As you all know, I’m moving on from BookBrunch soon – but there’s just time for three penultimate weekly interviews before the final one comes out next week!
“It’s in service of the public, ultimately, of people to whom books matter. There’s a difference between an elite achievement and elitism. We can get excited about the idea of excellence – by people who can do something beyond what we can do. Good books can do that.”
“There’s definitely a new breed of publisher emerging. There has been for the last 15 years. The challenge is moving your base from a print to a digital product, and the question is whether the digital is developing fast enough to counteract the decline in print.”
“If backlist were to disappear, that would be awful. You’d lose history, language – some beautiful language – it would be terrible. I think one can learn an awful lot from both fiction and non-fiction that has been written in the past, and that’s very important. The challenge for agenting backlist books is that there is so much choice out there. Trying to get particular estates and backlist noticed is always going to be difficult.”
