Publishing intern

Closing date for applications: 30th June at 11.59pm

Salary: National Living Wage

Start date: August 2025

Hours: 4 days per week (Tuesday to Friday)

Working pattern: Hybrid — Ideally 2 days per week in the office

Duration: 7 months

This exciting placement provides a hands-on opportunity to explore sales, publicity, and marketing in an independent publishing house based in Birmingham.

The Emma Press is an independent publishing house based in Birmingham specialising in poetry, short fiction, essays and children’s books. It was founded in 2012 with a mission to make literature and publishing as welcoming and as accessible as possible. It publishes 7 - 10 books a year across genres and age groups, including translations, with 2025 seeing its first novels for adults, 2 poetry pamphlets, a full poetry collection, and fiction & poetry books for children.

The Emma Press was shortlisted for the British Book Awards Small Press of the Year [Midlands] in both 2024 and 2025. Its books have won prizes like the CLiPPA Award for children’s poetry, the Edge Hill Debut Prize for short story collections, and the Michael Marks Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet.

The Emma Press also runs community participation projects, and recently received Arts Council England funding to run a Young Publishers programme in a local school and a second iteration of the Birmingham Editorial Readers Group scheme. These will take place across 2025-26.

The publishing intern will take on a varied role learning key publishing skills, focussing on the sales, publicity and marketing of 2 forthcoming Emma Press novels, 1 poetry pamphlet, and 1 children’s poetry collection. They will have a focus on Publicity and Marketing while broadening out into other areas of publishing (Editing, Design, Sales). As part of a very small team, the trainee would work closely alongside the Director, completing tasks and receiving feedback. They will come away with a wide variety of valuable publishing skills and an in-depth understanding of how a small press works.

What you'll learn

The trainee will begin with learning professional social media, as a good entry point to wider publishing concerns. They will then progress to sales (emails), then marketing, then publicity, submissions, editing and design. Throughout the 6 months they will attend the weekly team meetings and shadow the Director and the Founder on various strands of their work, as well as getting feedback from the Publishing Manager.

Working on publicity, you will learn:

• Common methods for approaching different types of key audiences for books – including social media influencers, book reviewers, bookshops and festival programmers – and the skills to communicate with each audience.
• Understand social media marketing strategies and develop their content creation ability.
• To begin creating simple posts to advertise books, events and projects, and writing short targeted publicity emails to new and existing contacts in bookshops.
• There will be more opportunities for designing and taking ownership of new content over time.

You will develop:

• Creative thinking and research skills in creating lists of publicity contacts, using a book’s themes to reach less-typical and new audiences.
• Self-assessment skills, analysing the successes and failures of their publicity and marketing approaches, and understand through encouraged experimentation what makes an effective social media post and publicity email.
• As their first book comes to publication, they will work directly with the author, learning relationship management skills in supporting them with publicity.
• Throughout, there will be opportunities to shadow the Director in meetings with authors, distributors, funders and sector partners, to gain a good understanding of the business of publishing.
• There will also be regular one-to-one mentor sessions with Founder/Publisher Emma Dai’an Wright, to answer more general questions about publishing, contextualise the tasks and provide shadowing opportunities in areas such as editing and design.

What you'll be doing

• Read the books and discuss their potential markets & readers
• Be coached to plan mini publicity campaigns for the launch of the books, based around influencers, reviewers, festivals, and local and national press
• Learn research techniques to explore people, places and bookshops to contact about the books
• Work on writing press releases and other marketing copy
• Learn to create effective social media posts and schedule them
• Experience liaising directly with authors to support them in their publicity
• Help posting out webshop orders and publicity copies
• Support planning book launch events online and in person
• Answer email queries and learn to manage an inbox
• Attend team meetings and shadow the Director in sector meetings
• Take part in Birmingham Editorial Readers Group sessions (optional)

What you'll bring

• Genuine enthusiasm for books in general, but also specifically knowing and liking what the Emma Press does.
• The ability to communicate engagingly about books, including writing for different audiences.
• Imagination and motivation to seek out and create publicity opportunities.
• Strong organisational skills and attention to detail.
• Ability to bring a fresh perspective and contribute meaningfully.
• Collaborative team player with a proactive approach.

To apply

• Log in to your Creative Access account or register today to apply for this opportunity
• Upload your CV and cover letter as one document (applications without a tailored cover letter will not be accepted)
• Once submitted, you can no longer amend your application, so proof-read carefully
• Do not contact the company directly
• Please email any queries about this role to Creative Access at this address: recruit@creativeaccess.org.uk

This opportunity is open to individuals from groups that are under-represented in the creative industries. This includes, but is not limited to, individuals who identify as Black, Asian, or from other ethnically diverse backgrounds, or people of any ethnicity who belong to the following under-represented groups: disabled people, people with the characteristic of gender reassignment, individuals from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, carers and asylum seekers.

The successful candidate for this opportunity will also participate in a Creative Access support programme that sits alongside workplace training. This includes a programme of induction training, monthly masterclasses, wellbeing support, buddying / mentoring and more.