When a publisher starts the first day...

Close to a month ago, I wrote a post attempting to explain my new job...and to be honest, I felt like I was doing a poor job of describing it. Of course, this happened before I graduated college (WHAAAAT?), moved into an apartment, attended two days of training in Texas (that trip is a long, strange story of God's grace...but we won't get into that here), and watched my baby sister (who is no longer a baby at all) graduate from high school. So as I stand in my apartment kitchen and stretch my cramped legs after sitting cross-legged on the floor for hours, allow me to elaborate. 

My office is so official these days.

--Best Version Media hired me as a publisher for the Southwest Ames area. This involves launching a magazine for the southwest neighborhoods in the city as an independent contractor who technically answers to a division manager and a regional manager, as well as the Home Office staff in Wisconsin. My magazine will be called Neighbors of SW Ames.

--My daily job involves calling businesses in Ames to ask if they would be willing to meet with me in person and talk about possibly signing a contract to sponsor the magazine and, in return, receive a certain amount of advertising space in the magazine. If they say yes, I set up a time to meet and hopefully what follows is a "yes" and a contract.

--Since I don't have a magazine in print yet, I am technically an Associate Publisher. Until I reach my baseline (which is the amount of money required to fund the magazine, pay the designer/content coordinator, and distrubute the magazine each month) and go to print with the first issue, I won't receive a paycheck. This is just scary enough to give every publisher a little incentive to reach their baseline and go to print as quickly as possible.

--Like most salespeople, I'm paid on commission. Pretty straightforward.

--My main goal when connecting with business owners is to get them excited about the possibility of advertising to an extremely local audience with hopes of becoming a more tightly knit community.

Today was my first day on the job, officially. Although I didn't have Julia around to cheer me on (she's in London until the 9th) and I got started a couple hours later than I had hoped, I have to admit that today was a success. I feel really good about the things I accomplished and was able to move on from the things that didn't work out.

If you want to hear more, please shoot me a message. I can't give away too much info on the Internet because of BVM rules, but I'd love to go into detail if anyone is curious. I had fun talking to my extended family and a couple of family friends about it at Natalie's grad party on Saturday, so my explanation skills are all warmed up. ;)

Now if you'll excuse me, my celebratory pizza rolls are just about cool enough to eat.