 Stephanie. You're now being recorded. Lovely, thank you very much. Hi folks, wherever you are, my name is Somnath Batabial. I am an associate professor at Saoas, the Center for Global Media and Communications, but that is not the hat I'm wearing today. I'm coming in here as one of you folks wanting, thinking about getting published in the near future and I'll tell you that story as we go along but our main focus of attention today is on Jack Ramm, my fellow panelist, agent and former commissioning editor at Viking. Jack will introduce himself and I'll tell you a bit more about me and why I am here and then we'll move into our question and answer session and I'll tell you more about it things as we go along. So welcome everyone, Jack over to you. Yeah, hi everybody, thanks very much for the introduction Somnath and thanks to Saoas I guess for putting this event on. I hope it will be really useful for everybody. So we were just talking at the very beginning and there's a kind of chat box so if you as we're talking and stuff like that if you guys have comments and things like that then do feel free to use that function but there's also the kind of Q&A box which we'll maybe get to later to answer specific questions that you might have about the topics that kind of come up through the course of today. So as Somnath mentioned I work in publishing and I figured I would tell you a few things about what I've done over the years and how potentially I guess that those experiences might be useful for you to think about when considering your own work and submitting to literary agents or whatever it is that you might be doing next with your writing. So after university which for me was at the University of East Anglia where I studied literature and creative writing I moved to London and I worked at the Eve White Literary Agency which is a small literary agency representing all kinds of different writers and various kinds of fiction also children's fiction and then non-fiction. After a few years of working as an assistant there and doing a lot of editing helping Eve who was the who ran the agency and was the kind of who was my boss I helped her sort of with the editing of particularly her adult fiction list which grew a lot in those in those sort of three or four years whilst I was assisting. After that I had my own list and was a kind of agent in my in my own right under the umbrella of the of the of the agency so I was almost like a kind of orbiting moon of the the planet of Eve White Literary Agency and I sort of specialized in in what we would tend to call literary fiction and I worked with or sort of discovered and helped to get the careers started of people like Daisy Johnson and Jesse Greengrass, a guy called Chris Power and then in non-fiction I worked with various different types of often sort of narrative non-fiction authors people like Damien LeBar who wrote Stopping Places and Darren Anderson who's recent work Tide Rack just came out it's not called that actually it's called Inventory now but it was originally called Tide Rack and and many others to boot. After about six or seven years working at the agency and about sort of three years being an agent and and for sort of being either an assistant or sort of a little of both and I moved over to Penguin where as a commissioning editor for non-fiction at Viking Viking is the sort of the sort of like literary but but but sort of chart focused part of of the Penguin side of the Penguin Random House group which is just a giant kind of company that includes lots of different divisions and imprints therein whilst there I I sort of changed focus I suppose as a as a literary agent essentially what you're doing is selling books to publishers and as a commissioning editor you're buying books the majority of the kind of work that I was doing didn't necessarily involve agents I would go out into the world and find new writers. My particular focus I suppose at Viking was working with often with academics for instance or experts in various ways and helping them to write books for a sort of general audience rather than for an academic or for a specialist audience. So during that time I worked with people like Iggy Pop the the musician and David Oman who is the former director of GCHQ the intelligence agency. A guy called Roger Kneebone who is an academic at Imperial in London who is a recent book expert was just published and I was there for sort of two years a big part of my job was commissioning but the other key part of my job I suppose was editing particularly because I was working with people who hadn't necessarily thought about writing books before or certainly writing books for a general audience. I did a lot of of working with the authors to sort of help them come up with feasible structures that they could apply to their books and just helping them from the sort of most macrocosmic editorial process i.e. making sure that chapter one, chapter two, chapter three are all on themes that sort of follow on from each other right down to the sort of more microcosmic line editing so making sure that sentences sound nice and compelling and have a certain aesthetic quality to them as well. After two and a bit well yeah I think about two years at Penguin I left and I set up my own business where I sort of put together the two roles so I do a little bit of agenting which we can talk more about I'm sure we will over the course of this seminar or whatever. I also edit for various publishing houses and also for you know other kind of what might be described as kind of content producers I do some work with Audible for instance the audiobook publishers and I also do a sort of hybrid version of publishing that I don't think anybody else is really doing where I'll work with a publisher to come up with ideas for books and then find um authors to write them and that's both in fiction and nonfiction so for instance with a more commercial novel there may be a good idea for it and I'll look to find an author with a reasonable level of experience to help bring it to life um or similarly in nonfiction perhaps there's as I sort of mentioned I was doing good viking I'll maybe work with an academic or something like that um to try and popularize their research um and in the agenting side I basically just work with stuff that I like mainly fiction and though it's quite broad um or sort of narrative led nonfiction for instance memoir or some kind of crossover type thing I like authors like Maggie Nelson for instance and I've recently sold a book to Chetan Winders um that's a kind of experimental nonfiction type piece so that's a rough sort of praisey of the last 10 years of my life and my working life at any rate and um my hand over to you Son. Thanks Jack wow that was fantastic I now have to match up and say why I should also be here co-paneling with you um so as I was saying I am I one of the hats I wear at Saras is as an academic as Jack was saying that he works with academics like me to bring out books which are which we are specialists or experts in in that particular subject but Jack and I met differently we met because of my interest in fiction uh and in writing um literary fiction I was part of the Jaipur Literature Festival which is one of the the largest literary festival anywhere in the world and I have been attending there as a panelist as a writer for a few years and we met a couple of years couple of years back Jack was it 2017 18 yeah it was 18 two years ago 2018 yeah 2018 January uh we met uh I was at a so I have published academic books uh with Routledge with um I have published nonfiction fiction with Harper Collins um which but for the last eight to nine years I've been working on uh what writers call there the big novel I started off uh on my own not knowing how long it will go on how long the research would be how long the writing would be and it ended up to be about eight years and I met Jack in Jaipur and we had a brief chat he was with Viking then and I told him where I was and I was feeling a bit lost after you know the manuscript which has gone up to about 250,000 words come down to about 160 uh so was a bit lost then uh I was in India for about a year on research and then when I came back Jack and I met and he was in the process of uh quitting Viking and setting up his own agency and I sent him three chapters of the novel like many of you will be thinking of doing and and we met after a month or so and Jack offered very kindly to take me on that was about a year back this last year has been tough we have gone through four drafts uh intense amounts of work completely tearing apart the fabric of the novel and putting it back together and as Jack said the final line edits which we have just finished and we plan to go out next week to publish us um fingers crossed so that is the story of how we came together and why I felt that I'm almost quite close to where you folks might be in wanting to think about publishing how to publish how to look for an agent what kind of publishers you would want to go through and so therefore what now I'll try and do is almost act like one of the audience and ask questions of Jack with the added advantage of having worked with him and um perhaps a few steps closer to being published than many of you would be so that's where I come in into this I hope that's uh clear if you have any queries I'll I'll take those questions or put them in the chat chat window and I'll see I'll try and attend to those um talking of I noticed that we have a question from Vidya and I suppose we're now in this sort of more conversational element I'll just go ahead with this yeah Vidya asks if there's an example of an academic work that worked very well as a non-fiction book could you please cite some examples it would be useful for us for most university students to understand how to turn an academic thesis into a readable work um you know well I think in a sense um they are different I don't think that I don't think it's they're a thesis is for such a clearly different audience and has to sort of jump through certain um specific hoops I don't actually know very much about academic publishing but as I understand there's you know there's a process that uh that a thesis has to go through before it can be deemed publishable there's like a review process and things like that and obviously that's not necessary for um for a more general non-fiction um perhaps it's easiest for me to talk about um say Roger Neyburn who I who I mentioned earlier who is an academic he's an imperial his research is um about education ultimately um and he runs an MA and he was a surgeon and he runs an MA in what he describes as surgical education which is basically looking at ways to teach surgeons and in particular looking outside of the field of surgery um to see if there is some kind of um sort of interdisciplinary cross-pollination and through sort of long years of teaching this course and publishing papers and stuff like that um he has developed a kind of idea about what it what becoming an expert um requires a few and so that was what his book was about um and you could you can sort of obviously look it up very easily it's just google roger neyburn experts is the title of the book um but I think that's a good that's a good example in the um clearly his academic focus is reasonably tight even though education is a broad subject he um comes from a specific background the the crucial um point is that he um has broadened his research for the widest possible audience by making it about expertise generally rather than about surgery um I can I notice there's a request for the author's name written out I don't know how to do that um how do I how do I write this a type message oh yeah no I got it it said that it was just been in my screen roger neyburn can I can I also ask the uh all the audience member not to ask direct questions in the chat function but put it in the q and a it just kind of probably is slightly distracting um is that okay jack or do you want this oh yeah otherwise thank you uh we'll keep attending uh so you're quite right I did send it try that panelists and attendees thank you very much I'm like not so technical um as you may have guessed at this point um jack when we were thinking of giving a title for this panel we said you know how to get published and yeah both of us felt that was a wrong question to ask so can I start by asking you why is the premise of this webinar actually a false premise why is it wrong to start there for a writer yeah that's a good question and I think also somebody else in the chat jasmine in the chat fox has also sort of asked a similar question what's the process that a person normally goes through to get published and what's the time frame like I think that that's similarly in a way uh it's a it's a it's a difficult question to answer and it also to answer it in in in direct terms by saying the process is this you do x y and z and it takes you 12 months um feels to me like a like a slightly piecemeal response and I think a better and more helpful response would be that the the um the most important thing um is that you have to write an excellent book and your energies and focus as a writer at the beginning of your career should be directed towards um writing I think as much as anything else and certainly worrying about what the publishing industry and people within it are um thinking and how they'll respond to your work feels to me um like it may well be putting the cart before the horse um I often talk about with my authors trying to focus on the things that you can control and chief amongst the things that you can control is the quality of your your work or certainly the amount of effort that you put into it um what you can't necessarily control is what will happen when you send your first three chapters as as as mentioned to a literary agent and if they don't like your book or don't respond to your your book again that's a subjective opinion of one person um and shouldn't be taken as a um as a as a as a sort of total response to the quality of your work the first person I think that needs to be uh to feel as though they have um that your work has passed a certain threshold of quality as you the writer um and so you shouldn't be too um I don't know too swayed by the opinions of others necessarily nevertheless of course we can talk further about what the what the kind of pipeline of a work is going from you the writer to somebody buying it in shop um and I suppose that that is um also then going to be the nature of today's talk but I'd also I would like to sort of it would be interesting to hear questions about uh writing as much as it would be interesting to hear questions about these um the nature of um of the sort of publishing industry and you know how to write a cover letter and things like that but but yet would you want to just since you mentioned it would you want to just uh lay out that the land what that pipeline looks like sure and then we so so at the very beginning of it is you the author um and book that you have written so let's say you um you you know have a great idea for a novel you go and you write it for however long it takes you to write 80 odd thousand words let's say a year and a half for instance at the end of that process um you may well want a literary agent that's not the only way to get your book published it should be said you can self publish your book you could tomorrow if you have written something that you um uh want to share with the world you can go on to amazon you can you can self publish the book it's it's it's not so difficult but the chances of other people discovering that self published book are reasonably limited without some kind of um you know marketing publicity and so on behind it and um I don't it's a lot of effort to go and do that yourself so a lot of people still um seek publication by uh a mainstream publisher whether that's an independent like Faber or Bloomsbury or a large multinational conglomerate like penguin random house my former um place of work um so to get often times to get on the radar of editors at a company like penguin random house you need the um services of a literary agent there I'd say I don't know the exact number but I would imagine something like between 50 or 100 literary agents they're not all based in London but the vast majority are um they're extremely easy to search for on the internet if you just type in literary agent you'll get pages of them um the major sort of companies include Curtis Brown Rogers Collaridge and white and so on so forth probably the best way to start looking for literary agents um that you think you might be interested in is to look in the back of a recently published book that you liked and doubtless the author will thank their agent in the acknowledgements so the acknowledgements page is a sort of right at the back of the book and amongst sort of thanks to you know husband and children and teachers and so on so forth there's often a note to the agent just search on the internet for that agent's name and their sort of page on from their company website will doubtless come up um you'll be able to see who else they represent and if you like some of those other authors too it's likely that um you'll find that there's some kind of um crossover between what you've written and and their text um the next step will be submitting to them most agencies ask in the first instance for um a kind of covering letter which covers like biographical information who you are you know any kind of relevant um experience or information almost like you would send a cover letter to a job um application so you know perhaps your university education if you're a student and it is relevant to the the book that you're writing um also uh I don't know like perhaps you've had a short story published in a in a in a journal or online or something like this you might mention that um they'll also ask for um a kind of blurb or a bit of information about the book and that's quite tricky I think for a lot of authors to do and maybe we can talk about that in more detail but the short thing to say about it is that you are attempting to give a flavor of um what the experience of reading your book is like rather than relating the events that take place there in um and finally they'll ask for the usually the first three chapters or if for instance you have extremely short extremely long chapters let's say the first sort of five to ten thousand words you send it off to them and hopefully you get a positive response back asking to read the full manuscript the agent will then read the full manuscript and all being well off the representation um I should also just add in at this point that lots of agencies run various kind of competitions um most agents are constantly on the lookout for people if you're publishing short fiction for instance in in journals or online or things like that or if you're publishing writing more generally um agents are looking for it in the way that um you know in the music industry A&R people go to gigs to to sign new bands something similar happens in in publishing too um and also publishing houses run competitions and things like that too. Penguin for instance runs a sort of scheme called right now I believe it's called um which uh is sort of a mentoring scheme for for young writers so there's lots of resources like that that you can sort of look up um and they may well help you get on the radar of either publishers or literary agents once the once you've secured representation sort of signed up with with an agent um your agent will probably work with you on the manuscript for a period of time this may be a long period of time like a year or something like that's me and you some that have been working for about a year and on your novel um maybe it's not very long at all maybe it's just like a very quick um few changes here and there it's different depending on where your manuscript's at and what kind of um work the agent sort of will tend to do some agents so will maybe do a little bit less some agents will do lots and lots um it's these are maybe things that you could talk about when you first uh meeting agents um and then they'll send your book to various publishers that they think will like it um so much in the same way as agents have tastes and specialisms imprints um at publishing houses and publishing houses themselves also do for instance um within uh the division of um of vintage at a penguin random house Jonathan Cape is sort of well known as a kind of very literary imprint um whereas Havelsteker does lots of work in translation and also some crime I mean different imprints have different sort of um focuses and your agent will be um well placed to know who at which different place is the right person for your kind of book they'll submit it hopefully um a sort of similar process that will that has gone on before in securing your agent will kind of go on again in a publishing house to secure you an editor your agent will represent all of your business interests during this time try and get a good advance for you and a good royalty package and that's the rough sort of um you know pipeline of getting your book to a publishing house though then be a sort of year when the publisher uh makes the manuscript into a book so that will include you know printing it editing it and so on and so forth um and and then you know sort of there you are you will then have your book out in the shops and in public so that's a rough outline of the of the pipeline uh thanks Jack I mean one of the questions which comes up and we have uh we had an email regarding this is when writer writers do want to get published very few writers just write we made to put it away the question which often comes is salability what kind of genre is working you know the fillers are working so when writing this cover letter and when writing what kind of book we are writing is it important to think through a genre or should writers think of the book they want to write or should they think this genre works so I'll write in that genre how you know given the competition given the difficulty in getting published how does one approach this what in what genre am I writing is it a question that one should think of so this is it this is the this we received a question from somebody by email before the event and this this is ultimately I think what she she was asking um I think that there's a couple of things going on here um firstly when thinking in terms of genre and uh writing a sort of pitch to an agent trying to secure an agent the reason that agents have put something on their website that says you know I do literary fiction or I just do crime or something like that is to really try and give a give a general sense of of what they're looking for I think there are very very few agents or publishers that are extremely explicit in the um in the kind of genre that they they work in the ones that are are as I say extremely explicit so for instance you know there are there are imprints of publishing courses that simply do say crime fiction or simply and and only do fantasy novels or sci-fi um likewise there are agents that only work in those areas so if you aren't um you know if you aren't sort of writing a fantasy novel then um definitely those people won't won't sort of work for you but in terms of the precisely what people are looking for I think it's maybe better when you're at the stage that you're submitting your your novel to various agents to go through that process that I mentioned earlier of looking in the back of your your recently read books for you know for the names of agents who might be sympathetic to whatever it is that your little project is um and trying them I think it's maybe good to think about the literary agents of London as just this sort of big machine and in a way it's a big machine that's sort of there to work for you um but it's maybe slightly unwieldy and mysterious you know how it works it's maybe slightly unwieldy and mysterious um so you just kind of have to experiment and that means sending your book to a couple of different agents if they look like roughly a likely bet if you think that in general they have done work that you've admired or liked um send this to them see what they say if they say no you know you haven't really lost anything um but what they may well say um is this isn't for me but I think it's very much for my colleague down the hall who loves this kind of thing essentially when we're talking about genre what we're talking about is taste um and people's tastes are individual and and subjective the only way that you can really find out whether whatever it is that you've produced is liked by somebody else's by showing it to them what perhaps you are describing is is um is a world which is very difficult to attain that you know you send it out and and agents get back to you most of the times most young writers are people who are starting out are very happy to get any agent any kind of representation and I say this from experience so for example um so about 12 14 12 years back when I first picked the first agent who said yes to me I said yes of course and and went with the person and maybe somewhere down the line I find that's not the person for me for various reasons and so it's a it's a difficult thing to be able to figure out who should be my agent some agents come um more flamboyant than the others um takes you out to the best places in town and who's you the other agent is quieter wants to work with you but you don't want them to work too closely because you like a hands-off approach how does one get a you know there's one thing of excitement of yes I've found an agent to a position where is this agent the right person for me how does one figure this out well I mean it's a personal thing isn't it like I think basically if somebody offers you representation you don't need to say yes and you certainly don't need to say yes right away you should go and meet that person and have a chat with them and make sure when you talk to them about your book the the things that they are saying resonate with you and make sense to you you know um if they if you feel as though they haven't carefully read it or comprehensively understood it or even haven't understood it in the way in which you want it to be understood then it may well be the case that um you know this person it's not a good fit for whatever reason I'd say that's quite unusual in some ways um very often it's the case um it's quite it's quite rare to to offer representation to somebody it's often an extremely long-term commitment on both parties sides so it's not something that is offered or entered into lightly on the part of the literature certainly it shouldn't be um so yeah I mean I I definitely understand what you're what you're sort of saying but in a way it's like any um relationship any business relationship if the if you feel convinced that this person um firstly has something that they can they can legitimately offer you and secondly that you will enjoy the process of going through that with them if they seem like somebody you can trust that you can talk to um and that really gets your work I think that you're probably onto on the right course yeah I think what I was trying to get at and and and what you're saying is that not to be too overcome at the first offer of representation and and take it carefully because it might not work as you say it's a it's a long-term relationship yeah probably but having said that the other side of the coin is you do not get too many people offering representation no it's it's it's right but I mean I suppose what you should remember if somebody is offering representation you know I I personally take a very emotional response with all of uh approach with all of my authors and I find it very um like you know we can get into the sort of detail and stuff that I go into editorially with with people um but equally there is an underpinning to the relationship which is that A I I I work on the author's behalf and B you know I must on some level think that there is at least a chance of the book being publishable um and therefore there's some kind of you know financial incentive um for me too and you know I think that you need to make sure that you um feel is to feel a sense of trust to to play something precious and you know your work is something precious uh it has a value beyond pure economics I would argue um and so you need to make sure that um yeah that the that you feel okay with the person who you're entrusting that um that power to I suppose there is a all uh successful authors have this remarkably remarkably similar story of oh I have had so many rejections at the start of my career this is a favorite trope which everyone plays on but as you and you've explained to me every writer is each and every writer is bound to be rejected by somebody or the other would you want to tell us a bit about the once it goes out to the publishing world what happens and what are the best possible case scenarios and the worst case scenarios so both moments of submission there's the submission of the author to agents and then the agent submission to publishes um rejection is an inherent part of the the process um maybe it's easiest for me to talk about um the rejections that I receive as as an agent clearly I I receive more rejections than I receive sort of um um acceptances for publication but then I send a book to maybe 20 publishers when I when I send it out and you know for a book to get published I only need one I would hope to have more because it's uh if there's competition between um publishers it's it's usually better financially for the for the author it also means that you have options so the the the process of trust that we talked about is replicated again when you come to meet your editor um I think it's useful to meet more than one um just so that you can have a sense of how different people would would work on the book and publish the book um the nature of rejection and the the sort of um the certainty of it comes in part through um I guess just like the um the the the fact of of publishing being a business you know a an imprint at a publishing house may only have a certain number of slots that they can feasibly publish into in a given year and they may have filled them off when your book goes on on submission they may have bought a book that's extremely similar to the the the one you've you've written in in terms of where they would go looking for for publicity and marketing and how they would appeal to to booksellers like Waterstones or Amazon to to try and get the book to the the public um simply put you know different people like different things and and whilst your book might be in the right area for for an editor that doesn't necessarily mean that specific editor who publishes in that specific area likes your specific book um I think a certain amount of uh resilience about rejection is really important for writers particularly young writers or or beginning writers because you're going to experience quite a lot of it over over the years and there's no um there's there's sort of no getting around it and I would say just on this point again an oft kind of told story is also that um you know 14 publishers turn the book down and one publisher took a chance and and then the book goes on to be a multi-million sort of um selling success and the kind of implicit um suggestion is that those 14 publishers will were wrong somehow um and that they made a mistake because of the inherent qualities of the the book there's no saying necessarily that those 14 publishers didn't recognize the inherent qualities of the book they just felt for whatever reason that they couldn't capitalize on them likewise it's not a dead cert that simply a book being placed with a publisher just because the book is is good or whatever will then go on to be a huge sort of multi-million selling success there's there's so many contingencies and there's also a kind of team of people who make stuff happen and that I think is where the sort of magic of publishing lies if um it was if the whole thing had been done by a different age and a different publishing team who's to say that the outcome wouldn't have been different as well um because the book would have looked different it would have it would have probably read slightly differently um there are all of these kinds of things too so it's not simply that um rejection happens because um publishers often make mistakes it's that success is a contingent on the way in which and who says yes and why and would you say that your agent would be the person best place to decide on which publisher simply because of all the contingent factors that you are talking about now certainly your agent will have information that you don't necessarily um and presumably more experienced particularly if you're if you're a debut author so you know a key job of your agent is to provide you with good advice and counsel um that's what they're that's what they're there for but having said that something that your agent doesn't know is how you feel about a certain person or a certain idea and if you feel uncomfortable with something that editor X or publisher Y says about your book or or or how they want to sort of market you or any any anything it's it's necessary for you to feel comfortable to say to your agent I don't like that idea and I don't want to do it ultimately it's you and it's your work and that's what you're you're the sort of you're the sort of last points of responsibility for all of that you don't need to say yes just because somebody offers you something you can always say no but two questions before I kind of open up to the house um one is uh you know most writers young writers almost always have a primary career and they're on the side and there are very few who know that they're born to write now um how lucrative perhaps not being the right word but how how tenable is a career in writing well I sort of think it depends doesn't it um you know uh just to I I'm not I'm not being um facetious or something when I when I say this but there are lots of different careers that have you writing yeah so um you know journalism is a form of writing lots of academics essentially make their career by being writers um I think there are there are lots of there are lots of jobs out there where the the the the sort of process of writing is a core component to them um and obviously people make their living doing that in terms of making your living by being a novelist and certainly in the early years it's it's it's it's unusual and certainly before anybody you said that they're going to publish you you know you don't have any income um agents the model is not that agents will give you a year's salary whilst you finish up your edits um you you will have to be sort of funding yourself in some in some way um I was once told by a publisher who is also a poet and a writer like Robin Robertson something that really stuck with me um which is that um if you're a writer who will will will never make enough money to to live on from your writing and poets I should point out um invariably don't I think you can probably count on one hand in the UK the number of of poets who solely exist through the sales of their poetry um he said if you if you're going to have to have another job um to keep yourself writing you should think of your creativity and your rightfulness as being like a well and um a job will um also cause you to put the bucket down the well and draw from those waters um so sometimes I think it's not always necessarily if what you really really want to do is write novels than having a job in which you're flexing your writerly muscle day to day um that takes up a lot of your time and intellectual kind of capacity and stuff like that isn't necessarily um going to be the best of you um certainly um I think that having a job in which you're able to take slightly longer periods of time out like a sort of summer holidays sort of situation may be may be useful for for you in terms of averages I think that the bookseller put the average earnings of a writer through this sort of publishing system something like 13,000 14,000 pounds a year um but I don't know if this is a mean or a median income because clearly there are writers who make you know six figure seven figure salaries likewise there are writers who who who make hundreds of pounds uh from their writing a year so I don't know exactly how that average is is is sort of worked out but if you think about it in terms of an advance let's say your first book gets you sort of 30,000 pounds that's roughly sort of 15,000 pounds a year over two years which I think is probably roughly about the time frame that you would be talking about from end to end right um there's another thing which uh I just might mention here and an editor at now at Picador Ravi Murchand then I said that do not leave your job the moment you get in advance you might not get it for the next one so for those of you who suddenly get very excited that that also remains um Jack there's a I also add one final point on this which is that um by and large writers um have to be out in the world living and experiencing things and doing stuff um and so a job shouldn't simply be seen as an obstacle to writing it should be seen as subject matter right okay um there's one question which uh so has been at the forefront of you know and uh politically so which is decolonization uh and therefore the question comes up is how difficult or how easy or you know how ordinary is it for a person of color to get published in the UK and the US is it more difficult I mean firstly there's there's a few moving parts in this uh question firstly I think in the UK and the US they're very different countries with very different publishing infrastructures in the US for instance there are far more um imprints that are explicitly set up um to publish say African-American authors and we don't have so many in the in the UK I I'd also so a caution against that necessarily being a a a good thing in general I think it's in in some ways it's a it's a really important thing but equally um simply because it focuses um attention on getting non-white authors into into sort of publishing houses but I think that there's something slightly troubling for me anyway um that they are the sort of ethnic minority writers are then being published in a different way to to um to to white writers um as I as I said I think that there's there are there are lots of reasons why um sort of specific and specialist imprints are a necessary um component of decolonizing publishing um but I think there are lots of other things that people can do as well people um specifically working within the industry um as if you're if you're a writer I think um that this it does feel to me uh I mean I've only been working in publishing for sort of 11 years 10 11 years and like that it does feel to me as though um we are in a time where big publishing houses um and right at the very top are making a concerted effort to address the the sort of pretty chronic lack I would say of um of ethnic minority writers um UK based and internationally um in UK publishing I mean and um so for that reason I think that there's certainly more opportunities than ever there's a there's a genuine and um and clear need for for for books from from non-white people um and I get the strong sense that things are changing um and so I think that I think that if anything you should be um submitting um with confidence and and a feeling of optimism I don't I should I should also say that I don't think that publishing is is in any way perfect and I don't think that it has um reached some kind of uh some kind of place where um where this isn't a problem I think clearly is a problem but um I think that there is some energy and goodwill and um actual concrete effort rather than just the sort of same old words and and and speech um to address the problem Jack on that hopeful note let's end this conversation between you and me and open up so um we have a few questions which have already come in do you want to have a look and decide on which ones to take and then for uh the house anyone who wants to ask questions now please start putting them on the Q&A I can't promise that I'll be able to take every one of them but we'll try and do our best given the time frame that we have yeah there's there's quite a few already have come through already in do you want to have a look Jack and decide on which ones to answer well let's just go from the top and work our way down yeah all right yeah and we're trying to be how much time is there we it's four o'clock I want to do about 20 minutes of this and then perhaps have a conversation Jack specifically on blurbs um writing that cover letter and title and just kind of end there okay if that's all right and if the questions lots and lots of questions come in though I I say that maybe we keep trying to answer them all okay fine fair enough let's let's start with the first one okay shall I read it out uh I yeah please please okay so hi thanks to this class I've just been funded to edit and co-author a book bring together other practitioners in my field this is my absolute first time doing something like this the book will be offering alternative ideas to Eurocentric psychology and decolonization do you have any tips and should I pub should I self-publish or go for a traditional publishing route where can I learn about the technicalities in the galleries e.g. if there are multiple contributors how to royalties if any etc work any advice to sign posting oh sorry any advice or sign posting to resources or anyone I could get mentoring from would be super helpful thanks in advance so funded to edit and co-author a book um of sort of various essays I think I don't know if this is maybe like an academic book or whether this is this is um this is an academic book it sounds like like that and in terms of academic kind of publishing as I mentioned earlier I'm not really I don't really know anything about it though I'm sure and some of you could maybe help out here but like I'm sure that there are resources so as yeah I mean so the sauce should be able to help in this and also you should be able to since you've got funding you're already in a better place than other researchers or or academics so you should be looking at traditional academic publishing houses um like OUP all the universities which publish can can route lurch so there are many of many of them and the best way to would be to send a proposal to these publishers in academic publishing in my experience of the last 15 years you do not need an agent and you can approach publishers directly but the first thing to do would be to give a brief synopsis of your project uh synopsis of the chapters would be good uh your career profile and you should be hearing back from them I mean mostly I've never had enough a query go unanswered from publisher academic publishers I hope that answers your query Jack anything else you had no other than uh there are there are resources for for authors and editors um at the Society of Authors always a good place to start if you have if you have questions if you join the Society of Authors they will look at all of the um they'll look through a contract for you and and they'll help you with legalities and stuff like that um so they're more for sort of trade publishing but um but yeah I mean a good place a good place if you have questions like that if you've been sent a contract say they'll they'll look at it for you right uh is there a topic that has been overwritten Jack so we create something more innovative um is that a right place to start thinking or uh poor that's an interesting question in in lots of ways I mean I don't so it depends really what you're doing I suppose sorry if that's a really sort of um lame answer but if you there there appears to be no slowing for the um the thirst with which people have for um you know crime novels say that there's an endless supply of them many more of them get published every year including by debut authors and they you know it's a it's a it's a huge sort of part of the um the market um clearly the the sort of setup of somebody getting murdered and then somebody else finding out who did the murdering um could certainly be described to be overwritten but I suppose um the evidence is that it can't be because people still want to to read that story I'd actually even go one further and say that people often people by which I mean readers feel a sense of comfort or in familiar stories too um however as as authors um I hope particularly you know young authors starting out you know I hope that um you have a desire to be innovative purely um because it's it's interesting you know the the novel is called the novel um that is to say that it it's supposed to be something new and um and different going back slightly to the the point that we were just talking about regarding um uh ethnic minority authors I think that in a sense there's an inherent interest in um novels telling stories about um ethnic minority people in the United Kingdom at the moment because they are underpublished so so yeah I would say that there isn't necessarily a thing there isn't necessarily such a thing as something having been overwritten um as long as you can find a way of doing it um that sort of plays to all of your strengths as a writer more generally I think we missed a question as well above that one do you think about that there's some that I feel like can it be a certain if one has a saleable idea yeah that's kind of the same trope what's the saleable idea yeah I so I mean one thing that you can do is think well you know here are five books that do vaguely similar things but slightly different to what I've just written and they all did well but give some kind of proof of concept right or there's some kind of evidence that people in general like this sort of a book but as for um this idea that you have a great story but it might not be something that publishers think can be sold to the audience again that feels to return to something that we were talking about really at the beginning of this um session I have a fear in some ways that until you try until until you have seen whether or not publishers think it can be sold to the audience you simply won't know so there's in some sense there's no no need to really worry about it you should focus on on making that idea into the best book that you can possibly write um regardless of of of your um sort of um preemptive concern over whether a publisher will be interested or not you'll find out whether a publisher is interested or not when you have a book that you can show to them we'll go one after this an interesting one I have a lot of ideas but I have a writing block any tips uh well I think all writers will have experienced um a form of writer's block in in some ways um and I think all writers equally will have a certain a certain time felt as though they didn't enjoy the process of writing I don't think writing is like fun per se if it's you know what I mean like it's not like fun in the in the way that sort of watching tv or something is is is an enjoyable way to pass an hour it requires effort I think the best way of getting out of a kind of uh a block is is probably the the most boring way as well which is to set a routine and stick to it um so if you have a great idea for a story maybe a way in which I often work with people is to set aside an hour a day and um maybe it's first thing in the morning or whatever it doesn't really matter when it is um the actual factor of that hour is a as a sacrosanct period of time that you work on your writing a way in which you can sort of start chipping away at an idea is to start off by using that hour to just write out the idea write out the idea in as much detail as you possibly can then break it into segments let's say into sort of beats of what the story is or what the uh what the sort of um idea um how you can kind of like break down the idea um and then in each of those hours over possibly a period of months even years you uh you try and flesh out those kind of headings if you like and slowly but surely if you turn up every day and do an hour you you will write a book but there's no kind of getting around the fact that writing is hard and takes a long time yeah may I come in here jack there um a couple of things I'd just like to say from my experience you know um having written a few books both academic and fiction and this particular manuscript um so I started writing this in about 2013 and my aim initially every day I used to write 500 words I mean make it a point to then some days I could write a thousand some days I wrote 5000 but a minimum of 500 words and as jack says within a year I had a pretty hefty manuscript I mean it's not always the best way because I found the the manuscript stretching 250 000 words by the end of that process so that was too big uh and you know it can go here and there but this idea of that you have to write every day is a very good one and I also come from a background of journalism so about 10 years of journalism instilled a discipline of writing an article a day whether it be 500 words or a thousand words so it's it's good practice even if you're not writing a novel or you intend to write a novel writing something every day is not will not necessarily go waste and writing various kind of stuff just do what would I say um kind of get your muscles ready for a big adventure and it is an adventure and the other thing is a quote from one of my favorite uh writers and Ernest Hemingway and I think many of you would have had this he says that writing is easy every day I sit at the typewriter and I bleed so it's not an easy process um and many people do not many writers do not enjoy the writing part of it so yeah should we move on uh yeah yeah so uh mr. Manik's question I think we cannot see messages typed we haven't typed much so we can move on from those um Navidif is saying hi I've been approached by a publisher to publish a book congratulations arising from a conference I just organized it will be publishing the papers presented would I still require an agent how do I respond what are the opportunities and pitfalls I should be looking for thanks can I answer this jack having done this yeah so Navidif um hello uh I have uh done what you are saying you are about to do a couple of times uh as a PhD scholar in sahas we organized the conference uh and got a publishing contract from Routledge and we published it together with Routledge bringing all the contributors one of the difficult things of that is yes you get the publishers contract and you send it to all the participants the most difficult thing was people come to a conference present a paper but to get them to write it get them to edit get them to publishable form uh is is the difficult part everything else is taken care of if you have a publisher generally and of course you have to know what kind of a publisher you haven't said that here but uh the difficulty you will find is in getting it into coherent form writing the introduction putting perhaps your own paper there and I've done this a couple of times uh in fact two two of my books have come out in with um Routledge in the same format that you are talking about and the most difficult thing was getting everyone together and to have a vision overall vision of the book so uh you you could say yes to the publisher uh get a time frame uh also tell your co-authors what kind of a time frame you've given uh when you expect the papers back then do remember that you'll have to edit them they'll be sent for peer reviews there will be loads of questions asked and you'll have to redo it and then send it back again and then you'll have to work with the publisher on the final final draft so it's a look it takes about a couple of years at the very least but congratulations on on getting a publisher that the first step is uh jack the next question is for you is there a platform to see publishing competitions for nonfiction not that I know of um maybe maybe you could try something like the Writers and Artists yearbook might have a list of competitions for nonfiction I think the Writers and Artists yearbook now is also online so you don't need to buy it I mean like when I first sort of started out with this big sort of doorstop like the other pages and I believe now you can just get it online um I would also imagine I would imagine that um a good place and I'm going to sort of again sort of my lack of technical expertise but I know that a lot of competitions are advertised through social media and so if you're following um places that say publish or work with nonfiction um in various ways you may well see them advertise that um right but as for as for a specific platform I don't I don't know if there is one I don't think that there is one uh it's uh just to let everyone know it's quarter past four we have got exactly half an hour we have to be out of this place by 6 45 I'll try and take in as many questions as I can the next question Jack is the process the same when you're interested in finding publishers for short story collections yes it is basically the same the only points of difference uh that some agents may say on on their little blurbs on their websites that they don't um they're not looking for short story collections they're not looking for short stories um and in general debut short story collections are trickier because the the market for them is smaller but it's not impossible um and indeed all three of uh three of my first deals when I was an agent at the right literature agency were short story collections for Jesse Greengrass Daisy Johnson and Chris Power so um yeah short short short literary fiction is um is still being published um though it is a little bit harder I would also say there are there are a few places sadly not that many that are publishing individual short stories journals and um you know literary reviews and stuff like that and that's also a good place to start putting yourself on the radar of the as the publishing world at large um in fact Jack may I just kind of ask you to elaborate a bit on this given uh earlier questions um there was a very interesting process in how you located Daisy Johnson and Daisy Johnson uh for those of you who might not know is the youngest shortlisted booker prize nominee um and Jack was her agent would he just want to tell us a bit about how you found her and how agents do look for people in convention areas and the second thing associated with that is when we talk about genres and what sells and what doesn't sell Daisy is not the most obviously selling uh author that one would in if somebody told me short stories about the pen I wouldn't probably jump at it but look at the mark it made because of spectacularly good writing so we just want to elaborate on this bit. Sure uh I mean um so the process was that Daisy was doing an MA at um Oxford on Oxford University's MA in creative writing I believe yeah it was Oxford um agents go to lots of those kind of creative writing MA's the UEA bath um there's there's loads now um and agents are sort of looking at all of the most of them will publish a kind of um like a little journal um that collects the the the students work and that's what happened here I read an extract of about I think it was about sort of 800 words or something like that I really responded to the the writing I wrote to Daisy I think she sent me a short story or two I I don't really remember exactly what it was but it certainly wasn't very much and she hadn't finished a book and I offered representation and then we worked together on the book that became uh Fen um that's quite actually a common way of um of things happening you know as I've mentioned a couple of times there are agents looking in uh in journals you know um that are published at the end of MA in creative writing courses but also most universities will have a kind of writing MAG of some kind uh whether it's online or or in print um or we'll have a writing society and um often agents are sort of looking at those kind of things there are also lots of different and sort of small um journals or or sort of literary MAGs that publish short fiction like Aesthetica for instance in the UK or the White Review there's there's there's lots um and yeah agents are also proactive they're not simply waiting for you to send them work they're trying to get ahead of everybody else and find people who are who are writing and starting to publish okay the next question is from Fatou actually sorry I would just I would just add one last thing there which is that um whilst it is great to be publishing um short fiction um if you are trying to work on a on a short story collection um it isn't always the best thing if everything has already been published elsewhere and is available for free because um you know there's some value for a publisher in the stories being original and exclusive yeah um the next one is on um do you have any tips for those of us who are used to an academic writing style that is writing an MA and PhD thesis and want to write for a wider audience can I start this one Jack yeah sure a couple of things Fatou one of the one point is that your MA and your PhD thesis can both be published I have had several students who have written excellent dissertations master's dissertations and I've aided them in getting them published in journals my own PhD thesis was published into a book form by Routledge it takes a bit of work to turn a PhD thesis into a book format and you have to give it about a year but it can be done it's best not to start writing MA dissertations and PhD thesis thinking you will turn them into books because they're two different beasts and should not be uh you know put together in the beginning when you're writing something else that is one but you are also asking a question which is about writing style and wanting to write completely different things for a wider audience now I want to answer this a bit because I have done both I have written academic books and I write for a wider audience through journalistic pieces and and novels they again you put on a different hat you forget that you're writing an MA and PhD thesis and you are writing whatever you are writing at that point of time for a wider audience and you do not necessarily think I don't know Jack is this a good question to think of imagining an audience you know is that a place one starts to think or do you uh for example I as a writer I tend not to at least in the initial stages for several months at a stretch to a few years do not think of an audience I just think of what I want to write and how best I could write it but it could be that you go down a wrong route and your audience has no understanding of what you're doing where does one start is there a middle point somewhere you know I think there might be so the novelist Stephen King wrote a great book about writing and he has a chapter dedicated to what he describes as his ideal reader and in it he says that he imagined when he was a when he was a young writer he would imagine the person who um he most wanted to read his books and who he was writing for and he sort of talked about he imagined say a healthcare worker or a teacher or something like that um on reading reading his his work like on the bus whilst commuting um and sort of rather happily for him this neatly described his his wife who was a who was I think a nurse and had a long commute so he wrote with his um with his sort of wife in mind and I think that making specific an audience into like an individual person whom you can imagine reading the book I think is is potentially useful um in and sort of following on from what you said that person can to an extent be you you know you can you are also I I assume the the writer of this question's name isn't available but I assume you're you're you know a reader too and you know what you're looking for in a book the trick with writing is to then translate that so that you're in a sense giving yourself what you want um that you feel is somehow not um not out there and I feel like um yeah I feel like a a great way of of kind of conceptualizing what writing is or or sort of good um writing could be is um to try and create the book that you would love to read yourself yeah thanks jack on that I'm going to skip the next question which is talking about the PhD process and competitive academia it's not the area where we are going to today uh with jack and me so I'm going to in a not really this is not the space I'm going to come to yes means question it's an important one that we have been talking about it what is it in the writing slash manuscript that catches the attention of an agent immediately well I think that that's slightly dependent on the agent though I can definitely talk about me um I um when I first open the document usually I'm reading on the screen when I first open the document I'm looking for um some kind of flair for language um this is in fiction I should be clear um I'm looking for some some way in which the actual writing um expresses a kind of sensitivity to the potential that words on a page um have um to convey ideas in in not simply um sort of clear ways but also in beautiful ways um after that I'm probably most drawn to character I look for writers who are able to make people that I think seem real and who I'm interested in and then from there into whether I'm sort of drawn into the world in the story that is being um portrayed as I say different different people are looking for different things but that's a at least a personal response cheers jack up I'm going to ask you to have a look at Simon's question Simon atkinson uh it's right down your alley as um when you were at Viking um which is non-fiction publication yeah Simon okay written an eight thousand manuscript of an academic book about yogurt that will have a large readership outside of academia I'm confident it's a good piece of work I intend to approach a publisher directly without an agent I teach academic writing in a university and I used to be a journalist but my qualifications are in subjects unrelated to the book topic I need to write a book proposal what is it important to include okay so um I'll try and keep this as clear as possible and sort of bullet points it so you have sort of obviously the title with the subtitle then a kind of one liner a one line pitch on what the book is if you like this is almost a an extension of of the subtitle perhaps the subtitle is a question this is a one line answer to the question posed by the subtitle um so for instance you you mentioned that yours is an academic book about yoga it could be that the subtitle is something to the effect of what is yoga and that one line is yoga is x y and z after that you need a kind of sort of positioning statement or a blurb this is a couple of paragraphs that explain clearly what the book is what it intends to do what its promise is um what the reader will get out of reading it non-fiction is quite different to to fiction in the sense that often a reader will come to a book with a specific aim in mind from reading the book they want to be informed about something they want to be entertained about something whatever it might be um they want to learn something so what are they going to learn you know uh what what is in publishing speak we would call that the promise what's the promise um that's I would say about sort of 500 to 800 words for maybe no more than that then you want a chapter breakdown whereas those first two things have been essentially about brevity um and concision here is where you have an opportunity to explain more depth and detail what the book is what the themes are that run through it so you will let's say you have 10 chapters you have 10 bullet points chapter heading for each one and then a paragraph or two paragraphs on each one what the chapter does what it's about what the kind of themes are um what that means for for the reader whatever it might be um then you would require an author biog so again all of the kind of relevant information you mention in your in your question Simon that you are um I think if I've understood this correctly you're not to say an academic of yoga um I think here is your opportunity in the author biog to um to give an explanation as to why it is you who is writing this book um perhaps you're in some way an expert perhaps you have a personal relationship to the subject matter in some form um whatever it is I think that that's a place where you can answer the kind of the the the larger question of why why you're the right author for this project um then I would include a section on competing um books and also comparison titles so this is a kind of place where you can say this book is like some other books but it occupies a slightly different niche these other books prove that there's a kind of um uh that there's a kind of um commercial track record for this sorts of book but this book is different in these ways um and then finally I would include a sample of of writing say uh 10,000 words 15,000 words if you've already written it you may as well include more rather than less but certainly no more than 20 no more than 20,000 um and it doesn't necessarily have to be say the introduction you could jump right in at chapter two if you think chapter two is really interesting in a way that uh you know the introduction most introductions look kind of a bit like each other um after that maybe finally just to wrap up the whole document I would include specifications so most um most um non-fiction sold on proposal rather than the full thing so it would include a projected delivery date specifications i.e how long it is um you know that that kind of thing so just the the real nuts and bolts stuff that the the publisher would need to know um and that's it thank you Jeff we've got just under 15 minutes um Vidya Venkat asks how can a Debbie author protect the intellectual property rights of the idea as well sending in book pitches um well there uh the first thing I would say is that in general um if if you're if if you're your your agent or your editor who you're writing to is um is a legitimate person which you can kind of see based on on what else they've done you wouldn't really need to protect your intellectual property rights because it it it wouldn't be in their interest to steal your ideas it would be more valuable for them to to work with you um however if it's something that you were genuinely very very worried about a thing that you could do is um post the the manuscript that you send in to yourself or keep a record simply if it's being sent via email that will be date stamped and then if at a later date you see that say a publisher has published a book with your ideas that have been uncredited you have a proof that you um send these ideas to them um at an earlier date to the book that they've that they've published and that would hold up in court should you decide to sue them um thanks Jack I'm going to now be selective about the questions because um so there's a question from Janthi what about people who want to start writing or who do start writing at a later age say after retirement is age also colonized within brackets or is it immaterial for agents and publishers uh I would say in general it's it's not a big deal um writing is is quite a nice thing in the um it's often um there is research on this but I think that the average age for a debut author is something like 42 so it's um I don't I don't think it's I don't think it's it's necessary and indeed as as with all things think if it's something that you can say that your your age and your experience has a claim on a reader's um attention for for whatever reason for instance I don't know whatever that might be but like perhaps you have been in a field for a very long time say with so lots of people asking questions about nonfiction you've been in a field for a very long time you're extremely experienced in that sense your age is very much your virtue I also think that age in um novel writing is often a a virtue because the process of writing good novel is sort of synthesizing experiences that have been had over the course of a lifetime and then turning them into into stories that mean things um so yeah I would say I would say again not to worry about it right next question ever handled a author with procrastination problems and what advice would you give that's an interesting question I have um I I have I think everybody um I mean everybody wants to procrastinate um because as as we were talking about earlier with the the person who mentioned that they found writing difficult and and stuff it is difficult and certainly it would be easier to to procrastinate than to not um I think that there are there's sort of it's a sort of twofold approach to procrastination one is shutting down your ability to procrastinate um and the other is um sort of getting into a routine that you start to find enjoyable so there's quite a lot sort of written about this in behavioral economics and things like that that I've spoken to with with with authors and that literature is pretty widely available so you can you can track it down there books about procrastination for instance um but certain obvious techniques include shutting off your internet keeping your phone in a different room and I would actually say that these are essentials you should just do it um it will make your life easier and better if you don't have the option to procrastinate you're less likely to do it um having a person um who keeps you accountable to doing something so for instance perhaps you have a friend who is also writing something you can um you can both say to each other okay in two weeks time we're both going to have ten thousand words or whatever it's going to be and um being beholden to somebody else I think for a lot of people uh is useful again this is one of the things that an agent can do if you if you have one you can you can set up a delivery schedule um you can be you can hold yourself to sort of smaller deadlines I think that smaller deadlines in general are a good way to um to um stop procrastinating there's a book by Anne LeMon and I think it's called Bird by Bird and she tells the story of her younger brother who has not done his homework and it is about a sort of he has to sort of write little pieces about garden birds and he is um he suddenly you know the night before he has to hand it in tasked with writing sort of 50 biographies or whatever of these garden birds and he can't he can't conceive of how to do it because it seems like too enormous a task and um his very caring father advises him to take it bird by bird and LeMon goes on to use this as a metaphor for writing which is that you have to break it down into individual and component parts um and then the other side of the the coin as I mentioned is um getting into a good routine that hour a day that I was talking about is is um really the way that you'll sort of start breaking the back of of say an 80 000 word word book um so yeah. Thanks Jack um can I also comment on this Jack um part of uh one of the things which I did as part of uh my writing schedule for this novel was um I used to write very early in the morning I used to get up at four in the morning and finish my writing by six o'clock and not all of you will be able to do that but it meant that I had a very clear head and but to be able to write do that two hours of writing what I would do diligently every night the previous night was um after dinner take half an hour out and think of what I am going to write in the next morning and whenever I have stuck to that routine I found writing became so much easier uh something happened in the process of thinking it through and going to bed and getting up in the morning and was just able to write um it the process was of writing was not as painful as it normally is whenever I haven't followed that it always gets more difficult so it could be some an example you might want to think of um following just thinking it out the night before what you will write in the morning um I have got maybe two more questions um question to Mr. Sumner is it common for academics to write fiction books too is it frowned upon or lauded at universities or academia how different is the thinking and writing process for fiction and nonfiction um is it common I I know many academic who have written fiction uh what I can say is that my academic work helped me think through my fiction in a far more coherent theoretical manner but let me give you an example um much of this book I have been thinking of writing you know everyone has a novel in them so for the last 20 years I've been thinking about writing a book about the small town I grew up in India um and my three or four friends whom I grew up with now everyone has the same experience you know they've grown up in big cities or small cities all of us think our childhood to be special and beautiful and I'm sure they are but if everyone of us wrote that same book it wouldn't work so I as I said I had this story I thought I would someday write but then post journalism when I came into SAAS for my PhD masters and a PhD I started to think through or get interested in more and more in the idea of nationhood and imagining the nation and how we are made to feel part of our nation and also being a brown person in London how we might be not to feel you know part of the nation or how you're alienated from the nation so this interest and reading a lot around it you know uh Benedict Anderson and you know the is a common name imagining nationhood uh was the theoretical position from which I jumped into this novel you know and the in fact the first book first portion of the book is called the nation state and but at three individual stories springing from this idea of belonging or not belonging so to answer your question for me it was not a hindrance at all it helps me formulate my central thoughts very theoretically and then completely try and move away from the theoretical position and try and tell that story and make it more accessible I've always felt that academia is not necessarily accessible to each and everyone and I think it's a duty of academics because we are funded by the state to make it easy and accessible and there's a lot of work now around it so and of course a lot of fiction work is becoming part of the academic field also academia is expanding in a in that manner and the idea of what could be what is possible what might not have happened but could be possible is becoming part of the conversation journal papers are being written and academic work is being done very much on the possibilities of fiction in academia so it's not as rigid as before it's not necessarily mainstream too but you know we balance and and you know it's a conversation which will carry on but you will see more academic work becoming more and more accessible as we go on uh jack I also think I just want to add to that like it follows on neatly from something that we were talking about earlier about how your day job shouldn't simply be seen as a hindrance to your novel writing or whatever sort of other writing that you're doing either for pleasure or for general audience it's also subject matter and it's also um hopefully um an influence and indeed I mean a lot of historians academics writing popular books um you know capital being one of the ones which you meet and you know historians like William Dalrymple writing narrative fiction um and narrative non-fiction so there is a lot of movement between the two but there are different writing styles but I say because academia demands a kind of rigor and uh not that non-academic books don't but there's a certain kind of prescribed format to which you write yeah they're different beasts uh I must say that it's now time that I have to have I've got a minute left I'd love to just very quickly mention this this next question on the on the list is are there organizations or projects or indeed individuals where people who don't have confidence can go for guidance encouragement and support also those from minorities within minorities and for the afraid of being known or identified how would you suggest dealing with this I think it's a really great question I know we don't have a huge amount of time um let's do it yeah let's attend to this question but there are but there are um various organizations and projects I I did mention right now which is um some a scheme that the Penguin Random House run I'm sure too that there are organizations at your university if you're indeed at us um though universities in general will often have a sort of writing club or or something similar um there are various kind of writing groups across um London and in in cities across the the UK that are all really accessible and really open um and there are um a sort of specific ones currently being set up um with a focus on attracting purely ethnic minority um members to deal um explicitly with some of the problems of confidence that you talk about um so yeah there there there are there are there are lots of different resources out there um and I really hope that you feel the the confidence to sort of make something of them because I recognize how difficult it is particularly for writers and particularly for young writers and it's the the urge that often leads people to want to write um is equally um comes from a sort of potentially a lack of confidence in other areas of your life or anxieties in other areas of of your life um but I hope that the process of writing also helps you to feel more confident generally thank you Jack um I'm very sorry that I've been told that this is it I cannot take any more questions so we have to end here Jack thank you for joining us Stephanie thank you for doing all the work in the background everyone who has come in I hope you've found the session useful and um yeah thanks for joining us hope to see you sometime and hope to read you all uh sometime soon in this world yeah Jack thanks very much again yeah thank you very much for doing everybody bye bye bye folks