Literary Connections Across Publishing Fields | An Interview with Barbara Heinssen

An interview with Barbara Heinssen, professor of Editing Fundamentals at Hofstra University

Q: Can you tell me a bit about your career in publishing and how you came to be a professor?

A: I started since I was in this publishing program—my junior year, I got an internship with Holt, Rinehart & Winston, and I was devastated because I wanted to go into trade. But I realized as I was doing it that I really liked academic publishing, because you could learn and continue learning at the same time as you were working. So I did that internship and I worked in the permissions area, and they wanted me to continue on but I already had a job at Hofstra. But when I graduated, they contacted me and asked me if I would come in and continue, so for the whole summer I worked for them remote[ly], which was way back when. And in the fall, one of the women that I had worked with told me, “Oh, Marie Shappard is looking for an assistant, I think you should talk to her.” And I went in and started talking to her, and before I even realized it I was having an interview… and I did get the job, so I started as an editorial assistant then I went to copy writing. And I knew I didn’t want to move, so I waited until there was a sales position in the New York area and I got that—because back then, you could not become an editor unless you did sales. So, I did sales and did well in sales, and then I became an editor—I was an English editor. And I did that, then I got promoted and I wound up as the Director of Student Success at Houghton Mifflin.… 

During that time I came up with some new ways to present [an author’s] material. I did a shorter edition, I created a website (back then websites were not that big), and I increased the sales of the other books as a result. Then I left there. Actually, I was at St. Martin’s Press prior to that and I was the Director of Development. I managed a whole bunch of development editors as they worked on books, and after that, that’s when I went to Houghton mifflin. When I left Houghton Mifflin, I had kind of had enough of college publishing, and I got a job with the Princeton Review. And they wanted to start up a K-12 afterschool program—that was when there was a thing called “No Child Left Behind” and people needed materials to do that, because it was an afterschool project.… So, what we came up with was a print product that supplied you with all the things that you needed. So, if you were teaching reading, we supplied not just the workbook, we supplied the actual books that the students would read. And for the math program, we did the same thing. We provided the manipulatives. So if you had to go teach at a different school, and it was math, you took this tub with you and you went and taught….Well that was very successful, we did grades two through eight, and they told me that they wanted to expand their publishing. After this came out, though, they said, “Well… we’re not really sure, we think we just want to keep this.” And they got into testing much, much more. And I’m not really interested in that, so I left there, and then I was going to go look for a job. 

Long story short, my father got sick and I was the main person to take care of him, and when he was feeling better, a friend called me up and said “We have this English project and we need somebody pretty much full time, would you be interested?” And that started my freelance career. 

Now, that is also when I started teaching at Hofstra, [in] 2007. And I’ve been teaching ever since, and part of why I did it is because I very much believe in the program, and I like to be in touch with students to see—especially in academic publishing—who would help, because then I’d have a sense of what the audience thought. And sometimes I would bring things in and ask the students “what do you think?” So that was very rewarding for me. And I didn’t really do it for the money, because they weren’t really paying me that much. I did it more because I just really enjoyed it, and I like mentoring students, so that’s something as well, and that’s why I’ve been doing it ever since. 

Q: In your eyes, what is the value of having programs specifically dedicated to book publishing, such as the one here at Hofstra? Should there be more of such programs? Or is the concentration somewhat unnecessary?

A: I think the program is very valuable because when students leave the program and they go out to get a position, they’re really more like “assistant editors” as opposed to “editorial assistants,” because the knowledge base that they have is so far above what someone just comes into publishing [with]—you know, from, “Here’s my resume, I love books, I wanna work here.” So, you understand the language, you understand mechanics, the types of things you would have to do to do the book reviews and things like that. And in Book Promotion I’m sure you write jacket copy and catalog copy, so those are all things that are very familiar to the students that graduate from this program. Personally, I think it needs more exposure, it needs to be marketed. And right now, we’re not offering as many courses, so that makes it a little difficult for the students… So, I believe in the program, and I think undergraduate is valuable. As far as the graduate programs, I don’t know now. I think there is value to the NYU program, but… My friend and I went to look at the master’s program at Pace (and this was in the ‘90s) and we listened to what they had to say, and we looked at each other and said, “We do all this now. Why do we have to pay these people money just to say that we have a certificate in publishing?” But that was a long time ago and I haven’t looked at the other programs in a while. 

Q: Do you feel that there is a connection between your role in publishing and others that aren’t on the teaching side of things (such as teams on literary magazines or professionals working at publishing houses)? Do you think any of these roles affect the others?

A: Yeah, actually they do. If you remember from the [Editing Fundamentals] class, I would say, “If you remember nothing else, remember audience and purpose.” So that’s really the key for every single one of those areas. You need to know your audience and what the purpose is behind what you're publishing. So, literary magazines, they have an audience of these types of people, and their purpose is to transfer information and allow people to have a broader perspective on what’s happening and who’s doing what. And trade publishing, it’s an opportunity again to see what’s popular, who’s reading what, who the audience is for different books. Like when I had you do your book idea [project], you had to figure out, what was the audience for that book? What was the age range? So, that is certainly part of academic publishing. 

And one of the things that I did when I was an English editor is I did a book that was almost like prep for first year composition, but it was taught as a first year composition. Because, well, you may not know, but there are certain schools where a large number of applicants and people who get in are really not prepared for college. And they used to have remedial programs, but those were eliminated in many, many institutions… because their contention was “If these people are coming in unprepared, why are we paying to do this?” The problem was, though, you still have those students. So what do you do with them? They have to take first year composition. So if you have a book that’s appealing to that level, you can have success. And you can say, well, they finished Comp One—because they did. And they’ll leave the course with a better understanding, so taking Comp Two, they’ll be much more successful. 

Q: What would you say is the goal of publishing programs at universities?

A: At universities? (Laughing) So that professors can get tenured. But I mean, it’s really to disperse information. That’s the primary goal of academic publishing within a university. If you think about the Chicago Manual of Style, that’s from the Chicago University Press. So, they do all types of papers and things of that nature. If you go to Columbia University Press, that’s now separate but I believe it started out at Columbia. And many times journals will be specific to an area, and if you’re, say, an engineer—and engineering is always changing—you want to read these papers that come out. My brother is a psychologist and certain journals that he reads, some of them might come from Berkeley, or University of Washington in St. Louis, [etc.] and they’ll have things like… what’s going on in research for schizophrenia, the medications, the cognitive work that they do. So that’s really the value of having publishing coming out of universities. 

Q: Are there any literary magazines you read on a regular basis?

A: No, but when I was an English editor I used to read The Chronicle of Higher Education and [P]MLA. And I did look at some other journals—mainly, it was [P]MLA—but there was a journal (I can’t remember the name of it) that was specific to rhetoric and composition, and I used to read that one too. 

Q: What do you feel is the importance of literary magazines today?

A: Well, it gives people an opportunity to get their feet wet in writing and getting published. Because one of the most important things to get yourself noticed is to have publications. And if you’re in academics, it shows that you’re engaged in your area of specialization, or that you are interested in poetry, or short fiction, or memoir, and hopefully it can get to a broader audience. And it also helps with creative writing students, it gives them an opportunity to get something published—graduate programs, [it’s] the same thing… So that gives people an opportunity to get published and to read what other people are publishing. And often, I think you can also get a sense of what’s working, and I think people who are teaching writing also get a sense of what’s good and what’s not so good. So, that’s where I think the value is. 

Q: There seems to be a growing trend of universities cutting funding for their literary magazines, and thus ending the publications. As someone with a bit more perspective on the finite resources of a university, do you think that literary magazines hold enough value that universities should dedicate their resources into keeping them around?

A: Yes, I do think there’s a value. Because it gives students an opportunity to see other forms of writing and it also gives an opportunity for students to write and get published and to go through the process of what… it means to present something as reviewed by experts, give it back, edit, [and] give it to the publisher. And then they may see it back in production, they may not, but it gives them a whole sense of what publishing is all about and what writing is all about, if that’s where they want to go. So I think there is value to it. 

Q: What is one moment in your career that you are proud of? 

A: One of the things is that when I did that brief version of the student success book, it was the number one book that year in terms of sales. Also, when I was at the Princeton Review, it was a thousand pages of product and we got it all done in nine months, which was, you know, about thirteen people involved, and many of them reported to me. So that, I was really proud of. And for my teaching career, [it’s] the fact that a number of my students are now in [different] positions, getting promoted within the publishing world. And in academic publishing, I had a friend who would contact me and say, “We need interns,” and I mean, she obviously knew who I was, but the other people in the department would say, “That person at Hofstra who knows really good people, could she help me? I need somebody.” And a number of those students have gone up; I just saw that one of them is now a full development editor. Another one—I had him in for guest speaking—he’s now a director in one of the science companies out of Philadelphia, so he manages whole lists. So that—I’m very proud of that. And they’ll keep in touch, and it’s nice [that] if I contact them, they’ll get back to me right away. And I can guide current students to talk to those students, and they’re usually very receptive.