I looked at the E&T blog yesterday and realised that I haven’t posted since AUGUST! What on earth have I been doing for the last five months, you may cry, and rightfully so. (I’ll tell you what I’ve been doing– weeping noisily in the corner at the distinct lack of advent calendar in my life for yet another year. Having said that, my housemate gave me what was left of hers when she disappeared home last night, and I immediately ate all three remaining chocolates, so who KNOWS what would happen if I had a whole one.)

But I digress. Despite the old maxim ‘All work and no play…’ the last few months have been incredibly busy, making me a very dull, brain-frazzled boy indeed. [N.B. I am not actually a boy. Just so we’re clear.] So, as I’m currently struggling to string together full, sensible sentences, without further ado, here is the round-up of a very hectic year in the life of E&T:

January

An industrious month, January, where we started putting the finishing touches to our Spring list. I learnt an enormous amount of animal facts thanks to 152 Wild Things to Do, which for a time proved an inexplicably successful party trick. Time also to reflect on the success of Classic Ephemera, our runaway bestseller from Autumn 2009 and which to date has now sold over 30,000 copies – an incredible achievement for a small independent which only started trading properly in June 2009.

February

In February, Mark set off for Cape Town to take part in the Young Entrepreneurship of the Year Award. Although he didn’t win (much to my dismay – I was tempted to start heckling until Lorne gagged me), he developed some incredibly useful business relationships, including one with Penguin South Africa, who now distribute all of our titles throughout the country. Since then, we’ve agreed terms with a North American distributor, and in 2011 we’re hoping that our titles will be sold in Australia, New Zealand, India and Asia as well.

March

Back on home turf, this month we launched The Game by Alex Buchanan, and in doing so fulfilled my lifelong ambition to go to Soho House. In March I also developed a taste for cricket (well, Stuart Broad), and went on the London Eye, courtesy of our sponsorship partners Veolia, where I found that the flight is roughly 49 times more enjoyable if you can actually get your Guide To The Sights open prior to the flight ending.

April

In April I set up the brand new E&T work experience scheme! As unlikely as it seems that anyone would want to voluntarily spend time with me whilst I impart all my wisdom, we had a huge number of responses to our advert and over the next 8 months we had a variety of graduates join us for three or four weeks at a time, to learn a little bit about how an independent publishing house works. It’s been a fantastic experience for all concerned, not least for the amount of chocolate and rose I received as thank yous. (Although, according to Mark, saying at the start of every placement, “Oh, would you like a biscuit? Just a little gift from our last intern…” is *apparently* unprofessional. What does he know etc etc.)

May

May will mainly be remembered as the month when we convinced a group of hardy souls to get up at 4am and launch 152 Wild Things To Do with us as morning broke over London. Mark and Lorne may remember it as the day when I drank so much Diet Coke to stay awake post-launch that I surpassed myself in terms of both a) inane stories and b) speed of speech.

This month we also launched The Spirit of Cricket at what was possibly my favourite E&T event to date (definitely not sure if I’m allowed to say that), where we discovered that I’m rubbish at pub quizzes, and Mark has an unfounded aversion to chocolate-covered strawberries.

June

June – oh June. What a great month this was, from the World Cup to a sweltering Glastonbury. Back at the ranch, however, we were about to launch Middle Class Nightmares, the first book that I project-managed from start to finish. Obviously I’m not one to blow my own trumpet AT ALL, but with Middle Class Nightmares I devised the concept, briefed an author, briefed the jacket designer, proofread the manuscript, sent it to print and publicised the end product. I also manually forced it upon all my friends and family, but that, as they say, is another story. At the risk of sounding cheesy, it’s incredible to think that in 14 months, I had learnt so much that I could put an entire book together from scratch. (Although admittedly, as my brother pointed out, ‘It’s rather thin, isn’t it?’ Got to start somewhere my boy!)

July

This month the Wine Guide went off to print, meaning a very busy few weeks all round. In addition, we were also hard at work on our Autumn lead titles, Courage Under Fire, Nature Tales and The Xfm Top 1000 Songs of All Time, and when I finally flew to France to join my family for a few days at the end of the month, I genuinely felt like I didn’t have a brain left. (This could also have been a direct result of my birthday drinks the night before but the less said about that, the better.)

August/September

A mad rush to finish the Autumn list and send it all off to print. This season was our most ambitious list to date, with The Xfm Top 1000 Songs Of All Time our most ambitious project. A 120,000 word, 400pp, full colour, hardback music anthology, with 11 authors and no picture budget, working in partnership with one of the UK’s best-loved radio stations, and with only 4 months to put the whole thing together? WHY ON EARTH NOT?

We launched the book with an event at Proud Galleries, where Dave Berry hosted, the View played an acoustic set and I sold a copy of the book at full price to the bassist from Placebo despite four of their songs actually being featured in the book. Well done me.

October

All those organisers amongst you, get excited, because in October we launched our first range of diaries – the Classic FM Diary 2011 and The Londoner’s Diary 2011, in partnership with Classic FM and LBC respectively. As this was the first year we’d done them, we didn’t have samples in early enough to hit the key stationery buying periods (I ask you, who thinks about diaries in February eh?!) but since copies have come in we’ve received excellent feedback from buyers and, fingers crossed, both diaries will be appearing in a Paperchase near you next year.

November

There’s an on-going joke in the E&T office that despite my generally cheery disposition, you only need mention the word ‘eBook’ and immediately I get cross. On the maxim that a lady should ‘never apologise, never explain’ I will say nothing more on this subject – except that, yes, after what seemed like YEARS and YEARS of endless inputting of metadata our eBooks are finally available to purchase from Waterstones and Amazon, should you wish to do so.

December

Running the whole gamut of emotions this year, because this month both Mark and I have some very sad news in that we are – in a show of spectacularly bad timing – both leaving E&T at the end of this month. Mark has been poached by a larger publishing house whilst I’m leaving publishing altogether to join Anthony Nolan as a Communications Officer.

My replacement is a boy called Nick Sidwell, who has been doing a very similar role to me at Icon – I Interviewed him and am confident that he’ll be roughly 19 times better at this job than me. In fact, so much did I rave about him to Mark and Lorne post-interview, that they changed the name of our server, usually called Ellen’s Documents (yes, it is all about me) to Ellen Loves Nick’s Documents, the day before he was due to come in for an induction and in full knowledge that I didn’t know how to change it back. Brilliant.

Joking aside (although if you have learnt anything over the last 18 months, it’s that my definition of ‘joke’ is a lot looser than most people’s), I would like to take this opportunity to say thank you on behalf of both Mark and myself to Lorne particularly, but also to everyone that we’ve worked with over the last two years. It has been an incredible experience and when I look back at what we have achieved at E&T, I’m very proud to have been a part of it all.

As someone who has been known to cry at both Hollyoaks and X Factor, I am truly terrible at goodbyes. I actually told Lorne that it wouldn’t be a permanent goodbye, as I’d keep popping back in the New Year to see how everything was going, but he told me that a) he’d change the locks and b) stalking Nick was actually illegal. Awkward. So on that note, thank you for reading, Merry Christmas all, and I hope you have a wonderful New Year.