[00:00:01.490] - Sunyi
Hi, I'm Sunyi Dean.

[00:00:03.610] - Scott
And I'm Scott Drakeford, and this is the publishing rodeo podcast.

[00:00:06.550] - Sunyi
In 2022, we both launched debut novels in the same genre with the same publisher in the same year. But despite having very similar starts, our books and subsequently each of our careers, went in very different directions.

[00:00:21.890] - Scott
That pattern repeats itself throughout the industry, over, over and over. Why do some books succeed while others seem to be dead on arrival?

[00:00:30.570] - Sunyi
In this podcast, we aim to answer those questions and many more, along with how to build and maintain an author career.

[00:00:38.410] - Scott
Everyone signing a contract deserves to know what they're really signing up for. In an industry that loves its secrets. We'll be sharing real details from real people. We'll cover the gamut of life as a big five published author, from agents to publishing contracts, finances, and more.

[00:00:59.890] - Mark
I do enjoy your intro. Music. Is that you on bass?

[00:01:05.830] - Sunyi
No, I went and found, what was it? Some royalty free, like, copyright free music.

[00:01:12.470] - Mark
I'm very disillusioned now because I just imagined at the beginning of every episode, you're there playing bass as you introduce.

[00:01:19.040] - Sunyi
Yeah, I can just about tell a bass from a regular. So.

[00:01:26.570] - Scott
We really should have Lee record something for us, shouldn't we? Seems like a missed opportunity.

[00:01:32.250] - Sunyi
Welcome to this week's publishing rodeo. We're a little bit out of sync with the order of our episodes, but that's all right. I don't think anyone mind. With us today is Mark Stay, who founded and ran for seven years, although I think he's recently stepped down. We'll talk about that in a second. Founded and ran the bestseller Experiment, which, funnily enough, is a podcast I used to listen to. And then quite randomly last June, I agreed to do this sort of book event in Medway literature festival and didn't really pay attention to anything on the sheet and sort of turned up. I was like, oh, Mark stays, the other author that I'm in conversation with.

[00:02:06.390] - Mark
(laughing) Who the hell are you? What are you doing at my get out?

[00:02:11.990] - Sunyi
Oh, it was brilliant, fun, even though he told me a story about his first live theater performance that has haunted me ever since. So if you want to introduce yourself, Mark, and the many, many things that you do and have done, that would be a fantastic place to start.

[00:02:26.030] - Mark
Thanks, folks, and thanks for having me on. I really appreciate this. I'm big, big fan of the podcast. Listen to every one of them. I'm Mark stay. I am an author and screenwriter. I worked in bookselling and publishing for 25 years as well. So I went to Waterstones for a Christmas job and ended up working in the industry for over half my life. Yeah, I was copresenter of the bestseller experiment, which is still going, I hasten to add. I just stepped back for perfectly amicable reasons last Christmas, simply because I've got a lot on this year, a lot of writing projects, and it was taking up. I don't have to tell you guys this, it was taking up a lot of time, which I sort of had to focus on stuff elsewhere.

[00:03:08.000] - Sunyi
So, yeah, it does take up time. Did you ever find that? I mean, the pressure of it as well, because I think bestseller really took off in some quadrants. I guess you're kind of the Guardian in all sorts of places.

[00:03:19.510] - Mark
Yeah, we had a really busy first year, and we only meant to run for a year. The idea was that myself and Mark, because I'd covered the film robot overlaws and I did the film novelization, and that was my first book. And when you write a movie, people come out of the woodwork. And an old friend of mine that I knew from my teens, guy called Mark Devoe, got in touch. He said, I've always wanted to write a novel. This is great. You're living the dream. He said, I've always wanted to write a novel, but I always get stuck at 20,000 words. And one thing led to another, and we sort of challenged ourselves to co write a novel within twelve months and self publish it. But the thing that we did, I think the best thing that we did was we challenged our listeners to beat us to it. So we said, if you've got a half written novel in a draw, or if you're just starting from scratch, or you've got one you wrote five years ago and put it away, dig it out, listen to the know. We kicked off a bit of luck.

[00:04:11.730] - Mark
It was Gollancz Fest just before we started recording. So I got, you know, Joe Hill, Joe Abercrombie, all the joes, we got some fantastic authors to start us off. And then we had the Brian Cranston episode as well, which went viral because we rather cheekily said to him, because this is 2016, we said, if Trump gets in, do you want to go and live with Mark DeVoe in Canada? And it got reported as Brian Cranston will leave America if Trump gets in. And we were on Fox News, we had bots trying to crash our website, all sorts of stuff, but we were everywhere. But the key thing was that first year, all these amazing people were listening to who still listen to it now, who are part of the BXP group, which is a group on Facebook, if you're a Patreon supporter. And some are in the bestseller Academy now, which Mark started a couple of years ago. And I got a shelf over there, two shelves there, sort of too deep, full of people who've been published because they were inspired by someone or something they heard on the show. I mean, one of the first ones was Mike Shackle, who got a three book deal with Gollancz for his, you know, we've had award winners, Kindle storyteller award winners, RNA award winners.

[00:05:22.570] - Mark
So it was just an absolute joy. It's one of the best things I've ever done. We discovered this amazing community of people who all support each other. Yeah. But after 580 episodes and seven years of it, and there's a couple of things happening this year which might happen, and I thought it's better to quit while I'm ahead and just focus on these other things. Very happy I did it. It's been fantastic.

[00:05:46.200] - Sunyi
Yeah, I mean, that resonates with me a huge amount because I have generally a very anxious person. I just have this sense that because podcasts, in a way, they're very much more occult of personality than books are, or authors tend to be. And there's always that thing where it's like you're bound to say something eventually, or have on the wrong guest, or have on the wrong topic, or handle it in the wrong way. And I'm so conflict avoidant. The idea just sends me to a spiral. So quit while we're ahead is probably going to be my motto for season.

[00:06:13.020] - Mark
It's interesting what you say about the cult of personality thing, because what the world really needs is two more white blokes telling everyone what to do. But we did reach a turn. If you listen to the first episode we did with Sarah Pimbra and Sarah's fantastic guest, it was absolutely brilliant. But Sarah was very sweary, as you'd imagine, and she'd had a couple of drinks as well. And we were like naughty schoolboys egging her on as if say, be naughty, sarah. And she duly Obliged. And that episode didn't really sit comfortably because I know Mark Devoe, he was thinking, I want this to be a legacy for my kids. I want my kids to be able to listen to this. So we decided very early on to make it basically pg 13 at the most. One f bomb per episode. Although we did do a whole episode on swearing. We've done a whole episode on sex scenes, so we warn people ahead of that. But yeah, you have to find the tone very early on, and we wanted it to be best foot forward, kind of positive. I love your podcast, but we're like the anti publishing rodeo.

[00:07:19.770] - Mark
And we don't cover things up. We don't pretend it's all wine and roses, but we try and try and think of the positive way to get over those things and approach those things.

[00:07:32.770] - Sunyi
Yeah, no, that's actually very fair. And one of the things I wanted to talk to you about, which is basically I always felt in the early days when I was looking into indie, and again when I was listening to bestseller experiment, the idea you would set out with a goal that's very high and very specific and try and achieve it. And I do think, I don't want to make authors feel like I'm blaming them, but I do think there is a culture of defeatism sometimes in trad God, yes. Where we just kind of like, well, we're not going to make anything, so there's no point. Let's just accept the pennies. And maybe you can't do anything about it, but I don't know if you decide that it can't change, it doesn't. And that's true in lots of things.

[00:08:15.070] - Mark
It's a trait that all creatives have, I think, because we train ourselves to see the best of things and the worst of things. Every author I know is a very empathetic person and they're very caring. And it's why there was this massive liberal bias in writing creativity. Because we care about other people and we think, what that person over there who's different to me, how would they think, I'm going to put myself in their shoes for a short while and try and figure out what that's like. So we're very empathetic. But also I think that the flip side to that is we are also doom scrollers. We are thinking and we are training ourselves. I mean, I don't know about you. When I'm writing, I'd like to be an Old Testament God to my characters. I like to do the absolute worst thing to them and test them and prod them and make their lives an absolute misery, which means I'm always thinking of the worst thing to do. So you have this anxiety sort of simmering away in the background if you're a creative, because you have imagined apocalypses and murders and terrible things.

[00:09:14.560] - Mark
So I think that's always there. And I don't think it's just a trad thing. I think you get a lot of indie authors who think it's going to be easy, because maybe they were a Middle east author and thought, great, I'm going to go out and do my own thing. It's really, really hard. It's expensive, especially if you're going to pay for an artist, pay for copy editors, editors, proofreaders, all that kind of stuff. It's not cheap. And then your first book doesn't do anything. And it's like, what do I do? I've made a terrible are. What we never wanted to do was say to people, oh, just if you listen to those early episodes, Mr. D talks about a formula and the seven secrets. And I was always, there are no secrets. There's a lot of luck. There's a lot of being in the right place at the right time. There's a lot of perseverance involved. I think that's one of the biggest lessons we've learned, is, if you really want this, learn to love the process, because there are no promises. Even authors who are at the absolute peak of their game. I worked in the industry for 25 years.

[00:10:13.810] - Mark
I remember when Orion moved from Covent Garden to where they are with Hachette over by Black Fry's bridge. I'm clearing out old folders and catalogs, and I'm opening catalogs. And most of the authors I'm looking at aren't writing anymore. They've moved on or they've given up, or they had their moment in the sun and it's gone. But there are people who are still there, and not all of them are the big best selling names as well. There are people who just love to do this, and you've got to love to do it. You've got to love the process. And that, for me, is the biggest lesson that we learned, because otherwise you can go absolute nuts, particularly if you're trying to compare yourself to other people. That's the road to madness, frankly.

[00:10:57.210] - Sunyi
Well, for people who don't know your long road, how did you go from 25 years bookseller to becoming an author? And now you're a hybrid author, so you kind of across all the different bridges.

[00:11:07.670] - Mark
Well, I am like an idiot. I wanted to be an actor, so my wife went to drama school. She got the grant. That's how old we are. And I was working at Waterstones, and I said, well, you go to drama school, I'll work at Waterstones, keep the lights on kind of thing. You teach me everything you know. Then we started our own theater company, and I had booked a play by an author called Johnny Spate, who died. And I think the family withdrew the rights. So I had a theater and no play. So in the course of about eight weeks, I wrote a play about all the terrible camping holidays my family had taken me on. And we put it on and people really liked it. And I grew up in a working class family, didn't know anyone publishing or anything like that. So the idea of being a writer, I wrote at school. Teachers told me I was a good writer, that I had an imagination, all that kind of stuff. But it just seemed like a dream to me that I could write a film. But when I put this play on it, a friend of mine who was.

[00:11:58.680] - Mark
He makes documentaries now, but back then, he was what they called a cable basher for a show called TFI Friday, which is when the cameras run around, he runs around with the cables afterwards. He was the one person I knew in showbiz. And he said to me, he said, there are too many actors, but not enough writers. Keep writing. Which I think was his way of telling me I was a terrible actor. I can trace that because that was just before my daughter was born. So that's 24 years ago. So I started writing screenplays. I wrote a screenplay that got optioned, never got made. But the producer introduced me to John Wright, who was the co writer and director of Robot Overlords. And welcome the film that came out last year, 2023. And John and I just started writing together. And this movie, Robot overlords, a kids movie about a robot invasion. And these kids go on an adventure. And we somehow got Ben Kingsley and Jillian Anderson on board. And it premiered at the London Film Festival. And while we were in post production and I had been trying to write fiction and enjoying it, but kind of floundering, not quite knowing what to write, what was my genre, that kind of thing.

[00:12:59.320] - Mark
By then I was working at Orion and we published Joe Abercrombie and Joe Hill and people like that. And I was in awe of them. And we were in post production and the producer said, oh, we could do t shirts, we could do a book. And I'll do the book. I will do the book. That's me. Let me do the book. So, published ten years ago next year, 2025. And that was my way in. And it was interesting because it was published by Gollance. And I worked at Orion. And I remember John Wood at Orion saying, we don't publish staff, we don't publish mates. I said, look, just give me a chance. Let me write 10,000 words and you can tell me if it's any good. And they bought it based on those 10,000 words. And I was edited by Gillian Redfern, who was a goddess. Amazing. And I learned so much just from finishing and going through that process. I mean, that's the other thing that a lot of people who haven't been published yet, that thing of going through the. And I worked in the industry, I knew how it worked. But until you go through that thing of redrafting an edit, the copy edit was the real surprise.

[00:14:00.110] - Mark
It's amazing proofreading all of that. And so, yeah, it came out. Unfortunately, the film did not get a great release. I think it's officially a cult film now, but people seem to like it. But people did enjoy the book, and that kind of spurred me on to do more. So we did batch reality for the podcast, which was the book that we self published. And then I did a fantasy novel called the end of magic, and I'm working on a sequel to that now. And then three years ago. Yeah, the first of the Witches of Woodville series came with, from Simon and Schuster. I remember when I started working at Waterstones in Dorking, and american listeners would be going, really? There's a place called Dorking? Yes, there is a place called Dorking in Surrey. And it was the smallest Waterstones in the whole chain. And back then, Waterstones insisted that everyone have a degree who worked there. And I haven't been to university, and I snuck in because I was just going to work there for Christmas, but they liked me, and they kept me on. And I remember meeting the sales reps and meeting authors and thinking, this is it.

[00:15:01.730] - Mark
I'm in this thing that I never thought I could get into. I've got a foot in the door. And I thought, that's it. I'm never leaving. And I learned so much. I just soaked up everything. I went in, every course I could go on, went to every convention, all that kind of stuff, and just learned everything I could about how the whole system works. So everything you've been talking about, publishing meetings, acquisition meetings, art meetings, editorial meetings, I've been in them all. I've seen them all. And because I've seen both the best and the worst of it, I kind of have quite a sanguine attitude to it all, because I know that in the end, what really counts is loving the process and perseverance. I think that's a very long answer. Sorry.

[00:15:43.660] - Sunyi
No, that's fine. I asked for it. It's just fascinating to me, because you come at it from completely the opposite angle, I think, almost like through the industry and then out to authorhood, which.

[00:15:54.230] - Mark
Is cheating, kind of.

[00:15:57.730] - Scott
Well, that seems to be more and more common these days. I'm curious. What's that?

[00:16:06.000] - Sunyi
I was just going to say there's no regular path in people you talk to. It's like the receive wisdom is you're not supposed to ask people on podcasts for their story of how they got into their role. Right. Like I've heard that before. But in publishing, I feel like everyone is such a weird path in.

[00:16:22.140] - Mark
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, again, 580 episodes of the podcast, I don't think we've heard the same story twice. There are a lot of lawyers. That's one factor I noticed because lawyers, they are one of the few professions where you get a lawyer on the show and say, oh, and I took a year off to write my novel. It's like, oh, did you know? Okay, good for you. Which a lot of us mere mortals can't do. But that's one thing I've seen cropping up. But yeah, I mean, I remember when I worked at headline, I remember one of the editors, Charlote Mendelssohn, she published a novel while I was working there. And I was at Orion. Robin Stevens, a fantastically successful children's author. I remember her getting her book deal there and is becoming, I think a lot of people do see it as a great training ground just to learn about the industry because as you guys have pointed out, this industry has its own language, its own mysteries, its own weird way of doing things. When outsiders come in, they come, why do you do it like that? And that's how we've always done it.

[00:17:29.660] - Mark
And I was lucky enough to work through what I think was the biggest publishing revolution since the Gutenberg Bible, which is the. Because I was, I think because I was the only person in the sales team who knew what a podcast was. They said, oh, you can look after Amazon then because I was the young person who knew about, yeah, I looked after that and I got the first ever Kindle device and used to meet with Kindle team and the Amazon team and all those folks and Apple and Kobo and saw them all sort of rise, know, become different things as time went.

[00:18:08.170] - Scott
I, and forgive any ignorance on my part about your path and your process and everything. One thing that is really interesting to me, and I'd love to hear your take on is you had been in the industry at Orion. Sounds like you were on the sales side at Orion and the publishers. I think we're going to have more questions on that too. But you had been published traditionally, and then you start your podcast and sounds like you decided to go self publish for that before you even wrote it. You just didn't consider trad as a path for that. I'm curious as to why that would have been and how that worked out.

[00:18:55.260] - Mark
Because I think if we had, we'd still be waiting for it to be published. We had the conversation. We said, look, we can go down the traditional route or we know we can self publish. And I'd never done it up to that point, and I was curious to know more. And we just thought as well, just as an example to our listeners, we could say, look, we're going to make all these mistakes on the way. We'll make the mistakes so you don't have to kind of thing. And because we'd set that deadline of a year, so not only did we have to write it and edit it and all the other stuff, we had to publish it exactly one year later, which we did. So it was the only conceivable way of releasing a book in a year. And that was what was kind of exciting about it. And also we kind of thought there was a part me thinking there's a danger this book could end up a complete dog's dinner and a complete disaster, and no publisher would pick it up necessarily. Fortunately, it's a very good book that I'm very proud of.

[00:19:52.430] - Mark
So it all turned out fine in the end. But, yeah, it was mainly just because we'd set that twelve month deadline. It was the only way we could possibly do it. You know what it is, from the minute you sign a contract with a publisher, could be 18 months before your book is in stores, which I knew, and I told Mark, my copresenter. So as soon as we kind of thought, yeah, once it had been published, we did approach a couple of publishers and say, are you interested? And they were kind of like, well, you've done know you've put it out there.

[00:20:26.360] - Sunyi
So back in the early days, I remember I gave myself two years to try and write and publish a novel, which I thought was like a huge amount of time because I knew nothing. And now I look back and just find that absolutely hilarious.

[00:20:39.610] - Mark
That's it. I mean, again, a lot of people, because what you only ever see are the headlines you see. Oh, so and so got a six figure deal and they sold the film rights. And, you know, just last year when the movie came out, I had the southeast news come to my house and interview me, and I talked for an hour. But the only thing that ended up in the piece was the fact that Warner Brothers had paid 1.1 million pounds for the script, which is the most that Warner Bros. UK had ever paid for a horror script. But the way they reported it was that the money went to me and it didn't. It went on the budget. So they're always looking for that hook, that kind of, oh, money, money kind of thing. So I'm sure you've had this as well. When you visit family or friends and say, I'm an author, and they go, bet you're doing all right for yourself, aren't you? It's like, no, I'm skint. I'm stony broke. So there is that mythology, and you see, there are courses that will promise you millions if you sign up to do their course, and blah, blah, blah.

[00:21:45.420] - Mark
So there's a lot of mythology out there, which I'm glad you guys are doing your best to trying. Give us a reality check.

[00:21:52.850] - Sunyi
When you're doing, you must have come into it with a lot of sales experience, a lot of awareness of how bookshops were working, and without wanting you to condense, kind of seven years of podcast, what were some of the big takeaways? If you're advising authors for things they can do, whether they're indie or trad, to give their book a good shot, to try and build themselves up, because I felt like it was very much a bootstrap operation where you were setting out to do, to basically launch your book as well as you possibly can. And I think for a smaller press or even midlist authors, there's a lot there that they could learn from.

[00:22:27.150] - Mark
I think one of the most important things we did was build a community. And I realized that not every author can do this with a podcast, but that was one of our goals. We thought we'll build a community around us for when we launch the book. But even so, I think one of the most important things you can do as an author is get your little one page website. It doesn't have to be anything elaborate, because God knows we all need a little corner of the Internet that we can call ours, because social media is at the whims of billionaire man babies. And they can. My copresenter, Mark Devoe, he is a musician, had a band, and his band had 80,000 followers on. Oh, God, I forget what it's called now. What was the social media platform before Facebook? But anyway, Myspace.

[00:23:22.270] - Mark
And everyone just moved to Myspace, and he lost them all overnight. And so another big lesson we learned was start a newsletter. Just start a newsletter, because each one of those people who signs up to your newsletter is a reader who's going to tell another reader who's going to tell another reader. So build your readership straight away, day one, before you've even finished your book, because by the time the book comes out, it's kind of too late. You need to have a small audience there that you can at least talk to and can become your champions. In terms of what to write. I'm very much a do as I say, don't do as I do kind of person because I think the big difference we've noticed is that particularly say if you're writing fantasy, if you're going traditional, what they're looking for are exciting new voices and new takes on the genre. They're looking for people who can push the boundaries, who can bring something new. If you're going self publishing, what readers want there is straight down the line fantasy. They want dragons and they want battles and they want quests. That's a huge generalization, but that's one of the things I've noticed.

[00:24:31.830] - Mark
And same with crime as well. If you're writing straight down the line cozy, crime, detective crime, whatever, you can do very, very well self publishing or going with the digital first publisher. But if you want to push boundaries, if you want to do something that's different and you have an exciting voice that's not like everyone else, then tread might be the way to go. Again, huge generalization, but that's kind of one of the big patterns that I've seen, particularly recently, the way the industry is going because they're taking on fewer and fewer authors.

[00:25:00.360] - Sunyi
I'm really glad you said that, actually, because one of the things that does drive me nuts is I think there's an agent that said on Twitter the other day, he was talking about how the market gets oversaturated and his replies filled up. All these people saying, well, it's because trad only wants generic books and that's what sells. But it actually doesn't, because what sells in trad is the books that cross genres. When you cross out of a genre and you grab all the mainstream readers and not to pick on anyone, particularly because this is a sentiment I've seen in lots of different places. But one of the things people were saying in that thread is show us the evidence, show us the statistics for this, because the books that tick the genre boxes and are the least original are the ones that sell. And that's just not true. We do have the evidence and the statistics for it, and consistently, the books which break out in a massive way in genre fiction are the ones which cross their genre boundaries and find a readership outside of the usual box. And we see that again and again.

[00:25:59.440] - Sunyi
That is a repeating pattern. That's how to find big breakout success, at least for Sci-Fi and fantasy.

[00:26:04.690] - Mark
But I think as well, where you do cross genres like that, you need a publisher's reach to find those readers and get you in bookstores, get you festivals and talks and conventions where you can talk about your book and maybe get you on local radio and podcasts and what have you. Whereas if you're writing something that's straight and there's nothing wrong with this, I love straight down the line genre. This is all good stuff. It's just if you're doing Facebook ads and Amazon ads, it's easier to do that and you might as well do it yourself and you might as well scoop up 70% of the royalty in order to sell that. I'm traditionally published by Simon Schuster, and they've been fantastic. But also, the end of Magic was a crowdfunding exercise with unbound, which was five years ago, I got the rights back because unbound didn't really know how to sell fantasy, frankly, and I. But it was great to do. I enjoyed the process and I kind of thought, I'll just do that as a one off. But when I knew that I could get the rights back, I thought, let's see if I can write a sequel.

[00:27:14.000] - Mark
So I'm writing a sequel, and I'm going to self publish that this year, and there'll be a third one next year. And that is not straight down the line fantasy, but it's as close to genre as I get. I mean, one of my problems is I can never write anything that's straight. I have to be a bit weird and go off the main road a little bit, because that's just me. But yeah. So I'm self publishing that and I think for the future I will take each project as it goes. I'm currently co writing a revenge thriller with another author, and she and I have been traditionally published. And we're thinking we are going to put aside our weird little quirks for this one. We are going to try and write something that is mass market and commercial, and we will try the publishers first just to see if we can get that big deal. Because it's an international story, it's set all over the world. We've got an american lead, a british lead. Let's see where we can go with that. So, yeah, it's kind of a horses for courses attitude at the moment.

[00:28:15.020] - Scott
I am curious about how that turned out. Right, because you built a whole podcast around getting a book to be a bestseller, and then you managed to become a, you know, Amazon bestseller or whatever. Did. Are you okay with sharing what that looked like from a monetary standpoint compared to what you might expect from launching something similar trad?

[00:28:41.670] - Mark
Well, I mean, to be, my experience was all in traditional publishing, and there was a way that we do things as you folks will know about. So you're working with retailers for promotions, you're working with wholesalers, you're doing those conventions and things like that, whereas indie was completely new to us, and so we were kind of, kind of going in a bit kind of newbies, essentially. So all that experience didn't really mean much, frankly, because it was kind of a whole new world. We did get to number one in ten categories, some of them fairly minor categories and weird categories, if I'm honest. But the book has ticked along. It's not paying the mortgage, I'll say that, sadly. But it's a cracking book. I'm very proud of it. It peaked and then it kind of tailed off. In fact, the one that seems to be doing really well is the audio edition, which I heartily recommend. So yeah, it's probably the least selling of my books, I think, of all of mine, but it ticks along. But again, we did something. If you listen to those early episodes, what we should have been writing was a thriller because everyone we spoke to said, write a commercial thriller.

[00:30:00.920] - Mark
And the thing is, I don't really read. I might read one or two a year. Mark Devo, he's a kind of Linwood Barkley fan. He was a bit more familiar with them. But what we did instead, we said, okay, what are we interested in? We love Douglas Adams, we love time travel, we love comedy. So we ended up with this book, batch reality, which is a sort of freaky Friday body swap time travel comedy, which, as you can tell from the collision of genres there turns out to be quite difficult to sell. But this is the story of my life. The most common review I get on any of my books is I wouldn't normally read this, but I really liked it, which is the story. This is going to be in my publishing gravestone when I'm finished. So, yeah, in the end, it's a tricky book to sell because it doesn't fit into any particular genre. We should have written a thriller. If we'd written a thriller and a series of thrillers like jet Reacher knockoffs or whatever, we'd be very well off, but that wasn't what we wanted to write. And I think one of the other big lessons we've learned from the podcast is you've got to write what you love, because if you start writing to market, you will be so miserable, so utterly, utterly miserable with what you're writing.

[00:31:14.610] - Mark
And I've met authors who've done that. They're kind of, well, everyone's running fantasy is not selling. So I'm going to write a thriller, and they sell more, but they're not happy with it. Like I say, horses for courses to don't I self be true in the end. But you may be skint as a result.

[00:31:35.950] - Sunyi
You've sort of written the exact opposite book of what you're telling people to do for Indy. And I do find that funny.

[00:31:41.630] - Mark
Exactly. Yes. Like I say, do as I say, don't do as I do. And the irony is we've got, like I say, all these authors, romance authors who've written really good commercial author romance and commercial thrillers and commercial fantasy and science fiction, they've all done better than we have. This is the thing. Our listeners are our know, these are the people who've done fantastically well because they did listen and take the lessons on board, unlike me.

[00:32:11.130] - Sunyi
I think it's worth it for the, you know, conversation, because Scott and I can never be bothered to monetize or anything like that. And I think we didn't want to be beholden to anyone and just, we were never that organized. But the conversations will stay with me.

[00:32:24.190] - Scott
For a long time, and we say things that people don't necessarily want to endorse.

[00:32:34.270] - Mark
Have you had any, have you had any, have you had any blowback on this after your first season? Have you had publishers or agents come up to you and say, do you want to dial it down a bit? Because I love it. I love the honesty of it. But you do talk about things that authors aren't supposed to talk about.

[00:32:49.880] - Sunyi
Not for me, because I'm in a privileged position of basically saying that my experiences are generally good. I'll leave Scott to answer his question.

[00:32:58.740] - Mark
How he sees you complete the fifth Scott, you don't have to answer that.

[00:33:03.610] - Scott
I try not to. Anytime I can. I expected a lot more blowback than there has been. I obviously have my issues with how my debut went, but after the podcast, they've actually been quite excellent. My agent and I requested an editor change, and it was granted. I'm now with an editor that fits a lot better. I'm not encouraging people necessarily to go out and air all the dirty laundry they can, but I do think that it's been received well, even by people who I thought wouldn't receive it well just because they understand what's going on behind the scenes.

[00:33:54.480] - Mark
Right. That's really good to hear. And I'm glad you've heard that because a couple of things. One big lesson I learned from working for a traditional publisher, the squeaky wheel gets the oil. It was the authors who were, and these were authors who were perfectly polite. They weren't being dicks. They were saying, I've got a problem with this. Can we sort this? There's an issue with my book on Amazon. There's this, there's that. And they would get fixed and they would be persistent, but they would be polite. Of course, there are occasional assholes out there, but that's another story. But the other thing as well, I, you know, listen to your, your podcast and I've listened to, you know, when you listen to certain indie podcasts, you know, they're like, oh, publishing is full of gatekeepers and they're all bastards. And I'm like, no, I've worked with these people. These are good people. They really want your book to do well. But the fact is they're working for big corporations. I was made redundant five years ago and I volunteered for redundancy because I knew that if I stayed, I'd be doing the work of three people.

[00:34:55.090] - Mark
And that's what your editor is doing now. That's what your marketing person, publicity person, they are all really under the kosh. So I'm very, very sympathetic to that. That their lives are made more difficult because of capitalism. Because every three years all the major publishers have to renegotiate terms with Amazon and every three years they come away worse off. So they have to drop people and let them, you know, I'm very aware, know the problems that they face. But at the same time, the industry isn't perfect. We could do certain things.

[00:35:30.520] - Sunyi
So, I will say they weren't totally happy with Scott, but they kind of have learned to live with it.

[00:35:37.870] - Scott
That is correct, yes. It wasn't all good feedback, that's for sure. Yeah. I think we will learn the true story of how upset they were when I go to pitch more books, which will be soon. So we'll see. I'll have my answer then. But yeah, to your point, Mark, I think we say it often, but the issues in the industry really are systemic. Right. And good people in the industry are put in a position where they have to choose between titles and which titles are going to get attention, which titles are going to get support. And it's really unfortunate that they have to do that and that there are titles that are picked up and aren't supported, but that's the nature of the business, right?

[00:36:33.120] - Mark
Yeah, I remember when I worked at headline, we had a brainstorming session and it was one of those, there's no such thing as a stupid idea. No such. Oh, great. Okay, I've got some ideas. And my first one was, I said, all of that money we spend on James Patterson, can't we just sprinkle some of that around some of our midlist authors and grow some brands? Oh, that's a really naive suggestion, Mark. Oh, fuck me. Right, okay, I'm out. So there are some people who are just, if you've got a big brand author like that, what happens is those big brand authors, they are concerned less with sales and it becomes a dick measuring contest about getting to number one. And one of the things we were constantly focused on was making sure that brand author X got to the top ten or the top five, or the top three, or to number one, because some editor had promised that when they renewed their contract with them, because brand author X and Y might be our biggest sellers, but we know they're getting offers from Transworld and from Harper Collins and from Random House all the time.

[00:37:43.010] - Mark
They could be poached to any minute now. So the publisher is desperate to keep them on in order to have the big brand name that gets to number one so they can attract other authors. But the trouble is when you end up just focusing on the brand authors and you're not building brands behind them, which is what's happened. Which is when you remove so many editors and get them to the point where they can't concentrate on those growing authors, you end up with behemoths where we were still publishing Wilbur Smith years after he died, we were still publishing these big brand authors who maybe don't need to have that railway advertising or London Underground advertising campaign because we know those campaigns are ineffective, but they feed that author's ego and they make the agent feel happy. Because the most effective advertising now is digital advertising, because you can measure it. If you do Amazon marketing, if you do Facebook ads, if you do online marketing, you can say, great, this is the click through rate. This is the return on our investment. We know this is effective. Whereas when you're doing railway ads, no idea.

[00:38:54.540] - Mark
No idea. All it is is just to make brand author X feel better about themselves when they go to a convention and they can say to brand author Y, well, look at me, I got this promotion, blah, blah, blah. So that's one of the things I'd like to change, but I don't think it ever will change. The other thing I'd like to change, I mean, the big mistake, I think certainly the big five are making is becoming bigger and bigger. They're becoming bigger and bigger in order to square off against Amazon. But Amazon could gobble them all up in one fell swoop. I think if they want to challenge Amazon, they should break up into know. It's like, do you want to fight one tyrannosaurus or a million.

[00:39:34.630] - Sunyi
Way?

[00:39:35.350] - Mark
Yeah. Whereas Amazon can't control lots of small publishers. But if they've just got the big five, then it's easy breezy for them. They just go in and have five meetings every three years or whatever, and they know they've got them by the. It's. Those negotiations has never come out well. And not just them, they were negotiating with the grocers. So over in the UK, it was Asda and Tesco's and Sainsbury's and people like that, where you're fighting for really small shelf space, but it's a shelf space that can catapult a brand into the top ten. So it was really important. Of course, you have chains in the UK like wh Smith's, where if the book is anywhere near the front of store, they've paid a lot of money for it to be. It's. Whereas those middle publishers, I mean, the ones that I think are doing really well now are the digital first ones, like Bookouture, because they are data based. There's no advances, so everyone comes out of the traps as an equal, and then some will take off and some won't, and they will go. And of course, the other thing Bookouture do, whenever they sign someone, is.

[00:40:45.630] - Mark
Everyone gets a newsletter, everyone gets a little mini website. They know and they know exactly who's reading their books and they know exactly how to target. Yeah. Whereas traditional publishing still flounders. I mean, I know Hachette bought Bookouture in order to learn from that, but they seem to be still making the same kind of sweeping generalizations. Oh, I mean, I would sit in meetings, there'd be some new contemporary fiction. All women in their 30s will love this book. It's like, oh, is that your targeting? Is that your thinking? And it still goes on. Sadly. They have tried to address it, but they never stick with.

[00:41:24.220] - Sunyi
So I've got two questions. The first is, you can ask me to say them again if we forget about them. But the first is, how do you see this Amazon versus big five war going as we go forward? And the second question is to do with digital publishers, because I have seen in SFF some digital first imprints launch, and they were just bad. And I'm very, very sketchy of them now.

[00:41:47.810] - Mark
Well, let me address the second one first, because I think that is partly due to the genre. I think that crime and romance work really well in digital first because those authors, again, sweeping generalization. But people who read crime might read three crime books a week on their kindle. People who read romance might read five books a week on their kindle. They devour that fiction generally. You don't always see that in science fiction and fantasy. Generally, what you see in science fiction and fantasy is people love the object. They love the book with the gold foil and the spreads and the maps and all that kind of stuff. And they love to have something tangible, sweeping generalizations again, but that tends to be the know and there's a crossover with ya. I remember we used to have a stall at Yaok, the YA literary convention in London, and you'd see readers with wheelie suitcases coming up and they just see a shiny book. Shiny. And they'd buy it because it was shiny, or it came with a bookmark, or it came, you know, so those, those kind of things, that kind of readership, if you're saying to them, here's a new fantasy novel, it's absolutely ace, but you can only get an ebook, an audiobook or a print on demand, which isn't going to have any extras or added value to it.

[00:43:10.940] - Mark
Then they kind of, well, I got all this cool stuff over here with shiny springs and things. So I think that might be part of the issue, is the kind of readers who love science fiction fantasy like an object, whereas people who read crime burn through it. That's my theory anyway, and 

[00:43:29.810] - Scott
you heard it here first, folks. Science fiction and fantasy readers are indistinguishable from raccoons.

[00:43:36.470] - Mark
You said that, Scott, not me. If I'm MCM or Gollancz Fest and someone pounces on me for that, I'm giving them your number. 

Scott –
Well, they know where to find me. (laughing)

[00:43:51.350] - Sunyi
No, I get that, actually, because when book Eaters is coming out, Harper sent me to YALC and I was like, why am I going to YALC? I haven't written a YA book and it doesn't matter. And I got and it's like because it was an Illumicrate book and everyone, people would queue, they would get it. They'd want it signed. It's like you don't know if you'll like it. You did. It's like it doesn't matter. It's a collection. It's going on the Instagram grab shelf.

[00:44:11.410] - Mark
Exactly that, yeah. And also authors if you want to know when your publisher stops loving you it's when they stop putting specials on the COVID of your book. I've been in meetings where that's happened. Your first book will have embossings and gold foil and the paper quality will be great. And then by the third book if it's completely flat on glossy with a glossy cover that's it. Time to look at another publisher because they are devaluing you with the extras that they put on the COVID of your book. Little top tip for you there. Going back to your question about the big five. I mean I don't know. I mean the fact is books for Amazon books are no longer their main focus really. They're making movies and rockets and all that kind of. And they make more money with their web services than anything else. They make so much money from their. It's. It's become a shop. Third one of the things I was constantly doing as Amazon account manager at Orion was removing infringing know so you'd have a you know we'd have the Gollance edition in the UK or Michael Conley and then you'd have the US edition which is from a different publisher and because the US publishers seem to be as soon as they get the metadata they spurt it out into the world.

[00:45:36.540] - Mark
So you'd look on Amazon and Michael Conley's new Bosch thriller will be the only title on Amazon and ours doesn't go out until twelve months before publication so I'd have to fill in a form and say this is infringing on our edition. They say well where is your edition? So Amazon was a nightmare. Amazon is making money through third party marketplace sales so there'll be someone who has a garage in Ipswich or whatever selling secondhand books or maybe they've got hold of firsthand copies or whatever and they're undercutting the publisher by a penny and sometimes that makes them the top search result. And Amazon doesn't pack the book, doesn't stock the book but it takes a cut on every sale of the book. It's free money. It's free money for providing a window for big brand authors. So they're making tons of money on know the books thing, which was the core of their business once, has become almost a bit of an afterthought. They'll deny it strenuously, of course, and my friends in KDP will deny that strenuously also. But you can't help but think that when they're building rockets shaped like penises, for whatever reason, so it's not the main thrust, bad choice of word of their business now.

[00:46:56.620] - Mark
But that said, they do make a lot of money from it, and publishers are utterly, utterly reliant on them. They're obsessed with pre orders, which are less important than you think, and they're obsessed with the Amazon charts, which no one looks at except publishers. And they're obsessed know star ratings. And so it's Amazon has become a huge focus. And Amazon know that. They know that be the other thing that changed as well is that you could not lie to authors, but you could say to authors, hey, brand author x, your book is doing brilliantly. It's fantastic. And you'd make sure that if they lived, wherever they lived, their bookshop would have copies and they'd have a dump bin at the front or what have you, and they'd be under the illusion that they were actually doing rather well. Whereas now you can't get away with that because they're visible on Amazon. They're like, hang on, I'm getting nothing but one star reviews, or people are telling me they hate the COVID or, I'm way down the chart, what's going wrong? So suddenly there's a visibility. Amazon has become this barometer where authors go, well, I'm doing really badly.

[00:48:10.800] - Mark
Why is, you know, I remember the days before that happened. I think this is my theory. This is why, despite the fact he went to jail, I think this is why Jeffrey Archer doesn't do as well. Because Jeffrey Archer, I think not as many people read him as we were led to believe. I think when I was a book spyer at Waterstones, you'd have the rep come in and say, yeah, take 100 and we'd send 70 back thinking, well, maybe we're just doing badly with these. But I think everyone was. I think once you had that visibility of sales and Nielsen sales and that kind of thing, publishers were able to go, yeah, some of these brand authors aren't as big as we think they are. So anyway, I'm going off on a Reddit there.

[00:48:50.970] - Sunyi
That's so weird. I heard somewhere it might have even been your podcast that people think Amazon makes all of the metadata stuff. Difficult and annoying on purpose just because it just like, it wastes everybody's time. Like they could make it easier and they don't. Negligence maybe, rather than malice.

[00:49:08.210] - Mark
Well, I mean, there was a lot of data. There was a lot of information. I mean, the thing I used to do on a Monday morning, I would do my Monday report where I'd essentially compile the sales from the previous week and do a report to editorial and sales and marketing just to say, look, this is what's happening. This is what's. And you got to the point where you could have hourly peaks in sales. So if someone went on this morning on the tv or they went on women's hour on the radio, you could see the spike. You could say, oh, that's great. So you soon got to know front row, woman's hour. Richard and Judy, they all had these effective sales spikes. I know a lot of your US listeners are going, what are these things? But you have equivalents in the. There were. We did build this obsession with sales spikes and know, maintaining the momentum of those sales, but there was a lot of data to go through. And it did become quite soul destroying because I started as a bookseller, then I was a sales rep for headline driving around the sold, you know, Neil Gaiman's american gods and know hand sold them to booksellers.

[00:50:13.170] - Mark
I was really passionate about that kind of stuff. And when I started at Orion, I was going to Ottaka's, you remember, know, fantastic chain selling, Michelle Paver and, you know, Jeremy Crombie and getting really excited and Scott lynch and being really passionate about them. And then I ended up. My whole day was spent staring at bloody spreadsheets, excel spreadsheets, which I hate. I'd close my eyes at night and it'd be like the matrix. I'd see nothing but numbers. So I was quite. It's interesting, in my last year there, before I took redundancy, one of the sales directors there said, you're a nice guy, but you've lost interest, haven't you? I'm like, yeah, you sussed me out because it becomes soul destroying. It becomes a numbers game. I mean, there was a changing culture at Orion as well. Orion was the part of Hashette that was like the crazy uncle at your wedding. And you never know what they're going to. You know, we would have these massive hits. We had books by the Beatles Chronicles. We had Trini and Susanna. Remember them? We had Michael Palin, his travel books. We'd have these massive successes. And then we'd have these utter disasters which took us to the know, but we loved that.

[00:51:29.370] - Mark
That was what it was all about. And then what happened when Hachette, when they became bigger, we were essentially taken over by little Brown, and little Brown were always the safe bet. That's why they got the book. You know, you knew with little Brown, they would do the sums and you get a return on your investment. And in a way, that's what publishing has become. Now they're sitting down, they're looking at, you know, Tuesday we'd have the acquisitions meeting. It would be, what's the comparison to this book? What is this? Like that sold before? That's what it sold. Okay. That's what we think we're going to sell. And it was just like, oh, really? We're doing that now? Okay. And it's sensible. It's like doing your taxes every year. It's the sensible thing to do. It's going to save you money. But it did take a lot of the joy and excitement out of publishing because there's nothing more exciting than taking something that's a bit weird and making it huge, making it absolutely massive and crossing over into the mainstream with it. And it happens less and less these days, sadly.

[00:52:30.550] - Sunyi
Where do you see publishing is going? Like, are there trends that concern you? Are there patterns that excite you?

[00:52:35.810] - Mark
I think what's exciting is you're seeing finally white, middle class publishing, realizing there's something outside the white middle class that they can publish. So that's something that's finally being addressed. And you're also seeing that not just in the authors, but also the people who commission the books and that kind of thing. And it's not going to change overnight. My worry is that it will be seen as a trend, and all it's going to take is a couple of books by non white people to fail. And there'll be people going, well, we won't do that again, especially with the number crunches. But I do see that changing slowly but surely. I think it's interesting seeing them taking a chance on new voices, which is good. There I am saying they're not taking risks a minute ago, but to be fair, they are doing some stuff like that. I think you might see one of the big five hit some serious trouble in the next few years because they're not too big to fail. I mean, you saw Simon Schuster try know they had their merger with Penguin Random House turned down, and the reason they were doing it is because they're doing it to survive.

[00:53:46.930] - Mark
So what's going to know, with them. So it'd be interesting to see, like I say, I think the mistake and you see the film studios doing this as well. They're all merging to become bigger and bigger. And I think when Amazon controls the funnel to readers as they do, I think that's probably a mistake because they could so much easier just to shut you off. I was there at Orion when Amazon switched off all our buy buttons for weeks. I don't know if you guys remember that. We had a terms negotiation which came to nothing.

[00:54:23.040] - Sunyi
I heard about it on Print Run (podcast).

[00:54:24.710] - Mark
Yeah. And we put our feet down, said that's it. And then they turned off all our buy buttons. So for a long time you couldn't buy our books directly from Amazon. Luckily I also looked after the wholesalers because Amazon bought all their books from the wholesaler. So I did very well out. So they were selling them, but just not directly from us. So you might see that happen again, a publisher putting their feet down. But yeah, the way it's always worked is the small publishers, the small presses take the risks and then what happens is the big publishers come in and take those authors and try and do more with them. Twasva thus. But I don't know, I do worry that they'll get too big and then one of them will collapse and there will be problems.

[00:55:19.510] - Sunyi
Yeah. I sometimes hear people say things to the effect of, oh, wouldn't it be great? Trad is dying and it should die and it's like, but then all that's left will be Amazon and that will be a fucking dystopia.

[00:55:31.370] - Mark
Really bad idea.

[00:55:32.300] - Sunyi
Yeah, living in our Prime Apartments.

[00:55:35.530] - Mark
Yeah, yeah, exactly. No, you don't want that. I mean, what I am seeing more of on both sides actually, I mean, I'm doing more of this as you can see, I've got my own stock here. I sell my books directly from my website, signed copies that you can't get anywhere else. So I do offer something that Amazon does not. So if you want to buy them from Amazon, and Amazon are really good, let's make that absolutely clear. Their customer service is fantastic. And if you're know, if you can't get out to a bookshop, you don't have a bookshop near you. Fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. But they can't be the be all and end all, but, yeah, so I see a lot of authors offering different things, doing special editions, printing books themselves. I know a lot of authors are starting to do their own audio and sell their audio directly, bypassing audible. So I see a lot of authors doing that, and they're making a lot more money on audio than they are through going through audible. So it's constantly changing, it's constantly evolving. I think what will remain, and the thing that's great about indie publishing is anyone can do it.

[00:56:52.920] - Mark
So you will still see those remarkable voices coming out of indie publishing and people dipping a toe in and trying stuff out, and then maybe moving on to a traditional and bouncing back and forth. I think the idea that you sign up to a publisher and you're there for the rest of your career is an old one. And I think the good news for authors is indie means you can reinvent yourself constantly. So if you are in a position where your books aren't doing well and you go back and they don't want your book, fine, I'll self publish it, or I'll go to a digital first, or I'll go elsewhere. And I think there are more options than ever for authors. And I think there's never been a better time to be an author. Your chances of getting your words out there and read are better than they've ever been in history. The trouble is everyone's doing it, so it's quite crowded.

[00:57:50.710] - Sunyi
Given that book scan isn't accurate, how important are book scan numbers to publishers when they are talking about sales and acquisitions? Because that's something that spooks us a little bit. The fact that for me, book scan is like maybe 55% of my sales.

[00:58:05.530] - Mark
Yeah. And that does happen. They'll say, okay, what's book scan? And then usually the editor or someone in the sales department will say, oh, but by the way, it did really well in special sales. It did really well internationally. So that is taken into consideration. It's not the be all and end all. So, yeah, I wouldn't worry too much about that. I mean, they are smart people making these decisions, but it's also their job to save the publisher money. So they will probably use it as ammunition against you when it comes to negotiating that deal. So then it's down to your agent to go, hang on, hang on, hang on. Let's see all the figures. Let's see. Let's hear the whole story. So Nielsen book scan is probably used as a negotiating point rather than an accurate measuring stick than anything else.

[00:58:59.230] - Scott
I do have one question, so I'm just curious about your experience on the sales side for the publisher. You mentioned going to whoever you were selling to and selling big names. What kind of attention did the smaller names on your publishers list get? What did that relationship look like for you? As a sales leader, that's a good question.

[00:59:25.260] - Mark
And when I was a sales rep and when I worked in key accounts as well, there were authors that we would adopt the ones, we had reading groups. We had regular sort of reading groups where we'd all read a different book and come to the reading group and say, this is an underdog. This is undercooked. We think we should do more with this. And there are authors that benefited from people in house reading it and being really passionate about it. Now, the trouble is, there wasn't always budget to actually do that, but we could at least begin that word of mouth thing and say, look, can we print some proofs? Because the other thing that changed when we moved into the big hashette building is we got a big printing room downstairs, so we could do basic, advanced, I say proofs, you say arcs, advanced reading copies. We could print some of those off in order to distribute them and get that word of mouth going. It wasn't a massive marketing campaign, but sometimes it led to big things. It kicked off an author's career. And when I was a sales rep driving around, I knew which buyers liked which kind of genres.

[01:00:35.990] - Mark
So I would go to myoticas in East Grinstead, because I knew Neil Gaiman grew up in East Grinstead, and I knew the buyer, there was a, you know, I'd be going to Jeanette and so, and that sort of would start spreading around the chain. There would be one of the nice things about, and I think Waterstones still do this, is they have key buyers, not head office anymore, but they have them in the stores. So, you know, to go to a particular store and speak to a particular buyer and say, this is the one we want for book of the month or whatever. So there are those opportunities there. But if there's been a big advance involved, then you have to earn it back. And they do get the focus. And there is less and less of that hand selling now, I think, than there ever was. But it's still there. It does still happen, I think, right.

[01:01:34.340] - Sunyi
This is the part of the podcast where we've now started asking people what the smallest hill they are willing to die on. And I mean, this can be anything from a light hearted hot take to your pettiest pet peeve.

[01:01:47.090] - Mark
I'd like to talk about american cultural imperialism, if I may, particularly in the form. Now, this is something that, pertaining to indie and trad authors. So you get indie authors in the UK are terrified of publishing a book with UK English spellings in them, because they've heard all these terrible stories of someone in the middle of midwest of America going, well, they spelled color with a u, one star on Amazon and they all live in terrible fear of this. Now I guess if you're writing a thriller that's set in the States with american characters, maybe it's a good idea to use american spellings. But if, like me, you're writing weird english stuff or you're writing fantasy that isn't set anywhere, but that's the language I write in. That's the language I'm going to write in. And it is this kind of, I think there's a fear amongst publishers and indie authors that they live in constant fear of, oh, I'm going to get a one star review because I used to recently, friend of mine, McDonald, who's a fantastic writer who writes sort of urban fantasy and also does crime thrillers, one of the forwards to one of his books went viral recently because he was saying, look, I'm irish, I write irish, I do color with you and I use S's instead of Z's or Z's.

[01:03:06.020] - Mark
So just deal with it. And that went viral. That's gone round. You know, he is pushing the boundaries there. He's getting the word out there. But yeah, I think it's one of those things that drives me nuts because when I was growing up, I was bombarded with american culture. I would read Mad magazine and say to my dad, who's spiro Agnew? And why are they making jokes about him all the time? So my dad had to, I had to go and look this stuff up. I had to have this explained to me, all these american jokes, jokes about baseball and what have you. So all of that culture is pushed out. But if you try and get british culture into, and I'm not talking about the other thing as well, is you love posh british culture, you love Harry Potter because it's a boarding school and you love Bridgerton and what have you, because it's a fantasy thing of what you think Britain is like. But actually it's not like that at all. And so it's really difficult to get to convince. Now, the weird thing is I've self published the Woodville books in the States and they do very well because I'm targeting those readers who like my kind of stuff.

[01:04:03.330] - Mark
But when I presented them to us publishers, they were like, well, it's not the kind of british stuff that Americans like. Sorry. It's like what they do. It just means you're going to have to work harder to do it. And the thing you learned from marketing people is they like an easy job. They like to be able to go, oh, this is straightforward fantasy, or straightforward, if it's a bit different, it's like, oh, I'm going to have to work at this. Apologies to all my marketing colleagues who are spitting venom at me now. That's true. They know that that's the hill that I will die on. And of course, the irony is I'm writing this revenge thriller and if it gets published and it gets picked up by us publisher, we will have no choice but to go through it and change biscuits to cookies and all of that.

[01:04:43.390] - Sunyi
That's one of the regrets I have for book eaters, is that in the edits a lot of things are americanized. And I kind of went with it because I was under the misapprehension that I would be doing copy edits twice and that the UK version would change everything back. And it didn't. And it just went to print like that. And I felt really embarrassed because I did get some reviews of people being like, oh, you can tell this person doesn't really know England. It's like, no, I just take it out my hands. Things like small things like purse and handbag, right? And stuff like that. There were bigger things. I think I'd gotten a note where they're like, oh, maths just sounds weird in american. Could you possibly change it to math? It's like, no, because then I sound illiterate to the people here. I think it's not treating readers very well. Right. I think most readers can work out that a flat is an apartment and stuff like that.

[01:05:37.290] - Mark
It plays into this idea that publishers are gatekeepers, which I don't like. I don't like to think of them like that because they are the good ones are your cheerleaders, actually. And they do things really well, but it's coming the other way. I remember reading, I've gotten the name of the author, but there was a novel called Robopocalypse, which was kind of a world War Z, but for got me doing it now, but for robots. And it was a fun novel, but there was a bit set in England where a car drives into a fire hydrant and water goes everywhere. It's like, yeah, our fire hydrants all underground. And a good english copy editor would have gone, no, sorry, you have to change, you know, stuff like that slips through. So it seems to be a one way street. And that's what annoys me.

[01:06:19.370] - Sunyi
My favorite one is I had a note that said in Newcastle, in the original manuscript, Devon goes into a pub that's called the Greyhound, which is a place in. And, you know, the note I'd had from tor was, could you not change this to a more english sounding name? And I was like, but it's because they don't know that greyhound racing is like a thing here. To them, it's the bus company. And I did change at the end because I thought Americans are going to think it's like a bus pub or something. Anyway. Yeah, I can join you on that.

[01:06:49.330] - Mark
Yeah, you have to make those judgments. But I'd like to see that change. And the weird thing is, I think through Netflix, actually, through, you know, being able to watch pretty much anything from anywhere in the. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It will change over. Know people will kind of get used to not all. We don't all go to boarding school. We don't all go to public school. We don't all live in big country houses. A lot of us live quite normal, regular lives. And that's the sort of stuff I like to write about with dragons and.

[01:07:23.500] - Sunyi
Witches and stuff like, oh, thank you for that. If you'd like to take the chance, could you plug anything that you feel you want to showcase? I was going to say podcast. And remember, you've left it now.

[01:07:34.850] - Mark
Well, it's still going. Mr. D is keeping it going, bless him. And it's still there. The bestseller experiment and all those episodes with me yaking on for hours and hours and hours. But we do speak to some amazing authors. Each one has a different story to tell. It is essentially a great resource for any author out there. So do check those out. And they've got a Patreon and an academy as well, which is all fantastic. I've got the Witches of Woodville series. I'm working on the fifth book in the series at the moment. It's essentially take the last ten minutes of bednobs and broomsticks, a witch on the home front in England during the Second World War, fighting Nazis and other supernatural threats. And they're good, fun stories. I'm working. The end of Magic is out there now. I'm getting some new artwork for that soon, hopefully. And I'm hoping to publish the sequel, the end of Dragons this year, May, June this year, and there'll be a third book next year as well, so keep an eye out for that as well. And I've got a movie called Unwelcome, which you can find at the time of recording is on sky movies.

[01:08:39.030] - Mark
And so that's a really fun monster movie about a couple who leave London, go to Ireland, and discover they've got red caps living at the bottom of their garden. And we pitch it as a cross between Gremlins and straw dogs. Give you some idea. So it's like little critters. Home invasion. All your worst nightmares. So yeah, there's that as well.

[01:08:59.050] - Sunyi
You've been listening to the publishing radio podcast with Sunny Dean and Scott Drakeford. Tune in next time for more in depth discussion on everything publishing industry. See you later.