I Have Fallen to the Dark Side...

...and I have to tell you, it feels great.

My job search is over; I'm starting my new job on Monday after being unemployed almost exactly four months. I am now a Marketing Manager for John Wiley in Hoboken, which means I'll have to stop referring to myself as an editor -- I am now officially a "publishing professional."

Some editors are not fond of marketing people, but I always got along well with them at my old shop -- which was good, since the nature of the bookclub business meant that we worked very closely together, and much of what I did was more marketing than editorial to begin with. From what various Wiley people have told me about their organization, the relationships among marketing, editorial, and creative services is similarly collaborative at Wiley, so it should feel like home.

There are probably a few of you shaking your heads at the word "Marketing," but wait! it gets even more interesting. The line of books I'll be working on is...Accounting! Stable, dependable, successful, and unlikely to steal my weekend reading time. It's not much like science fiction, but SF wasn't much like hunting & fishing, large print, or playscripts, and I worked on all of those for years at a time at the bookclubs. Wiley has an array of strong brands and market-leading expertise, and I am very excited to be joining their team.

Other good things:

• Marketing pays better than Editorial in general
• I'm working in New Jersey, so good-bye to double state taxation
• I will now get to work on a train, not a bus
  
• My new office will be barely two blocks from the train station

I don't expect to say much at all about my day-job from this point forward; I don't think anyone would care, for one thing. And I never wrote much about the day-to-day stuff at the clubs to begin with; descriptions of office work are either boring or legally actionable, and I try to avoid both of those categories.

So, until I get the laptop I've been thinking about (and maybe can post at lunchtimes), Antick Musings will only get updates nights and weekends. But I've got several things stacked up from this week, so I hope to post a flurry of things this weekend, before I start the 9-5 thing again. Reviews will continue -- I actually read more while commuting than when at home, with the distractions of kids and computer -- so if anyone has stuff for possible review, please contact me.

Update, later in the day: A couple of people have asked, here or in e-mail, whether I'll still be going to conventions. I'm planning on still doing a few, but they won't count as business trips anymore and I won't be on an expense account, so I'll probably be pickier. I'll definitely be at World Fantasy in Saratoga this year and almost certainly at Lunacon in March. After that, I'm not sure of my precise plans -- it depends on timing and other issues. I'd love to go to Worldcon in Denver, but I don't know how likely that is. (Ditto next year's WFC in Calgary.) But I'll certainly still be around, one way or another.