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By Root 406 0

like many recent graduates, she was not having much luck. “I graduated from college in May, and by mid-August, I was ready to slit my wrists, because nothing was happening. I had applied for jobs with all the major publishing houses and even the not-so-major publishing houses in New York. Basically, I was just doing what my college career center told me to do. I had a really great resume. I would spend two hours trying to personalize a cover letter and make it perfect, then send it out, and then hear nothing. All of the things that people told me to do in order to find a job didn’t work; no one called me back. I was just getting lost in the abyss of thousands of desperate job seekers. I applied for a job in a small publishing house and the guy told me they got five hundred applications. It was not the greatest job, it didn’t pay anything and he had people trampling over each other to get it,” she told me.

Marian tried to take a different tack.

She spent $100 on Facebook ads, with the headline “I want to work for HarperCollins” where the company name mentioned was custom-targeted to people who had listed one of the six major New York publishers as their place of employment.

I Want to Work for Harper

I’m Marian. I recently graduated from Davidson College. My dream is to work for HarperCollins. Can you help? Click to see my resumé.

Debbie Stier, who worked at HarperCollins at the time, saw one of Marian’s ads pop up in her own Facebook page and wrote a post praising Marian for her initiative and ingenuity. Now this fresh college grad had one of the most respected names in U.S. publishing openly urging her colleagues in the industry to hire her. Word of her employment campaign went viral within the publishing industry. Marian later wrote on her blog, “At least one person from every publisher I focused on e-mailed me to tell me they passed my resume on to HR, wanted to meet, or even just to say they liked my idea.”

Impressed with this young woman’s initiative and creativity, I wrote an unsolicited e-mail to her: I have a suggestion for you that will probably be the only piece of advice along these lines you will get:

Why seek an employer? With your drive, initiative, and talent, you could make a successful go as a freelance publishing consultant.

I’ve been happily self-employed for 3 years now, and I currently make much more than I would be making if I had spent that time trying to rise up from an entry-level publishing position.

I do all this while working my own hours in NYC, living comfortably in Brooklyn, choosing projects that interest me, and from my laptop so I can do it anywhere (I spent 5 months in 2007 doing this work while sipping lattes in Wi-Fi cafes in Buenos Aires!).

You’ve got the drive. You’ve got the talent. You could make this happen for yourself. I say, think outside of the box. You don’t need some publisher to pay you $35K when you could make much more than that on your own, with your talents.

It’s rare that someone has the go-getter attitude that you do and you will go far whatever you choose.

Marian wrote back to me, thanking me for my suggestions but saying that she was going to take an entry-level job that came her way through all the viral hullabaloo around her Facebook campaign. This was a position with a major literary PR firm in the city (a job almost any recent liberal arts graduate wanting to break into the New York City publishing world would have envied).

A few months into nine-to-five life, however, the self-employment bug bit her. She wanted to break out on her own, and she wrote me again, asking for advice. I started mentoring her on how to make the transition to being a freelance consultant. She made the leap, leaving the comfort and safety of the job, and starting with a few freelance social media consulting gigs she got through Debbie Stier.

In the year and a half since she struck out on her own as a freelancer—and just two years out of college at the time I’m writing this—Schembari has created a lively and popular publishing industry blog for herself