"If you enjoy listening to other people talk about themselves, if you're not threatened by conversations in which you often know less about the subject at hand than the person to whom you're speaking, if you can tolerate long hours and low pay, and don't mind disappointing hundreds of people a year by declining their work, all the while being happy to subsume your ego into another's, this may just be the job for you," writes Niko Pfund in the Chronicle of Higher Education on scholarly publishing.  "Add to this the never-ending arrival of new and interesting manuscripts, hobnobbing with some of the liveliest intellects in the world, frequent travel to conferences and campuses, and in general the opportunity to live a life of the mind... and you have a pretty appealing profession."

Liberal arts majors will be delighted to know that "it can be more useful to know a little about a lot than a lot about a little... Intellectual heft is a baseline consideration. Without it, you get nowhere. With it, you can still get nowhere if you're great in the library but have the social grace of a scorpion."

Pfund recognizes that "skilled editors are often generalists as much as specialists, whose daily duties are the intellectual (and sometimes not-so-intellectual) equivalent of multitasking. As an American history editor, say, you must have a working knowledge of America's military experience, its political watersheds, cultural scene past and present, basic historical methodology, and perhaps of jazz and baseball to boot."

Aspiring academic editors are warned that "at the entry levels, publishing tends to offer miserable wages. A former colleague tells [watching] as a union march went past, with workers carrying signs that proclaimed their inability to live on a salary that my friend glumly realized to be almost twice his own."

Lastly, interested jobseekers should note that "there's simply no substitute for hands-on experience... Internships have always been a feature of the publishing world, and these days seem to have become a veritable rite of passage".