Featured Publishing Professional: Alex Aceves
As sent to Jasmine Miranda
Why did you decide to work in book publishing?
Like most people who go into publishing, I’ve always been a huge bookworm, even from a very young age. I was absolutely that kid who just wanted to stay in and read or scribble out weird short stories in my notebook while all the other kids were playing outside. So I’ve always known I wanted to work in a job that involves a lot of reading and writing.
As an adult, I’ve come to realize that while this was partly just my personality, it also had to do with the environment I grew up in: we always had a lot of books at home, and both of my parents are big readers. Not all kids have that, for all sorts of different reasons. So I’ve grown really passionate about working with people who are invested in nurturing future generations of readers and fostering a love of reading early on. Kidlit publishing seemed like a good place to do that.
Can you tell us a little bit about what you do as an editor and what books you’re looking for?
I really love my current job because it has a lot of scope. I get to acquire and edit manuscripts for the Holiday House frontlist, and my focus in that capacity is on middle grade and YA fiction in prose and graphic novel form. I’m also working on developing Holiday House’s Spanish language publishing program—I’m a native Spanish speaker and very dedicated to improving the quality and availability of Spanish-language books for kids in the US, so this part of my job is really important to me. I get to hire and coordinate with translators, edit and route Spanish editions slated for publication, and look through our backlist for books that might work in Spanish.
As an acquiring editor, then, I’m very much looking for MG and YA manuscripts with Spanish translation potential, by which I mean books with characters, settings, or themes that are relevant to the Latine community. I’m also generally interested in publishing more stories by and about people previously excluded from representation in kidlit publishing. I can’t emphasize enough how frustrating it is that so few of the submissions I’ve received so far have come from BIPOC creators.
Most broadly, I love voicey and fresh-feeling contemporary realism, historical fiction with unusual settings, and soft-speculative fiction drawn from mythologies based outside of Western Europe.
There is a lot of discussion about the burnout amongst publishing professionals, editors in particular. Do you have experiences with burnout? How do you cope?
Oof, yes, the current conversations about burnout among junior and mid-level publishing professionals are long overdue, and I’ve absolutely experienced burnout myself. My last job was in part of a very small team at a small company, so the workload was high--at all levels--because there just weren’t many editors on hand to share the work. I was approaching burnout even before the onset of the pandemic, but the early days of the COVID work-from-home situation really tipped me over the edge. It was a combination of factors, including the total dissolution of the line between work life and personal life, and then some exhausting and time-consuming infighting about how the company should respond to the George Floyd protests.
One thing that helped me cope at the time was having great relationships with my fellow junior colleagues. We started this text thread where we would cheer each other on, and I think we all relied on it a lot to get us through. In retrospect, though, we shouldn’t have had to do that for each other. Looking back, I see it as a sign that there wasn’t a place to voice concerns formally that we felt comfortable using. That seems to be a recurring theme in these discussions. In Molly McGhee’s open letter, she said something like “this isn’t a Macmillan issue,” and I really related to that; even when everyone above you on your team means well and is trying their best to help you, it’s hard to evade burnout when there aren’t good systemic employee protections in place.
Ultimately, the best tool I’ve found for coping with burnout has been therapy. I know I’m in a privileged position in being able to do that—my copays after insurance are reasonable, and while it was a bit difficult to find the right therapist from the small pool that actually takes my insurance, I did find one eventually. Not everybody has access to that resource, which is another issue that merits discussing. But I want to say to any colleagues out there who do have access to therapy but have held back from using that resource because of the stigma around it or because it feels daunting to get started: for me, it was absolutely worth it.
How do you think managers and leadership can better set up their employees for long, successful careers?
In my opinion, the very first thing that needs remediation is the low entry-level salary range, along with the issue of mid-career salary compression. I think when careers in publishing are not long, it’s often because editors reach a certain point in their lives where they’re facing the prospect of continuing to live with roommates or accumulate credit card debt or work second jobs at coffee shops well into their thirties, and they realize they can’t tolerate it any longer. And when careers are not successful, it’s often because it’s hard to find time, energy, or means to learn new skills, network, or focus on professional development when you have to maintain a time-consuming side hustle to pay the bills or all your mental energy is consumed with constantly calculating whether your paycheck will last through the month.
What challenges have you faced in your career and how have you overcome them?
My biggest challenge was probably lack of access. At the risk of dating myself (publishing is a second career for me so I’m…old relative to the title I hold), I’ll say that there was just less internet when I was in college, so it was hard even to get information about how to break into publishing or what working in publishing was actually like. I went to a big university in an under-resourced state nowhere near New York because my parents were on faculty there and I could go for free, and there weren’t many people there equipped to help me get where I wanted to go. I blundered into an internship through my own devices, and there was nobody around to tell me the thing I didn’t realize but really needed to hear: that this particular internship was not a good fit and not really compatible with my interests and abilities. I had a very bad experience that summer and decided that publishing was not for me, which resulted in a huge career detour. If I’d had access to better information back then, I think I might be on the same career path I’m on currently but much further along.
I think the challenges young people face to break into the industry now are a little different because the internet has at least made it easier for most people to get some good basic information, but there's still a lot of gatekeeping around publishing, and it's not a coincidence that most of the workforce has a very similar background and comes from the same kinds of degree programs.
What have been your favorite books of the year so far?
I loved Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez--what a book to kick off the year with! In the kidlit space, I have been blown away by Sabaa Tahir's All My Rage and Crystal Maldonado's No Filter and Other Lies. I know No Filter comes from the press I work at, but I read it for the first time in ARC form last year for my previous job, long before I knew I was going to end up at Holiday House, and I loved it from the get-go, so I feel I can say I'm an objective hype-person for Crystal's writing. And everyone should keep an eye out for Kat Fajardo's delightful Miss Quinces, which I was also fortunate to read an ARC of and which comes out in May.
Alexandra Aceves is a Latine writer and editor originally from Mexico City and currently based in Brooklyn. She works as an associate editor at Holiday House Publishing, where she oversees the expansion of the Holiday House Spanish language publishing program while also acquiring YA and middle grade fiction for Holiday House's English language list. She was the 2015 Honor winner of Lee & Low's New Visions Award for previously unpublished YA fiction writers whose work centers characters from marginalized communities; her debut novel is forthcoming from Lee & Low's Tu Books imprint.