I just got word yesterday that one of our clients, a PhD student with whom we have been working on and off over the past year, has had her thesis passed, and that she is to graduate in April this year.

It might not sound like a big deal, but it is! We were brought on board to copyedit and typeset our customer’s doctoral thesis in late 2008 (I think). The edits and typesetting took us from roughly Oct-Nov ’08 until through early ’09 to complete. It wasn’t just the work, though, there was collaboration and meetings with both the customer and her supervisor, to ensure that best practice in thesis editing was upheld, and that we were all on the same page with how it ought to read and look.

Imagine our collective disappointment when the first submission came back with the note that it would pass with changes. While this is not an uncommon situation, it was originally quite heartbreaking for all concerned. However, with our support and with her supervisor’s support, our customer rallied herself, did what she had to do, and got stuck back into the work.

And we just found out yesterday that the thesis was accepted, and that her graduation is coming up this April.

After such a long process, one tends to become good friends with customers like this, because it is an intensive task – and at the end of doctoral study it is also stressful and tense for the student. Bearing that in mind, it would probably come as no surprise to you that a big part of our work is also customer support. I could personally imagine nothing worse than coming to the end of such intensive, long-term study, and finding myself stuck with an unsympathetic and inflexible editor. It’s why with jobs like these, we’re in there for as long as it takes.

We would like to take this opportunity to send massive congratulations to our client! It’s been a long time coming, and you and your research both deserve all the acclaim you receive. Well done! We are proud to have been part of your journey.

The Small Press Underground Networking Community here in Australia (SPUNC), of which we are hoping to soon become members, recently conducted some research into independent presses throughout the country. Happily, the research was published in two major papers: the Age and the Australian.

What the research found was that independent presses do it really hard. As the Age reported:

The key findings are: that most have a small annual turnover (58% no more than $50,000, and 28% $10,000 or less); a lack of funding (50% receive no funding at all); a lack of paid staff (29% have none); 89% have used volunteers in the past 12 months; a lack of staff (24% have only one staff member); and small print runs (47% have an average print run of fewer than 1000 copies). But the report says the 46 respondents have published more than 300 titles in the past 12 months, an encouraging figure.

So really, if you’re in independent publishing you must be either mad or driven – but I think that it helps to be a little of both.