Tag Archives: internship

About Paperight, Marketing

Marie-Louise starts at Paperight

My introduction to Paperight happened fairly haphazardly, as all fantastic things do. While helping out at a book launch for the Bay Bookshop in the Cape Quarter, I was having a well earned glass of wine and chatting to a librarian from the Cape Town Central Library and a creative writing lecturer from UCT. Both were inquiring about my next career step- as everybody seems to do with young people. Admittedly I had no idea, although I managed to say that I might be interested in finding a job in publishing. Paperight was mentioned as this great new publishing start up and once I did some research, I was sure that I’d found the best place to really test my mettle.

The interviewing process was nerve-racking only because I’d already made up my mind that I wanted to be on this team. Nick and Yazeed made my first interview incredibly welcoming, but sitting in the meeting room in front of 7 people and trying to be the best ‘me’ possible (while balancing precariously on an exercise ball) made me very anxious.

But in the end, I got the job!

My role at Paperight started as a Marketing and PR Intern with my main priorities being to assist Nick and Yazeed with their burgeoning workloads.

I would have to describe my plunge into the deep end as both exhilarating and utterly frightening. The sheer number of programs I needed to download, along with online apps that I suddenly needed to learn to use left me feeling intimidated and wondering if I may have bitten off more than I could chew. However, I coped and eventually learned to type my queries to the team through Skype instead of asking them out loud (a real challenge) and started to wrap my head around what a company wiki is and how to use the back end of WordPress.com sites- among so many other things.

My first assignment was to collate a media list for Paperight to take over their own PR output from Nichole Sochen of Al Dente PR. I started by downloading a .pdf copy of the Government Communication and Information System (GCIS) media list before copy-pasting useful contact details into a Google Docs spreadsheet while also coming up with a system for housing this kind of information. I also backtracked through the Paperight record of media mentions to gather contact details of journalists and publications who had already featured Paperight’s work – the Paperight fan club, if you will.

The initial brief was to fill five separate categories of media contacts, namely Technology, Entrepreneurship, Education, Books and Literature Pages, and Human and General Interest. After trying to work with these categories for the first 2 months or so, I found them wholly useless and have abandoned using them since. However, I can imagine they would be helpful to those encountering the media list for the first time and not the umpteenth. :)

For every press release, a copy of the master sheet is made and all details of the release are recorded, for example who it is sent to, the date and which emails come back as undelivered. All of this information assists with follow ups and maintenance of the contact list.

From Nick’s side, I took over the responsibility of drafting most of our written output. This included, the weekly newsletter, blog posts, press releases and cover letters. My drafts would then be handed onto Nick for final editing to benefit from his keen journalistic eye and seasoned understanding of Paperight’s distinct brand image.

From Yazeed’s side, I assisted with the on-boarding process of new outlets (welcoming them, advising them on how to use Paperight.com and adding them to the outlet map), follow-ups with and support of old outlets, as well as initiating a small number of new outlet sign-ups.

These responsibilities became regular, weekly tasks over my first three months with the Paperight team. Specific projects during this time have been split into the months they occurred so read on to find out more!

About Paperight, Content, Personal

Interning at Paperight (and some aspects of the early months thereafter)

In the beginning was a prayer. Joining Paperight for me was a matter of divine providence. By this I guess mean to disclose that I am a Muslim and by that I mean to say I believe in God, in the world of things unseen, in forces, in the coming together of processes going on out there in the universe for little me down here on earth as a response to a request for guidance in times of change, growth and confusion. Nowadays such talk is unfashionable, I know, and certainly not in connection to professional/career paths, but this is what – after all the theorising, the political, social, and economic analyses have been done and after the thinking, the emotions and sensations have had their sway – this is what for me everything always settles down to.

here I am,  staring at a poster that I immediately know without a doubt to be the firebird’s feather, beckoning me to pick it up and follow the trail of adventure

So. It’s Ramadan. August 2012. I’m praying the Maghrib (evening) prayer at the Leslie Social Science Building at UCT in congregation with about a hundred other Muslims on campus just after breaking fast. At the very moment that the prayer is over – I mean the very second that the prayer is done – my eyes fall on a poster on one of the building’s columns directly in my line of vision. Something – but what? – tells me that that poster I am looking at will tell me of the place I will now work, if I choose to follow through. All week, all month, for months perhaps, and each passing day with growing intensity, I’ve known that I need to leave the academy in order to pursue a vaguely defined dream of being a publisher or to work in a sphere engaged with promoting a ‘reading culture’ (whatever that means) in South Africa. But where to begin? Where exactly can I learn the most? For months I review various publishing houses to which I can offer myself as an intern or an entry level professional but nothing quite seems right for the kind of work I would like to do. So. Dear God, Dear God. And a few days later, here I am,  staring at a poster that I immediately know without a doubt to be the firebird’s feather, beckoning me to pick it up and follow the trail of adventure leading either to success or total destruction and sometimes both; there is just no way of knowing unless you pick it up and see where it leads. Ramadan is an auspicious time, I remind myself. So I pick up the feather and email team@paperight.com.

internships-poster

2.

I loved its philosophy, its grand vision, the work it was doing. I felt like I was working for a publishing NGO of some kind (‘social enterprise’ was a term I was still to learn) and I really liked that, the company’s strong desire to address social issues as part of business strategy.

I joined the Paperight team in September 2012 as an intern working three days a week. I could not work the whole week because I was unable to fulfill my personal responsibilities on an intern’s stipend. This was an arrangement I negotiated because I really wanted to work at this company. I loved its philosophy, its grand vision, the work it was doing. I felt like I was working for a publishing NGO of some kind (‘social enterprise’ was a term I was still to learn) and I really liked that, the company’s strong desire to address social issues as part of business strategy. Moreover, I immediately liked everyone already working for the company, something that has always been a huge factor in where I choose to work.

During my internship my main task was to wrap my head around the updating and maintenance of the metadata, on- and off-line, after having been slowly prepared for the task by Tarryn, the Content Manager. In those early days, Tarryn generally gave me small, mostly writing and editing related tasks (correcting special characters in the metadata, writing up long and short descriptions for newly prepared Paperight editions, editing or cleaning up the publisher metadata) before increasing my responsibilities to working on the website by making changes online and doing content tagging.

When I joined the Paperight team I felt, looked and behaved like a poncy old man and one area where this was most evident was with my relationship (or lack thereof) with technology of any kind. We just did not get along, technology and I, and our relationship had been mutually laid to rest months or years before joining the Paperight team. Not a small problem if you are working for an innovative technology startup company, needless to say. Set up a Skype account for office communication (Easy). Log onto the Paperight wikipage (Companies can have their own, private, wiki pages?). Massive spreadsheets – on Open Office (instead of Microsoft – which is what I knew when I knew these things). Google Documents (Hello, stranger). Google Chrome or at least Firefox (Ain’t nobody got time for Internet Explorer up in here). Open a Dropbox account. Sync your computer with Dropbox. Computer won’t sync. Try again. It won’t sync. Register on Trello. Do you have Thunderbird or Safari? (Say, what?) And that was just the beginning – the easy part, really. WordPress, HeidiSQL, CamStudio, Tampermonkey, Sigil, this, that. Never had to download so many programs before and try figure out what they do. My laptop could not deal – it did what my mind refused to do: slowed down and then crashed. I think, to varying degrees, various people on the team were surprised to learn that such technological illiteracy was possible in one human being before.

Anyway, punctuating my introduction to all this were training sessions that Paperight offered to all interns on various issues related to our work and the publishing industry in general. These sessions were offered by the senior Paperight staff to incoming staff and the sessions, and they went on even after I became a full member of the team months later. Some of the sessions I signed up for were:

  • Introduction to publishing (Tarryn)
  • Introduction to copyright (Tarryn)
  • Introduction to business finance (Dezre)
  • Introduction to sales (Yazeed)
  • Metadata and SEO (Tarryn and Nick)
  • Document processing (Tarryn)
  • Introductions to HTML, CSS and WordPress (Arthur)

This is not an exhaustive list. Training at Paperight never ended. Right up to the last week of my being at Paperight, a year six months later (March 2014) I was still sitting in on Paperight training session on Personal Finance. This was just the nature of how things worked here – I felt, to the very end, that I was learning and never quite sure how much, if anything, I could say I knew, even though I felt expansive and knew that I was leaving heavier than when I came in.

3.

When my contract as a Paperight intern came to an end at the end of November 2012 I was offered a full time position as part of the Content Team. I was a happy, nameless child with no designation (and some serious image issues): my business card simply read ‘Oscar Masinyana – Content Team’ and at the back had a photo of me taken by Nick that everyone at the office besides myself thought was a lovely photo of me. I was given functional authority over certain domains within the Content unit relative to my strengths (content curation, metadata maintenance), and only much later was I eventually given a title of Reading Communities Manager (with a new business card and a better photo). But now I’m rushing ahead.

Content

The list of content on Paperight 1.0 is growing

We continued work on Paperight Editions through August, and uploaded the split exam packs. By the end of August we had 928 titles prepped and listed on Paperight.

By the end of August we had 928 titles prepped and listed on Paperight.

I trained Craig as another freelancer and briefed him and Caitlin on the e-classroom material, and coordinated their work on this new set of content.

We met with TSIBA about the possibility of setting up Paperight sales internships, an avenue we did not end up taking. And conducted edits and improvements to help site: stuff like adding screenshots to make it easier to understand. Arthur and I also worked on messaging for publishers, and brainstormed approaches.

Content

Prepping books, books, and more books

Ra'eesa Pather
Ra’eesa Pather
Diann Selman
Diann Selman

We hired two new interns in June to assist with the processing and upload of the African Books Collective material. I set up a workflow process, and offered support and instruction as they implemented it. By the end of June, they had finished processing all 385 titles, and these were ready for upload.

Having Diann and Ra’eesa to work on the processing of those documents meant that I could focus my energies on the language exam packs. We conducted a full audit of papers we were missing, and filled in these gaps where we could. These were all processed and loaded onto the site by 15th.

In the final week of June we had loaded a total of 279 products on to Paperight 1.0.

Caitlin continued to prep Paperight Editions over this period. I did the administrative work behind the scenes to organise files and transfer these to her. In the final week of June we had loaded a total of 279 products on to Paperight 1.0.

We also began to work on the ideas and budgets for Paperight’s first online advertising campaign. The aim was to provide a link back on Facebook that would direct interested students and parents to their nearest outlet. This campaign launched at the end of the month, with a set of Facebook ads which linked the user to a ‘tab’ on Facebook that included an ordering process and an outlets map.

Other administrative work included loading all registered publishers on the wiki, for ease of reference, creating a scripted process for dealing with new registrations, filming and editing of Arthur’s reapplication video due, and facilitating the transfer of OUP study guides.

Publishers approached

  • Oxford University Press (Arthur and Tarryn met with)

Publishers registered

  • Hedaaya Publications (11/6/2012)
  • Big Bug Books (13/6/2012)
  • Gabbema Publishing (17/6/2012)
  • Skawara News (28/6/2012)
Content, Marketing

Marketing first steps

I started work at Paperight on 1 March 2012. I finished work at Paperight on 31 March 2014. A lot happened between those two dates.

In the beginning, I had only two other colleagues – Arthur and Tarryn – and we worked out of Arthur’s study in his home in Wynberg. There were many creature comforts – a kitchen full of coffee, a bowl full of avocados, and a box of free-range eggs weekly. I had signed on for a two month contract, thinking I would stay as an intern for a while and then go back to my rather miserable existence as a part-time blogger and a writer with no portfolio. (Luckily, Arthur decided to keep me on at the end of it.)

My first tasks at Paperight were quite simple: design covers, prepare documents when orders came through, and to write a weekly featured author post. During my time at Paperight, I designed roughly 900–1000 covers for Paperight editions of public domain books; most of these covers were designed during my first two months in the job. Tarryn had also initially delegated a small amount of content management to me, in the guise of master sheets and product uploads to the Paperight site, which at the time was a WordPress shell with what seemed like a hundred add-ons and extensions installed.

Over the first few weeks, however, my incompetence with regard to file and content management was made apparent. I was less than meticulous with file naming (to Tarryn’s significant chagrin), and even less so with keeping my version of the sprawling content spreadsheet up-to-date. I think that that had a lot to do with the fact that I was barely Excel-literate, and the thought of having to update the spreadsheet every time I designed a cover (all 900 times I did so) and every time I had to upload or change the details on a product page seemed like a particularly torturous circle of hell.

About Paperight, Building business, Content

Collating matric exam packs and starting to measure metrics

Michal’s internship finished in March 2012, and Nick began an internship as his replacement.

Our first priority was preparing packs of past matric exam papers. We’d started to source these as part of our initial content list creation, and these were already listed on the site, but the packs themselves had not been prepared. We needed to have them ready in case any orders came in. The primary challenge was creating complete sets of exam papers. The DBE website and WCED didn’t have all of the papers, and their online resources were often buggy or incorrect. We started by creating a list of outstanding exam PDFs, which we then used to individually source as many missing papers as we could (we called and emailed, and bought CD compilations of exams to try to fill the gaps). At the same time we started prepping the packs for those subjects which we had complete sets for.

Nick and I attended some ‘Open Education’ workshops at UCT, in the hopes that this would generate some leads for more content. We found, however, that we already knew much of what the workshops covered (but it was edifying to know we were on the right track).

The aim was that interns or new staff members could jump right in on tasks with a little training, and begin to develop skills themselves. Over the years this has worked incredibly well for the content team. It means that when we do in-person training in those first weeks, it can be much more in-depth (and is thus more valuable) than if we were to do general introductory training sessions.

I began creating and improving upon a series of wiki posts to govern things like document creation and document uploading. The aim was that interns or new staff members could jump right in on tasks with a little training, and begin to develop skills themselves. Over the years this has worked incredibly well for the content team. It means that when we do in-person training in those first weeks, it can be much more in-depth (and is thus more valuable) than if we were to do general introductory training sessions. Ops style posts that give detailed explanations of how to do tasks means that new and old team members alike have something to come back to for reference, and ensures uniformity (which is important when it comes to file naming conventions for version control).

We also began to track metrics for the first time. Our initial focus was on measuring publisher registrations, outlet registrations, and top-ups (i.e. the purchasing of credits in advance). This process of tracking metrics was one that we improved upon over time. It’s interesting how much insight our focus on these three metrics gives to our business goals at the time. We were focused on creating an outlet base, and increasing our content bank, rather than on growing our customer base. And we were more focused on the potential for sales than on sales themselves. The failure here was in assuming that these three metrics were a proxy for other things. We assumed that a wide outlet base represented more potential customers, that increased publisher registrations meant more content (and that more content increased the likelihood of valuable content), that top-ups were a signifier of outlet buy-in, and would ‘naturally’ lead to sales. The reality was that we ended up measuring the potential for success, rather than measuring success itself. It was a lesson we would learn later on.

Publishers approached

  • WITS
  • Hamilton Wende

Publisher registrations

  • Cingela (13/3/2012)
Content

1000 products are listed on Paperight 0.5

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Arthur created a mock-up of the poster, and Michal and I assisted in proofreading and product selection, as well as providing pricing information and page extents. Once the poster was finalised, and we’d received the finished products, we were each tasked with selling the Paperight service to a nearby copyshop. Poster in hand, I signed up 3@1 Claremont – our very first registered outlet. By February 2012 we had also started advertising for a sales manager, who would take on the role of outlet sales and support.

By the end of February 2012, Michal and I reached our goal of having 1000 products listed on Paperight.com. We’d created a spreadsheet of metadata for 1001 content items, created individual product pages for each of these items, downloaded the epub/PDF files for every title (and renamed and archived these), and created Paperight Editions of the titles that were advertised on our poster so that we’d be ready to fill any orders that came in as a result of our poster advertising. We’d also designed and implemented the first phase taxonomy for the Paperight website, based on the selected categorization of products on Paperight.com, and created cover images for the titles we’d decided to promote.

The table below roughly illustrates the composition of the current Paperight products database, based on year of publication, as of February 2012.

In further trying to demonstrate to composition of the current Paperight product database, we have created three additional data visualisations. The first provides an overview of the number of books per genre, currently listed on the Paperight website. These genres are also represented as separate and searchable categories on Paperight.com. The second and third charts show the composition of sub-genres within two of the primary genres of ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’.

Publishers approached

  • HMPG (Arthur emailed)

Publisher registrations

  • e-Classroom (16/2/2012)

Content

Michal starts working at Paperight

Michal began working as an intern at Paperight in December 2011. He assisted in the development of the list of 1000 open and public domain titles. Together we researched product leads, sourced documents, compiled metadata, and the listed each product on Paperight 0.5.

Arthur set up the Paperight wiki, with both Michal and I as contributors. We began maintaining records of publisher registrations and ops.

With the view to creating Paperight Editions of the public domain titles on our list, I created a Paperight Edition novel template in InDesign.

paperight-edition-indd-template

One of the main challenges I began to experience was the lack of response from people who I contacted ‘cold’. It became evident that one of the most useful resources for eliciting a response, was a mutual connection (a role that Arthur often filled).

One of the main challenges I began to experience was the lack of response from people who I contacted ‘cold’. It became evident that one of the most useful resources for eliciting a response, was a mutual connection (a role that Arthur often filled).

Publishers approached

  • Shikaya (Arthur and I met with)

Publisher registrations

  • Peter Delmar (6/12/2011)
  • Anthony Hambly (31/12/2011)