I am currently interning at Saraband and I could not have asked for a better experience. Saraband is an independent publisher located in Glasgow with a wide range of both fiction and non-fiction titles as well as some literary apps. The publisher is very small, with only three employees: Sara Hunt (managing director), Craig Hillsley (who works satellite from London) and Laura Jones (a former Stirling MLitt student and current Saraband assistant). But for such a small publisher, they manage to do an incredible amount of work. Sometimes I think Sara must have clones of herself in order to accomplish everything she does in a single day!
Working with a small publisher is ideal for students because it means you get to dabble in every aspect of publishing. My very first day I got to go to a trade fair, start copyediting a nonfiction title, practice filling in metadata spreadsheets and learn about promoting titles on Amazon. We all work in the same room so I get to overhear very interesting and educational conversations such as when to send out press releases or how to coordinate sales reps’ expectations versus authors’ expectations. So far, I’ve been able to see a title through from copy-editing to cover design and hopefully to final production in the future.
What I like best about interning with Saraband is that I am welcome to ask any questions I want. Sara and Laura are both fantastic teachers and go above and beyond to make sure I am getting good experience from my time here. Sara always makes it a point to explain why we do things a certain way in publishing so that I can understand where these processes come from. And Laura has taken time away from her work to personally teach me about typesetting, a skill I was very desperate to improve upon. Thanks to her, I was able to improve my publishing dummy project and I now feel much more confident about setting up 
both Word and InDesign documents for typesetting in the future.
One of my favorite tasks thus far has been to create book trailers for a couple of Saraband’s titles. I created very simple iMovie videos, but am interested in expanding my video-editing knowledge and exploring other video software programs. I was very happy to learn that the authors of the books for these videos were pleased with what I had created; it gave me a lot of confidence to have made something that both Saraband and the authors could use on social media. Moreover, I now have another skill to add to my CV with links to videos that I created.
This experience has been completely invaluable to me. Through this internship I have been able to gain the practical knowledge I need to enter the publishing industry, and I feel much more confident about my skills. Plus, by completing a variety of tasks, I now know with which area of publishing my skill sets and interests line up. I look forward to learning more as my internship progresses.