Behind the bestsellers: An insider’s guide to publishing with Elizabeth Briggs

Ever wondered how a book goes from a manuscript to a bestseller?

Join me in this episode as I sit down with Elizabeth Briggs, the editorial director at Saqi Books, who gives an exclusive look behind the scenes at one of Europe's most unique publishing houses. 

Elizabeth shares the rich history of Saqi Books, which evolved from Europe's first Arabic language bookshop, and reveals how they continue to amplify bold and inspiring voices from the Arab and Muslim worlds. 

Elizabeth also offers a glimpse into her daily routine as a publishing professional in London. From her invigorating cycle commute to the multitude of tasks she juggles, including coordinating with production teams, securing author endorsements, and pitching books to sales teams, she paints a vivid picture of her dynamic role. 

We  also decode the manuscript submission process and what it takes to get your book noticed. Elizabeth walks us through key industry events like the London Book Fair and Frankfurt, where agents and publishers pitch their next big ideas. 

This episode is a must-listen for aspiring authors and anyone fascinated by the evolving landscape of global literature.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:05

so if we don't love the story that someone's trying to tell, it's very difficult to imagine how we could do a good job of publishing it ourselves. So you know, I I really strongly recommend to anybody who's out there, who's writing, who's submitting their book. You know, anybody who says it's not down to individual taste is not being honest with you. It is, and just because your book is not right for one person or they don't see whatever it is they're looking for in that book, it doesn't mean that there's something fundamentally wrong with the book at all. It's like going for a job interview.

Speaker 2: 0:40

Hi friends, this is Read and Write with Natasha podcast. My name is Natasha Tynes and I'm an author and a journalist. In this channel I talk about the writing life, review books and interview authors. Hope you enjoy the journey. Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of Read and Write with Natasha. So I'm really excited today because I have an editor here for the first time. Her name is Elizabeth Briggs and she is the editorial director at Saki Books. Working in the publishing industry for the last decade, her experience spans agenting and the non-for-profit literary sector. Alongside seven cherished years at Saki, she has collaborated with some of the industry's most prominent voices and spoken at festivals including the Hay-On-Y LBF and Essex Book Festival. Elizabeth has a degree in classics from Durham University and you can find her on Twitter at Lit F Activist. Hi Elizabeth, so happy to see you here. And no pressure. You're my first editor here on the show, so I have a lot of questions for you.

Speaker 1: 1:58

Hi, natasha, great to be here. I'll try to edit my own really short answers so we can get through everything.

Speaker 2: 2:07

All right. So first, elizabeth, can you tell me a bit about Saki Books? My understanding is they focus on Middle Eastern books. So if you can just give us a big overview of what you guys do and what's your mission Of, course.

Speaker 1: 2:23

Oh, we started with a big question. Natasha Saki is a leading independent publishing house known for giving space to bold, inspiring voices from around the world and championing ideas from the margins and very specific to that from the Arab world, Muslim world more broadly. Saki was originally founded by two friends, andre Gaspard and May Gassoub, out of Europe's first Arabic language bookshop, so I'll take you just a little bit on the journey of where we began to where we are today.

Speaker 1: 2:59

So May and Andre came over during the 1970s from Lebanon and they founded the bookshop in Westbourne Grove. Sadly, the bookshop closed at the end of 2022, but it had this 50-year reign as this amazing kind of beacon of intellectual inquiry and light in West London. The clientele if you can say that I prefer, readers really grew and expanded from members of the Arab diaspora or people on holiday from Arab countries who were looking for books, usually that were banned or censored in their own countries, in the bookshop, and increasingly, westerners or people with little to no knowledge about the region started coming in and requesting books in the English language about the Arab world. And that's how Saki, the publishing house, was born from, from the bookshop in 1983, and it's we've stayed true, totally true, to that mission. Um Saki means water seller, inic.

Speaker 1: 4:04

So we tend to publish um books that are I don't like the word progressive, but considered by others progressive books that are probably going to be banned or censored in at least one country, usually more and ideas that should, should be, should be mainstream, should widely accessible, but generally, for whatever reason, aren't, and that includes fiction and nonfiction and everything on the nonfiction side.

Speaker 1: 4:30

So, unlike most publishing houses, we don't actually specialize by genre, we're kind of more by geography. So in one given year we might do cookery, art, gift humor even. But we also publish some really uh, dazzling classical and contemporary novelists. Uh, we publish the only nobel laureate for literature who wrote in arabic and I give my foos and the royal society of literature fellow, leila abu leila, both on our saki bookshelf series, which is a kind of curated list of dazzling writing from this broader kaleidoscopic region. And in addition we also have two other imprints. We have an imprint called Telegram, which is international fiction in translation published from 18 different languages there, and the Westbourne Press, which is a kind of a nonfiction imprint principally that publishes trenchant works of nonfiction that inquire into the leading issues of our times with passion, intellectual rigor, with dynamism and that's quite often, but not exclusively, social history. So to give you a couple of examples there, we published Zealot by Reza Aslan, which is an offbeat biographer of Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2: 5:51

Yeah, you published it. It's still one of.

Speaker 1: 5:53

Fox News' most watched interviews of all time Very, very odd name. And we published a stunning poetry collection about butch lesbian counterculture in the 1980s called Cunto, by Joelle Taylor, which won the TS Eliot Prize for Poetry which is the UK's biggest poetry prize a couple of years ago. So a real, a real range. But at our core we're still best known for our sarky titles and for the community that we've built around those books. Just reverting to what you asked about mission, we do see ourselves as more than just a publishing house. We see ourselves as part of the literature ecosystem and broader Middle Eastern arts and culture ecosystem too. So we collaborate with lots of organisations and writers and artists beyond just the lens of books.

Speaker 2: 6:43

Oh, wow, it's fascinating. So, without getting political here, after the events of October 7 and the war in Gaza and all of that, there's been a big push to read Palestinian authors you know they're seen as the underdog and Arab authors. And how did that affect your titles and your acquisition and do you see the actual shift in the publishing industry towards that? Or is that just a TikTok phenomenon?

Speaker 1: 7:17

Oh I, really enjoy your caveat of without getting political. Very hard to talk about books and not get political.

Speaker 1: 7:28

Well, you know, we cater for everyone, so that's uh, you know we try to be inclusive yeah, absolutely, it's been a really odd time, and that's true beyond just the publishing world. Um, it's been a very painful time for a lot of people and, you know, I think all of us in some ways are in crisis. You know, when you work in books, it sometimes doesn't feel like what you're doing is particularly timely or important, and then you read something from a reader that gives you focus and the galvanization to keep doing what you're doing. We've seen so much history and culture and, most crucially, human beings and their stories eroded and trying to preserve for posterity something of that, trying to have a medium, which is what books do, to allow us to understand other people, to allow us to understand other people, to allow us to understand our own place in the world more deeply. Yes, there's been a lot of focus, I think, and attention turned to books and you know, in some ways, it's such a privileged position being in a publishing house, because what you're doing is working to champion the writers and the books rather than yourself. So, you know, we've really focused on highlighting our Palestinian writers and books and being in spaces where they can be highlighted too and, you know, conscious of the spaces where they are absent. There has been a lot of. In the early days anyway, there was quite a lot of focus. I'll do something from an example from a general reader perspective. There's a group that we're a part of called Publishers for Palestine that spotlights Palestinian writers and their works. They got a lot of traction in November and since then we've gone through cycles of making books by Palestinian writers available for free for short time in ebook. That's got a lot of coverage in the Guardian. Um, lovely review of that.

Speaker 1: 9:36

But we publish a book called Wild Thorns by Zaha Khalifa, which is a stunning novel. Um, it kind of transcends the boundaries, perhaps what we think of as human empathy. And Saha herself is incredible. She's now in her 90s. We first published the novel in the 1980s and you know I chose this novel to highlight in that space, I think, because nobody wants to see something like this as a flash in the pan. You know it's not a crisis. It's been ongoing for more than 70 years and I think having a book that was first published 40 years ago but is still so timely and prescient today conveys that scale, shows that scale rather than telling somebody that again and again, which is what everyone is bored of doing. So that was incredible. We had hundreds and hundreds of free downloads within kind of 24 hours. So it really shows that there's an appetite for these books, that people want this kind of story, they want to engage with it, even if they, in those numbers, maybe don't pay for it, which is always a problem for publishers. But we're on our third reprint since last July, so that really shows how numbers have exceeded our hopes, which is amazing for us and it's amazing for the author as well.

Speaker 1: 10:52

There's been a real wave in terms of trends, of people wanting, you know, contemporary books or something that says something new today, which is historically not really what books do. It takes us, with the best will in the world, however quick we are, at least four months to get a book from an idea into a physical object. So, with the situation changing all the time, it's about knowing what the scope is for books versus where a story is better told as a podcast or as an interview or another form of media. You know that's part of the job that I think about quite a lot. You might hear an amazing story, but it's. Can I do this justice as a book with a long shelf life, or is this better suited to another mode of storytelling.

Speaker 1: 11:32

We've definitely seen more interest from from bookshops and from readers and online as well, with the books, but I think also, you know, since a harsher level of engagement, and I mean that from all sides politically, people understandably feel very involved and very opinionated and they tend to bring that framework to books rather than understanding that a good book adds something new to a conversation, but it in itself is not the whole conversation. Good book adds something new to a conversation, but it in itself is not the whole conversation. So, you know, we've had quite a lot of engagement across our social media channels and in conversations where people have said, well, why have you published a book called After Zionism? Why haven't you published, you know, something different on the two-state solution? Or why, politically, yes, that's good, but why doesn't he or she talk about this, this, this or this?

Speaker 1: 12:25

And you think, oh my God, you know, a book is an affirmation that something can't be summarized on social media in a pithy Instagram post. It's an affirmation that you need at least 300 pages to spend time in the gray areas or finding out something new in this conversation. So it's been both enlightening and boosting to hear of readers' appetites and what they want, but on some days a little bit demoralizing as well, partly because we feel like we've been here before and partly because we're a publishing house. We spread knowledge and ideas where we can, but we we can't solve global conflict and it's wrong for any of us to pretend that a book on its own can do that wow.

Speaker 2: 13:15

So I wanna think now just discuss the day in life um of elizabeth briggs. You come to the office, you open your email and you look at at the submissions. How many submissions do you get a day?

Speaker 1: 13:33

oh, this is great. Yeah, um, don't know how far back we want to go, but I normally arrive in the office with none of that gorgeous calm sense you you just conveyed.

Speaker 2: 13:44

Okay, you drink your coffee, you meditate.

Speaker 1: 13:49

I see my breathing. It's about nine miles between my flat in North London where I live and the office in West London, so I cycle and I normally end up in a hot mess, not sure whether it's raining or Tuesday. Okay, have a shower and make myself a cup of tea.

Speaker 2: 14:07

Tea, of course In London, not coffee, okay.

Speaker 1: 14:12

Open up my to-do list from the day before that I didn't get through. No, in all honesty and this is not Saki exclusive, this is editorial teams in many publishing houses. We don't, unfortunately, spend a lot of time in the day reading or doing submissions. So what I tend to do during my working day is manage live and active titles, so managing the kind of nuts and bolts of the everyday live title management with what we're hoping to have in the future. So that looks like working with all the other departments in the publishing house every day. We work really closely together for the whole book picture to kind of come together. So it might be that we've got a book out in six months time. Um, so we'll work on that scale. So at that time in the book's life the book has probably been typeset. So I'm working quite closely with our production team to make sure that the book and the specs of the physical book is how we want it to be, to check that corrections have been made, to check that the author's up to speed and happy. To check that the cover does everything we want it to do. I've probably got some quotes coming in from other writers and what we call VIPs. So you know everyone's a VIP on some level to see that we've got good endorsement quotes on the cover. So making sure that that whole package physical object looks and feels really wonderful.

Speaker 1: 15:39

I'm checking with my sales team to make sure they've got a really good pitch. I always say in publishing it doesn't matter which department you work in. What you've got to be able to do is pitch. You need to be able to be excited about your books, make other people excited about your books and make them understand what the book is, what it does, how it makes you feel. Of course, not everybody is going to have read every single book, so it's making sure that all the people who are out there talking about the book and giving the book a chance at a real life have from you, as the kind of key initial source of information on the book, everything that they need. It's making sure that the rights department and your sub-agents have got information so they can hopefully pitch translation rights, deals and other sub-licenses, because that all needs to happen pre-publication as well. So about six months, I'm having lots of those conversations internationally and it's about making sure that your publicist and your marketing team have also got all the materials that they need and that you together talk through ideas and avenues for getting the book out in the wider world. So that's the kind of you know active title from about six months out we publish about. Well, this year we're publishing 17, which is a record, so we've taken a little bit more than we can chew, but really enjoying that.

Speaker 1: 17:02

We publish around 15 to 20 books each year. So if you look at a calendar year, I have a book, we'll have a book, at most stages of its shelf life, um, in any one given month, and they all get my attention during the day. So, plans for forthcoming books, they probably still need a developmental edit, so perhaps something that's recently signed that still needs some form of kind of rearranging, as well as giving briefs to to designers and briefs to the rest of your team, meetings, meetings and conversations with prospective writers and people you might work with further, further down the line, um, these are kind of all muddled into my, my usual morning and, uh, thinking about how a book might come to fruition in the way you want it to. So saki is a small company. We are for profit, but in a book's world there's always some question marks about what that means.

Speaker 1: 17:58

So I also, um, you know it's my job to kind of have a full strategy of what a book looks like from start to finish and how, who the readers are, where we might find them and how we might bring all the pieces of the jigsaw together.

Speaker 1: 18:11

So sometimes that involves talking to grant bodies and funders as well, for example, currently working on a book in translation from Italian that's coming out next year which I'm really excited about, and we're just talking to different bodies who might help fund the translation costs, because translation costs are huge. They're a huge part of a book. They're an extra kind of at least 5,000 pounds that other books don't have on them. So trying to make that book happen in the best way possible so that I have extra budget there which then means, you know, I don't have to pinch budgets from marketing or from other departments so that the book can still do everything we want it to do. So we're probably about 3pm in the day now Eat another cup of tea, no coffee, I know, I do I do have coffee, I have to confess.

Speaker 1: 19:04

Confess, we used to have a brilliant bookseller in the bookshop where our offices used to be. Um, as I already mentioned, can you tell I'm nostalgic for those days. Yeah, the most amazing Turkish coffee in the afternoon which used to keep me going, cardamon used to keep me going all afternoon. But we have a very generic coffee machine here which I'm just not just not the same. Um. So, yeah, if days are bad, I might go down for a hot chocolate or a flat white over a cup of a cup of tea and, yes, we probably get in. It's.

Speaker 1: 19:36

It's difficult to give a fixed number of submissions. There are two big dates in the publishing calendar the London Book Fair in April March this year actually uh, in fact it was a whole month ago now, so I'm really behind the times and Frankfurt in October, and that's when I will meet, over the course of three days, around 30 agents and international publishers who are all pitching their books to you and vice versa. So those are really hot times of year. Each of those will probably pitch to me three, around three book ideas. So I'm going to get 90 really good new books in the course of three days. So those are the really hot times of year. The rest of the year a mixture of open submissions, so we have open submission policy, so things might land in my inbox or in the generic submissions at sarkibookscom there's a plug for anybody looking to find the right home for their manuscript and from agents and publishers that I know as well, I probably receive around four or five a day.

Speaker 2: 20:39

So you receive five a day from agents.

Speaker 1: 20:43

Do you receive agents and just from people directly?

Speaker 2: 20:46

okay, so do you accept an agent unagented submissions or do you have some sort of a bias like, ah, they're kind of second class if they're unagented?

Speaker 1: 21:01

no, no, we, we, we, we really do, and you know I feel really privileged. I've been doing this for 10 years now, so I have the capacity to in the sense that I can read through these quite quickly and see where a bit more work might need to be done or where this is something we can consider further.

Speaker 2: 21:21

Do you judge the manuscript by the first sentence? Where do you stop reading? I mean, I'm a journalist by training, so that's that's what you signed up for no, but your tactic sounds like you'd have ruthless reading policy.

Speaker 1: 21:40

It totally depends on what kind of project it is. Fiction, honestly, yes, yes, first sentence. Well, first paragraph probably.

Speaker 2: 21:53

So you stop reading. So an agented person let's say even agented sent you a manuscript. You're very busy. You read two sentences, that's it, You're done.

Speaker 1: 22:05

No, I would definitely go at least as far as the first paragraph. Whatever my initial thoughts are, this is something I think about a lot, but, but you know.

Speaker 1: 22:17

I'll say something a bit contentious please hit me, yes, give me no do. I always appreciate feedback? So if you think that we should have a better policy, I'd love to hear from you. The truth is, if you don't love a book, you're not going to do a good job by it. It's like if you oh god, I'm going to think of some cringy metaphors um, if you don't enjoy a dish, you are not going to be the best person to recommend that dish to someone else, and the dish is not gonna fly off the shelves.

Speaker 1: 22:46

We're a small team. We're a really small team. So if we don't love the story that someone's trying to tell, it's very difficult to imagine how we could do a good job of publishing it ourselves. So, you know, I really strongly recommend to anybody who's out there, who's writing, who's submitting their book. You know, anybody who says it's not down to individual taste is not being honest with you. It is, and just because your book is not right for one person or they don't see whatever it is they're looking for in that book, it doesn't mean that there's something fundamentally wrong with the book at all. It's like going for a job interview You're probably a brilliant candidate, but this might just not be the exact job fit for whatever reason. You know you might not gel with a team, and it's the same with a book. If the book doesn't gel with somebody, there's no point in trying to change their minds or making something work when they haven't seen in it what you want them to see in it. So fiction's much easier from that perspective. You know, it doesn't matter so much what the subject of a novel is or a poetry collection is. It's a bit like you'd rather go and do something really average with a best friend than do something totally amazing with somebody whose company you don't enjoy so much. That, to me, is what the experience of voice is in a novel. It's I've read a paragraph of this person what they're interested in, what they want to linger on, where they want to go next, how they want to write characters. And do I want to hang around with them? Do I want to be in their company? For another, you know 288 pages and actually you know in your gut quite quickly if that's the case. So fiction and we publish less fiction anyway. So you know what we're looking at is probably four books a year. So it's going to really stand out to me and to the rest of the team with fiction. So you know, necessity by margins means I do have to move quite quickly through that.

Speaker 1: 24:38

Nonfiction is very different. Nonfiction is often, you know, about the core idea. Has that topic been one of the first things I think about is is that topic timely and if not, why not? Is it hitting a zeitgeist moment? I will think about how much other written material is there out there on this subject? Sometimes there can be loads, and that's a good thing because it means there's a real appetite for it. Sometimes there's nothing and you think, wow, that's even better, this is going to be the only book that's talking about that. So subject's really important. There.

Speaker 1: 25:09

I think a lot about the person who's writing the book, why they're the right person to write this book. Not very often, but sometimes you have a brilliant idea that comes with somebody who you know, for whatever reason, is maybe not the person you would have approached to write something on that subject and you think, why is that? How do I feel about that? You know where do we kind of go from here? So you know why. Now, why this subject, why this person? And if I have all the answers to that quite quickly with a nonfiction book and I feel you know positive, that I can answer them, that I understand where the book is, what the book is doing, where it's trying to go. Then I get a lot more hands-on. I'll send the book out to other people in my team or other readers outside the team. It's not official yet but I'm trialing a kind of readers at large program which we're hoping to formalize a little bit later on in the year. So if anyone's interested in being a kind of Saki reader at large and whatever that might entail it'll probably entail looking at about six manuscripts a year and sharing a short report and your feelings on that book I would love to hear from you.

Speaker 1: 26:15

So yeah, we like to elicit, you know, expert opinions where they're needed. If it's a history on a specific time period or requires, you know, academic crossover influence, then I'll send it to somebody who knows a lot more than I do about that subject. You know, if it was a cookery book, for example, I would probably write to a few chefs and, you know, get some of their thoughts on it. So we take expertise really seriously at Saki. Our editorial reputation is really important to us. So you know it's much more than us. It's about the people who you surround yourself with, people who are generous enough to look at something and give a far more expert opinion than you yourself have on something.

Speaker 1: 26:55

So we go through all those steps and, if everything's coming favourable I've read the whole book at this point, or at least everything that's available if it's a proposal stage and I feel really, really excited, I'll try and speak to the author or have a phone call with them and just understand what it is that they really want from publication and that will lead me to feel certain that we're the right publishing house for them. You know what are their objectives. Do they want to sell a million copies? Do they want to win a prize? Do they want their book to be available in specific bookshops? Do they want a huge marketing campaign with tote bags and t-shirts? You know it really varies what people want from the publishing process and it's as important that we can give them that experience. As you know, they want to be published, that they want to be published by us. So again, if I've had that conversation and all the stars are aligning, you have a connection, you want to work together. You know you can do a good job with what they want. Then I'll start putting together costings and a broader strategy Like how does this fit in?

Speaker 1: 28:02

What does a timeline look like for this project plan? So actually quite mundane. I wish I could say to you that our job was reading something, falling in love with it, signing a contract and, you know, flying away with unicorns and dragons. But you know, the reality is the numbers have to make sense and you know you want to publish always with integrity and authenticity and you don't want to mislead somebody by taking on the project that you can't then realize to the vision that they have of it.

Speaker 1: 28:35

So, um, it's quite a lot of fine-tuning there and if I got to this point then I take it to something called an acquisitions meeting, which is when my colleagues weigh in from sales and from other departments and this is my first real chance to pitch a book. And if I can't sell the idea to them when I'm super passionate about it and it's my job to do this in 10 minutes then we have to reassess what we're doing. But generally, if a book's got to that stage, it's got a really good chance of the rest of the team backing it. So that's my chance to make a case for the book and for the rest of the team to ask questions, normally for them to start coming up with ideas about other elements of the book campaign, and then hopefully we get the green light, in which case I write to the author or to the agent with an offer and all the terms that an offer might employ.

Speaker 1: 29:24

So what advance we're paying? Whether we're having translation rights or world English rights, whether we're having audio rights, world english rights, whether we're having audio rights, that kind of nitty-gritty royalties, escalators, all this kind of stuff you want to iron out at the contract stage. And hopefully they agree with everything they read through the contract. They think it's an excellent work of legal, legal literature. Sign on the dotted line and then we're good to go so you don't handle the slush pile.

Speaker 2: 29:50

Who hand? Who handles the slush pile?

Speaker 1: 29:52

we do. I've got, we've got a brilliant publishing assistant at the moment called john and he and I he and I are the two members of the team who have access to the slush pile. So, um, we have. I better not give away all of our secrets, but we have kind of codes of conduct around what we do with different kind of books that come in there. So who reads reads what within what timeframe? You know we endeavour to get back to everyone to confirm safe receipt and you know if we ask further questions then obviously if the book isn't going to be taken on, we make sure we let them know within around eight weeks. We can't give feedback to everybody. Obviously. You know there's no income in responding to books that you don't take forward, which, having told you the numbers, I now can't think, but it's probably about, realistically, 95 of them don't don't get moved forwards with. So you know, sadly we just can't do that so you're in the slash pile.

Speaker 1: 30:46

You have, like what, six submissions a day, yeah, yeah yeah, probably around five, so not not loads um and they're a mix of agents and writers so those, so any agents would come to me directly, so that would come into my directly. So submissions is generally people who don't, you know, who don't have a personal connection with the publishing house. Um, so you know we, you don't have a personal connection with the publishing house. So you know we, you don't want to exhibit the kind of nepotism that. That's why we have the submissions policy, in the sense I definitely want to hear from people who don't have a foot in the door already. I want to hear from people who early, at the early stages of their careers, and don't have access to somebody who's going to give them a more direct route.

Speaker 1: 31:32

And some of you know some of your most interesting ideas come from that. We definitely take on books from the submissions forwarder email, not loads, but normally one or two a year at least. And there's also sometimes, you know, if we can, we might suggest to them other things that might be helpful. So other publishing houses if they are translating short stories, you know there might be options of other kind of short story prizes or other routes they might want to go down. So where we can, you know, give some advice and feedback, we do so okay, I'm going to ask more of an existential question.

Speaker 2: 32:11

Okay, I'm going to ask more of an existential question. So you know, I talked to a lot of authors here and a lot of them are self-published and, honestly, they're making a killing with KDP. And then you have now IngramSparks that distributes the self-published book at bookstores. And then you have platforms like Readie where you can actually hire editors. You can hire a whole team if you have to have some nest egg saved up to do that. But are we reaching a point where the publishing houses might become dinosaurs and we are in a stage like you know how, you know, like you're seeing AI changing things, but do you think, like self-publishing is gonna be the future and we might not need the gatekeepers in the sense of a publishing house? You might still need the gatekeepers, like hiring editors, but in the sense of a publishing house, how do you feel about this, this existence? I?

Speaker 1: 33:12

just came on here to be called a dinosaur.

Speaker 2: 33:14

I'm only 30 no, like young dinosaurs, young and pretty, young and pretty dinosaurs um, no, I, oh where to start?

Speaker 1: 33:36

anything that encourages people to read and to write is always a good thing. So we start from that bottom line that I think it's great that there are more options and opportunities and there are loads of occasions where being self-published is a great thing and where, you know, I would recommend that people explore that Generally, the kinds of people who do really well self-published are genre fiction. So if you're writing in areas that have a high appetite, so people want to read lots and lots.

Speaker 2: 34:08

Romance.

Speaker 1: 34:10

Romance, sci-fi, fantasy, dystopia, erotica, erotica, exactly. Yes, then it works really, really well. We don't publish in any of those genres because I don't well, we haven't historically. But I also don't think that you can be competitive with other publishing houses and people who can find a good readership for that books that way. So you know, we know through the volume of sales that it's mainly Amazon. Realistically, you know the big platforms, in the West at least, where people download, find and buy and read voraciously, the price points the books tends to be much lower. So you have to sell a lot more copies to get the same kind of royalty rate.

Speaker 1: 34:49

In those spaces the whole makeup of it is quite different. Where people don't do so well, self-publishing is where you might struggle to find your readers. So if somebody doesn't have genre fiction or is writing literary fiction and their book's not really like anybody else's, then you still need a traditional publishing house to help you find those readers. Publishing house still is a kind of mark of respect in the sense that you know there are that. It's very definitely gatekeeping, because most bookshops won't stock and sell books by self-published writers. Most prizes don't accept submissions from self-published.

Speaker 2: 35:32

I sort of disagree, but it's okay.

Speaker 1: 35:34

Okay, I mean no self-published book has won the man Booker Prize, for example, or the RSLM Ducky Prize or the Women's Prize for Fiction.

Speaker 2: 35:46

I mean I'm talking about stocking, like, especially, local bookstores. If you go actually knock on their door and give them your self-published book, they would take it and plus, as I said, with services like IngramSpark, they will stock the book for you At places like Barnes, noble or in the US, like Target and others. So it's yes that's absolutely true.

Speaker 1: 36:10

But you do have to do quite a lot of that heavy lifting yourself. So the joy of having a publishing house is you've also got sales people talking about the book for you. Some people aren't the best sales people of themselves and their own works and you know they might not get the same level of uptake or enthusiasm and you know they might not have time in their working day or whatever to kind of do that. What you've just described is quite a door to door kind of sales approach.

Speaker 1: 36:38

And it's taxing and we work with a lot of writers who want to stay in their room and write rather than doing this kind of level of heavy lifting. Doing this kind of level of heavy lifting. So, as the role of publishers within the service industry, I think that kind of service level is good. And then of course, you also have to different levels, expertise and experience. So you know, if you know who your readership is and you know where to find them, then you're going to be the best advocate for your book yourself. But if you don't know who they are and you don't find marketing particularly interesting and you don't know the book market particularly well, it can be really really hard to do that because it's our full-time job. So everybody's different, every book is different and what everybody gets from the publisher experience is also really different.

Speaker 1: 37:30

I work with some authors who barely need any editing. Their writing is absolutely brilliant, but when it comes to all the other stages of the process they don't enjoy it. It's not what they want to do. It's where they feel a bit lost and they really appreciate having someone that they can call at any time of the day. Who's going to answer the phone, who's going to do something about that area they're not so keen on. And that leads me as well to the slightly peculiar role going with a particular plot line, to believe in a particular character, to be a middleman, to reach out to really well-respected writers and other people that are going to help the writer in question progress in some way. So there are a lot of people out there who are great self-starters and for whom the self-publishing process makes loads of sense, but there are others who, for whatever reason, I think, will always want somebody to work with, who they trust and who can, you know, get things done. That's different to what the writer themselves principally wants to do.

Speaker 2: 38:46

Which brings me to the question. So I talk a lot of authors here and a number of them told me, either agents or editors told them, your book is great but your writing doesn't matter because you don't have a big platform. And this is probably mostly in, I guess, in the US, or maybe the big four now the big four publishers. And we're reaching a stage where you know you, you no longer your. Your platform is as important as your manuscript and as your talent if talent is anything and um, so that the you know. Before you would have like stephen king with zero followers when he first started and you would immediately embrace him. But now things completely changed. Do you judge authors by the number of followers?

Speaker 1: 39:41

Absolutely not. They don't judge me by my number of followers either.

Speaker 2: 39:48

I heard it at least twice or three times that they will not take you on if you already haven't built on it.

Speaker 1: 39:57

Yeah, no, I think. Oh, I don't want to slag anyone off, so I'll try not to, but it depends if you're proactive or reactive as a publishing house. You know it's what you all want is the same thing, which is to find readers that the book resonates with. Now, if you have a lot of followers on social media, if you're a writer in other spaces, like a journalist, you're likely to have built up a bank of people who like your work, respect your work and are going to buy your book. If you don't have that, then you're starting from scratch and a publishing house that's going with a high churn technique is not going to be able to be bothered to find those readers from number zero. Um, that doesn't mean the readers aren't there, it just means you have to work harder to find them.

Speaker 1: 40:45

It's not really interesting to me to publish something I don't care for just because you know that there's a ready-built readership there. Again, to my mind, that person probably is better self-publishing, because I don't think I'm any value add in that scenario. Where we are, value add as publishing houses is finding those readers and knowing who they are. So we're really lucky. One of the ways you can do that is through backlist. So Saki has almost 600 backlist titles, so there's going to be something in there that resonates with something that's new. So if you had a runaway success with um, actually I can give you a concrete example we publish um, the brilliant, brilliant scottish student. He's right to leila abu leila yeah, I know I love her work.

Speaker 1: 41:34

Yeah, yeah, yeah, did you publish her short story collection.

Speaker 2: 41:38

Yeah, elsewhere home and um, we've just, I love that I did, you did that. Oh, great job.

Speaker 1: 41:47

I can't claim any credit. Most of the stories Percy Layla is absolutely brilliant and requires almost no editing but also quite a lot of those short stories had been published before, so it was just a case of bringing them together. We did have some new short stories in there. That was really really exciting.

Speaker 2: 42:03

Yeah, she has a new uh. Well, this is kind of a shameless uh self-promotion, uh. But uh, we, there's a new collection coming soon called stories from the center of the world, and she has a short story yes, and I'm in it as well. Congratulations, thank you. So we uh, yeah, so that's, that's fun uh together.

Speaker 1: 42:28

Yeah, city lights, I'll do a plug, I'll do. I think it's out in may, isn't?

Speaker 2: 42:33

it. Yes, yeah, and if you're coming to dc in may, we're gonna have a book launch, uh, so come, you're invited I don't know if that was exclusively to me, but I've taken it.

Speaker 1: 42:45

Yeah, yeah, really, really, really great to see that.

Speaker 2: 42:48

Yeah, um, so you were talking about Leila.

Speaker 1: 42:49

Yeah, sorry yeah, um so, and you know we just um brought out Paperback River Spirit, which is her amazing um novel or kind of set events in Sudan on the turn of the 19th century. Yeah, I bought it long listed for the jalik prize, so yeah, I bought it, so I have it.

Speaker 1: 43:07

Oh, thank you, cross your fingers for the short listing for the prize the end of the month. Um, so there's not direct crossover, but we're just. I've got some show and tell so you don't have to keep looking at my face against this gray carpeted accountant's coffin of a zoom booth. We're publishing this. We just published in the UK and it will be out in the autumn in the US and it's going to be published in Canada by Invisible Publishing next spring.

Speaker 1: 43:34

A Mouthful of Salt by Reem Ghaffar was probably mirrored incorrectly because I'm on camera.

Speaker 2: 43:39

Okay, I see. No, no, it looks good. Yeah, reem Ghaffar.

Speaker 1: 43:42

Okay, it's brilliant, it's brilliant, it's brilliant, it's brilliant. And so Reem is Sudanese living in Canada and you know it's a work of historical fiction set in Sudan. And that's really where the similarities end with River Spirit. But because we've published Leila Abulela and River Spirit and we know all the places that stock that book and all the people who love that book, we can find the readers for A Mouthful of Salt from a springboard position. Because I can go to all of those people and say you know you loved River Spirit, you know you love Leila Abilela.

Speaker 1: 44:14

How many New Sudanese novelists do you get published a year? Very, very, very few. So those people are all going to immediately take notice. It's a kind of word of mouth recommend system. So you know you can build up readers. That's how a traditional publisher builds up readers. You can find the media spaces. You know the journalists that would be keen to write about the book, the book clubs that might be keen to adopt the book, because you know what their tastes are. So you can find your readers. You don't expect an author to bring their readers with them with literary fiction, certainly not with translated fiction, which we publish a lot of, because generally the author can't speak English, or doesn't like to speak English or doesn't write in English. So you know, we publish writers who have sadly passed away. We publish writers who aren't based in the uk and don't speak english, and those platforms are zero. So why would we expect people who, who do speak english, to bring a readership with them?

Speaker 2: 45:12

this is fascinating. We've we've been talking for like 50 minutes, so I'm I know this is great, uh, but, um, before we conclude, what are the top? Let's not talk about tips, but let's, because we always talk about tips here. It's becoming a bit of a cliche. Let's talk about top mistakes that you, the top mistakes that you see when people uh send you manuscripts, when you, when you manuscripts, when you read the first paragraph, you set it aside. Just give me the top mistakes that people do when they submit.

Speaker 1: 45:52

Yes, Overflowery language. Don't use adjectives to describe your own work. Okay, Tell me what it is and tell me what it does.

Speaker 2: 46:04

Don't use buzzwords, hate jargon, and I don't think I'm alone in that you're talking about the query, about the pitch, or you're talking about the manuscript?

Speaker 1: 46:12

talk about query letter.

Speaker 2: 46:13

Sorry, cover letter okay, I'm talking about the manuscript, so you approve the crib.

Speaker 1: 46:18

Yeah, okay. Okay, god, there's less, there's less, I have fewer. I mean it'll be really basic for the actual manuscript, which is really patronizing. Okay, god, there's less, there's less, I have fewer. I mean it'll be really basic for the actual manuscript, which is really patronizing to say, but things like can you have the line spacing in 1.5 so that I can read it properly? You know most of us don't print out, so I actually read most of my manuscripts on my phone while I'm waiting or in between things or having a bath. So I need to be able to physically read it to make it an enjoyable reading experience.

Speaker 1: 46:52

Don't overwrite, I think is a good one. Particularly again, this is mainly applicable to fiction, but I think that's mainly who's listening to the podcast. So I'm doing that deliberately. Find your own voice and stick with your own voice. All of us get influenced in writing by what we've recently read. I don't want to find a different voice. Every other paragraph has been influenced by something new. You should be really confident when you found your own voice and you can be consistent with it. That that's what you want to do.

Speaker 1: 47:22

Don't try to make characters be a metaphor or an obvious stand-in for some larger societal issue that you want to discuss. Allow them to be humans. We all want to read books about human beings, you know. Otherwise we're in some kind of I don't know medieval wisdom literature. Where you have, you know, somebody is uh oh, I'm having a brain blank for the word anthropomorphism of the figure of gluttony, like that's just not interesting. Do bring yourself into it. Do you know what I mean? We're all so self-conscious writers, so self-conscious about not writing about themselves. But you have to draw from your own experiences. You have to draw from your own understanding of the world around you to authentically write it. So don't be ashamed of that or shy away from writing what's close to you or be informed by the people that are close to you. And, crucially, do ask yourself why is a stranger going to want to read this? If I'm aiming for publication, I'm not just writing this for myself, which is, by the way, a completely valid exercise.

Speaker 1: 48:28

If you just write fiction because you enjoy it, please keep going. That's the most important reason to write it. But if you're writing it to find a broad readership, you know people don't love reading about arguments all the time. People don't love reading what they know all the time. Are you writing a novel that's going to find resonance? Because people find comfort in seeing something represented that they don't often find. Are people going to feel seen, and that's why they're reading your novel. Are people going to feel uplifted or hopeful? Is that why you're reading your novel? You know why are people going to want to read your novel, what are they going to get from it? And just keep that at the back of your mind the whole time you're writing.

Speaker 1: 49:05

Because, ultimately, we read fiction because it's enjoyable on some level. It doesn't mean it can't be sad, that doesn't mean that it can't be dramatic. That doesn't mean it can't chart pain. But if it is doing those things generally, it's because it's cathartic and somebody who's reading that is going to feel and empathize with you. So have you achieved that in your writing of pain? So yeah, I think, without sounding too book therapist about it, which should completely be a job, by the way, we have book coaches. I don't know why we don't have book therapists. Really, think about you know why is someone going to want to read this and just kill your darlings if they are not answering to that? I'm sure that's the tip you get all the time. But it's really true. It's hard, when you've written a beautiful paragraph, to lose it, but if there's not a strong reason why somebody would want to read it, then it's working against you and the rest of the novel.

Speaker 2: 49:59

This has been really great, elizabeth. I'm really glad we connected and I'm sure everyone who's listening or watching will, you know, be better from this conversation. Sorry, this is my dog. Hi, natasha's dog. Yeah, she needs attention, so anyway. So thank you for everyone who's listening or watching, for joining us for another episode of Read and Write with Natasha and until we meet again, thanks, natasha.

Speaker 1: 50:32

Thanks everyone for listening.

Speaker 2: 50:37

Thank you for tuning in to Read and Write with Natasha. I'm your host, natasha Tynes. If today's episode inspired you in any way, please take the time to review the podcast. Remember to subscribe and share this podcast with fellow book lovers. Until next time. Happy reading, happy writing.