 Hello and welcome to Creative Women Creative Business, feminist publishing, design and comics, a three-day festival organised by the Business of Women's Words research project in collaboration with the British Library. My name is Polly Russell and I'm the British Library partner for Business of Women's Words and also the lead curator for the library's current exhibition, Unfinished Business, The Fight for Women's Rights. The exhibition connects the current moment of feminist activism and protest with the longer and fascinating history of women's fights for rights in the UK. It tells a story which is bold, dramatic, colourful and lively and it does so with more than 180 objects including film, sound, manuscript, costumes, letters, banners and posters. Unfinished Business will be open until summer 2021 so please visit in person if you can. If not though, then check out the Unfinished Business digital exhibition on the British Library's website which includes more than 100 digitised objects with accompanying essays. There's also an exhibition podcast series and a whole host of wonderful associated events including this festival. Again, to find out more, look on the British Library's website. But back to today and to the festival, it is incredibly fitting that Creative Women Creative Business is accompanying the exhibition because although Unfinished Business appears to tell the story of women's struggles, what it actually does is celebrate women's incredible creativity. Whether in different forms of protest and resistance or in finding ways to carve out space and be taken seriously, creativity has been a hallmark of women's fights for rights. And of course, in publishing, writing and illustration, these have been crucial ways that women have harnessed forms of creativity to profit, profit in the sense of being heard, being able to challenge and change the world and of course to profit to make money. This is going to be a thrilling three days of events. Join us for as many as you can, we can't wait to hear from our speakers and we can't wait to hear from you. Now, over to Margareta Jolly, the business of women's world project lead and the festival organiser. Welcome to this first event in our wonderful festival of women's creativity and enterprise, Creative Women Creative Business. In these sessions, we'll share ideas and experiences from women active in publishing, design and comics. We'll also ask what lies behind our favourite feminist writers, bestsellers, classics, magazines, podcasts and shows and meet some of those making it all happen. We'll also ask what it takes to get a job in the feminist creative industries and crucially how to uphold your ideals while doing business once you've got there. This festival is brought to you by the business of women's words, our project that's exploring the dramatic story of the feminist publishing revolution of the UK women's liberation movement of the 1970s and 80s. Through our work, we've discovered a host of ways that feminists have created ethical enterprises and fought for greater equality, justice and inclusion in the wider business world. Our project is based at the University of Sussex where I work as a professor of cultural studies. It's a partnership between Sussex, the University of Cambridge and the British Library, funded by the Levyhoom Trust, whom of course we're very grateful. Our festival is kickstarted by two brilliant women. First, you will hear from Charmaine Lovegrove and she will be followed by Lenny Goodings. Charmaine Lovegrove is the publisher of dialogue books, part of the Little Brown division of Hachette UK. It's home for a variety of stories from illuminating voices often missing from the mainstream. Charmaine has worked in press relations, book selling, events management and TV scouting. She was the literary editor of Elle magazine. Moving to Berlin, she set up her own bookshop and creative agency. Charmaine's contributions were recognised with the Future Book Publishing Person of the Year Award 2018-19. She serves on the boards of the Black Cultural Archives, Watershed in Bristol and is a founding organiser of the Black Writers Guild. Charmaine is proud to be part of the African diaspora and books make her feel part of the world. Our second brilliant speaker is Lenny Goodings. Lenny is the chair of Virago, the legendary publisher of books by women. She's a writer as well and her terrific memoir was published earlier this year, A Bite of the Apple, a life with books, writers and Virago. Lenny was part of the management buyout team who created a newly independent Virago in 1987 and she later became the publishing director. In 1995, Virago was sold to Little Brown where she remained the publisher and editorial director. Lenny's contributions were recognised with the Book Seller's Industry Award, Editor and Imprint of the Year 2010 and a Lifetime's Achievement Award at the Women of the World Festival in 2018. This year she's become an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Born in Canada, she's lived in London since her early twenties and working with authors and books is her passion. I wholly believe that the publishing industry is a wonderful mechanism between writers and readers, creating, producing and selling books from the incredible minds that write them and illustrate them into the hands of readers who lap up stories and consider rich narratives which are affecting and arresting. To that end, my start in the publishing industry was when I was 15 years old and I got a part-time job in a bookshop in Battersea, south west London, which is where I grew up. I've known since I was eight years old that I wanted to work with books and I recall being handed a brown paper bag with a copy of Boy by Roald Dahl and thinking that I wanted my life's work to make people this happy so I aspired to be a bookseller. Working in Battersea, I had an array of customers from new parents eager to occupy their kids who picture books to readers of literature who came across the bridge from Chelsea or across Clapham Common. There was something for everyone in that bookshop and what I learned then and I really hold on to now is that the maxim you should never judge a book by its cover is the same for readers. You can't always tell what someone is interested in just because of what they look like. I've sold Doris Lessing to older black men in their 50s, crime fiction to teenage girls, French literary translation to taxi drivers and sci-fi to women over 17. The beauty of reading is that you can get lost in worlds that have been created and imagined and it's between you and that narrative. It's a private form of expression that, as booksellers, I think we had a really great privilege to witness. Following being a bookseller in Battersea, I worked in secondhand bookstalls under Waterloo Bridge, then Waterstones in Edinburgh, Foils and Charycross Road and London Review Bookshop in Bloomsbury. I love selling books. I love creating libraries for people and I love repeat customers who come back and they're often excited and sometimes disappointed in what they've read. Even if they didn't like a book, there was always something to learn and I would implore the experience wasn't wasted as all books give you something to consider and stay with you throughout your life. After a long time of bookselling, I thought I might be better suited to publicity and I got a job with the incredible Fiona McMurray at FMCM Associates and I learnt the art of getting readers to hear about books that they would then buy from bookshops, creating events, going on book shop signing tours, pitching to newspapers for critics review. Publicity is a really fast-paced and multi-faceted role and although it was a steep and challenging learning curve, I really loved it. However, there was something missing for me and that was the deep knowledge of being able to talk about and think about hundreds of books in a day and not just the books that I'd been assigned to and I knew that in the end my future lay in bookshops. After trying to get a loan from a bank to open a bookshop in London Fields before it was trendy, I set my sights for a field and travelled to France, Italy, Spain and Germany, looking for a place that I could live and open a bookshop. The reasons for those countries is because of the netbook agreement. In the UK publishers decided that the recommended retail price on the back of the book could be determined by the retailer, which allowed the market to open up to Amazon and supermarkets. In European countries, the price of the book was the same wherever you bought it from, so I felt that I would have a better chance in succeeding in my bookshop if the commercial market was fair and if I failed it wasn't because of Amazon, it was because I hadn't connected with my audience. Looking back now as someone with a small income and no investment and no family, it was a wild dream, but I was determined to have a bookshop in a country that knew the value of literature and after some deliberation I chose Berlin and Germany. Dialogue was supposed to be a working title, but I found that after I found a space for my bookshop to start in the back of a tea room in Mitter, the central district of the German capital, the name stuck and Dialogue Books was established. Using my years of experience as a bookseller, I already knew how to think beyond my taste and I'd saved £5,000 over the previous winter. I learnt on the job how to run a business, how to plan, budget, publicise and also market my business. In Germany to get a business licence you need certain qualifications and luckily I had over seven years of bookselling experience in the UK which they deemed akin to doing a bookseller's apprenticeship and so I was able to move forward and set up my shop. This literal stamp of approval also gave me the confidence I needed in starting my business in a country that I barely knew and a language I hardly spoke. Having a unique selling point for Dialogue was really, really important, so Dialogue was the first new English language bookshop in Berlin. This meant we only sold new books, not secondhand. Even then I was interested in an ecosystem where the booksells went directly back to the author and the publisher. With secondhand books the sales go directly to the shop and I've always been interested in the wider picture of publishing rather than my own gains. One customer said of Dialogue, this bookshop is where you come in Germany to find the best French philosophy. One customer said of Dialogue, this bookshop is where you come in Germany to find the best French philosophy and Italian criticism translated into English and I am very proud of that. Part of having something original and unique meant that I could partner with interesting companies. For example, we had our coffee machine and all our beans from Ili Coffee for free and so I could give free coffee to customers as they browsed. Very early on we partnered with Soha House to create the Dialogue Literary Lounge where we hosted authors such as Jonathan Coe, Rufa Zecki, Jonathan Leifam, Claire Mesud and Taya Salasi. We hosted the Lounge monthly for five years. The Literary Salon has long been a tradition in Berlin. It has its roots in Jewish women during the Weimar Republic opening their homes to discussion and the arts. I was very proud to be part of a generation who carried on that tradition, inviting hundreds of people to an opulent space each month to listen and participate in ideas from writers. Being innovative whilst learning from the past has been a core strength of Dialogue. The company we have had many different guises. What started as a bookshop became a publishing consultancy called Dialogue Berlin where we worked with a range of different brands and companies to enhance their English language and innovate their publishing offerings. One of our clients, Ufa, the largest production company in Germany, asked me to find new stories for them. I would go into my bookshop and think about books that would be the right fit, and then I'd look in the acknowledgement page and find agents in the back, and then I would call the agents and ask them if they had screen rights, if they were available to each of the books. That's what's been announced to me as this is entirely made up. This was actually a job and I really, really enjoyed it. I found it fascinating, elevating my skills from the bookshop floor of finding the perfect books for readers to finding the perfect stories to be adapted to screen. Having lived in Berlin for seven years, I really wanted to enhance what I could do and also take the opportunity to learn from people who had been publishing for much longer than me. Working in a small but yet brilliant team in Berlin was amazing, but I had to acknowledge that I had started so young. I was 27 when I started my bookshop, and I needed to learn from more professional practices and more from other people. It was really important to me that I didn't kind of languish in what I already knew, and that was a huge acknowledgement for me. I also wanted to see more what I could do and was lucky enough that London is my home. So I took the plunge of moving back in summer 2014 with my husband and son. We closed the bookshop and I started working full time as a scout for Fremantle. It was the first time for the company to employ a scout and to have someone like myself. There were two others in the industry, one person worked for the BBC and another for a large production company, so this is a really new area. For Fremantle, I worked for 28 different territories, finding stories to be adapted, but also coming up with trends and ideas to follow. It was clear that the publishing model was slower than making television. What was being discussed could influence what we watched in two years' time, and I wanted to be the person to help connect the two. It was incredible to be home as London is so vibrant, it's really multicultural and I understood and importantly could easily access everything that was happening, although my German had got a lot better in Germany that there really is no place like home. So after a year of working for Fremantle, I met Toby Coventry, who was on the cusp of starting his own consultancy, and we decided to join forces and create dialogue scouting. As you can see dialogue, the word has been a really important part of my life and that connection of the conversation between two parts is what I think we all live for. It was incredible to be a scout, being the first and only consultancy which specialised in finding books that could be adapted into film and television in London was a very special thing to create. We were a formidable team of three, having bought my assistant Kate Loftus O'Brien over from Berlin with me, she continued to work with me the whole time whilst I was at Ufa and again a dialogue scouting. And I'm really proud of both of them who now have their own companies and are doing exceedingly well. So during this time when we started dialogue scouting, Elle magazine approached me and asked me to be their literary editor. It was a great crossover as I was able to find another place to keep amplifying the stories that I believed in. For me, it's really important to share all of this with you as the question of this event is what is being a game changer. Often my appointment of publisher of dialogue books is seen as radical as I didn't start within a publishing house. I, however, see my appointment as necessary. As you have heard, although I've done many jobs, they've all really been about the same thing, connecting readers and authors, connecting ideas and inspirations and connecting knowledge with empowerment. When after a publishing dinner and drinks, I got talking to Charlie Kane, the MD of Little Brown, the literary editor, sorry, the literary agent Julia Kingsford and Philip Jones, the editor of Trade Magazine, the bookseller, about how appalling the stats around Black Asian and marginalized ethnic people within the publishing industry and authors were. There was this stat that really stood out that was out of 165,000 books that were published in 2016, less than 100 were by people of color and only one black male debut was published. I'd recently seen the BBC Virago documentary and was really inspired by its establishment and how empowering the vision to change publishing forever was and, you know, to include women, I just thought that was absolutely incredible. And I knew that Virago was at Little Brown, and so I said to Charlie, I felt that we needed a similar imprint, but underrepresented voices, and the seeds that I had never considered dialogue books as an imprint was planted. I never thought that I would do the job, I thought that we would find someone in the industry who was able to spearhead the imprint, but it became both an honour of my life and also truly bewildering that in 2017 I became the first black publisher in a corporate publishing house. The incredible women who have come before me, such as Margaret Busby of Alison Busby, Valerie Branders of Jacaranda and BB Bakari Yousaf of Casaba Books of Cornerstone of incredible independent publishing and there are many, many more, especially black women independent publishers. My true hero is Toni Morrison, who took her place at Penguin Random House before becoming an author. Toni Morrison stood absolutely firm and true within a big corporate environment and towards her need to publish for black people and for black people to have the opportunity to tell our stories. I looked towards Toni Morrison her work, but her practice is a publisher and editor greatly in the work that I do. I also of course looked to my colleagues at Barago and Lenny who I'm really pleased to share this stage with and everything that Barago has done as a sister imprint. I am truly honoured to share a place with them amongst being an activist imprint. So true to its roots dialogue is all about being inclusive, inspiring and innovative with bold covers celebrating the characters and intentions of the authors and illuminating an inspiring publicity and marketing campaigns that are underpinned by our activism, which is absolutely at the core of what we're doing and our desire for equality, equity and civil rights. As a team and I'm so grateful for my team, we really centre our authors and our aim is to bring exceptional narratives such as The Banishing Half by Britt Bennett, Nudie Branc by Erinus yn Acogi, Rainbow Milk by Paul Mendes or The Old Slave in the Mastiff by Patrick Shomerzo, and we hope that these books will leave an indelible imprint on thousands of readers. We have a long way to go to reach the goals of what I would consider to be fair and equal in publishing, but I am hugely proud of the work that I do alongside my publishing. Then I'm very lucky to be supported by Hachet as a company and to be patron of changing the story, which is our inclusivity initiative within the company. It's a really huge challenge, but for us to do things like bringing the ethnicity pay gap forward before any other publishing house, before the government have requested it for the trainee schemes that we've set up. Just all of the different initiatives that have come from our networks that are concerned with the equality of different protected characteristics across the company. It's just an incredible place to work and dialogue is absolutely in the right home being at Hachet and Littlerealm. I'm also incredibly proud of the work in setting up the Black Writers Guild with my co-founders and co-organisers. It's a huge amount of work that started last summer following the murder of George Floyd and asking questions around what does it mean to be black within a publishing industry and framework and within the United Kingdom. Understanding the forces of white supremacy and how that has hindered our progress over many, many years and coming together as a group of over 200 writers to say no more. Our voices should be heard, our stories should be told and we should also be employed. I am really looking forward to a day where I'm no longer the only black publisher where there are many black publishers across corporate publishing houses. Many more editors, sales, production, heads of production, heads of all different departments, people on the boards and CEOs that come from a wider range of backgrounds than we currently have. We're not at the beginning. As I said, many more people have been on this journey for much longer than me and there's lots of people like the black agents and editors that are working tirelessly to ensure equality within our industry. And then there's institutions such as the Publishers Association, the Agents Association and also the Arts Council who have kind of set their goals with integrity towards equality. And so as a game changer, I suppose I feel I am really part of this movement for change and I just hope that by the time that my my child and my nieces and nephews are ready to, who are sort of 8, 9, 10, by the time they're ready to enter the workforce, that they won't know what inequality will look like. And I hope that for all the writers who are writing the books, that they will not have the same barriers to entry and that as an industry we can open the doors and let the inspiration, imagination and innovation be free. Unfinished business, how Virago and the other feminist presses were game changers in the world of publishing and reading. Hello and thank you so much to the business of the women's word project and the British Library for inviting me to give this talk about Virago, the feminist press, begun by Carmen Khalil in 1973 and where I have worked for over 40 years and about which I have written a book. A Bite of the Apple. This talk is a celebration of writing, of reading and of the joys and challenges of the business of publishing. At Virago as publicist, editor, publisher and now as chair, literature, feminism, business, writers and politics are my daily bread and I love it. I want to talk about what I believe feminism has changed the world and radicalized writing, reading and the publishing industry. I take you back just five years before I joined to set the scene of the year that Virago was founded and to show you why this revolution in publishing was so game changing. 1973 was a dramatic time of political change. The western world on the cusp of power shifts. Watergate was about to bring down President Nixon. It was three years from the UK Equal Pay Act and in a tennis match billed as the battle of the sexes Billy Jean King accepted the challenge from Bobby Riggs, the female sex one. Creating a book list with the political and philosophical mission gives a publishing house tremendous energy and purpose. Virago and the other feminist houses published instinctively knowing that there was a hungry readership for their books. Carmen Khalil, Ursula Owen and Harriet Spicer, the original three shared their readers' concerns, quests and passions. Beginning on the crest of the women's liberation movement, Virago was almost immediately recognized as a living and breathing realization of many readers' wants and desires. Women wanted a voice. Women wanted to understand their history. Women wanted to see themselves on the page. Women wanted a champion. Though the 1960s had heralded a social revolution, many women felt they had been left out, not asked, not represented, not heard. Carmen Khalil said, I was inspired by the underground press's lack of engagement with women's ideas, their works, their opinions, their history. Their opinion sounds almost tame compared to the other noble pursuits, ideas, work, history in her list, but it was key to the sense of the time women were just not listened to. Hashtag Mitu and other feminist campaigns of many decades focuses on the power of breaking the silence with the female voice, one that is even now still muted in some places, some industries and some countries. Opinions. Part of the women's movement was women discovering for themselves that they had opinions. Virago was about to publish those opinions. From the beginning, Virago challenged the idea of niche publishing and niche market. Virago's first catalogue announced, there is a specialist publishing imprint for almost everything, except for 52% of the population, women, an exciting new imprint for both sexes in a changing world. That refusal to be seen as marginal, the desire to inspire, educate and entertain all women and men too, to bring women's issues and stories into the mainstream, these passions and beliefs were the bedrock of Virago. And that attitude remains ours today. Virago, publishing stories not heard before or about lives and subjects formerly not deemed worthy of print, showed there was an audience previously not listened to. Then, like now, the feminist stereotype existed, but it was too late for these naysayers. Women who worked in newspapers, radio, libraries, book shops, schools and universities were hungry for news of the books we and the other feminist presses were publishing. We had enthusiastic supporters, men as well as women, and it meant our books could blast through the cultural gatekeepers. Virago means heroic, warlike woman. It was provocative, outrageous and fun too. We did everything ourselves. We typed, we packed the books, we licked the stamps, we dragged bags full of review copies down the four flights of stairs from our wardrobe street office in Soho. We also took turns cleaning the office. One Friday night, not long after I had joined, I was late, still working and it was Carmen's turn. While she was cleaning a telephone I asked, why did you start Virago? The answer came in a beat. To change the world darling, that's why. I knew I was in the right place. Out on the streets were feminist politics. The personal was political, but in the publishing board rooms were mainly white oxbridge men. Lots of women, as now, but not with power, and very few people of colour. In publishing, the editors are the first gatekeepers. If a manuscript or a story or experience speaks to them, they believe it will have a market and they bring the book to acquisitions, where the next gatekeepers, finance, sales, marketing, publicity and CEO, sit and judge. The sales people will be anticipating the bookshop gatekeepers. The publicity people will anticipate the press. It is easy therefore to be conservative to go with what's already working, already selling. In fact, the hardest thing an editor is up against is when they know and therefore say at these meetings, there is almost nothing on the bookshelves like this. This is utterly original. This is the new voice we have not yet heard enough of. That leaves the gatekeepers without any reference points. And so even though they may say, let's publish, they will be cautious, unambitious. I have come to believe that it is only social movements that change publishing. Publishing, like most industries and institutions, is effectively devoted to the status quo. It is the default position. Publishing really only changes itself, changes who gets published, who works in publishing and therefore what gets published, when social movements force the transformation. Feminism gave birth to publishing houses such as Virago and changed the face of publishing in the 70s and 80s. Now I watch and applaud Black Lives Matter, which is going to utterly radicalize the industry again. It takes an outside force, a social movement, to insist on change, to upset the status quo, to storm the gatekeepers of publishing, to go over the heads of decision makers. And the reason? Readers and writers. It's because social movements are made up of writers and readers who demand books that reflect and include them. Then publishing responds. It's a readers' revolution or even a book buyer's revolt. It's first a vanguard of readers and writers who identify with the movement for social change. 60s revolution, feminism, LGBTQ+, Black Lives Matter. But then that number of readers quickly expands until what was a niche group becomes a market that publishers understand and respond to. And of course it happens much faster when the decision making people in publishing are part of the movement. Publishers are waking up to that now. When Virago and the other feminist publishers' houses started, we had our ear to the ground, we knew what was missing. Women's stories and experiences. We were part of the feminist movement. We showed the big houses that there was a market and an interest not being satisfied. Virago published stories not heard before or about lives not deemed worthy of print or forgotten women writers. I feel very strongly that feminism benefits all genders and Virago was reaching out to all readers. But our mainstream stance was not appreciated by all. Radical activists accused of being the acceptable face of feminism. They criticized us for not being a cooperative, for aiming for and believing our books should be on the high street. Whereas the mainstream in the form of the press belittled us, calling us Paper Tigris' or Fane Delight and Terror in going out for lunch with a Virago. Idealistic notions fuelled Virago's founding and inform our choices today. But we're not a lobbying group or a charity. We are a business. We have to make a profit or we don't survive. We have to get our hands dirty. We have to compromise. We are not independent. We have to listen to sales and marketing. But to me that aspect of Virago is what also excites me. It's challenging and it's real. Carmen said the power to publish is a wonderful thing. Delight in power and that enthusiasm for the project in the early years meant those passions and politics alongside a scarcity. The diversity of resources and anxiety to survive created tension. I am not going to lie. There was crying in the loo. Margaret Atwood, familiar with small publishing houses in Canada in the 1960s, dryly observed in the BBC4 documentary about Virago's history. In my experience, the smaller the cheese, the fiercer the mice. But two things propelled me. One, I was determined not to be defeated by it. Two, I believe we were doing something life changing and game changing. We were challenging people's notions of women's literature, of what women could do, of the importance of women's stories and histories, and we were part of the feminist movement. I believed in that. Was the cost to some of us worth the gain? I would probably say yes, but I would also say I'm glad we don't have to operate like that now. However, asked any passionate, self-starting, ideological group about rouse and difference of opinions, and operating on a shoestring, and I suspect you will find the same story. Over these years, probably close to 100 women have worked at Virago, and we published nigh on 4,000 titles and just over 1,000 authors. In Virago's first months, a reporter asked if Virago would find enough to publish the next year, as if. We were a highly effective outfit, and we all took great pleasure in that, despite our differing individual temperaments. Some radical presses were co-operatives with no shareholders. That was how some set up shop. Ours was a more traditional business model. Though there was a consensus on what we published, we each had an area of responsibility. Carmen knew about publicity, and Ursula Owen knew about editing, but there were other skills that we had to learn from scratch. Carmen talks a pouring over an article called, Mr Hopeful Starts a Publishing Business, and how she learned about reading balance sheets with help from Sunny Mehta, then at Picador. Harriet Spicer leaned on printers and typesetters to learn the art of production. Our advisor group was not only called upon to suggest books and authors, but were asked about rights, contracts and sales. We had a traditional business model, but it was powered by idealism and altruism. Workers and authors gave their all to the company, taking low advances and wages and working long hours. Authors were very much on our side from the start. Synasism or opportunism, those have never been Virago motivations, and over the 40 plus years that Virago editors have chosen the books to publish, their guiding principle has always been to ask, what does this do to champion women's talent, or what truths does it tell about women's lives? But not without an eye to success and profit, because from the beginning Virago has wanted to prove that the business of publishing books by women is a profitable enterprise, and that the very existence of Virago shows the world that a feminist business would work, that women's writing could be the foundation of an inspirational, financially viable list. To stay alive to publish, you have to make a profit, and now when Virago is part of a larger publishing conglomerate, we've been with the Little Brown Book Group since 1995, profit is still our protection. But being part of a group also means we no longer have to run strictly on passion, it means we've been able to do what is right, pay staff and authors profit properly, and still be profitable. Over the years we have set trends such as reclaiming women's history and literature with the Virago Modern Classics, and followed the political mood, such as publishing feminist polemic in more recent times, with feminism's fourth and fifth wave. Virago has had seven incarnations. It began in association with Quartet, then became independent with shareholders, then sold itself to become part of Chateau, Virago, Bodleyhead and Cape, which then sold itself to Random House. We then did a management buyout with Rothschild Ventures, with 50% of the shares held by directors, which kept us independent for eight years, before selling ourselves in 1995 to become an imprint of Little Brown, then owned by Time Warner, who then sold Little Brown and all the imprints to Chateau, where we remain today. Our different business models have been partly in response to the trade and have afforded us different benefits and disadvantages, but our final move in 1995 has been a good and stable one for us. That wouldn't have been the case if Little Brown, Hachette had not respected the philosophy behind Virago and also crucially if we hadn't already proved ourselves to be good at knowing our audience, at choosing excellent books and understanding how to market ourselves. The word brand is something that makes me queasy with its commodification associations, its flattening out of complexity of meaning and its apparently cynical eye for the marketplace. So instead I might use the word reputation, but what I mean with the words brand or reputation is respect and loyalty and authenticity. The media, booksellers and readers know that our name stands for quality writing by women. Even people who don't read know that Virago stands for feminism. This reputation is not one we take lightly and it's something that must be burnished and refreshed. We have a heritage, but we must stay up to date. We must publish with relevance and we must reach the market in the ways that today's readers respond to, Twitter, Instagram, websites and most recently a Virago website from which we can sell our books direct to readers. Like any brand we can't assume undying loyalty in an attention scarce marketplace, but we draw great strength from our name and reputation. Virago lives within the tension between idealism and pragmatism, between sisterhood and celebrity, between art and commerce, between behaving independently but for over 25 years part of conglomerate, between watching feminism wax and wane and then become popular again at the same time knowing so many of the battles are still to be won. When we sold ourselves in 1995, we said, let's vote for the course that will keep Virago going at least for the next 10 years. We're still here. Almost the only feminist press left from the 1970s and instead of thriving for just another 10 years, it's been 25 and we're still going strong. With the sale we got what we needed, capital, might in the market and an international reach. I turn now to the books themselves. We publish and continue to publish the Virago Modern Classics, the series that challenged what is deemed great literature. When the classics are reprint series of forgotten 19th and 20th century authors started in 1987, only four or five women were really thought worthy of the literary canon. Austin, Elliot, the Brontes, Wolf. The Virago Modern Classics list challenged that and also demonstrated a female literary tradition, a line of women writers who stood on each other's shoulders that had been neglected. Rebecca West, Antonio White, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Ann Petrie, Zora Neale Hurston, among hundreds of others. Individually not political novels, but together make a political statement. Women writers worth studying, worth reading. Polemic, politics, litgrit, history, memoir, science. There is nothing women can't do or write about. And out of the great writers we publish, including Marilyn Robinson, Angela Carter, Sarah Waters, Sandy Toxvig, Sigrid Nunes, two I want to mention, Maya Angelou and Margaret Atwood. Margaret Atwood has been with us since 1979. You can possibly imagine what it was like for me who had studied her at university to be part of her British publishers, to be publicising her novels, The Edible Woman and Surfacing. It was thrilling for a young Canadian. A writer always ahead of her time, always putting women at the centre of her fiction. They motor her stories. She is utterly brilliant, funny, wise, courageous, my heroine and a writer and a woman who represents all that Barago aims to be. Maya Angelou coming into our lives was profound for me. Her astonishing memoir entitled I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was first published in America in 1969 and she told us that it was turned down by British publishers because they said nobody here would be interested in the story of a young black girl growing up in southern states. Until Barago found it 15 years later. Readers loved her for her belief in speaking the truth but also in the power of poetry and because she encouraged us to share her mission in life to not merely survive but to thrive and to do so with some compassion, some passion, some humour and style. Today those authors and others such as Sarah Waters are celebrated writers, celebrities even and Barago had to learn to step up to their increasing popularity. Easier in some ways once we were part of a large publishing conglomerate with strong sales outreach. We learned how to play a new game to work with film and TV companies to produce tie-in covers. Our publicity teams had to become adept at handling the phenomenal media interest that comes with celebrity and we had to continue to show authors and agents that we could meet the demands of the massive readership for these writers. A publisher must be worthy of their authors. We are their vehicle to success and cannot expect blind loyalty and nor do we. Publishing like most artistic industries depends on bestsellers to balance the books and to compensate for the fact that probably about 80% of the books we publish either lose money or break even. Prizes which are fantastically arbitrary and bestselling authors are crucial to us. Not only do they help us by making a profit for us and the authors, they also promote what Barago set out to do to change the landscape of publishing and bookselling and to bring the voices from the margins to the centre. I want to finish by briefly mentioning the joy of publishing a book myself and seeing it published. My memoir about Barago, A Bite of the Apple was published by Oxford University Press. I have always walked alongside my authors, held their hands, took the flack and praise alongside them. Though that is true, ultimately there is just one name on the book. The rest of the authors publishing team is behind them but the author is out front, alone, exposed. That has been salutary. And even though I worked with over a hundred authors, sometimes line by line, I don't think I had appreciated the sheer stamina it takes to think, to write, to rewrite, to edit, to dig deep, to complete a book. I have come to completely appreciate the help and support I got from my publishing houses here and in Canada. I loved working with my editors and I found the process of being on the other side illuminating. I saw how it feels to hand over your creation to others, to mould, to copy edit, to provide a jacket and a market. I have come away with an even greater respect for the people on whose shoulders the entire publishing industry stands. The authors. It was the author, Maya Angelou, who said to us publishers, You must take your job seriously to be aware of the power you have to know that somewhere out there, someone who you will never know will pick up a book you've published and find a friend. We must listen to authors. They are the ultimate game changers. Thank you. Well, wow. Thank you, Charmaine and Lenny. I found what you said utterly compelling and I hope that all of you people listening and watching did too. If you want to explore any of this with them directly, come along to our live Q&A session at 5pm this Wednesday, 13th of January or if you're watching this live later today. Our Creative Women Creative Business Festival continues on Thursday the 14th and Friday 15th of January. Please do join us for our four practical talks on publishing, design and comics. These are all free to attend. Just sign up via the British Library. Welcome to Creative Women Creative Business Feminist Publishing, Design and Comics, a three-day fantastic festival for free organised by the Business of Women's Words Research Project in collaboration with the British Library. My name is Polly Russell. I'm the British Library partner for the Business of Women's Words and I'm also the lead curator for the exhibition Unfinished Business, The Fight for Women's Rights, which is currently being staged at the British Library, although tragically because of COVID, is not at this moment open. It is, however, running until August, so very much hope that many of you will be able to visit at some point in the future. I am absolutely thrilled about this three-day festival and tonight's event. It is absolutely right that the festival is running alongside the exhibition, which, in so many ways, celebrates women's tenacity, their ingenuity and, of course, their fantastic creativity in demanding rights, in changing the world, in creating space and, of course, in earning a living. So it is wonderful to be hosting this event. We're kicking off the festival today with this event, with two women who have shaped, challenged and changed the publishing sector in this country and, indeed, around the world. They have already recorded a fantastic set of keynote speeches, which hopefully some of you have already listened to. In fact, I can see that you've already listened to those. However, if you didn't have a chance to listen to them, they will be live for the next seven days. So it really is worth going to listen to those pre-recorded conversations. We are now, however, going to go live to have a conversation with them, which will be chaired by Professor Margareta Jolly, who is the project lead for the business of women's words. I know this is going to be a brilliant event. I can't wait to hear from them in conversation, but we also can't wait to hear from you. So please do use the question function on the screen in front of you and send us your questions, because I know that the panellists, Lenny and Charmaine, are really excited to hear what you have to say as well. A couple of housekeeping points are nearly there, and then I'll hand straight over to Margareta. We have a bookshop on the website too, where all of the contributors and panellists from the whole festival, their books, publications are there. This would usually be a British Library, the British Library online bookshop, unfortunately because of COVID, that's not running. So we've linked to individual independent retailers. So please do check out those books. Also, I just wanted to mention, we hope that you will come to as many of these events as possible over the next three days. They're all going to be amazing, but there are also other events from the British Library going forward into the future, which I think really resonate with the subjects of this festival and of tonight's talk, including the amazing cartoonist Alison Bechdel is doing a talk, the creator and artist and writer, Laurie Anderson is doing an event for us later in the month. And we also have the fantastic economist, Mariana Mazucuto in conversation with Gillian Teig. On the 26th of the 1st. So this is three days, an amazing three-day sprint marathon, but keep on with us throughout the month. Finally, please, please do ask questions. Just a reminder there, I'm handing over now to Margareta. I look forward to seeing you all through this week. Bye bye. Thank you so much, Polly. And again, welcome to our wonderful Festival of Women's Creativity and Enterprise. Create, of Women, creative business. I'm so pleased to welcome back our two speakers, Charmaine Lovegrove and Lenny Goodings, following their fabulous talks earlier today. For those of you just joining us, Charmaine is the publisher of dialogue books and inclusive publishing house, which builds on her pioneering work in press relations, book selling, events management and TV scouting and more. And Lenny, Lenny Goodings, is chair of Virago, the legendary publisher of books by women. She's a writer as well, and her terrific memoir was published earlier this year. A Bite of the Apple, a Life with Books, Writers and Virago. So I'm going to start with some ideas for discussion, but as Polly said, what we really want is for you listeners to give your questions or comments. And again, that should be easy, just use the box. So I'm going to start with some ideas for discussion, but as Polly said, I'm going to go first at the bottom of the screen and we'll pick them up as they come through. But I should say, Lenny and Charmaine, you may have questions for each other, of course, and we'd love to hear, you know, your comparing and contrasting your own very rich experiences. And to that end, I thought I would start by just filling listeners in of whether you two know each other and how did you two meet? Maybe Charmaine starters off. Hi, thanks for having me. So I've known about Lenny and her work for Virago for many, many years and I actually watched the documentary on Virago a few years ago. I think it was in 2016-17 and was just really inspired by that journey of what it means to create something from the need of women's voices within publishing. And literature and our society. And so when I met Charlie King, who is the MD of Little Brown and was talking to him casually about publishing and diversity, then I brought Lenny and Virago up and kind of, you know, it's been a really inspiring, Virago and Lenny have been really inspiring to me in creating dialogue and now we're colleagues, which is great. Thank you Lenny. So I remember I was at a women's prize for fiction party in the days when we did those glamorous things and suddenly Charmaine was in front of me and I said, oh my God, here we are, we're now going to be colleagues because I had already heard she was joining us and to bring dialogue to us. But I knew her through L when she was the literary editor of the L magazine and yeah, it's great. Then so now we are colleagues though we weren't much together and we were free in that in real life but it's great and I really welcome dialogue to Little Brown. It's good. It says Little Brown is a smart publisher. It welcomed Virago in 1992 and 1995 brother and I have witnessed how, you know, when you take a press like us we were already fully formed and we arrived. I've been very interested to see whether you can grow an activist press within a conglomerate and I'm impressed by that. Well, that was in fact, my next question was the fact that both of you are working as imprints within a conglomerate within what might appear to be a very large global, you know, traditional business. I thought it would be helpful to reflect on that particularly having in Virago's case been a very proudly independent press. I mean it raises so many questions about feminist business models and there's a lot of passionate debate on whether there should be a particular type of business model and should it be independent or cooperative or collective or how do you transform from within and I did, well, I would love to hear your view on that and maybe also just to explain to listeners what an imprint is because not everybody may understand how you are imprints within Little Brown. Well, so Virago was founded as even an association to begin with in 1973 Carmichael founded Virago and it was originally associated with Quartet and up till where we are now this is our seventh form of ownership so we've had independence, management buyouts, part of conglomerates in and out and now, we're at home. As I said in 1995 we sold ourselves to Little Brown. What an imprint means is that you don't take responsibility, cash responsibility for everything so what an imprint in companies like Dialogue and Virago are in Little Brown is we're more like an editorial imprint and we have people who specialize in our publicity and our marketing and even design to a certain extent but then we share all the things that we had to manage when we were independent obviously had accountants, receptionists, production department, etc. so you share all of those things and you still, you pay I mean the way it's organized is that you don't get a free ride your imprint has to bear certain parts of overhead. Why I said it has been a good place and I imagine Charmaine will say the same thing actually I'll start from a different place because Virago was fully formed they've already been going for years for decades actually so the company knew what they were buying with us they knew what we were that we were a feminist publishing house they knew we had the Virago Modern Classics all sorts of things and they honored all of that but we were fully formed it was like buying a grown-up whereas with Dialogue it was a sort of baby it wasn't a baby idea that has happened but I had always said until I witnessed Dialogue actually what I had always said is that I don't know how you can be an activist press within a conglomerate because the tensions are different when you're starting up a press you have to probably lose money for a while you try certain things out profit cannot be your only motive whereas within a conglomerate obviously that is the motive isn't it is to keep on making money so it's a balancing act of course balancing books in every sense of the word but anyway, Charmaine can talk about being growing from nothing to a successful... Charmaine jump in there Dialogue was just sort of a seed of an idea to become an imprint and it was taking that inspiration from Virago and how successful it had been in creating space for women's voices within the publishing industry and for readers and it's a really interesting conversation of what does it mean to be at once activist within a corporate space but the thing is is that I think the flavour and the technique comes from the person that's running the list and I am resolutely as Lenny knows resolutely an independent person and an independent thinker and actually I'm not really I've never worked in a corporate environment before so it wasn't it actually wasn't that difficult for me to kind of like be in my own lane with my own vision but what really helped was I can really focus on the books, the authors, the editing knowing that the sales the distribution and the production side of things are taken care of so I'm not kind of mired in having to really dig into all of those things every day that I can really think about the culture that I want to create and then lean upon others when I need to and I think that for me that's really really helpful and for an activist imprint it's helped to give us a voice and foundation and kind of create a brand around our culture that's become distinctive quite quickly because I'm not really distracted from the sort of the mission by worrying about printers for example and that kind of really frees me up for the activism side of the role that's right that's absolutely right and when we joined we suddenly got an amazing international reach that we hadn't had I mean it isn't always a happy marriage it's not going to say every imprint within a conglomerate is always good but in our cases it has been very good it's not when we sold ourselves to Little Brown Little Brown was actually owned by Time Warner and then Time Warner sold itself to Hachette which is who owns us now and they are a much more sympathetic organisation and I remember the first time I met the whole boss of Hachette in France here he came over to me and I remember saying hello I'm Lenny Goodings from Virago and I thought you're not going to have a clue who I am and he went you published the books that matter we've come to the right place okay well I'm going to sort of pause at that point in the sense I think this again opens up the really big question that we want throughout this festival to debate which is how you pursue ethical business there are I think what you're saying is there are different routes and different ways and one can work on the face of it apparently within something that isn't owned by feminists or owned independently or whatever but I think we'll I'm sure come back to that but I can see lots of questions coming in and I think just picking up Lenny your point about international reach this is a question from Michelle who says what are your recommendations for women from less visible ethnic minorities Pacific Islander in acquiring literary representation and just a second by the rest of the question when there is little effort in inclusion in mainstream literature what trends are you seeing in terms of DEI to change this internally in publishing houses and literary agencies so I think that puts together some of the really burning questions about representation and inclusivity but with also the question I think we can add to that about reach and not necessarily the most obvious exclusions and maybe Charmaine do you have any comments? Yeah, sure I mean what's really interesting is that just before this panel I just got off the phone to one of the one of the biggest literary agencies that just pitched me a book by a native indigenous American and I just you know the I think you know the there's a lot of different barriers to entry within the publishing industry but I also think that it's really important to understand writing and different forms of writing as well and there's often sometimes I do think it can be too easy to say that because someone's from a particular protected characteristic that that means that they're not able to do something and as a black woman I've never ever thought that I couldn't do something because of my race and I understand totally why other people believe that it's a hindrance but I think when it comes to your art you have to absolutely push through and find if not similar but similar types of people and similar types of sensibility I mean no one's really sort of writing in a vacuum even if you have very unique experiences from like the Pacific Islands for example there'll be someone somewhere who has written around what you're writing and the role of the writer when finding an agent the right agent is to look for like-minded people and to look for the sensibility the understanding and the culture and that doesn't necessarily mean that they have to look like you or they have to be a personal colour or they even have to be a woman what it means is that they have to be able to you have to feel like they're going to understand your work for what it is outside of your own protected characteristics and I kind of feel like as artists which writers are that's the best sort of gift that you can give yourself because in the end you don't just want people from where you're from to you don't just want people to read your work from the same background as you you want millions of people all over the world to hear your voice and so it's really important to find the right people from the beginning and they could be from anywhere but it has to be about sensibility of language and often if you look at the back of your favourite writers and you look in the acknowledgments then you can see agents and they'll always thank their agents and then maybe those of the agents that you reach out to I want to follow this with a question around translation I was very struck again Charmaine with your story about moving to Berlin and the kind of transnational perspectives and a mix of languages there and it raised to me a related question around the politics of translation and obviously just the practicalities and economics of translation and translated literature I wonder Lenny if Virago has any translations that you know about or any views on the role of translated authors and how to kind of break the dominance of English language which is one aspect of I think the limitations and inequalities of culture really I think it is tricky there's no doubt about it unless you're speaking those languages a bit like what Charmaine just said you have to have a knowledge of the area it's very difficult for editors if you only speak English for one thing obviously that still takes you right round the world but I think it's very important that you have to have a knowledge of the language and the dynamic on the whole with British publishers in American English languages these are the two biggest English language countries in America to Britain and we also we share a lot of sensibilities don't we or in Canada from where I come from so that is tricky it's also expensive it's anonymous actually the woman who wrote it was about the sacking of Berlin and we first tried one a very famous translator and the estate didn't like it so we had to trash that entire translation and start again I mean luckily we were sharing the cost with the Americans but there are a lot of barriers to it actually but this autumn I'm publishing a book called The Book of Mother by Violin Hussain and I just I didn't have read it I mean I'm now read it in English but I bought it without knowing I just read everything about it a lot of people recommended it but it's a jump isn't it that's a big leap and I'm not sad I've done it but you have to be cautious with it and sorry I just one more thing to say is we haven't exactly got a huge appetite for translated language but I think it works in this country I mean it comes in fans if you think about it when I first came into publishing it was sort of South American publishing that's how you got Elizabeth Iyndi etc and then there's Scandi you know you have if publishing is like other areas of entertainment and education stimulation which is it does go in waves and so you get a popularity and so on but you know that would have been something to break through initial well I think we can move to some we've got quite a few questions that are coming in that are about a particular interest which is about making your way in this particularly in the context of pandemic times and the challenges at the moment I mean we have some lovely tributes to your talks engaging talks but for example Coco Nina says do you have any advice for a recent English grad looking to start a career in publishing during this pandemic and we have another related question from Pippa Sturk saying do you have any advice for unagented writers trying to carve out a niche in writing that is explicitly for and about underrepresented groups perhaps that's from the wanting to get into writing and publishing as a writer and there's also how to get into publishing as a publisher and perhaps you might both reflect on some of the other jobs that are available that aren't just editorial and I think sometimes people don't realise the range of work that's involved so shall may maybe start us off on that yeah so I think it's important to understand that it's not just a you know an English literature degree that makes a great publisher it's a an absolute need to want other people to share in what is the transformative experience of reading and so it's less about yourself and it's more about the other and I think that that's one thing that I really noticed that's incredibly important is that people apply for jobs within publishing it's always like I've read lots of books and so therefore I should work in publishing and it's like you know that's like a part of what we do but the drive in the morning when we wake up especially as imprint heads as publishers is to think about that you know that sheer joy of the numbers when you start seeing that you know that you love that you stayed up until two three o'clock in the morning reading and knowing that that's shared with with tens of thousands of people and has the ability even if that doesn't always work out and just the constant drive to make that happen and that's also negotiation so working with lots of different teams so from the sales team who take a manuscript from an agent then when you acquire the book you work with the contracts team who do all the contracts to ensure that we've got all the rights that we need then it goes through the editorial department then it goes to production the design team are also designing the designing the cover then you have the rights team who are talking about what rights they're going to sell that you've acquired then you have the marketing team, publicity team who are looking at how to spread the message about the book and then you have the sales teams who work really closely with the retailers and sell the books in and pitch them to the different retailers and whether that be Amazon, Tescos or Waterstones or Independence so there's a really wide range of people that you're talking to and it's a great mission as us as the publisher which is to ensure that the most amount of copies of books go to the most amount of people and the most amount of people hear about it and it all starts with that email that you get with that manuscript and your initial love as a commissioning editor Did I miss anyone out LNA? The reader I always say about publishing too it doesn't matter how technical we get technological we get rather and how far it gets away from the old pen actually writing on the page publishing is still about one person telling another person you must read this book and I do love that I agree with Charmaine the heart of it so you have to have that drive but I would say in terms of getting into publishing everything that you can think of around publishing I would run your own blog I would work in a bookshop I mean Charmaine's career is a very good example of trying lots of different things before she became a publisher you just have to think that the competition to get into publishing is obviously quite stiff and first of all don't only head for editorial I totally agree with you there but secondly really do your homework I would say it's a bit like what Charmaine was saying earlier about writing to the writer who wants read around your subject think hard about it don't think unfortunately no one is owed either being published or becoming a publisher you do have to earn that space I think actually but I think if you really want to sorry I don't mean to be like Americans saying if you really dream you'll get it I don't want to do that but if you really set your path for it I think there are ways to get into it and there are other ways to show that you want to get into it too so when we get letters from people applying to jobs and they've done a series of things they've run their newsletters to certain places or whatever you believe in their commitment Thanks very much we all know these are really unprecedented the challenging times but I found listening to your getting over challenges in the past actually quite encouraging times have been difficult before I wanted to ask a question here that maybe goes to that history I guess that you were both sharing with us this is from Sophie as two women who have accomplished so much within feminism in the publishing world what would you say has been the biggest breakthrough moment for you or female writers or publishers in general and I think that's quite a lovely question of course it's a big question I think what I would like to say I'm not even going to say one thing I think when you've been in publishing as long as I have and I've been at Barago for 40 years for God's sake I can't believe it myself frankly and I've seen lots of different I've seen the different waves of feminism as we call it which I mind because as I keep saying waves are all about ebbing aren't they ebbing and flowing but as we know progress doesn't go straight what I would say is that yes we are so far from where we should be right now I'm talking about gender politics and equality we are still far from where we should be but we have actually come a really long way and we are still far from where we should be so when I started in publishing it was even an idea that women were waking up to the idea that they had opinions that they had opinions that were worth publishing and that women would take the radical thing doesn't feel very radical and that's why this is the exciting thing the radical thing is that women would take a decision about what would be published that was radical and so that's what I would say you have to far from being there in how much we have progressed I would say OK, Charmaine can you pick any one breakthrough moment? I think it's for me it's getting closer to the realisation that we're not a monolith either as women or as people of colour or from different sexualities or abilities or disabilities I think that we're getting closer to a point in which we understand that there's a multiplicity of person and that as an individual that we don't speak for any one group that we can share ideas and that we can be entirely intersectional in our thinking without it being contradictory and I think that to me that feels pretty that feels pretty radical because and really necessary actually you know I'm the first black person to be running an imprint at a corporate publishing house and so for me it doesn't at all feel like we've come very far because you know how is that even possible in 2017 and how has no one else joined me by 2021 and so I'm still on this huge journey we are still on this huge journey but so I take the individual what I'm looking forward to is when more black people join me at my level and higher and our MDs and CEOs in the future that will see that like women all the same then black people are not all the same as well and for me the fact that we're getting closer to something of that understanding is you know that we need more than one is hugely important to me May I come in here with a slightly challenging question of course I think what you've both said everyone will resonate with but this is a very practical question around marketing that I wanted to ask you again going back to in a way the tensions between business imperatives and all of the brilliant kind of representational work you're worth doing and this is a question about the way that often cultural products are marketed in very reductive stereotypical ways I suppose I'm picking up on what you're saying because I mean about the need to show women are not all the same black people are not all the same the differences, the specificities and diversities within all of our communities and yet I think marketing often goes for making something look a predictable stereotypical samey kind of face if you see it to me and I just was really curious how you I know you're not necessarily in charge of the marketing actually but how do you in your particular houses manage that and I thought maybe we could look at some of the book covers if we could see slide three some of the lovely books that dialogue books has been bringing out I suppose really you've got to show instantly what the face of the product is this shows a lot of different different stories so could you just talk to that question? So you know for me I was a literary editor I have also I've run my own bookshop I've worked in bookshop since I was 16 I totally understand that people see the marketing or the design of the book let's say it's not marketing it's design but feeds into marketing and sales as being quite derivative there is a reason for that in a way you know we published in 2016 we published 165,000 books in publishing you know it's a phenomenal number and in order for people to readers to understand what it is that they want then often they're looking for something quite quick that's visible that looks like something that they've had we are not the only people that do that like you know when you go into a supermarket you know we have aesthetics for different groups of people and that's just how marketing and the world works and what I try to do I'm just very design-led as a person and so what I wanted to do with dialogue is have the opportunity to have really bold covers that really try to tell a story and one of the things that I really love is say if you look at the Old Slave of the Master of the Orange one that was one of the first books that I published it's a translation, it's by Patrick Shanwazo what I really love about this is that it's a slave narrative where I wasn't afraid of putting an actual black man on the cover and I wasn't afraid of showing that when we're going to talk about slavery we are talking about the bodies of black men shimped you know it's like sorry that's German or like full stop but it's like but it's like it's so clear and so evocative that what it is that we mean there's no silhouette there is a black body in all of the heat and the sweat and the pain and everything that this man has gone through in order to live his life and that's what the story is telling us and with the vanishing half you know having the halves of the two sisters that are moving some people said on Twitter you know it's really reductive having all these books by black people where they're silhouettes and they were like look at the vanishing half and I was like but then it's literally called the vanishing half like how can I not have a silhouette so you know remembered again it's just about bringing in that corn and remembering what the slave trade was about you know it's for me it's because the design is so important and I feel like our design team obviously Lea and I share a design team at Little Brown and I think they're really really incredible and they took dialogue on as a with gusto and really wanted to send the message of our books because all of our books are by marginalised writers so I'm very proud of you I think that's really illuminating and as you say getting us to sort of the reality of what how one has to communicate and the structures within which we live, operate, do business re-create I want to now go to the slide one actually and ask you Lenny about the Apple of Avvarago and picking up in your talk you did express very eloquently your discomfort with the terminology of brands and branding and you explained it in a way I found very beautiful as in fact about loyalty and recognition and you talked about loyalty and I thought this Apple is so recognisable and it's one of the distinctive elements of Avvarago is if you like the brand but could you say something about I guess what this Apple means to you what you think of that again as a kind of very quick iconic way of communicating but if you think that the two things that started Avvarago one is the Apple the bite of the Apple which we all associate with sort of Eve taking the bite of knowledge isn't it and then the downfall of man ever since there's that and then Avvarago which means heroic war like woman that we reclaimed if you think about something like Shakespeare the taming of the shrew Avvarago started a bit like I'm sure I mean something about dialogue it started up front this is what we're about this is who we are this is who we mean to appeal to there are two other things about Avvarago which is that we send I think Charmaine would share this too actually is that we didn't say we're just publishing for ourselves you know we started right from the get go thinking not of ourselves as marginal we might publish from the margins but we published to the mainstream we believed ourselves to be as worthy of notice as anything else that was in the mainstream and to answer your question about brands and socialities and things I mean I had said to you before I used the word brand I mean Avvarago is a brand we've been here for 48 years and we are known for what we publish people understand who we are but if the word brand has got so and correctly it makes me queasy too actually because it's so commodified isn't it and so the complexity is bled from it actually it's very singular but when I talk about brand I would prefer as I said in my talk and I feel what we're talking about there is what we cherish about our books and what we want to say to the world about our books and what reputation we uphold and we take that really really seriously and people feel loyal towards Avvarago and you know that's nothing that's not to be taken lightly and nor is it you know we have a heritage but we have to look forward too do you know what I mean it's quite a it's a great blessing to have a reputation or a brand but it's you really have to handle it well thank you okay if we can go back to showing us thank you I'm going to come in with a sort of related question about well I think which is about appreciating the art of design and this is from and I guess the visual arts this is from Ellen Francis who says is the conversation extended to graphic novels as well as just the written word and this is a sideways move but I think very relevant to this festival in particular we're interested in graphic graphic storytelling and as well as literary storytelling or textual storytelling so this question is followed is there anything to bear in mind going forward with graphic novels within publishing we're starting to do graphic novels and Sarah Savitt who is our publisher at Paragu now because I'm the chair she has started doing some graphic novels and that's another thing you must do as a publishing house evolve to stay abreast with what's interesting and new they are quite tricky it has to be said because you probably need another publisher to share it with because it's basically an illustrated book but I think they're great actually and I also love things like Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale not that we publish but they've made that into a graphic novel too I think they're terrific I think it's a very clever way both to reintroduce things that we already know about but also to do brand new things with images and text really fascinating I think OK, well I want to ask another multimedia kind of question inspired by Charmaine's experiences in television scouting and crossing again the visual, the verbal the broadcast, the magazine and now of course book publishing to ask I suppose in a way for up and coming creative people do you feel you need to be able to work across these platforms or do you need to be able to broadcast I suppose, what's the role of the multi-platform Charmaine maybe you could answer that one Yeah, I mean I think it's really important to again think about what is it that we're doing and really it's about audience and how do you communicate with audiences and when you think about a really good friend of mine in Berlin he is a television producer and you know some people are very snobby towards him and say why don't you make films he's very intelligent so you should be making films apparently and he says well I love that I can make a show that reaches like 25 million people you know the reach of a show that I'm making is so huge and with cinema it's very very difficult to get so many actors and also to make something that's episodic that's returnable and with characters that stay with you for a very long time and that's also really compelling and I think there isn't anything that anyone sort of I'm always I find it very hard to say what anyone should or shouldn't do I just think it's about sort of following this path and understanding where your sort of centre of gravity lies to people and different types of people and more lastly I've been more obsessed with like who gets left behind when there is such a thing as a mainstream and who's not part of that and so now that's like part of my sort of life's mission with dialogue but I also think that as a reader that we don't just kind of live in a silo you know it's not like I only read books and I don't watch television you know I love photography What are you watching? Can I ask? What TV do you enjoy? So at the moment I'm watching salt fat acid heat so like I love watching television about food because I like I love eating we're not going to restaurants and my husband's an amazing cook and I basically get loads of ideas from no longer from restaurants but from watching television of like what he should cook for me my friend made the show on Orthodox which I just thought was absolutely incredible who's actually the wife of the husband that I just mentioned who is a television maker and then I watched you know obviously I've been watching Bridgerton obviously and I mean I watched so many I watched like you know I grew up in the 80s in England like of course I watched like neighbours and then I would also watch like 7 Up you know it's like it's it's you know it's just I don't I think that I'm actually a lot broader in my television in my visual taste than I am in my reading taste I probably don't read as commercially as I watch but I find it really interesting to kind of pick up on different types of dialogue and characters and I feel like television really informs me and I think that has actually made me a better publisher having worked in television for so long well I'm thinking this again raises actually underneath bigger questions around how we change culture and how we use all these different platforms whether we're doing it as readers or TV watchers or consumers even but before I come to that question because I know we're moving to the last section of this wonderful talk I see a question I think is really a nice one which I want to perhaps ask Lenny which is actually going back to the literary character so this is in fact it's responding to your speech Lenny where you mentioned that Varago editors when considering the work ask themselves what truth does it tell about women's lives so the question is how does Varago feel about controversial imperfect female protagonists even anti-heroes that represent the fundamental flaws that women as all people have so yeah Brigitte I would say I am not a big TV watcher has to be said what I am more obsessed by is the written word and what I feel I mean that would be my food if I go back to show amazing of eating I feel like if I I do feel quite nourished it doesn't have to be great writing necessarily I mean although someone like Shirley Hasard or Marilyn Robinson certainly does that kind of feeding Maya Angelou or Neil Hurston you know there are so many people so many writers who do really really feed you I feel actually fed and actually if I don't read for a long time I know I can feel that too but I don't know what help me out a bit more tell me give me a bit more this is maybe we can probably all think of some of our favourite anti-heroes or flawed flawed characters and we did a wonderful book actually it was published by Ursula Doyle at Varago by Clare Mesud called The Woman Upstairs and people just it was fantastic the woman had such rage I mean to open my God you felt the page was just hot when you opened the first page and people had a lot of conversations then about how whether or not we have to like our heroines and Clare Mesud was great she said look you know it's not your friend somebody in a book you know that's what you're reading other you know someone beyond yourself and not you're not reading to have a best friend you're reading this person or not what you should say is are they credible and so no I'm very much for the anti-hero and I'm very much for the also the flawed person I also like novels that aren't perfect for that same sort of reason too actually I mean I think it's more it's representative of who we are isn't it hmm thank you well we're getting quite a few suggestions and comments around the big question of how do we make the industry more diverse and how do we change culture at large and I'm liking the idea we're all flawed and we're all struggling together on this but I thought I'd focus that around a question of the idea of the game-changer because you'll see I see you as both game-changer you are game-changers that's true but Lenny in your talk you said you thought the authors were maybe the real game-changers I do and Margaret Atwood of Maya Angelou what about the readers what about all of us who are listening to you and maybe reading or watching these TV programmes does it have to in a way come from the bigger public who are driving you know and do they have to we have to be consumers to force that change or could you be a reader without what I suppose what I'm really saying is that we have to be a place that can be turned to anti-racist feminist inclusive ends because there's so much debate around that so I think again what I said in my talk and I'll be interested to hear what Charmaine says about this but my view is that the things, the industries, the institutions they change in response to the social movements and even though people say they won't change from within it's the status quo is easier and it's only it seems to me when movements come through and in these waves as I was talking about that force the change and of course they are readers they are readers and writers who are saying I'm not represented and they demand to be represented and they demand that the publishing houses change and they will change faster of course if they have those people who are demanding change in the publishing houses they will change their decisions Charmaine what do you, can the market be a place for for justice and change? Yes absolutely I mean you know as living in the capitalist societies that we live in then we vote with our feet we vote with our cash and where you choose to spend your money whether that be a small independent bookshop or at Amazon like you're making you're making conscious decisions or at least she should be given where we are in time but you know I mean it's I mean I can't not kind of go back the step because I just think I think that it's quite easy actually to be a armchair renegade by buying in an independent shop or like you know watching something that you think is kind of worthy and actually that's kind of quite passive and I always will pay the highest amount of respect to the people who who put their head above the parapet as I've seen with my co-organisers of the Black Writers Guild and you know this summer we as we mourned and were horrified by the murder of George Floyd then we got together over Zoom obviously and created a a new cultural institution that is basically taking publishing to task and by having by being empowered by the the LM movement being empowered by the readers and you know the public for there to be just their outrage that we're even in this situation and knowing that the structures within publishing needed to be changed then we created we're creating a new system of mechanism by which change will be accountable and so by writing a letter to the biggest publishers in the UK and having meetings with them and spending I mean I cannot begin to tell you how I've already probably spent like 200 hours to help the BWG and by being a publisher in that space with 200 authors you know I'm just so impressed by the authors and their their want, their desire, their need not just for themselves but for future generations and as a publisher then I'm able to kind of give insights into how the industry works and so what I've understood more than anything is that by having knowledge and using that knowledge for the greater good of other people outside of yourself is the biggest gift that you can is the biggest gift that I can personally give and so yes the consumer question is consumers are really powerful but it's very individually driven rather than collectively motivated and then it's all a question of it's a question of taste and then it's sort of everything follows but the reality is with consumers is that things have to be created in order for them to consume so you know as someone that's not actually like a big fan of capitalism we have a problem with kind of centering the consumer from that perspective because I don't believe that they're the ones that are necessarily doing the work I think you've beautifully brought things together there and I do believe most of us listening are struggling with that how to change things within a capitalism that we didn't choose but I want to just pick out your point there that you set the black writers guild you set that up during the pandemic and I think that's another hopeful sign that we can do things even when we can't leave the house you know so that touches on some other questions and I know we're coming to the end here so I just want to get these in so these are practical questions one from Angela Richmond fuller about thanks for your engaging talks can you recommend any online networks of women to carry on discussions about these engaging ideas and there's one from we'll just find where Priscilla Gon-Salvez I hope I'm saying that correctly who runs a literary salon in London and was like to hear about the one that you ran in Berlin Charmaine and said it would be amazing to get some names or social media links to the salons there in Berlin as well as to get more knowledge and potential collaborations so I think there's some general interest in how to connect how to create these networks I think they're all going in the same direction we want cultural change from all directions but if you have any practical pointers oh there was also one about how could they get hold of the Virago documentary I think it's on YouTube actually at least some of it is on YouTube okay that was easy Virago documentary on YouTube how to connect to networks or I think you need to you need to troll through websites it seems to me I mean Virago has we have a new podcast called Our Shelves we also have Virago newsletters etc and we started something before the shutdown called Speak Easy which was a bit like the salons but I think back to what Charmaine said earlier go to the books you love go to the authors you love go to the questions I believe I really do believe that I would definitely agree I mean listen I'm I'm really not a fan of just kind of I mean I always love to give props to people and work that they're doing but I'm not really a fan of being like okay go to like I'm not going to do the work for you like if you're interested in this stuff then it's all there you'll find it and also but also like exactly have courage but you know also that what makes you who you are and when you're in job interviews etc etc then it's like you know you want to show that you're someone who figured it out and not just someone that like is told stuff and you know I you know today like my son asked me last week my nine year old asked me how what was what happened with the Spanish in Jamaica and I was like great that's going to be your afternoon project so this afternoon he's had to go and research it and he had to I was like you can use four bits of information from around the house and the internet and then you have to write me an essay and so he hasn't written that essay yet but he says that he's been collating the information and the reality is is that what kind of person would I be bringing up if I just told him okay okay okay get on with do your homework I love it absolutely love it okay I thought I do want to just show two more images if we can the slide four and slide seven just to end on you know again I'm sad this is this is pre lockdown vision but I think this is a vision of the fun of both of what you do and also actually the initiatives that you've both taken so slide four which is Charmaine in all the different groups and settings and I hope shows your bookshop and then we also will just see this slide of Lenny's wonderful book Abide of the Apple but also as I took a picture of it in the Oxford bookshop window which is which again to support the related businesses like independent bookshops that we want to do so thank you both for this genuinely stimulating discussion and also of course the audience and we are on a journey together in very uncertain times but as I've said I've found a great inspiration in your your own stories of how you responded to challenges very creatively and in times that also weren't easy before either and you know look where you've got and look where we're getting so again please join us for the rest of the festival where we will continue to explore these ideas with practical solutions I hope that you will be able to share your feminist stories reprinting lost classics and making feminist comics to go back to the questions about design and visual creativity and bring your pencil and paper for that one if you want to have a go yourself and on Friday we close with a panel debate on the feminist marketplace where we will continue these questions about living and social justice and creative inclusion and if you miss anything all will be recorded and available on the British libraries website if you want to know more about the business of women's words project check out our blog so thank you all and good night