Day in the Life (In Office): Amanda Gaglione
Assistant Editor, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.
Day: Tuesday, June 10th, 2025
9:15 AM: With my pre-desk routine complete (AKA gathering my breakfast, water, coffee—always iced—and teeing up a podcast—this time Amy Poehler’s Good Hang), I begin going through my emails. I like to open everything and flag what I’ll need to spend time on so I can tackle them later. For now, I respond to anything quick or urgent, and every task goes in my agenda or on my calendar (color-coded, of course).
10:00 AM: Since fact sheets are due for Summer 2026 soon, I spend some time researching comps. This involves a lot of Google searches and seeing what other comps have used for their comps. It’s a bit of an internet rabbit hole, but I like that it feels like gathering pieces of a puzzle.
11:00 AM: I listen in on the acquisitions meeting. I don’t go every week, but if I have time, I like to go to get some insights on what the other departments are excited (or not so excited) about. That sometimes helps me evaluate the submissions I’m getting. I also like seeing what my colleagues are acquiring and cheering them on from a distance!
12:00 PM: A quick check-in meeting with one of my editors. Since she was out last week, I catch her up on what happened while she was away and flag any important deadlines.
1:00 PM: I have a super exciting video call with a content creator I reached out to last week, to see if she has ever considered turning her video concepts into novels. She has a lot of ideas, and we do some brainstorming. While the more traditional publishing pipeline involves an agent and sharing a manuscript with an editor, I sometimes like to think outside the box and reach out to interesting people with interesting ideas that could become books!
2:00 PM: Lunch! Today, it’s adult Lunchables (I highly recommend food storage containers with lots of compartments).
3:00 PM: I reach out to an author to request her preferences on audiobook narrators for her next book. Our awesome audio team mostly handles this, but the process is kicked off by editorial requesting an audio brief from the creator(s) to see if any characters have specific accents, speech patterns, or if there is anything else we should know up front.
3:30 PM: The content creator I met with earlier sent me something she has already written (eee!). That is too tempting to leave sitting in my inbox, so I start it. One of the hardest parts about this job is that I often have something exciting that I want to read, but… other tasks come calling.
4:00 PM: Since today was a meeting-heavy day, I dedicate the next hour and a half to those smaller tasks that I flagged from the morning. Some metadata updates, some follow-ups on routing pages, etc. I make sure to update my agenda for tomorrow.
5:30 PM: I make sure that I didn’t miss any emails or Teams chats before heading home to finish packing for a cross-Brooklyn move later in the week.
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