Communication and marketing graduate Laura Hutchinson tells us about her career in marketing for the publishing industry and meeting a childhood hero.
Your title is Marketing Executive—Young Readers for Penguin Random House Australia. What does that involve?
My job involves planning and coordinating launch campaigns for books aimed at young readers, which includes children anywhere from birth up to 18 years.
Some tasks I perform regularly include: briefing the graphic designer to make banners, posters or activity packs; writing blog posts for our website; securing advertising in magazines or online parenting platforms; posting things around the country for giveaways; planning upcoming campaigns and reporting on recently launched titles; updating our website; creating email newsletters; listing books on Goodreads, and; working with authors and illustrators to make sure they’re happy with how their book is being presented to the world.
My target market, depending on the title, includes kids, teenagers, parents, grandparents, booksellers, teacher librarians and educators. I also need to keep my boss happy by keeping the campaign within budget.
It’s not always promoting new releases. Penguin Random House has an amazing backlist of popular titles such as The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Hairy Maclary and The Fault in Our Stars. As I write this, I’m working on the 40th anniversary campaign for Where’s Spot? by Eric Hill.
What do you love about your job?
I get all the fun of working with kids’ stuff without actually having to work with kids. (There’s a lot of reasons I’m not a teacher but behaviour management is certainly one of them. My hat goes off to you, teachers.)
I was an avid reader as a child and blitzed my way through Premier’s Reading Challenges, MS Read-a-thons, the Narnia series, the Babysitter’s Club, everything by Morris Gleitzman, Roald Dahl, Cathy Cassidy and Elizabeth Honey. Going to the local library with my mum to choose the next stack of stories was an absolute joy. I grew up to be a story-loving adult, and so getting to work at the largest publishing house in the world is a true honour and privilege – I pinch myself constantly. I’m thrilled to be surrounded by great stories and extremely intelligent, socially-aware people every day. Seeing Spot, the loveable cartoon puppy, still gives me warm, fuzzy flashbacks to my mum reading to me over two decades ago.
I got to meet Morris Gleitzman. I looked forward to the event for weeks. I was so nervous and flustered, I gushed about how much I loved his books, how he was my favourite author, and which of his stories I enjoyed the most. It was extremely embarrassing but also exhilarating. Some of my colleagues laughed and thought that was adorable—they had been editors and designers of the books like Once and Boy Overboard, which had blown my 11-year-old mind in 2005.
There’s so much more I love about this job. I’ll try to summarise:
- I’m a member of the Green Team (environmentally-focused volunteer staff group) and my whole office (around 90 people) recycle waste in three different ways: we compost all food waste; participate in Clean Up Australia Day, and; educate our colleagues during National Recycling Week and World Environment Day. Globally, Penguin Random House and its parent company will be climate neutral by 2030. This makes me very proud.
- We partner with charities such as the Indigenous Literacy Foundation, where we help Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people create children’s books about their cultures, using their languages. My colleagues and I were also fundraised for bushfire recovery and donating books to schools that burnt down. All of this makes me proud, too—using the power of big business for good.
- My colleagues are super smart and wonderful people. Everyone treats each other with respect and kindness, which makes it a pleasant place to work. And there are free biscuits.
- The stories. It’s very special to read a manuscript and then see how it transforms through editing to become a fantastic novel.
No job is perfect. What do you find most challenging?
The hardest part is answering this question: How can we get the next generation passionate about reading? Even though I was a two-book-per-week teenager, when I was given a laptop for school at age 15, all of my interest in books fell out the window. Most kids are the same. Why sit still and read words when you could play video games or stream YouTube videos?
When I was being an annoying seven-year-old in 2001 and my parents had to keep me quietly entertained, I was handed a book. When seven-year-olds are being annoying in 2020, they’re handed an iPad. In the past 10 years, literacy rates have dropped dramatically in Australia. Fourteen-year-olds today are reading and writing at the same levels a 12-year-old was in 2009. This is producing a generation that is great with navigating technology but that is struggling with grammar, spelling, empathy, anxiety, memory, conceptual thinking and concentration skills. Since reading has all of these benefits, it’s used as an educational tool in classrooms and as a healthy punishment by parents who’ve restricted screen time. This has given our kids the idea that books mean chores and work, instead of relaxing and fun.
This is a huge problem for the future of our society. But it’s also a problem for our company. If we don’t create and nurture young readers today, we won’t have readers to buy our adult titles in 10 years’ time.
How has your career changed and progressed since leaving Avondale?
I graduated from Avondale in 2016 with a Bachelor of Arts in communication and a Bachelor of Business in marketing. I also had two internships in media and public relations and a handful of casual administrative and retail jobs listed on my curriculum vitae.
My first full-time job was Marketing Coordinator at Q Station, where I promoted events, tours, hotel accommodation and a restaurant, almost entirely online and with an extremely small budget. I worked at Q Station for two-and-a-half years and think of that time as baptism by fire—there was so much to learn about having a full-time career, living out of my parents’ home for the first time (the residences on campus don’t count), the hospitality industry, creativity, collaboration, confidence, and resilience. The location is beautiful and found the job lots of fun at times but also really hard. I’m grateful for the experience because it taught me some life lessons, which have shaped the person I am today, and gave me a good foundation for a self-motivated career. I started working for Penguin Random House in August 2019, at age 25.
What is your next career goal?
I love collaboration but feel anxious in leadership roles, which means I’m not interested in climbing the corporate ladder at this point in my life. And that’s OK. The world needs diversity to keep it spinning. My current goal is to learn and grow as much as I can in digital marketing and content creation, also to keep growing my network, so that one day I’ll be able to work flexible or part-time hours in a job I love while also being able to invest time in my (future) children’s daily lives. Flexibility of employment is the way of the future. I want to be so indispensable that a company would hire me even if I can only work for four hours per day instead of eight—that’s my next career goal.
How useful did you find your Avondale education? What learning was particularly valuable?
My communication and my marketing classes complemented each other. I have used a lot of the knowledge from the writing and media classes. In marketing and public relations roles it’s essential to understand and cater to the media industry and its employees, no matter in what industry you’re working. Particularly with so many closures of companies, media industry employees are often understaffed and overworked so having the ability to create content that is close to what they would create for themselves has helped me score editorial pieces and interviews for free that would have otherwise cost a few thousand dollars.
I cherish the experience as an intern and then student worker for Brenton Stacey in the Advancement Office at Avondale, as well as finding a mentor in the then Head of Avondale Business School Dr Warrick Long and a whole squad of cheerleaders made up of lecturers. All my lecturers knew my name, skill set, life situation and career goals—partially because I’m an over-sharer—but mostly because they genuinely believed in me and actively helped push me in areas I needed it, applaud me when I deserved it and give insights to industries and management styles I had not yet encountered.
I loved my Avondale experience and highly recommend it. Out in the workforce, people don’t care what university name is on your curriculum vitae—they care about your skill set, work ethic and previous work experience. So, work hard to impress your lecturers even when the assessment seems pointless, work hard to get that internship even when it won’t pay you, work hard to build and foster connections with professionals who can give you recommendations. Avondale gave me the environment to do all that as well as create deep friendships and explore my faith, too.
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