I was twenty-two years old, fresh out of college with an English degree and a conviction that publishing was where I belonged. My internship at a small literary press started on a Tuesday in September. By Friday, I had paper cuts on three fingers, a coffee stain on my only professional blouse, and a deep uncertainty about whether I’d made the right career choice. That was twelve years ago. I’m still in publishing. The paper cuts have healed, but some of the lessons from that internship are still with me every day.

I should say upfront that I’m not going to name the press where I interned, because some of the stories I’m about to tell are unflattering, and the people involved were, for the most part, decent humans who were just exhausted. Small presses run on fumes and dedication, and the behavior I witnessed was almost always the result of overwork rather than malice. But the intern’s-eye view of a publishing house is a specific kind of education that I think more people should hear about, especially anyone considering a career in this industry.

My first task, on that first Tuesday, was to open the mail. This sounds simple. It was not. The press received somewhere between twenty and forty pieces of mail per day, and roughly half of it was unsolicited manuscripts. Physical manuscripts, printed on paper, often accompanied by a cover letter and a self-addressed stamped envelope for the rejection. This was 2014, and even then, most submissions came through email, but there was a steady stream of writers who preferred the tangible approach. My job was to log each submission in a spreadsheet, read the cover letter, skim the first few pages, and sort it into one of three piles: “maybe,” “no,” and “definitely not.”

The “definitely not” pile was the largest by far, and I felt terrible about it at first. These were real people who had spent months or years writing something and then put it in an envelope with hope and a stamp. And I, a twenty-two-year-old intern with no publishing experience, was their first reader. The weight of that responsibility hit me hard during the first week. By the second week, it was replaced by something more complicated: the realization that I could tell, within a page or two, whether a manuscript had a chance. Not because I was gifted, but because the problems were often the same. Weak openings, vague settings, dialogue that sounded like no human had ever spoken, point-of-view shifts that made me dizzy. I wasn’t judging the writers as people. I was learning to recognize the craft issues that separated polished manuscripts from unfinished ones.

The “maybe” pile went to the senior editor, who read them with more care and experience than I could offer. I sat in on a few of those evaluation meetings, and they were fascinating. The editor would hold up a manuscript and say something like, “The writing is strong, but the structure doesn’t work. If this writer is willing to do a major revision, there might be something here.” Or: “Beautiful sentences, no story.” Or, once, memorably: “I have no idea what this is, but I can’t stop thinking about it.” That last one got published.

Beyond the slush pile, my duties were wildly varied in the way that only small-press internships can be. On any given day, I might proofread galleys, update the website, pack books for shipment, write catalog copy, research potential reviewers, or drive to the post office. I once spent an entire afternoon trying to unjam a printer that was older than me. I was, simultaneously, the lowest-ranking person in the building and one of the most versatile, because interns at small presses do whatever needs doing.

The pay was zero dollars. Let me be clear about that because it matters. My internship was unpaid. I worked three days a week, roughly twenty hours, for academic credit and “experience.” I could only do this because I was living with my parents, who fed me and didn’t charge rent. An intern without that safety net would have needed a second job, which would have made the internship nearly impossible. This is the dirty secret of publishing internships: they select for people who can afford to work for free, which means they select for a specific demographic. The industry has made some progress on this, more internships are paid now than when I started, but the progress has been slow and the underlying problem persists.

I learned more about the business of publishing in my first month as an intern than I had in four years of college. College taught me how to read closely, how to write analytically, how to think about literature as an art form. The internship taught me that literature is also a product that has to be manufactured, marketed, sold, and shipped. It taught me that a beautiful book that nobody buys is, from a business perspective, a failure, even if it’s a literary success. That tension between art and commerce is the fundamental tension of publishing, and it never goes away.

One of the most eye-opening experiences was sitting in on a marketing meeting. The press was about to publish a novel that the editor loved. It was literary fiction, beautifully written, the kind of book that might win a small prize or get a thoughtful review in a literary journal. The marketing discussion was sobering. The budget for promoting this book was approximately $400. That covered a few social media posts, some review copies, and a modest email campaign. There was no advertising budget. No book tour. No publicist. The book would succeed or fail based almost entirely on word of mouth, and the staff knew it. They talked about the book with genuine enthusiasm and real resignation. They believed in it and also understood that believing in a book is not, by itself, enough to sell copies.

I saw this pattern repeated throughout my internship: good books published with insufficient resources to support them. It’s the reality of small-press publishing, and it’s heartbreaking in a low-grade, chronic way. The editors care deeply. The marketing people do their best with what they have. The books go out into the world and, more often than not, are met with silence. Not hostility, not bad reviews, just silence. The worst thing that can happen to a book isn’t a one-star review. It’s no review at all.

The relationships between editors and authors were another revelation. I’d imagined the editor-author relationship as a meeting of minds, two literary people discussing the finer points of characterization over coffee. And sometimes it was that. But more often, it was a negotiation. The editor wants to cut the prologue. The author is attached to the prologue. The editor thinks the ending is too neat. The author thinks the editor doesn’t understand the ending. The editor has a deadline. The author needs more time. These conversations were conducted with professionalism and mutual respect, but they were negotiations, and they required diplomacy skills that nobody teaches in English departments.

I remember one author who called the office in tears because their book had been reviewed negatively in a small literary magazine. The review wasn’t cruel, just lukewarm, but for this author, it was devastating. The senior editor talked to them for forty-five minutes. I could hear the editor’s side of the conversation: calm, sympathetic, gently redirecting the author’s attention to the positive reviews they’d received. After hanging up, the editor turned to me and said, “Part of this job is being a therapist.” She wasn’t joking.

The interns before me had left notes in a shared document, a kind of informal survival guide. It included tips like “the bathroom on the second floor is the quiet one,” “don’t touch the editor-in-chief’s mug,” and “the FedEx guy’s name is Marcus and he appreciates being called by name.” These details were trivial, but they gave me a sense of continuity, of being part of a lineage of young people who had stood in this same spot, done this same work, and moved on to whatever came next.

The most valuable thing I learned as an intern wasn’t about publishing at all. It was about work ethic. The people at that press worked extraordinarily hard for modest pay because they believed in what they were doing. They could have made more money in corporate communications or marketing or a dozen other fields that value the same skills. They chose books. That choice came with financial sacrifice, long hours, and the constant frustration of watching good work go unnoticed. But it also came with a sense of purpose that I’ve rarely seen in other industries. When a book finally reached a reader who loved it, when someone wrote in to say that a novel had changed how they thought about something, the satisfaction was real and shared.

The copy editing was another education entirely. I was given galleys of a forthcoming book and a red pen and told to look for errors. I thought I knew English well enough. I was wrong. In my first day of proofreading, the senior editor found fourteen errors I’d missed: inconsistent hyphenation, a dangling modifier, a character whose name was spelled two different ways on adjacent pages, and a comma splice that I wouldn’t have noticed in a hundred years. She wasn’t harsh about it, but she was precise. “Read every word,” she said. “Not the sentence. Every word. Individually.” I started doing that, and my error-catching rate tripled. I also started reading everything in my daily life with an editorial eye, which is a habit I’ve never been able to shake. I can’t read a restaurant menu without noticing a misplaced apostrophe.

There was a book launch event during my internship that I’ll never forget. It was held at a small bookstore, maybe thirty people in attendance, folding chairs arranged between the shelves. The author read for ten minutes, answered questions for twenty, and signed books for another thirty. The whole thing was modest, almost quaint. But when the author read from her book, the room went quiet in a way I’d never experienced. Not polite quiet. Absorbed quiet. Thirty people breathing in unison, leaning slightly forward, following every word. That’s when I understood what all the unglamorous work was for: to create that moment. To put a book into the world and watch it connect with readers, even just thirty of them, in a rented room on a Wednesday night.

I also learned about the unglamorous reality of returns. In publishing, bookstores can return unsold books to the publisher for a full refund. This system, which dates back to the Great Depression, means that a publisher might ship 2,000 copies of a book and get 800 back six months later. Those returned books, often shelf-worn and unsellable, represent a real financial loss. Watching boxes of returned books arrive at the warehouse was sobering. Each one represented a copy that had been printed, shipped, displayed, and sent back. The waste bothered me then and still does. It’s one of the industry’s most persistent inefficiencies, and nobody has figured out a good solution.

I think about my internship a lot, especially now that I’m on the other side, working at ScrollWorks and reading submissions and making the same kinds of decisions that once seemed so daunting. The industry has changed since 2014. Ebooks are more established. Social media marketing is more sophisticated. Print-on-demand has altered the economics of small runs. But the fundamental experience of the publishing intern, the mixture of excitement, exhaustion, idealism, and paper cuts, is probably the same as it ever was.

If you’re thinking about interning at a press, my advice is: do it, but go in with open eyes. It will not be glamorous. You will not spend your days reading great literature and discussing it over wine. You will spend your days doing whatever needs to be done, and most of what needs to be done is not literary. You’ll learn about ISBNs and print specifications and distributor catalogs and the maddening logistics of getting a physical object from a warehouse to a bookshelf. And somewhere in the middle of all that mundane work, you’ll have a moment, maybe reading a manuscript that surprises you, maybe holding a finished book for the first time, maybe hearing a reader say they loved something you helped bring into the world, where you’ll think: yes, this is why I’m here. That moment is worth every paper cut.