 Hello and welcome to Creative Women Creative Business feminist publishing design and comics a fantastic three day festival organized by the business of women's words research project in collaboration with the British library. I'm going to have to all ask you all to forgive me if you watched yesterday's events. Well, because the festival started yesterday because I will be slightly repeating myself, but I am compelled to do so because I have information that I need to impart. My name is Polly Russell and I'm the British Library partner for the business of women's words. I'm also the lead curator for the current exhibition at the British Library unfinished business the fight for women's rights. Because of COVID, it is not possible to visit however the exhibition will be open until August so hopefully when we're out of this hell, we will be able to open our doors and as many of you as possible will be able to visit. It is absolutely right that this incredible festival is being held alongside the exhibition at the British Library which so much celebrates women's tenacity ingenuity and of course creativity in creating space demanding change insisting on rights and of course in making a living today's event which is the second of our festival. How to sell a feminist story is with two real industry leaders and innovators crystal Mahay Morgan and Jane anger and it is chain chair chaired by Dr. Sarah I'm going to ask the person who is the research associate for the business of women's words. I'm about to hand over to her, but just a couple of housekeeping points. On your screen is a tab for the book shop, which lists all the publications for all of the contributors and speakers across the festival. would, under ordinary circumstances, link to the British Library's online website, but unfortunately this has had to close because of Covid, so instead we've linked to different retailers so you can still purchase people's books and check out their publications. I always wanted to mention that beyond this fantastic festival this week, which is running today and tomorrow, British Library also runs a whole host of wonderful events and I just wanted to highlight a couple coming up in January which are really relevant to the theme of this festival. We've got Alison Bechtel, the cartoonist speaking later in the month. We have the artist and writer Laurie Anderson doing an event for us and we also have the economist Mariana Mazakuto speaking with Gillian Tett on the 26th of the first, so do think about coming to those events later in the month once you've done this wonderful festival. Finally, please ask questions. We can't wait to hear from our panelists, but we really can't wait to hear from you as well. There is a tab or if you scroll down the bottom of your screen you'll be able to see a space to ask questions and I know that everybody would be really interested to hear what you have to say as well. So I'm going to hand over now to Eleanor Kerlis and I look forward to seeing you later on in the festival. Thank you. Good afternoon. I'm Eleanor Kerlis, a research fellow for the Business of Women's Words project and I'm delighted to introduce our two brilliant speakers for how to sell a feminist story. Our first speaker, Jane Anger, has spent most of her book trade career on the retail side. Starting in medical bookselling, she became a founder member of the legendary feminist Silver Moon Bookshop, which opened in 1984. She was active in both the Women in Publishing Network and the Feminist Book Fortnights of the 1980s. Having run a general bookshop and been a publisher's rep, from 1999 she ran academic bookshops for the University of Leicester. Since 2016 she has worked at Five Leaves Bookshop in Nottingham, an independent radical bookshop. Five Leaves initiated the restart of Feminist Book Fortnights in 2018 and Jane coordinates this national promotion for about 50 independent bookshops. Our second speaker, Crystal Mahe Morgan, began her career as a freelance journalist at the age of 16, writing for publications such as The Guardian and The Face magazine. At the age of 19 she became marketing manager for Rain Dance Film Festival and after graduating from SOAS University she embarked on a career within publishing firstly working as literary assistant at Peter, Fraser and Dunlop, then joining Random House in 2009. Her most recent role at Penguin Random House was online digital account manager where she was responsible for managing digital retailer relationships with the likes of Apple and Google. She resigned from Penguin Random House at the end of 2014 to realise a long-held vision of bringing fresh voices and new stories to market in pioneering ways. In 2015 she established the storytelling lifestyle brand Onit, a publisher and agency that publishes and produces powerful stories across books, music, art and film. This panel discussion is all about how to bring radical stories to a wider audience to gain insight into the workings of the book trade and how to transform it into a more inclusive, more feminist industry. Before I hand over to Jane and Crystal, I wanted to give you a very brief overview of these different but extremely complementary creative businesses. The feminist businesses of the 1980s such as Silver Moon, which Jane Anger co-founded, were enormously important contributors to the transmission of feminist ideas. Books and reading cultures were absolutely central to the development of feminism at this time, not only in spreading the word of feminist activism, but also in reshaping the literary canon, the publishing industry and even the way we use language. As Beatrix Campbell, a feminist activist, put it, we ate the literature that was pouring out of the women's liberation movement. We ate it. You just read everything and it impacted massively on your life. The original feminist book Fortnite was also established in the 80s with hundreds of bookshops and public libraries across the UK taking part and rapidly became one of this country's most successful annual book trade promotions. Although many of the feminist and radical bookshops that were established in the 80s wind in number during the 90s, last year 2020, independent bookshops in the UK somehow managed to increase in number and we currently have the highest number of independent bookshops in the UK since 2013. Five Leaves in Nottingham founded in 1996 is one of the stalwarts. One of the main challenges faced by feminist and radical bookshops has always been financial, how to reconcile profit with feminist purpose, how to balance the books without compromising on your principles. The same is true for radical writers, how to pitch and sell radical stories in a mainstream market. This is where radical publisher agents like Onit founded by our second speaker, Crystal Mahe Morgan come in. Onit unusually unites a publisher and an agency under one banner and nurtures the diverse talent that eventually finds its way under the shelves of radical bookshops. Onit does this by rethinking the economics of the book trade and offering greater royalties to its artists and writers and conventional agents in order to attract more diverse, traditionally marginalised voices. As a publisher as well as an agent they are able to support their writers all the way through to publication and are doing vital work to make an overwhelmingly white industry more inclusive. In the wake of the worldwide Black Lives Matter protest movement last year, Onit has been joined by other pioneering initiatives such as the Black Writers Guild which seeks to ensure that the whole supply chain is more knowledgeable about and committed to publishing diverse voices. The work of agencies like Crystal's and bookshops like Jane's is of absolutely contemporary relevance and together they support a radical book through its entire life cycle from its inception to its realisation and promotion and into the hands of the reader. Here's Jane Anger who will tell you more about the revolutionary work of feminist bookselling. Hi, thanks Helena. I'm going to talk about what happens in bookshops once a book is published but this is also a story. It's a story of how bookshops can influence publishing or how bookshops can make space for poorly represented or underrepresented voices and how we can make spaces for conversations which can also be stories. Once book is published it needs to reach its audience, the reader. Now publishers do a lot of this work but it's also where booksellers come in so I'd like to talk a bit about that, how that happens. First a little bit about five leaves and how we do things and then specifically about how independent booksellers worked hard on one particular project, Feminist Book Fortnite, a joint celebration of feminist writing with 50 other independent bookshops. So more of Feminist Book Fortnite in a moment. The first five leaves which was actually founded in 2013 by Ross Bradshaw, it's a radical bookshop open in a small alleyway bang in the centre of Nottingham. It's radical in the widest sense, lots of fiction poetry of course, sections on general politics, left leaning, anarchism, feminism, the environment. We've always had a Black Lives section and we've always had a very diverse children section. We stock books and put on events that seek to make the world a better place, a more just place. So if you could put on the slide of the team please, we are a team of seven people, mostly part-time and in a minute a slide will come up with just five of us, there we go. So we have Ross Bradshaw on the left, we have Simon Griffiths, Mayor Wilkins who was recently a judge for a Costa Poetry Prize, myself, Pippa Hennessey who does a lot of our design work and online events. We also have two other members of staff, Carl Davis and Dr. Deirdre O'Bairn. The shop is well known for in pre-COVID times for holding over 100 events a year. It's a small shop, a tiny shop, we can get in 45 to 50 people at a push. We have a very supportive and diverse customer base and we also use other bigger venues so if we find the bookings are going up for something we can hire a space that takes 100, 200 and we've done events with 300 and 400 people. I'll just explain a little bit about our approach. We're not interested in pushing to make sales, making a customer buy things they don't want but ensuring what we think is interesting. It's what we call curation in the book trade. We select stock that we think customers will be interested in. Often we'll try something on the basis of a conversation with a colleague or a customer. I'll give you a complete example of that. We started a section on autism because a few customers were ordering books on autism and neurodiversity. Then we did some events focusing on autism and they were packed. That's typical. We try to trust that there will be an audience and there usually is. We just have to make sure we promote it properly. Pre-COVID we were regularly full for a wide range of events. Rarely fiction though, which is interesting to some people, sales of non-fiction actually outstrip fiction and that's reflected in the range of our events. Now we do events online and it seems we have a YouTube channel which I'll refer to a bit more in a minute. Our job is to pick up on the interesting poet, the academic researcher writing an accessible book on women's labour, in that case Nan Sloane or on lesbian knives that was Jane Trace or on women artists and that was Griselda Pollock or on Black radicalism Cahindy Andrews and see if we can do an event. That's where we take our approach, we drive that agenda. So for example, we mused about why now there are less books on women artists than there were in the 1980s and then Bloomsbury decided to republish Griselda Pollock and Rosika Parker's book, Old Mistresses, Women, Art and Ideology. It's as important now that book as it was then. So we offered to do an online event which we did and Griselda was brilliant and that video has now been viewed more than 600 times. So that was our way of amplifying and contributing to a conversation that needed to keep going about the lack of books in that area and that conversation needs to keep going. Now, on to feminist book fortnight. I was in bookselling in the 80s and this is a story about a small part we played in some bookseller activism. So I was in bookselling in the 80s and the co-founder of Silver Moon, as Eleanor said, that was a feminist book fortnight and Sharon Cross Road when there were several feminist presses in the UK. To name a few, Virago of course, The Women's Press, Sheba, Pandora, Black Women Writing, Only Women and more. Some mainstream publishers were also publishing feminist books because there were a couple of key editors in place. But these were hard won gains in a predominantly white male heterosexual industry. There were at that time also the feminist book fortnight and feminist book fort that Eleanor's referred to. But it was overwhelmingly a very straight-laced industry. So fast forward to 2017, it's hard to imagine this now, as things have changed a lot in the last three years. But in 2017, myself from Ross Bradshaw, who owns Five Leaves and is also a radical bookseller from the 80s, found ourselves having several conversations about the lack of diversity in the books we were seeing published. Almost no books with children of colour in them, almost no feminist books, almost nothing by black British writers or any black writers for that matter. Stats showed that women, books by women, were not getting reviewed as often as those by men and that some writers were reporting that they were much more likely to get published if they had a female protagonist. And the heavy lifting on this, publishing the interesting stuff, was nearly always being done by independent presses, small independent presses. Now we knew that there was an audience for feminist books, especially among young women, teachers, librarians and others who had come into the shop. But it felt like most publishers weren't interested. At the same time as we were having this conversation at Five Leaves, voices were being raised in the publishing industry about the lack of a diverse workforce in the book trade generally and specifically in the publishing industry where the decisions are made about what to publish. There was the start of a debate. So we decided to make an intervention in that debate from the book selling side and also crucially for us from outside London. Remember there were no big budgets on offer here? I rang around other independent bookshops and radical bookshops and asked a question. If we started a feminist book fortnight for 2018 to celebrate feminist books, would you take part? And actually people cheered down the phone, not just radical shops but small independent shops that knew that their customers were looking for more than was being published. We were also looking to make spaces where conversations and discussions could happen. This was key to our approach and frankly it's the way a lot of booksellers work. It was really clear to us that customers wanted diverse children's books and also to discuss ideas and so we aimed to provide some forums for that. And of course we want to sell books, that's what we do. But when we discuss selling books as booksellers we often mean making the space for readers to find them, to find the place to chat about them. We were not really interested in jumping on a publisher's bandwagon for a big author although if that author is interesting to us we will do that. We were making our own agenda and that agenda was let's find and showcase and discuss the books that move the discussion on. In the end 52 indie bookshops took part and in 2019 we ran it again. It was up to each shop to do what they wanted so there was no central organisation of events. A window they could do just a window or an in-store display or one event or more. It was no big budget. Just my labour at Five Leaves so I coordinated the website and the social media and my colleague Pippa Hanna see designed the posters and Five Leaves put in 200 pounds of printing posters that we sent out to each shop. Three feminist libraries took part as well as a bookshop in Rome and a bookshop in Venice and I didn't get to go there. Some shops put on six events or more so housemen's and lighthouse and ourselves we each put on about six events. We ran an event with the local cinema there was a very good documentary about Ursula Gwynne, a film documentary about her. We persuaded the cinema to put that on. They had to move it to a bigger screen because they had so many takers so that was just one of the events we did in Nottingham. That again was about working with other people. All the shops, all the venues welcomed the dialogue that it provoked. It was a very, it was very successful in showing that readers wanted diverse books. And when Black Lives Matter took off last year lots of bookshops did displays as well as a way of being part of that discussion. Lots of radical shops have always had Black Lives sections in their shops but this was on a different level. So for example Woodbridge Emporium, a small independent bookshop in Suffolk, the owner got personal abuse for putting on a Black Lives Matter window and that needs recognising. Feminist books, lastly feminist books need not to be seen as a passing trend by publishers. It's happened before. Likewise we need to ensure that books on Black Lives don't become a passing trend in publishing. And finally coordinating feminist book fortnight really highlighted something for me. Our history often gets erased. There is no documentation for what a lot of what went on in the 80s. There are some archives and they're very good but they're patchy and they far from reflect the activities and networks that got things done and it is networks that get things done. It wasn't online then. Feminism was seen as a trend by a publishing industry that absorbed the ethos of the backlash and feminist books stopped being published for a long time. So I'm really conscious of what's going on now could easily be forgotten or unhappened. So reflecting something Nan Sloane said at an event at Five Leases, women curate your archives. Don't throw it away. Men keep their archives. We need to make sure we keep ours. The programme of events that bookshops put on in 2018 and 2019 gives you a very good snapshot of a little bit of bookshop activism in this debate. If you're interested in seeing the range of events and who participated, the 2019 programme is up on the website. Go have a look and I'm happy to answer questions at the end. But here is just a few slides of some of the 2019 feminist book fortnight events. Thank you very much. Thank you Jane. It's fascinating to learn about the reinvigorated feminist book fortnight. Now I'm going to hand you over to Crystal who will tell you more about her visionary agent publisher Onit. Hi thanks so much. It's so good to be here. It's so inspiring to hear Jane speak about the work that's been happening for a long time and continues to happen. I think there's so much alignment with what Jane's doing on what so many independent medical bookshops are doing and what we're trying to do at Onit. By way of backgrounds in terms of where the vision came from or how it all started, I worked in mainstream publishing for maybe 10 years. Part of that was at a literary agency, mainly within publishing. I was really frustrated. I was really frustrated. So this is, we'll talk about 2012, 2013, 2014. I was really frustrated with just the lack of voices that were coming through, something that Jane touched upon, the lack of representation in many different forms, whether that be race or class or gender or across the board, there was just such a lack of certain voices coming through. And the result of that was twofold. There were very talented writers who were not being given opportunities, even though our culture and our society would have been richer if their books were out and audiences were being ignored. And I think there was whole audiences. I sat in many apposition meetings, for example, and really interesting books would come into the meetings or things that I found really interesting. And you could see by the way they were being discussed that there was an assumption that there'd be no audience for books like this. And in that sense, they wouldn't be commercially viable. And so therefore there'd be no need to invest in them. And you could see this kind of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy almost, because the way a lot of acquisition meetings work within publishing is you look at comparable titles. So you're deciding whether you take on a book, a lot of mainstream publishers think, okay, what other books like this have sold well? And if they've sold well, then maybe this is something worth us taking on. So I started to see lots of patterns forming in terms of the output and the things being published are not published, but also the audiences that we're being catered for. Alongside that, and again, something that Jane touched upon is the workforce within the industry. Because then I started to think to myself, why is it that this is the case? How have we got to this situation when we live in such a kind of eclectic, rich cultural kind of society? And then it was the workforce. The workforce was very monochrome. It was very similar in the people that were not only in the industry, but then also progressed, say, to the boardrooms and the kind of decision-making kind of roles. And as someone who's very not traditional publishing in so many ways, kind of British, Asian, working class woman, very outspoken, very kind of confident in myself and where I come from and not wanting almost to change that to fit in, that was something that was not kind of very publishing and not something that publishing was used to. And I think now we're very lucky in that the conversation around diversity and representation and the need for it and the importance of it has moved on quite a lot than, say, 10 years ago. And there's more of an understanding or at least more of a mainstream understanding that that's something that needs to be addressed. But I think probably, as Jane has experienced previously, it was something that was very much in the sidelines. It was something that was very much a marginalised conversation as opposed to something that people thought everyone needed to be part of. So all of these frustrations essentially led me to feel like, well, it's not working in the places that I am. So let me step out and let me try to make something work in my own vision and in my own kind of understanding of what's going to take our British publishing industry and therefore society to a better place. So I set up Onit. I co-run it with Jason, so whereas I come from a publishing background, Jason comes from a music background. He was in a UK hip-hop group in the kind of 90s, late 90s, so what he'd call a lifetime away. But he very much comes from that music background. So when we set up Onit, we decided we wasn't going to call it a publisher or a record label or any particular label. It was just going to be a storytelling lifestyle brand and the idea would be that stories are at the heart of it and however those stories are told, whichever medium, whichever industry, whatever makes the best sense to tell that story, that's what we're going to do. So in setting ourselves up like that, we became very open in the ways we could release stories and engage with audiences. And for us the key thing is always artists and audiences. All the kind of middle industry staff were less kind of interested in, in a way, like we just want to connect great stories to audiences who want to kind of read and engage and kind of consume those. So that kind of created lots of opportunity to work in very different ways to traditional publishing in the sense that when we launched books, for example, we do it for an event and our events would be very different. So rather than what I've been used to in terms of a Waterstones event with some cheap wine and, you know, two hours and we mingle and there's like speeches and a little clap at the end, we was like, actually, how can we get a whole new audience to books? Because if there's certain audiences who haven't been engaged in books previously, that has nothing to do with the audiences. That has everything to do with what's coming out of the industry. And not only what's coming out of the industry, but the way it's coming out. So we didn't necessarily want to try to get people into spaces that they weren't comfortable in. So there's loads of people, you know, even some of our writers in the past have said, I'm just not comfortable walking in something like a Waterstones or a Foils or a bookshop environment. It's not something I've grown up with. It's not something I'm used to. It's not something that I would choose to do if I had a day off a spare time. So we started to think about how can we take books to them and how can we take conversations to them in a way that is within their comfort zone and they would find enjoyable and choose to do. So our first launch, for example, our first ever book, incidentally it was in 2016 and it happened to be the only book published by a Black British debut male novelist in 2016, which is kind of crazy. And it's crazy that it's coming from us, a small independent publisher with no budget as our first book. But what we did was we did an event at the Hackney Empire, which is a theatre in East London. It seats 1,300 people and we sold that out and we sold that out because we didn't market it as a book event. We marketed it as an event. It had hip hop artists, it had poets, it had musicians, it had comedians. It had people that a wide cross-section of society would be interested in coming to see and often that's the reason they bought the ticket. But when they turned up they realised that actually it's a book event and it's a book event. It was a hardback kind of novel debut fiction and we sold over 600 copies on the night as well as selling out a 1,300 capacity venue. So I think that's a really interesting insight into the fact that all of those acquisitions meetings that I've sat in where people are like there's no audience for a certain type of book, this isn't going to be commercially viable, this just isn't worth our investment. That event actually in that publication just dismantles that whole way of thinking and all of those assumptions that I've been hearing for so long within my career. And then from that we kind of developed. So we did events, we did kind of multi-media digital books which had songs in them. We kind of really pushed the boundaries of what storytelling was and how you could release stories in different ways to engage new audiences. Maybe about two years ago now we set up the agency side of the business that happened very organically. It happened because where previously we've seen a gap in the market in terms of publishers publishing kind of represented voices in interesting ways that were attracting new audiences. We started to see that actually there were really kind of veteran writers who have been doing it for a long time who are kind of such important parts of our British literary canon but couldn't find agents that they felt understood their editorial approach wasn't trying to make them write about saris and curry if they was Asian for example or wasn't trying to make them tell just one narrative. For example a slave narrative if they happen to be a black British writer or a black writer. So we started to see that actually there was a real lack in terms of representation where there was people who both understood the editorial aspect of what writers needed but also understood the terms the negotiation the business and and kind of being able to get them the best deal and marry in those two things which essentially is what every writer needs in an agent. So that happened very organically. Our first client was Claudia Newland who's just had a book published called River called Time and it's a sci-fi fiction which is set in an alternative world where slavery and colonialism never happened colonialism never happened and it's really interesting because he's actually he started writing this book about 18 years ago and it was essentially no draw for 18 years not for lack of him trying but because he couldn't find the right agent because he couldn't find the right publisher and a lot of the feedback he was getting is this is not how sci-fi is written or if you're going to write a book why don't you write a book in this genre. So he previously published a book called The Scholar that was his debut it's a pioneering kind of cult classic it was one of the first kind of black British books where you saw British kind of slang and you know kind of lingo and dialects and authentically represented by a writer who came from the world that he was creating and it's really interesting that what his book does is as a sci-fi book it redefines who can write sci-fi how sci-fi can be written and who sci-fi is for and I think that very much defines what we're trying to do and why we feel it's important for us to exist and kind of push boundaries. As an agency we work across books obviously but also film and TV and many other areas so going back to that idea that it's just storytelling at the heart of what we do and because we've always been set up to represent eclectic verses diverse voices and I say diverse in the kind of most diverse sense of the word diversity I think sometimes when we when we use these phrases and these labels we start to think of them in very restricted ways so you know diverse in publishing comes synonymous with race but actually there are so many other aspects of diversity which have been neglected we've heard from Jane for a long time and you know class is a real issue I mean in terms of me trying to progress in mainstream publishing a lot of my barriers were probably because I came from a working class background as much as it was that I kind of I'm not white you know I'm not a man or I'm not so there's many areas that are kind of neglected and when we think about diversity we need to think about it in the in the broader sense and of course excuse me of course like women women voices and and women's voices again not being restricted to certain stories or within certain genres is something that's always been an issue just like in a way you know women in boardrooms is it part of only its existence in the fact that it's a black and brown owned business with myself and Jason the fact that there's a female owner co-owner you know these things are important because going back to the workforce if we have eclectic workforces with people and owners and and decision makers that's going to affect kind of the output that's coming out so I think in terms of female voices and feminist voices that's also something that's often being neglected and I just wanted to share maybe some of the the voices that we have published or we do represent that we're very proud of and hopefully gives you a sense of kind of the very different kinds of voices we work with but also the different ways that we work so if we could go to my first slide um so MC Angel is an amazing kind of inspirational woman so she's a very uncompromising white working class queer voice um she's written her memoir about her struggles really growing up in poverty on a council estate in Camden to Catholic homophobic parents as a young lesbian trying to find her way in the world and I think not only is she and herself a powerful kind of inspirational story but she's also a brilliant writer and she's empowering and I mean one thing that I would say about all of our writers is they're very political but not in an overt sense they're political in the very personal way so in the sense that just their existence and the stories that they're telling make a difference to the world um and if we go on to the next slides you can see some of the different ways that we've worked with her so she's actually an MC she's kind of a hip hop MC and a poet that really lent itself to doing lots of live events with her lots of kind of interesting audiences coming to those events again not necessarily to to have a book event but to kind of just experience kind of music and poetry and comedy but then through that finds her book so actually this is just different examples this is some photos from one of her events um which you can see kind of was set up more as a music concert to be honest then a book event ify adanuga is someone that we've recently published and in many ways the opposite end of of the scale she's kind of an immigrant mother who's come from Nigeria water on Nigeria she's raised um four children who have been dubbed some of the most influential british creative so um her eldest son Skepto won the mercury music prize um and she just again is a very powerful feminist voice one that probably we're not used to hearing especially when we're talking about diverse stories recently we hear them from second generation perspectives but not necessarily that first generation who came over because within publishing if you're over kind of 50 you can't have a debut kind of book because you know you have to of course be 21 or 22 to do that so again with us publishing her it's to say that voices are valid in many different forms and our pre notions of a debut having to come from a 21 or 22 year old kind of doesn't make sense because sometimes you need to live and have those experiences before you can kind of communicate those in powerful ways through books so that's just some of the press that she got her studio we've published an art poetry book with her and she's very kind of interested in empowering positive images of young black women and again a very different end of the spectrum to the others in the sense that those are memoirs this is an art poetry book so different genres different formats and a different voice within feminism because it's not a monolithic kind of one one idea one ideal fits all and again these are some of the events that we've done with her on the next slide you can see some of her artwork which has very positive images and through her art raise many kind of interesting discussions the Selena Godin a feminist place a poet someone who's been in the game 20 years is publishing her debut novel Mrs. Death Mrs. Death at the end of January and she imagines death as a working class black woman and through her book she she's exploring that erasure of voices and the people that you don't see you know we imagine death as a man because everything is imagined as a man whether good or bad or you know and she's actually trying to address what it's like when you re-imagine what things can be and again she's done many interesting things and then finally if we flip through to some of the last slides Rose Cartwright so talk about diversity for us like mental health is part of a diversity conversation that often is ignored and Rose wrote a really powerful book called Pure which was about a form of OCD which is experienced through intrusive sexual thoughts and it's an uncommon form of OCD but a very kind of a very serious one that many people suffer from and it took great courage for her as a young woman to say this is something that I suffer from and I want to talk about and I want to open a conversation about to make sure there's other supported young women so hopefully from that you can see that even within representation and diversity we try to be as diverse as possible and it's just really important for us to build on the work such as Jane and such as so many of our publishers who have gone before us who often aren't recognised or aren't sung about but should be because we're not reinventing the wheel here we're just contributing to a long line of history of people fighting for more radical voices to be heard. Thank you. Thank you Crystal. I'm going to open up the floor to discussion and questions from the audience we've already had quite a few questions come through so thank you keep them coming we really want to hear from you we've we've had some some great feedback as well somebody's saying that's incredible five five leaves books that's a comment for you Jane I was going to kick start with a question of my own before moving through some of these audience questions and this is both for Jane and for Crystal I was I was going to ask you how you manage a marketplace which can be so unpredictable and Jane you touched on this and talked about passing trends and Crystal talked about this as well how do you sell books without resorting to to stereotypes? Should I go first? I don't think we need to resort stereotypes I think what we see sometimes when we get the books from publishers is that they will kind of slot it into a genre or a stereotype and give us a reference we kind of tend to look at it afresh and think you know who will want this book and we'll take a punt and even if something doesn't fit into something we'll take a punt and if something doesn't fit in a shop in a bookshop section and that's always an issue for booksellers there's something if something's crossed genre where are you going to put it? On the table so if you put it on the table the person who needs to find it will find it and then you'll find that a book you didn't even understand yourself and you're not quite sure what it's about put it on the table it'll keep ticking over and then eventually you get to learn more about it so I think inevitably there are stereotypes but but I don't think that the writers that we are interested in or the writers we stock or our customers are looking for those stereotypes really I think they're they're looking for something interesting to read. I think for us because we think so much about audience and and writers and then try to just be all of those middle things in between we we go direct you know a huge part of our sales comes through our direct website or a huge part of our sales comes through hand-selling at our events where we've got audiences of 600 700 people where we do work with bookshops is always the indie bookshops because they're much more dynamic they're much more forward-thinking they're much more about curation and they understand audiences in much more savvy ways but essentially we never trouble ourselves too much with the things that currently exist and the structures and the the routes to market that currently exist because traditionally they've not always worked so we just really think about creating our own routes to market whether that be through events our online website or or partnering with the independent bookshops who are forward-thinking enough for that not to be an issue for. Thank you I've got a great question here from Claire who's asking how feminist businesses but I think we could also include yeah radical businesses under that rubric manage competition in a market so a similar question I guess but slightly different and Claire asks does competition sometimes help even feminist or radical businesses improve? Yes I'd say yes there's always competition and five leaves is deliberately cited within five minutes of waterstones we wanted people to be going able to go from one to the other and they do competition in the sense of fair competition is fine so we could look at for example you know when Amazon discounts books that's not fair competition so that kind of competition that was seen as a major threat to the to booksellers for a long time but what's happened is actually more and more people are coming to actual bricks and mortar bookshops and that the old adage of use it or lose it is very much sunken with the publishers and that kind of easy trope that the bookshops are dead is clearly been disproved in the last five or six years you know we are thriving so it's more I find the lovely thing about the book industry is the corporation not the competition it's and if you talk to people in other industries they're always amazed by the amount of cooperation between seeming competitors that we we are a cooperative industry a lot in the way we work and I agree I think healthy competition is a good thing I think when that's balanced with healthy cooperation that's an even better thing for us personally we're a hugely commercial business sometimes I feel that the conversation about having kind of eclectic voices more representative voices is tied in with somehow it needing to be charitable and that's not the way we personally see it where we're hugely commercial and there's no reason why we shouldn't be because we publish incredible voices which stand up against any other ways to have huge audiences which have universal appeal and for us it's never about marginalizing us in any way whether that be creatively or commercially so we're hugely ambitious we're hugely commercial we never want to be the only independent publisher publishing the types of voices that we are or just independent publisher at all if there's other brilliant independent publishers doing what they're doing and keeping us on our toes and likewise us keeping them on their toes for us that's healthy competition because everyone will benefit in terms of the stories that have been released and the way they've been released so healthy competition is always a good thing for us. Thank you both for speaking to that with such energy I've been really struck by like your shared drive to share stories with audiences I think it's brilliant so we've got we've got a great comment which I just wanted to share so I already shared a comment for Jane and Five Leaves this is from Amy Rack who just wanted to say that I come from a poetry background and absolutely love MC Angel and Selena Godden Selena particularly is an absolute legend and I'm totally delighted to find out about Crystal's agency owner great work I'm going to be following everything you're doing thank you for a great speech so a bit of feedback there and then I was also going to ask a question from Linda again to both of you but I guess this is maybe slightly more tilted towards Jane but I'd be interested to hear Crystal's take on this as well from what you can see in your sales do you think non-fiction is the best way to represent voices that are not heard rather than fiction? If you look at sales non-fiction outstrips fiction but is it the best way? I'm not sure I've heard Elif Shafak speak very eloquently about the importance of telling different stories and she does it through fiction and her that is so important to get people to understand people that are different from you and writer after writer and reader after reader has said that so in terms of value I think it's equal in terms of sales I have to say that for us non-fiction well it's true in the industry actually everybody talks as if the industry is about fiction it's actually non-fiction outsells fiction all the time so it's whatever root the reader wants and I think picking up a bit on what Crystal said you know we've recently gone back to having a science fiction fantasy section that's a great way to explore lots of ideas and it's been traditionally explored by people like Ursula Grinn and lots of different writers have explored that for different realities and therefore a route to making change. Yeah I think back to the idea of storytelling first and audience first and I think any blanket statements from our perspective is never something that we want to adhere to I suppose traditionally speaking non-fiction outsells fiction in that sense and you know that's that's almost considered a safer market then fiction which maybe traditionally has been a smaller market but in terms of our books personally we can't really divide it in terms of non-fiction or fiction and you know like I say we've done art books and we've done photography books and we've so it's very much about I think how you package something and how you deliver that to an audience that is the audience for that book and I think anytime we get into kind of ideas that this is going to sell better or this is going to be the better way to tell a story we're almost going down the slippery slope because each story each or fight each audience in its own merit. Thank you Crystal I've got a question for you from Marta. Do you have any advice for an aspiring radical indie publisher and fellow SOAS graduate? Yes like please exist we need you. I think it's really hard it's really really tough if you're going to get into it like know that know that it's it's the most rewarding thing in the world and every day I wake up and I'm part of something that I feel is is really trying to make a change even if in a very small way but with those rewards does come a lot of kind of pressure and a lot of burden and in many ways we do have to try to exist in some kind of structure that is already existing and often there's many barriers and you know whether that's through distribution whether that's through press whether that's through all of the things that as a publisher you need to plug into often it's much harder than independent publisher first but then particularly as a radical independent publisher and what you often find is there are diluted versions of what you're doing or the stories you're telling or the voices you're representing which people will find more palatable and therefore promote more so I think you have to have a very thick skin but having said that it's the most rewarding thing in the world so yeah please do it get in touch like we the more of us that exist I think the more we can turn the dial within the mainstream because as Jane said earlier it's always it's always been the fringes whether it's independent bookshops independent publishers that's always where the real work the heavy liftings being done and then over time that kind of filters in and feeds through to the mainstream and then we turn the wheel again and we come with something a bit more radical so so yeah it's tough but it's worth it and we need you. It's brilliant that's not to feel like I want to go into publishing. I've got a question for Jane this time this is from Jing who says I was really interested in your point about archiving is oral history a good way to capture the history of women in the radical book trade? It is and I find myself at an age where I've been approached now I am a bit of history I've done some archiving of my experience in the 80s so for instance there's a very good archive oral history archive been done by women in publishing which which is many voices from that time and the kind of campaigns and the differences we were trying to make then and if anybody's interested in hearing that it gives a very good shot of the kind of things we were trying to achieve then and what what individuals life experiences were within that and I have other friends who are ex booksellers who've been interviewed for various oral history projects and I know that a lot of that is under the aegis of the British Library so that's very important I think also there's a there's a become aware recently when somebody talked to me that there's a very good archive of a lot of feminist publishing stuff at the women's library at LSE and that's another important archive but there is a there is a lot missing so the oral history is great I had to say that when I was being interviewed I didn't know I forget a lot though you know so you need to keep having the conversations because it makes you remember more of what went on and a lot of it is not searchable on the internet so it's it's really important the women publishing archives a really good one to look at Thank you Jane um yeah I like that idea of oral history as an ongoing process and that's also really interesting the way that that yeah conducting oral histories can actually get start memories flowing and kind of yeah create history in that way um I've got another comment to share with you um this is from Anna Mota I'm just saying thank you so much for such a brilliant presentation from all um thank you so much for this opportunity I just thought I'd share that um I've got a really interesting question from uh from Lizzie who's asking what would you class as a feminist fiction story is just having a strong female protagonist enough or should feminist ideas weave deeper into the story um I'm going to sound like a broken record I don't have a predefined definition of what a feminist story is when I see it and I read it and I feel it I know it I think saying it's just about who writes it or it's just about what's written or it's just about whether there are ideologies in it or not you know to me that just doesn't ring true I know it when I see it and I don't have any predefined notions of what it is before before I see it I agree absolutely it's gone yeah great um I think maybe we have room for one more question and then I'm going to have to wind up unfortunately which is a great shame because we do have more questions than I have time to ask and I'm really sorry if I haven't got to your question um but I guess maybe a kind of yeah a round-up question would be good at this point I just wanted to ask you both and I think I know what the answer is but be great to hear in your words do you think the marketplace can be a place for justice and change um I don't think it's it's whether it can be I think it should be I I suppose it depends what you mean about marketplace I think from a commercial point of view commercial things are commercial things but I think what sells and what people are interested in are things that reflect our experiences and you know whether that's through escapism or whether that's through reality I think the the power of storytelling is to connect to our humanity in whichever form that is so I think commercial decisions should never be based purely on kind of wanting to be PC or doing the right thing but I don't think they have to be because I think actually being representative of society and telling stories with universal appeal essentially in one way or another end up being about our humanity and those are the things that sell so I think in that order that's why having kind of things which reflect social justice will always be commercial and where they haven't been in the past is essentially for one of a better word gatekeepers you know or a predefined notions of who should be published why they should be published and who we should be publishing for I agree that that spot on I would also add that the publishing for social justice also takes place in in the bookshop spaces where people come together and talk about those books and and that moves conversations on that leads to more social justice you both so much for your wonderful talks and a really inspiring discussion thank you to our audience as well for all your questions I'm now going to hand over to Margaret a jolly who's going to tell you more about the other events we have lined up for you this afternoon thank you also really really inspiring and I'm just going to begin by saying I'm fascinated with all the comments coming in that are saying the same you know thank you this is exciting and interesting you know really surprising event opening up my my perspective on the business I will say there's a number of questions about how do I get in touch or you know I'm interested in advice on a particular book that you're working on I'm presuming the answer there is to look on your website to pitch in the usual way both of your the things the things you've talked about are all available online so I guess that's the answer I'm afraid there were too many to for us to deal with in this short time we had together but that also would include people interested in writing for screen and television and film and own it if this is another interesting aspect I think of what you're doing that is to to talk to that industry as well so I just want to thank you both for a wonderful discussion as well as the audience for your thought provoking questions and of course to invite you to join us for the rest of the festival which will be continuing very shortly at two o'clock so it's in an hour we have another session on reprinting lost classics and I think we we're probably all appreciative that's a really distinctive element of feminist business and I think it has particular importance again in thinking about heritage in the past this conversation we're all having about the past the present and the future so join us for that with Kate McDonald and Maria Vashilupazos from the British Library and also with DM Withers as chair and then we have Making Feminist Comics with Nicola Street and at five bring your pencil and paper for that one if you want to have a go yourself you can just I should say attend that without actually taking part if you want to but I'm sure it'd be fun to to have a go drawing and she'll she's the expert she'll tell you how to do it even if you've never tried before on Friday we close with a panel debate on the feminist marketplace this will bring together our big questions about how to do creative but also ethical business within a capitalist economy and world if you miss anything or will be recorded and available on the British Library's website if you want to know more about the business of women's words project check out our blog again thank you all and also especially to our wonderful chair Eleanor careless see you soon