Legacy Book Publishing Summer Internship 2016

Allison Harper

Legacy Book Publishing is a small independent publishing house that

specializes in book's inspiring virtuous character and retaining the authors voice.
They are seeking out stories, fiction or nonfiction, that have a positive impact on
society or simply life stories that need to be shared with the world. I discovered this
company through searching online for publishing houses in Orlando. I had just
searched and sent out a couple emails asking about needing an intern for the
summer, and they responded and brought me in for an interview and to discuss the
details of the program. I was initially hired as the office's editing intern. We
discussed that Tayler was the office's only real editing outlet at Legacy currently,
and that she was needed in other areas for the office as she is the only other paid
employee save the president Gabriel Vaughn. So I was very eager and happy to be
taking on some real material to edit. We agreed at the initial interview that I would
work there on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 11-4pm for 6 weeks. He
brought up the idea of sending me home with files to edit on some days to reduce
travelling all the way from Saint Cloud, FL to Winter Park (about a 45 minute drive
down I4 on a good day). This was finally put in practice on my third week due to a
work opportunity with my parents at the COPA America Tournament. Editing at
home/away from the office compared to in the office was a refreshing surprise and
has made me consider freelance editing even more seriously than before. For my
first time editing in the office Tayler gave me a portion of a text she had already
looked over to compare and assess style initially. I looked over that bit and after a
quick review and decision that my editing was up to the normal standard at Legacy,
I continued on with that manuscript entitled Out On Parole and finished it by the
end of the week. It was a very challenging first text to handle as it was a novel
focused on two local Orlando street gangs so the dialogue and content were flexible
in their syntax as it was of unstructured slang. I made sure I was consistent in my
editing choices, and that any style alterations were minimal and for clarity only.
That first editing session taught me the correct paragraph format for dialogue and
their clauses in a book and with that very essential knowledge I kept special
attention to all quotations in my editing from that point on. So right from the get go
I was interacting with a larger volume of narrative than before as this manuscript
was 214 pages. I will go farther into the various works I have edited at Legacy later
in this essay.
Overall, my day-to-day experience at Legacy Book Publishing was mostly
structured like this; We would, all three of the interns, arrive at 11am and head up
the stairs to the 'design studio' office where Mr. Vaughn and Tayler were already

waiting and gathered for the morning meeting. We would all listen in on the
checklist-like priorities for the day directed at Tayler and therefore also us by the
extension of the diffusion of work and wait to be assigned a direct task and released
into whatever nook was ours to work in for the day. The office was pretty small and
had a total of three computer. The length of these initial meetings would vary but
they would typically end around 11:45am. Since there were too many people to
computers available in the office who each had specific personalities/downfalls
usually seen in older computers so the shuffling for access and the prioritizing of
projects was commonplace. I began to bring my laptop into the office so we could
free up a work space, and still work on the content that needed to be looked over.
The lack of abundant technology really challenged us all to work as diligently as
possible as all time was precious. One of these valuable computers is in Mr.
Vaughn's office as well so whenever he would have meetings with authors or Tayler
alone, we would have to transfer to another device if it was available, if not we
would try and do something else equally as important that didn't require a screen.
As more things became high priority, I just committed to working on my own laptop
to relieve some of the pressure off of the other two general program interns I was
working with. Mr. Vaughn would leave to take lunch around 12:30 until whenever he
came back, and those were the most productive hours of the day for the rest of the
team cause we could communicate more freely as we were all college-age women
who could relate. Mr. Vaughn was hard of hearing, and Tayler's voice is the only
female pitch that he can hear without aids so sometimes exchanging ideas required
a little more explanation than it normally would. If we ever finished what we were
tasked with in the morning, we would head up and find Tayler so she could look it
over and find something else to do. The way that he runs his business is 'do this
first, then when you're done come back for the next part' so it is individual project
goals one by one instead of a list of things to be accomplished or attempted today
and us working at our own pace to knock them all out. When we did have enough
stuff on the horizon that we did receive an idea of other things to work on without
his go ahead directly before I would finish in no time at all because I work quite
efficiently. But when it is one task at a time there is time lost in the transition time
and the ensuing conversation or speech that will occur because I had to engage him
in communication. So lastly, just as at the beginning of the day we all had to
reconvene in the digital studio office for an end of the day meeting at around
3:50pm and though our work day ended at 4pm we would be in these meetings for
upwards of 40 minutes sometimes just due to his meandering way of working
through what he wishes to touch upon, whether it be about work just completed or
work that needs to be done or finished the following day. So in that regard, being
aware of time management and the factors that affect the entire team is a way to
suggest improvement in this area because those lost minutes will and do add up to
the overall bottom line.
Now I will highlight the work I did during my time at Legacy this summer as
said previously I was mainly focused on the editing aspect of publishing this time

around as that is my ultimate career aspiration. I edited the entirety of Out On

Parole during my first week at the office and it really surprised me how much I was
enjoying it and how fast I was at it too. I have always been a naturally adept at
reading and understanding grammar and sentence structure so this position was a
natural fit and I was proving that to be correct in these first days. It was the perfect
text to start with because it was conversational dialogue, it was set in the present
and it was entirely centered around episodic violent interactions so it was a fast and
engaging project. However, the author did struggle with maintaining the correct
tense throughout the story and that was very confusing to reframe once it's written,
personally. As a comparison, my second editing project was a short biography
Memories of a Creole Boy coming in at around 42 pages which explored the familial
history of all the founding members of the Parish of Iberia and its surrounding
communities. This text was nothing like my last project, it took on a more
informative and historical tone as it lays out all that has happened since its original
settling. He also had a lot more problem with finding appropriate filler descriptor
words to fully explain the context of each family or segment of town history. This
text gave me the very necessary reality check that not all of the work you edit will
be something you also enjoy reading, those two tasks can be separate now that I
have developed the skill to read with different considerations than just taking in the
main ideas. Next up on my to do list was Come Apart My Beloved, it is a small
collection of inspired writings from an individual of Christian faith and the most
editing work that was done was in the area of sourcing and correctly quoting the
many Bible verses throughout the text. The text that I edited on my time away from
the office was the story of Ruth. This was a very large novel, at over 250 pages of
very beautifully written prose. They style of her writing was a distinct shift in voice
from my previous projects, it was a very indulgently written text and it was done
astutely. The prose did slow down the speed at which I could edit considerably,
which was challenging because she was already pretty polished as a writing voice
that it ended up being me reading large sections of the book before finding another
major error. The very crucial philosophy of retaining the author's voice is a blurry
line to when trying to edit something that only needs minor flow changes, as then it
becomes a matter of style versus necessity. This book gave me a taste of what a
content editor might help assist author's with as this novel was very a
characterization heavy book and the end seems very undeveloped and rushed
compared to the rest of the flowing, detailed interactions from the rest of the story.
The heaviest editing for clarity, flow and word choice was with Heart, a
biography of a pioneering cardiothoracic surgeon who practiced in Buffalo, NY. He is
originally from Turkey so this manuscript was typed up by his daughter and was also
partially 'edited' by her as well before and after I looked it over, and a result of that
was clause confusion, malapropisms and simple sentence structure throughout. I
also wrote the back cover copy for this book and it was my first ever attempt at
creating that genre of text for that purpose. It is quite difficult to write these
excerpts, as they have to be engaging but not become an explanation of the novel.

My return to fiction came with my start on the 300 page A Second Life toward the
last few weeks of my internship. This novel is set in WWII in France, it follows an
American soldier throughout his time in France during its occupation. This text was
segmented and I ended up reading the last 70 pages before reading the middle
portion due to some rewriting that had to be done by the author. This was a highly
enjoyable read and a very good editing project as it was consistent enough to
correct that it helped me strengthen my editing flow and speed. I also wrote a back
cover copy for this text and it was even more difficult than before as this book
contains a twist pretty early on in the story. I am actually very proud in my
strengthening of this ability to read and work on a manuscript then synthesize and
output it in a new form that serves to draw the audience in. I think it's a unique skill
and I hope I keep honing it in as my experience grows. My last editing endeavor at
Legacy was a collection of 70 poems entitled Butterfly Wings, the author was a
ninety year old women who had them all typed up in individual word documents, so
I had to compiled and edit them all into their right order, keeping the sketch
illustration/description with the correct poem. I also went a step further in the
production process and helped format it for printing in Pagemaker, which is a unique
and tedious but critical step. We printed a few books in house throughout my time
there, so I learned about the formatting specifics when creating books smaller than
the standard 8x11.5 page size, as well as how to store and handle the loose pages
once they are created. All of these works offered me a new and different strength to
put into my editing skill toolbox.
Overall my time at Legacy was a very successful investment in my future
career endeavors as it gave me the material I was so eager to dive into editing with.
I am more confident in my choice to pursue this facet of publishing and I'm also
happy I had the opportunity to work in a small business as I have worked for
Aramark on campus for the last three years. I really loved working with girls from
other institutions and they also taught me a lot about professional relationships. I
will definitely be visiting when I am in town and am grateful to them for the
fantastic 7 weeks!

Final Word Counts:

Out On Parole: 1,916
Memories of a Creole Boy: 3,437

Come Apart My Beloved: 379

Ruth: 1,692
Written back cover copy: 100
Heart: 2,237
Written back cover copy: 149
A Second Life: 769
Written back cover copy: 74
Butterfly Wings: Formatted
Total Word Count:
- Edited: 10,430
-Written: 323