Until six months ago, I had always worked at independent publishers. I had been proudly, determinedly independent, in fact. Almost, if truth be told, anti-corporate (I even published successfully on that subject).

The joy of being an editor at smaller, independent companies is that on a fundamental level it’s much more creative – you really have to think, you have to come up with ideas and match that with the right author, you have to spot the diamond in the rough and edit, edit, edit. Your personal belief in and passion for a book is your currency. You can take more risks – you have the freedom to make offers on books very fast and publish very fast too, and aren’t so worried about reprisals (it’s not so fun or lucrative pursuing a small, poor publisher for libel).

These are all the arguments I used to use to persuade authors to come and be published by me. That, and the fact that they’d make money from royalties instead of a huge up-front advance – it’s just a different way of distributing the same income, after all. And all of these arguments are true, and they served me very well for many, many years.

But the reality of being an editor at a big, multi-national corporation is very different from what I expected. Most surprisingly, it seems that sometimes you’re actually free to take more risks. You know that tiny gem of a book which, let’s face it, looks like a tricky proposition commercially speaking, but it might win a prize, and it’s pure and beautiful and everyone loves it and believes in it? At a smaller company, it’s very hard to make that leap; to invest in the wonderful but unlikely and ignore the bottom line. But at a bigger company there can, if you’re lucky, be just enough fat around to cushion such risks (or, there’s a conversation about it, at least). Then there are the obvious differences, like having more power and influence with booksellers, which gives books a better chance from the get-go. And, as an editor, you are sent the best books by the best agents: the job becomes as much about selecting well as about making books from scratch. I was expecting cynical and hard-nosed, and it’s just not.

Of course, all of this is based on my own very limited and recent experience, but it just goes to show that our preconceptions are just that. And that it’s always worth venturing over to the other side to find out what it’s really like.