Studying at Pace was one of the most enjoyable things I ever did in my life. Everything was great from my first class about comic books. Coming from a different culture, this course gave me an encompassing overview of how the publishing industry works in the U.S., allowing me to reconcile what I had learned at home in Brazil with a completely different reality. My favorite classes were the ones covering my favorite subjects. Besides having comic book legend Paul Levitz as a professor for two terms, he also arranged for my idol Karen Berger to teach a class when he was away. Having Manuela Soares, editor of Harry Potter, teach about children’s books was a dream come true.

When I first started working at The Experiment, I wore a lot of hats. The position I applied for was part-time, dealing with contracts and helping foreign agents. Then they decided they wanted me to work full-time (and that was the kind of job I needed because of my foreign status), so they combined two part-time positions and I ended up working as an assistant to the Production Manager and taking care of metadata (not to mention office managing).

As The Experiment’s list grew (from about 15 titles per season when I first started to 23 currently), they really needed me to take care of contracts (which was never a big passion of mine, but a natural fit because I’m very organized and had been managing my own company for 15 years). They also needed to take greater care with subrights (which is the area I’m really interested in), which was part of my original job description.

After a year, our foreign rights and licenses income increased quite a bit, in part because now, for the first time, there’s someone dedicated to helping agents and following submissions and pitches closely. I got a new job that I never considered, which was selling audio-book licenses. In 2017, the first full year I did that, income grew 350 per cent in comparison to the previous year.

I do all the company’s contracts (publishing agreements, licenses, domestic, and subsidiary rights), help foreign agents, and deal with domestic rights. I’m also responsible for getting translation/publication grants for books, an area I have a bit of knowledge about because I wrote my graduate thesis on international literature in the U.S. (At The Experiment, about 10 per cent of books published are translations, which is quite high for a U.S. publisher.)

The best thing about working here is that you can do more than your job description. I also examine foreign lists/news to look for titles that could be published. One book I suggested last year, Let’s Play Yoga, was recently acquired and will be published in the fall. I was happy to find a great Brazilian title that complemented The Experiment’s list, and I got to translate it into English. It’s the first translation I have published outside of Brazil, so I feel quite accomplished!