…with Daphne Tonge
In this detailed, question-loaded interview, Daphne kindly joins us to talk the nitty-gritty of building not just one, but two industry-shaping small businesses, and how it might impact genre fiction in future.
Show Notes
- The founding of Illumicrate, and Daphne’s story
- A bit about book production, what they can or can’t do
- How does IC choose and acquire books for its crates?
- What IS a crate book – is there such a thing?
- Buliding a book community
- “Social media doesn’t help” but it does?
- Crate market in the usa – why so small?
- UK versus USA book culture
- Setting up an independent press, makign the leap from Illumicrate to Daphne Press
- The importance of editors, and why Daphne wanted to get that exactly right
- What exactly do trad editors DO? Scott breaks it down.
- Editors jobs are complex and very poorly paid
- Why Daphne doesn’t acquire world rights atm (it’s a good and noble reason!)
- What Daphne looks for in author submissions
- Daphne’s surprising tip for how you best catch her attention with your submission!
- Why Daphne Press doesn’t currently accept indie submissions (but hopes to in future!)
- Daphne’s love for indie books and authors generally
Links
Titan Books (works with Daphne Press)
Transcripts (by Sunyi Dean)
[00:00:43.370] – Scott
Welcome to the publishing rodeo podcast. We have with us daphne of Illumina Crate and Daphne Press fame. We feel extremely lucky to have her here because SUNY and I and friends have been watching from afar all of the things that have been happening with Daphne Press. And we’ve been talking for even longer about why is publishing so broken? What would it look like if publishing weren’t broken? And then, lo and behold, we see a publisher break onto the scenes that seems to have a lot of things figured out. So we’re very excited to have you here, Daphne, and we’ve got a lot of questions lined up.
[00:01:33.770] – Daphne
Thank you for having me, and all the very kind words.
[00:01:42.010] – Sunyi
We were wondering if you could sort of tell us about the founding of Illumina Crate, what sparked the idea and how you got started. Because the first time I ever heard of crates, I think, was when Harper was trying to woo me during the auction and they sent a marketing deck that said, we’ll pitch you for crates. And I remember reading it, thinking, what’s a crate? And then I learned how absolutely kind of powerful and important they are, really, they have an impact on the publishing scene and was blown away. So, anyway, feel free to tell us about yourself.
[00:02:11.830] – Daphne
Yeah, just by anyone does it. I am Daphne. I am the founder of Illumicrate. And Daphne Press. Illumicrate came first. So I first got into sort of the book world through book blogging. So I was a book blogger from 2011, so, like, a long time ago. And it was kind of at the height of when blogs were a thing and book blogs were a thing. And I kind of found the book community through that. I made a lot of friends, got to know a lot of authors, got to know a lot of people that worked in publishing through the book blog. And in 2015, when crates were becoming a thing, not necessarily book crates, but just crates in general, there was a lot of things like loot crate and beauty crates and food crates and things like that. I thought, well, why don’t I do a book one? And that was the extent of my thought process for a limit crate, why don’t I do one? And it obviously took longer than that to get it set up and get started. But I felt that because I had connections in publishing, I could source the books, I could source some bonus material.
[00:03:34.150] – Daphne
And back then, we didn’t have all the fancy, all bells and whistles approach to the books. We were just getting trade copies with signed book plates or author letters or something along those lines. But I felt confident that I could source them. And I also felt confident in working with other small businesses to provide items for the crates as well. So I put my first box together in November of 2015. We had 150 boxes back then. That was the first box. And we packed everything in my living room. I bribed some friends with some pizza and I said, why don’t you guys spend your hardearned Saturday afternoon at my living room packing boxes? And they said, sure, we’d love to. So shout out to those friends who helped me from the very start. And yeah, it grew from there. And in 2018, I took the business full time. So when I started the business, I had a separate job, a separate full time job in the finance sector. And in 2018, I kind of just made a leap and decided to try and make Illumina Crate work full time. And thankfully it has.
[00:05:04.110] – Scott
So yet another overnight success story that actually has been eight years in the making.
[00:05:10.190] – Daphne
Absolutely. I mean, I don’t think people realize how old, how long it’s been going on. It has been eight years this year and it was a very slow start. It was pretty much a crawl. I think for the first five years of the business it was growing, but very steadily and very slowly. And it wasn’t until the pandemic hit that the demand just kind of really shot up and Gratefully has kind of stayed relatively consistent since. Yeah.
[00:05:47.470] – Scott
And did that happen fairly organically when the pandemic hit or was there some outreach, something that you put together that made that happen?
[00:05:58.690] – Daphne
I think we were fortunate in that, at least in the UK, and I’m pretty sure in other countries as well, obviously online businesses were still allowed to run during the pandemic. So fulfillment centers were allowed to run, the mail was allowed to run. And so we were, I guess, lucky enough to be in one of those industries that was completely online. And all of the parts of the business that affected the production of the books, like the shipping of the books, the packing of the books, those were all allowed to sort of run as normal as possible. And so when people were shopping online and people were reading more, there was a lot of organic looking for things. It also did sort of coincide with when we were trying to make books prettier as well. I think back then we were starting to do a little bit, we were spraying a few edges here and there. I think that with the whole everyone just had a lot of time to order stuff online just worked its magic.
[00:07:14.060] – Sunyi
Together and just bookstores being shut, I mean, you can’t go outside except for limited activities in the day. So it’s like, where are you going to get your books from? Delivered to your house with toys?
[00:07:28.730] – Scott
Yeah, that’s really interesting. I am curious how your user base grew between the UK and US. Whether you have any other footholds in other territories, that kind of thing. What does that look like and how hard was that to build in both places at once?
[00:07:53.170] – Daphne
I think the UK grew pretty steadily, but is obviously just a much smaller market than the US is. And the US will always be the largest kind of English speaking market because it is the largest English speaking country in terms of population. And so I think there’s always a factor of cost, right? Because when we were shipping everything from the UK, the cost to ship our box to the US was nearly as much as the box itself. And that’s just what international shipping is like. It is expensive. The boxes are relatively sizable. They’re heavy because they’ve got books in them. And so you do just have to pay to get it on a plane across the ocean. Europe has always been a really big market for us and we do have a lot of customers in Europe because we’re lucky enough to use a really great sort of a shipper that kind of was able to navigate things in Europe, especially with Brexit and all of that stuff, and have kept our European shipping rates relatively low. And we do a lot of operational things right in Europe, I think we take people’s VAT up front and pay over to the authorities rather than people having to pay it when they receive their parcel.
[00:09:30.060] – Daphne
And it’s just little things like that that I think has really helped our European customers be really satisfied with our offering, both from a price and also from an admin perspective for them. But in terms of growing, the market in the US is vast. It generally is vast. There are so many people, there’s so many book lovers, which is great.
[00:10:14.270] – Sunyi
Yeah, I mean, I remember looking at the cost of IC when I first started, because when I first learned about crates, I thought, I should learn about this because it’s relevant to me and being really surprised, actually. If you get the basic ones that are just I think the book it’s not really that much more than going into a store and buying it, but it’s prettier and it gets delivered. And I was like, okay, that was really impressive to me. And you mentioned how you started doing kind of the sprayed edges. I won’t say my least favorite word. No, it sounds terrible. Scott looks confused. I’ll say it once for you. Scott spreadges. Got her spreadges the worst word. No, it’s nails on chalkboard.
[00:10:57.790] – Scott
I’m not deep enough into that world to know that term or care, really.
[00:11:03.520] – Sunyi
It’s an amalgamation of sprayed edges. But, yeah, I love how they look. Just the term. How much marketing knowledge did you have before you started and what prompted you to move into making kind of the books look special? And was that just something you were doing gradually and finding it was successful?
[00:11:23.430] – Daphne
Yeah, I think it was a little bit of everything, the edges, whether sprayed and obviously now sort of digitally printed. We went through a phase of stenciling. We went through a phase of ombre. There are many different processes for coloring edges of books and I can spend a whole hour on production because I have become quite the expert on all the different ways you can make a book pretty. But I think that just kind of came from honestly, printer, what printers were able to do. And some genius at a printer was like, why don’t we literally use a spray machine and spray some color onto the edges of books and wouldn’t that look nice? We first started doing some sprayed edges in maybe 2019 ish. I think there was some books of ours started to have just like a one colored sprayed edge and that was like a big deal. But I think as printer capacity became better, they’ve invested a lot into machines that can do amazing things to books. It just became we always talk to the publisher in a lot of detail about how we want our books to look anyway. And we always know that people love fan art, for example, in books, people love drawings of the characters, people love a fancy edge.
[00:13:13.410] – Daphne
People want their books to look unique and special. And I think we, more than other places, have really pushed the boundaries on what’s feasible to do with a book. I think me and our team, we have real pie in the sky ideas of how nice we can make books look. I’m a lover of the acetate dust jacket, which is something I did for one of our boats last year and I absolutely love it. And it’s things like that. I see things or I think about things and it’s like, what if? That would look nice. And actually we are in a fortunate enough position now where if there’s something that we want to see on a book, we can kind of get the publishers to ask the printers if it’s possible. So it’s a mix of what the printers are capable of doing and now it is like there’s imaginations your limit almost. And then we’ll see what the printer can do, which is a really nice kind of shift, but our curation team have a great time with it.
[00:14:28.770] – Scott
Well, I’m very tempted to ask about your full supply chain, but I think that’s probably better held for offline that wasn’t in the approved list.
[00:14:38.900] – Daphne
We can talk about that in a separate conversation.
[00:14:44.640] – Scott
Yeah, those are industry secrets right there. I think we’re going to ask some duplicate questions along the way as we move from IC into Daphne and how those differ. But I am curious how you choose books for Illumicrate specifically. Because I know you’ve got a lot of really big names, which is smart and probably doesn’t need a lot of explanation, but I think you’ve got some pretty unique selections as well. That might not have been just an obvious well, this is going to sell a shit ton of books, right? So is there some unique insight that you have into your user base and how you select books based on that?
[00:15:32.310] – Daphne
I would say that selecting books is an entire team’s process. It used to be just me. Now it is my entire team that get involved in selecting books. And that’s one of the perks of working for Limit Crate. You get access to all the cool manuscripts that we get, but our entire team are free to read any of the submissions that we have, and people find things they’re passionate about and want to champion it. I do the same. I kind of follow the same process as the rest of my team. I’ll read a blurb or something will get pitched to me that I’m really into. I will read it, I will love it. And I’ll be like, yes, I want to do that for IC. When I set up Illumicrate, or when Illumicrate was founded, we always did want to support debut authors. That was always a big priority of mine because we are in such a unique position to be able to share a debut author’s book with a lot of people. And I was that way when I blogged as well. I always paid special attention to and made an effort to read debut books and shout about them if I love them.
[00:16:55.260] – Daphne
And I’ve kind of carried that same thing on with the Illumicrate in terms of how we determine the entire so we think of a Illumicrate almost in seasons. So when we plan, we plan it in seasons, q one, Q two, Q three, Q four kind of thing. And we think, what have we got on this season? And we try to pick titles that are not too similar to each other. So we really like a balanced list. We will include some big authors because I think that’s to me, that’s kind of a nice thank you to our subscribers. It’s like, here’s a book that we know you’re going to love because this is a very popular author and it really resonates with our audience. And then we usually like to then have some lesser known authors and new authors in the mix as well. And we really try our best to look at the year as a whole and make sure that we’re balanced in every aspect of the types of books that we’re promoting, the types of authors who are writing these books, the sort of stories they are.
[00:18:16.510] – Daphne
We really do try to balance the entire schedule. And the team are great because I could not do the reading, all the reading required to run Illumicrate, Daphne Press and our other two boxes AfterLight, which is our romance box and Evernight, which is our horror box myself. And so it’s great to have the help of the team and their opinions. We have to trust each other’s tastes. We have to rely on each other to make good decisions about the books and know that the books that we pick, our audiences will like, and our team are so involved with our audience. We have our own discord. We’re on all the social media. Obviously, my team interacts with customers on email all the time as well, via customer service. And we just get a really good vibe. They get a really good vibe of what works and what doesn’t work.
[00:19:19.900] – Sunyi
So, I mean, on the author side, because crates really were massively taking off when I was, I think around the time I’d sold my debut and just a bit before and when kind of pubs were looking at pitching it and stuff. And there was talk between agents and editors about what books are crate books and whether a book might be a crate book. Do you feel like that is a thing? Do you feel like either illumina crates specifically, or crates in general have a kind of feel to them? I don’t know if that’s because I know you’re looking for a variety, but also, for example, I was discussing this in Discord the other day. I was saying to Ryan, I love Annihilation, but you would never see that book in, like, a crate or like, Game of Thrones. That doesn’t feel like a crate book to me. And I was trying to pin down what does Gideon feels gideon the 9th feels like a crate book, but Annihilation doesn’t. And I guess, yeah, if you have a sense of what that means or if that’s unintentional or unintentional.
[00:20:20.450] – Daphne
First of all, I was not aware for a time that publishers were specifically or saying that things were or were not crate books or pitching it as such to authors and or agents. I was not aware that that was a thing, but I’ve heard it now, so now I am aware. I think we have to look at the crate consumer, like the average crate consumer, who would be mainly female, mainly in their sort of want to say, and probably lean more towards fantasy than any other genre. So taking all of those into consideration, I guess you kind of have to then pitch books that, you know, will appeal to a female 20 to 30 something, fantasy loving audience. And that’s not to say that’s all our customers are we obviously have a lot of customers that fall outside of those brackets. And I think we’re very grateful for our customers, for sticking with us and for choosing a luma crate because we do provide a wider range of different options than other retailers. But I guess that’s maybe what publishers mean when they say, this is a crate book, right? It is a that will appeal to that particular audience.
[00:22:13.550] – Sunyi
I think among ourselves, we were we were also speculating that it can mean basically books that lend themselves well to creating like a fandom, in a way. So again, to use like Gideon as an example, you go to a convention, there’ll be loads of people dressed up as Gideon or 9th House Folks or loads of fan art, loads of fan fiction, I suppose things that inspire fan interaction. Whereas I love annihilation, but nobody wants to be the biologist.
[00:22:45.150] – Daphne
I completely agree with you. There are certain things that will make people want to turn the story into a fandom– hot characters!
[00:22:54.730] – Sunyi
Yeah.
[00:22:58.550] – Daphne
Cool world building, having powers, or feeling like you could see yourself in that world because you can have that power, or you could be that type of person, or you could go to that school or those sort of things. But to me, we did feature Gideon in one of our boxes. It’s not really a very obvious box book, I thought, because it’s so strange, it doesn’t really follow the kind of linear storytelling. It’s very irreverent and that I actually don’t think it is a box book, but I think yeah, not in the traditional sense. I think it’s Sci-fi. It’s not really even really fantasy, so it’s not really taking a lot of what I would consider what the majority of box buyers would think was a really great book. But I think that book was just obviously so good that it grabbed the exactly. It just grabbed the audience and just kept them enthralled.
[00:24:16.430] – Scott
You having your criteria and you obviously understand your target audience and that was something I might actually touch on a little bit later. But you having a pretty good idea of who you’re targeting and how and what makes a crate book or in your case, really just an Illumicrate book or your other variations and then how other people try to interpret that based on what you release is extremely interesting. I love that and I love how wrong we get it when we’re looking at things and trying to interpret based on that. I do have just one question. Based on what you said about targeting, you know, targeting your audience, does that mean that you’re primarily trying to like, hit your major user base that female, twenty s to thirty s, fantasy lover with every book and then trying to branch out here and there but not lose your main base? Or do you have specific books that you target toward, like, oh, we have a group of people that like Sci-Fi or something, but it’s not our main user base, but we’ll throw them a bone every once in a while. How do you think about your market segmentation and how you target different groups?
[00:25:40.060] – Daphne
No, that’s a great question. Honestly, we target and we don’t target. I know it’s like a stupid answer, but we know who our core audience are. But we as a company love other types of books and want our audience to love those types of books. So we ask our audience to trust us when we pick something that is maybe different or reverent or is out of their comfort zone of reading. And we ask them to trust that they know our taste. We know their taste, and this book will deliver something that they will enjoy, even though it’s not something that they would normally pick up.
[00:26:33.850] – Scott
Have you had a lot of backlash for anything you’ve released? And was it obvious?
[00:26:41.690] – Daphne
Not really backlash so much. Sci-fi is always a harder sell for us every time we release, like a theme. And we mentioned that the book is a Sci-Fi book, you will naturally get people that just opt out. They’ll be like, oh, we’re skipping this month because it’s a Sci-Fi book and there’s not really a lot we can do about that. But as a business, we love Sci-Fi and we want to support Sci-Fi authors and Sci-Fi stories. It’s the same, unfortunately, sometimes with queer books or diverse books, which hurts my heart more, I think, when people choose to opt out of those stories because of that sort of content that maybe they’re not comfortable with, but it’s not really backlash in that, oh, you’ve picked a really horrible book. No one likes it. It got one star rating on Goodreads, you know what I mean? And I feel like I trust my taste and my team’s taste enough that that wouldn’t happen. But there are certainly books with certain content that maybe other people don’t resonate as well with. And you see it when you get the skips, essentially.
[00:28:06.150] – Scott
So it’s mostly skips, and you probably see that in real time, pretty quick, rather than having to wait for people to read and get mad.
[00:28:16.650] – Daphne
I mean, they do that too.
[00:28:18.970] – Scott
Yeah, I’m sure you get plenty of emails and chats and what have you.
[00:28:25.150] – Sunyi
I will admit I actually snuck onto the IC discord early on. I left before my book came out. But I was just curious because when I’m in learning mode, I try and learn everything about a thing. I don’t know, because I can’t cope with not knowing information. But it blew me away. It was like this very interlocked, complicated, invested community. Very active, very lively. All the stuff where it’s like, oh, the reveals, the hints, the way everyone’s reading it together at the same time, and it creates a live kind of FOMO. And I was like, this is really cool. I wonder why publishers don’t do it. Because then you’ve got a whole community of people, or even it’s like they’re not necessarily that excited about the book or it wouldn’t be their thing. They might try anyway to read it with their friends. And there’s still that discussion interaction. It becomes a community engagement activity instead of just this solitary thing that you do at home in your living room. Right? Anyway, sorry. Let’s go to the next question now.
[00:29:24.590] – Scott
No, I think that’s a really interesting subject. How much of that was purposeful in terms of creating a community that does read alongs and things like that and did you notice a big uptick in growth or maybe retention, et cetera, when you put that together?
[00:29:49.270] – Daphne
I don’t know. There is a specific correlation but I do know that it fosters that community feel. And reading as sunset is sometimes such a solitary thing and it’s not consumed in the same way that other forms of media are consumed. Like TV shows or films, when they’re out, everyone goes to watch them and see them kind of at the same time. And then the conversation is very now, it’s very of the moment because everyone is fresh in everyone’s head and everyone’s watched it at the same time. Whereas books are different. So even when books come out and people may even buy them all at the same time, but they don’t necessarily read them at the same time because it’s a bigger time investment than a lot of other forms of media. You need to be in the mood, I think, to read a book and to spend four to 8 hours reading something. And that’s for me, I’m a relatively quick reader. I’m sure it takes people a lot longer to read books. So I think that community feel really helps in terms of getting people excited about books, getting people wanting to continue reading the book because they know that they’ve got someone to talk to about it.
[00:31:11.010] – Sunyi
Oh yeah, I mean, I think we all know that feeling as well. Growing up, because I was one of the only people reading fantasy in Hong Kong in the 90s in my Christian school. And I’d read this book and finish it and be amazing and then it’s like literally no one else I know is reading. I’ve no one to talk to. But kind of now with the Illumicrate stuff, I was very aware that wow, people are going to read the book, they’re going to get online, they’re going to get a discord to their community, say, hey, did you read chapter 20 yet? And everyone has, or a lot of.
[00:31:40.670] – Daphne
People have and it’s great. I’m the same as you. I grew up in the Philippines and it was very hard to find fantasy books in the remember I was in I must have been about twelve or 13 and our local bookstore had just stocked like this fantasy series. And seven of us classmates were like, look, we’re all going to buy it and read it, or we’re going to buy two sets and we’re all going to share them and read them kind of at the same time so we can all talk about them. And that was kind of my introduction into fantasy. And so I now looking back feel like that was quite formative to have that kind of community around me and we were all talking about the same book at the same time. That was so nice.
[00:32:39.070] – Sunyi
How does social media fit with your business? Because I think social media is a big part of building your community. And one of the things that we’re always told in Trad Publishing is that social media doesn’t really gain traction with readers. But that is exactly what IC has done. Like, you’ve got a massive social following and they’re very, very engaged.
[00:33:01.590] – Daphne
Yeah, kudos to my social media managers, honestly. So my first employee I ever hired is Caitlin. She’s now our chief operations officer and does so much for the business, both for Illumicrate and Daphne Press. Shout out to Caitlin. But I initially hired her on to take over social media and customer service. That was her first job at IC because I wanted to not do social media as soon as possible and she’s done a terrific job with it. And then we then hired another social media manager. We’re on our third social media manager now and I think that social media in itself has changed a lot since I first started using it and I was running the Illumicrate account. But what I do have to say, I guess, is because we are selling a very visually appealing product, the visual social media works really well for us in terms of obviously the majority of our following is on Instagram and that’s how we grew our business. Now I guess it’s on TikTok. And obviously YouTube was a huge we never ran our own YouTube channel, but we obviously collaborated with the tubers that did. And because our products are so visual and the kind of opening of the crate and taking things out and taking photos of everything together was good content, not just for us, but for everyone that produced it, I think naturally it just started to gain traction in that way.
[00:36:43.860] – Scott
But that’s something I hadn’t fully realized until literally today, right now, during this conversation, is that you’re not just selling a gorgeous product and a fun personal experience, but you’re selling a community experience, which is fantastic.
[00:37:06.170] – Sunyi
Just what apple does, man. Yeah, well, it used to drive me nuts when I was a kid because I always felt like when I was a teenager, I used to refuse to use Apple products because people who buy Apple products used to say, oh, they’re joining the Apple cult. Right. It becomes like a lifestyle thing. It’s like you’ve got your your Apple phone and your Apple ipod and it plugs into your Apple PC and your mouse can but it is smart. It’s smart.
[00:37:30.330] – Scott
I have one brother in my whole family. I have one brother that doesn’t have an iPhone, and our family texts are all fucked up because of that one brother. Stupid hunter is a little hipster and he won’t get an iPhone.
[00:37:44.600] – Daphne
Anyway, I did want to circle back on the point about publishers. Potentially. Yes, a lot of them have social media presences, and they can obviously do a social media push, but it’s like all brands and customers are really savvy now, and they know that when a brand is working with an influencer, they are paying the influencer to do it. And so their reviews and their unboxings and their photos are not 100% authentic. And I think the book community is probably one of the last vestiges or one of the last communities that is very much 100% powered by authenticity and what is authentic and what isn’t. And publishers do work with influencers, and it works great. But I think there’s always a caveat from a customer’s point of view. I think that this person has been paid to talk about this book rather than this person has bought this book out of their own money and are now talking about it.
[00:38:57.270] – Sunyi
I do think Harper are really savvy just from what I’ve seen of them in their marketing. And I do think there’s a degree to which keeping some distance between themselves and readers is a choice that they make to not, you know, that meme, where the guys like, hello, fellow kids with no, but, you know, I mean, you don’t want to give that vibe. You’re like hey we’re pretending to be cool and it’s like you’re a corporation.
[00:39:25.150] – Scott
But at the same time they’re going through the same process they find a book, they like they’re championing it as people they’re a fairly small group of people. I’m thinking more of on the side of putting together a discord, that kind of thing. There’s just not a lot of community, and I know some publishers have kind of tried to do a little bit of that over time, and it hasn’t worked great for them for one reason or another. I think targeting books my point is it’s very cool that you are yeah.
[00:39:53.320] – Sunyi
I think targeting booksellers continues to work for them, and that’s the readership that they target, because if booksellers love your book, they’ll sell dozens of copies, and that’s great.
[00:40:03.130] – Daphne
And I think I’ve seen so many publishers that do target booksellers specifically, they have bookseller only Arcs, or they invite booksellers to specific events to pitch their books to. And I always think that’s a great marketing strategy for publishers.
[00:40:18.930] – Scott
Yeah, that community aspect does matter a lot because even today, you two talked about growing up, how much that influenced you and what you read and maybe how you enjoyed it. But I find myself, even now, reading I have a huge stack up here is mostly my whole stack of books that I need to read still, although I have some read some of those, but I find myself pushing my literally hundreds of books that I want to read and have own aside for whatever book my friends, Richard, whoever are saying, oh, my God, this is so good, and I’m like, okay, fine, I’ll read it.
[00:41:04.670] – Daphne
I get that. Even just with my staff in our staff chats, if someone’s reading something and they’re very involved with it, obsessed with it, I want to say they make everyone want to read it, and then they do. And then we have a long conversation about the books, and it’s really fun because you want to read something that other people have read because people naturally, I think, want to share their opinions on books, and you want to know that listening.
[00:41:35.850] – Scott
I think we need to have a psychologist on one of these days. Because not only does it influence what I read, it influences how I read. And I think not only am I giving books more time when somebody I know and trust says, hey, this is good, check it out, I’m really enjoying this, but I think my expectations going in, I’m looking for those to be met and I’m looking for reasons for those to be met. And I might be putting aside some issues I might have with whatever I’m reading that I otherwise wouldn’t because there’s that group aspect. So that’s really fun and really awesome that you do that for debut.
[00:42:19.750] – Sunyi
So I was just going to say, from the author side, it felt to me like Illumina Crate was having a big impact on the book landscape, not just changing how publishers operate. Because obviously before their crates were thing, they didn’t pay attention to it. Now that they are, they’re very aware of it. But I think it has an impact on how we think about books and how we view them as more collectible and that it’s kind of like especially with ebooks basically destroying mass market paperbacks now it’s more extreme, right? You get an ebook, you get an audiobook, you have like a collectible hardback. And I just wondered if you felt like Illumicrate was changing that book scene or if you were kind of aware of that in a sense.
[00:42:58.450] – Daphne
I don’t know if it’s just Illumicrate that’s obviously driven the sort of the book collecting market. I’m sure it has had an impact on it for sure. I’m not going to say that we haven’t. I am a collector, so as a person, I am a collector. And when I, when I collect, I I collect hard, you know, so I go all in. Yeah, I don’t have chill hobbies. This is what I’ve discovered about myself. I cannot just have a chill hobby. When I’m into something, I hobby to the max. And books were like that for me before it became a business. I I was a first edition collector. You know, I would hunt down, sign first editions of, you know, books that I loved and keep them in pristine state and just revel in owning a signed first edition of something. And that’s the kind of, I guess, part of the mentality that I’ve kind of brought to Illumina Crate, because I am that person. I’m that person that collects every edition of the book that I love. I have a lot of collections of just arcs for a specific author or title or things like that.
[00:44:24.130] – Daphne
I hunt down like, every edition there is. And I was that person. And I know that my customers are those people, and we help fuel that. That’s why they like collecting our books, because they are beautiful. They are very collectible. There’s like a great kind of second hand economy as well, that as an economist, I find completely fascinating the reselling economy, like what books are worth, why books are worth more than others, what people buy the books for, is it to keep, is it to trade, is it to sell? There’s so many different factors, I think, of why people buy our books. But I definitely say that yes, we have helped. We have definitely helped that kind of collectible making books a collectible item landscape. But that’s something that’s been around for ages. Who has collecting first editions, collecting nice copies, collecting illustrated editions, signed editions. That’s always been a thing for book hobbyists.
[00:45:48.240] – Sunyi
They used to be really expensive, though. I remember the Folio books did this incredible edition of like Philip K Dick’s Collected Works, and I absolutely loved it. Like, it was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. And it was 700 quid. And it’s just like I don’t love it that much.
[00:46:00.990] – Daphne
Yeah, it’s really hard and I dabble a little bit. In the high end collectible market, there are definitely really small presses that do letter press stuff, like really short run numbered editions. And I do, I love those books. I think they’re beautifully made, I think they look gorgeous. And there’s something to collecting, like a beautiful piece of art of something that you love. I’m here for collectors. If you want to collect, collect and do it, have fun doing it.
[00:46:38.540] – Sunyi
I was going to ask one last question about crate markets abroad and then let Scott move into Daphne Press itself. But, yeah, we sort of know in publishing at least, authors are told that the crate market is not as big in the States, even though it’s a bigger country. And I just wondered if you had any insight into that. If you don’t know, it’s all right, or if you can’t share, that’s okay. Because Illumicrate has now gotten USA distribution, hasn’t it? And I guess we’ll find out if that’s a game changer.
[00:47:14.230] – Daphne
The very first box, I think, of its kind of this sort of kind was based in the US and they are still a box that are operating today. I genuinely think it is down to firstly, the market size, I think does play into it because the UK is a much smaller market. So an order of the size of Illumina crates and or some of our competitors is big enough that publishers will see that as a significant order for the market size and will do what they can to make the book as special for us as a customer as possible. I think from what I’ve heard in the US. Obviously I don’t directly work with a lot of I work with some us. Publishers now that we are bigger. But I have heard of other smaller I’ve heard sort of secondhand smaller customers. And actually knowing what my discussions with publishers are that there are minimum quantities that us publishers will need for them to be able to do something bespoke. And I think customers want or need that level of bespoke when they are choosing to buy the book, not from a bookshop, but from another specialist retailer such as ourselves.
[00:48:43.650] – Daphne
So I think that is a huge barrier to entry in the US market, more so than it is here. I think UK publishers have introduced a minimum order quantity, but it is, I’m sure, a lot lower.
[00:48:59.830] – Sunyi
Yeah. So it’s a smaller niche, but you can dominate it, which is what we try to do with this podcast. Very niche topic.
[00:49:09.210] – Daphne
And part of it is also printer capacity. I think UK printers have improved their capabilities, as I’ve mentioned already, they’ve been able to do the fancy edges, they’ve been able to do this, that and the other, whereas I don’t know or think US printers have had the ability to or maybe they just choose not to. So I think that’s part of it as well. Like what they actually can offer is interesting.
[00:49:41.890] – Sunyi
Yeah, no, that makes sense and I would never figured it out. Thank you. Yeah, everyone in the UK wants it on it now. Waterstones want to do other fancy editions.
[00:49:52.250] – Daphne
I’m very much like the more the merrier. I think the more people see it, the more people want it. Right. And it becomes more of a thing. And demand will cope with demand will increase, sales will increase, what printers and publishers can do will get better to meet those needs. And, you know, I think it’s great.
[00:50:18.030] – Sunyi
I honestly love it. Like, I if I buy a book, I want it to be beautiful, so I completely get it.
[00:50:26.050] – Daphne
People’s shelf spaces, they’re limited, right? And so when people buy something to display on their shelves, they want it to be nice. Yeah. They want it to be decorative as well as something that they want to read.
[00:50:44.850] – Scott
No, I was just going to comment on somehow that answer is not as surprising as it might seem at first blush. That it’s who the blockers might be on the US side. Sorry, I just had to throw a little shade. But that is interesting. And I wonder I was sitting here wondering in the UK this is just anecdotal my personal observation from the outside, but it does seem like the UK science fiction and fantasy community is a little more tight knit. And I wonder how much that has to do with geography and more shared experiences or ability to connect in real life, or at the very least, more shared context for shared experiences versus the US, where it’s a vast area. Yeah. People from Texas have a very different life from people in, say, New England or what have you. That’s interesting to think about.
[00:51:58.730] – Sunyi
Yeah, it is very tight knit from the author side. No, that’s right. I would say it is very tight knit from the author side. Like, you go to conventions and I would say a lot of people generally know each other because the pool is smaller and you can cross the country in a day. I do recognize a lot of the same faces crop up under the same small group of agents and stuff like that. And the readers here tend to be very dedicated. When I lived with my ex husband, we inherited a load of books from his uncle. But when his uncle died and his uncle had every science fiction fantasy book published in the UK between 1972 and like, 2005, and then he had a bunch from the as well, and 10,000 books in his Kindle.
[00:52:46.390] – Daphne
Wow.
[00:52:46.860] – Sunyi
And it was just yeah. So we had this house that had 4500 sci-fi and fantasy books, physical copies in it. But it’s because he didn’t when he was growing up, there weren’t that many readers and nerds, so the few that were there, they’re very dedicated. They know each other, and I guess maybe that’s a bit more of a cultural thing for us. I’m not sure.
[00:53:11.150] – Daphne
Yeah, I definitely think having a distance always plays a role, but I also think because, as Cindy says, it’s just a smaller pool, it’s the same people and you just naturally kind of gravitate to each other and form a really good group, I think.
[00:53:34.470] – Scott
Yeah, makes sense.
[00:53:36.220] – Sunyi
So how did you make the leap from doing crates to running your own Sci-Fi and fantasy imprint? And we’re kind of interested in what prompted that change. What kind of practical considerations are involved in setting up an independent publisher? Because that is really complicated. I see a lot of people in Facebook groups and forums say, how do I set up my own press? And the advice is almost always, don’t.
[00:53:59.390] – Daphne
I wish I was hard as those groups now.
[00:54:02.460] – Scott
Yeah, it seems like literally every small press and no offense to small press listeners, but you hear about all of these presses pop up, whether it’s somebody building a press just to print their own and their friends, or whether it’s somebody trying to set up a legitimate business as a small press, it just seems like it’s such a tough business.
[00:54:23.610] – Sunyi
But most of them fold within two years.
[00:54:26.950] – Scott
Yeah. You seem to be the lone star in a dark sky. So we want to hear about we’ve.
[00:54:33.700] – Daphne
Not yet hit two years, so we’ll see in a year’s time. Well, I think just going back to the original question, tell us about how we started. Daphne Press it almost felt like a natural progression, I think. I feel personally that we as a team, both from IC, daphne Press and we all work kind of as one big happy family. We have a really good understanding of what we think our readers want and what our readers like to read and what our customers have historically gravitated towards. And I felt like we had all it just seemed like the natural next step to then publish your own books. Honestly, I was quite frustrated with sometimes we would see a book that would be acquired in the US and we would ask and it sounded great. And we would ask around and we would ask and say, is anyone in the UK publishing this? And usually the answer is no. And I get it. It’s a smaller market. There’s not room for every book that gets published in other countries to come to the UK. There just isn’t. But it was a bit of both. I wanted the freedom to kind of choose the books that I wanted and bring books over or acquire books that I thought were really good fit for the modern fantasy reading audience.
[00:56:20.880] – Daphne
I want to say here in the UK, I also just wanted the freedom to be able to do exactly what I wanted to the books that I had. And that was my sort of thought process for starting my own press. And again, it doesn’t come without it’s. Like, I’ve had a lot of experience with the Luma crate. I kind of have a good sense of how publishing works. I’m in touch with a lot of agents. I felt like I had enough in place that I could give it a try. Right. That’s how I approach things. I’m always like, I’m going to think sensibly if I’ve got the tools or the skills or if I know the right people to be able to at least make a go of it. And that was always the first thing I think about when I’m trying to start something new with Daphne press. It definitely did have its challenges because there were always parts of publishing that were unknown to me.
[00:57:56.200] – Daphne
I think publishing as an industry, as you guys have talked about on several occasions, is very opaque, and it is for a reason. I think it is because as businesses, they need to protect their knowledge, and that’s what makes the business run. And it’s like giving away industry secrets. It’s like, give KFC told everyone what their secret recipe was. It’s that kind of thing. And I understand that businesses have to protect their business, and knowledge is a big part of that. So it was very difficult. I knew right away I needed to hire an editor. I’m not an editor. I don’t have any editorial experience. I knew right away that was the first role that I needed to hire. I needed to hire a commissioning editor that could work with authors that we acquired, because I wanted to give authors the same experience that they were getting. I didn’t want to just kind of start up this press, buy some books, and not be able to edit my author’s work or work with the authors into making their books better. So I knew that the first person that I needed to hire was that. And thankfully, we have hired David Lancet.
[00:59:17.500] – Daphne
He came from another SFF publisher, so he had five plus years experience commissioning and editing books, which is invaluable.
[00:59:27.990] – Sunyi
Do you have input onto story changes? Because I know you say you’re not an editor, but if you’re involved in the acquisitions process, or maybe you should tell us if you’re allowed to talk about what that acquisitions process looks like, because I think you do it a bit differently.
[00:59:42.110] – Daphne
Yeah, I definitely have some input. Obviously. I think what I’m lacking is like, I’ve never written edit letter, I’ve never kind of workshopped through a book because I’m both not an editor and I’m not a writer either. So I have no insight into either part of the process, really. But I guess I know when something’s not working in a book, and I have some suggestions of what I would do to improve a book, but it’s not so formal. And I think that I didn’t want to just go in, maybe tell me if I’m wrong, but I didn’t want to acquire an author and just start telling them, I don’t know how to fix this, but you need to fix this. I don’t think that would go very well.
[01:00:48.130] – Scott
That’s a very noble sentiment. I’ll just throw out there that the range of what people get back from their editors is very wide. And that’s just coming from knowing, like, a dozen or so authors and asking them what their edit letters look like and what kind of feedback they get. As far as I can tell, there’s no standard.
[01:01:20.570] – Sunyi
Well, no, I think they’re all trained, but I think it was shipping and handling podcasts where they talked about the fact that some editors are really good at marketing, but, like, marketing in the sense of getting people excited for book, pushing hype, getting booksellers excited, being really good project managers. And some editors are actually good at the craft side of the editing. And the gold standard is an editor who’s good at both, but you don’t necessarily get one who’s good at both. And I think that’s why it can vary, because different books maybe benefit from different levels of editing, or some books some authors produce books that are basically polished, and so they’re fine with that. An editor is just a good project manager, and maybe that’s where a lot of the variety comes in. And I can say that with impunity because I feel like my editor is good at both. So that’s always why I’m okay to be on the podcast, basically.
[01:02:10.330] – Scott
And I think that’s actually really three or four different roles that you mentioned, right? From my perspective, they do a ton of different things.
[01:02:19.020] – Sunyi
Crazy.
[01:02:20.750] – Scott
Yeah, well, and that’s a big part. We’ve talked about this a little bit before, but I think that’s a huge part of why publishing can go so wrong for some people and why relationships with editors might flame out pretty hard sometimes, because they really are expected to do so many things. There are relatively few roles that I know of in corporate America that expect that much out of that kind of role. Because, as you mentioned, there’s the craft, right? They’re expected to be good enough at writing and storytelling that they can tell a professional author, at the very least, what they’re not doing right and where they need to pay more attention to something that’s not working. Maybe they suggest specific fixes. I don’t know how each individual works. Right? But so there’s the craft, then there’s project management, right? Like, people make whole careers out of just project management. And it’s hard, and it really sucks. Half of why I got out of corporate America is because I kept being forced into the project management or program management box and I just hated it. Like, it is so bad. And then there’s marketing and knowing who the target consumer is and knowing who a book would be targeting and what that market size looks like and how they are best communicated to.
[01:03:53.410] – Scott
And that’s insane too. Right. And then there’s that internal politics and gathering support internally and honestly, in the corporate world, people who are good at all four of those things end up being executives that are paid shit tons of money. Like, so much money. If you’re good at all those things, you are worth so much money.
[01:04:20.050] – Sunyi
Unless you’re an editor, in which case.
[01:04:22.450] – Scott
You make that’s the problem. Yeah.
[01:04:25.980] – Sunyi
And then you can make 45 grand a year in New York.
[01:04:32.330] – Scott
Live in the subway. Yeah.
[01:04:37.120] – Sunyi
Every so often I hear people say online I think people outside the industry have this view of editors as being like, they’re only in it for the money. And I just think, like, do you guys know how little money they don’t make?
[01:04:50.510] – Daphne
Yeah. Publishing. And I gave a talk at a school just earlier this week, actually, for kind of teenagers that wanted to know more about publishing. One of the things I said was that no one works in publishing unless they really love books. Right. It’s not one of those industries that you go my analogy is like, no one works in banking and is like, all banks, they’re the best. Right. But people that work in publishing love books. You have to love books, I think, to work under the conditions that you work under when you work in publishing. Sorry.
[01:05:42.110] – Sunyi
Yeah. We were, I guess, waffling on about how complicated it was in hiring editors.
[01:05:47.260] – Daphne
Oh, yeah, absolutely. Well, the other piece that I found extremely difficult was the sales piece. And a lot of people I talked to, a lot of people who are very even high up in traditional publishers, people with experiences starting their own presses, have said that the sales piece is absolutely crucial. And because if you’ve got no one to sell your books, no one’s going to know it’s a book and it’s not going to get into the shops, which is what we wanted. So I didn’t want to start a press and just print books to go in the lumicrate. That was not the intention of Daphne press. That’s a nice bonus, I think, that, to have kind of a direct retailer that I can work with. But it wasn’t the only thing that I wanted to accomplish. And I wanted our books to be available widely in the trade. And I wanted, again, all the authors that I brought on board to get that experience of seeing their book in a bookshop, which was very important to me. That piece was different. Honestly. It was hard. It was really hard. I reached out to a lot of different people.
[01:07:05.000] – Daphne
There are a lot of companies that do sales on behalf of small publishers. That is a business. There’s certainly a lot of those companies here in the UK. But I wanted someone with the right experience, the experience handling genre, selling genre, and we were lucky enough to do a deal with tied in books that do our sales and distribution. And Titan obviously are themselves an SFF publisher. They are independent, but they have a great sales arm. And first of all, I just want to say kudos to everyone that works in sales in books, because I think your function is so important, it really is. And I work with a lot of salespeople, both from who do sales for Daphne Press and who do sales for publishers, to me as Illumina Crate. And I think you are all doing an incredible job, I generally do. So kudos to everyone that works in sales, in publishing. But yeah, but Titan books were just they just felt like a good fit because they were genre specialists, they were themselves an independent publisher and their books are widely available in the trade here and export, and they had the right capabilities to be able to sell our books and they have honestly done a terrific job.
[01:08:27.010] – Sunyi
They’re a lovely press, and George is like he’s one of those editors that I know, I think two or three people who have him as an editor and they absolutely adore him.
[01:08:35.530] – Daphne
George is yeah, he’s great. But, yeah, just honestly, they’ve done so well for us, and I think we’ve been very lucky to have a sales team that actually push our books, because our books are in bookshops and we’re getting Waterstone special editions and we’re selling to other retailers. And every time I go into the works, I see one of our books and I’m like, that’s really cool, right? And I wouldn’t have just done it for a lumicry, I wanted it to be like a legit.
[01:09:21.510] – Scott
Now, you mentioned Titan does both UK and sales for export. Does that mean they have gotten you a significant US footprint as well and you have good distribution there? Or is it primarily UK? At the moment?
[01:09:41.150] – Daphne
It is primarily UK. Europe and Australia. New Zealand, mainly. Because most of the things that we have acquired for Daphne Press are those territories. Thus far, I have had books sent to me that we’re offering World or we could have bought World, but I again, I don’t wanna I don’t want to do things that I can’t deliver on, you know, so I wasn’t going to acquire World, not knowing how I was going to sell the book into the US yet. And I’m working on that, right? And I’m learning about the US market, I’m working on what works there, who are the key retailers, how does distribution work, and I want that in place before I then start acquiring US rights and not doing anything with them, to be honest.
[01:10:40.830] – Sunyi
That’s very sensible.
[01:10:44.770] – Scott
And I think that more than anything separates you from the other players in the game. The fact that you care about, you know, what you’re doing with the rights you acquire. And it’s not just a grab to get all of the rights that you can because they might become valuable to you at some point in the future. Yeah, that’s pretty amazing. And that makes a ton of sense.
[01:11:12.490] – Daphne
For me. I care about my authors. I want them to get the best deal that they can possibly get. And I know that them selling me US rights is not going to be the best deal for them. And so why wouldn’t I be happy with the rights that I can actually sell for the markets that I am comfortable, that I can do a good job in and actually let them get that other part of their income from other rights that they can sell to other publishers that can do an equally good job in those markets? Yeah.
[01:11:46.470] – Sunyi
And in the end, everyone benefits that way because if it sells well in one market, it’s kind of boosting it in another one.
[01:11:52.950] – Scott
Yeah, for sure.
[01:11:57.430] – Sunyi
I think you’ve got a few more questions, Scott, and then we’ll probably let you go after those.
[01:12:03.050] – Scott
Yeah. Daphne, I know it’s late there for both of you, really.
[01:12:06.570] – Daphne
I know. Honestly, this has been really fun. You guys are great. I’m a huge fan of the podcast. I look forward to it. When it comes up on my podcast saying there’s a new episode, I get very excited.
[01:12:20.430] – Sunyi
Thank you.
[01:12:22.110] – Scott
That’s really amazing to hear. And weird to hear, but amazing to hear. Yeah. I mean, the rest of our questions and Sunyi and I have been going through a shared document of our questions that we sent you and crossing off and adding as we go, so trying to look through and see what we need to hit. I think you’ve organically hit most of them. I think you talked about why you built Daphne in addition to Illumina Crate, and that plays into how I’m sure you acquire books, but is there anything specific that you look for? And this might be something to inform the agents and authors that are listening, which is also weird, but they are. What are you looking for at Daphne? What do you hope people send your way?
[01:13:24.040] – Daphne
Yeah, for sure. Daphne Press I think we are still trying to form our sort of identity. I want the identity to be we are a home for being a space for marginalized writers to be able to tell their stories, you know, and that that is obviously one of like our key pillars, you know? So I want to tell stories from different authors, from different backgrounds, authors of colour, whether that’s diaspora, whether that’s not disabled authors, queer authors. I want those stories and those are stories that I’m always looking for. The team are always looking for. I have certain things that I love. My team and my editor obviously have certain things that they love. I think obviously Illumina crate books are a good measure for the type of books that we’ve read and enjoyed and again, that is very vast in terms of the types of books that we have picked and featured. I’m going to put this out there into the world because I promised my teens I would something, but I like that. I have become a huge audio listener, actually just literally this past year and I would probably get to submissions faster if the author would read me the first three chapters and send it with the submission.
[01:15:10.240] – Daphne
So I’m just going to throw that into the world and see if that actually becomes a thing. No pressure, but I really enjoy books being read as audio. I’ve read so many fantastic books that way and that’s I think a testament to some of the great audio production and the narrators that are hired and actors that are hired to do audiobooks. But I find things more memorable, I think, when I listen to them in audio, which is a strange thing and it’s maybe just because I read a lot, right, and I do a lot of my reading on my Kindle because a lot of things I get are manuscripts, so I don’t actually have physical books. By the time physical arcs come out, honestly, it’s too late a lot of the time. So I do all of my work reading on my Kindle or my computer. I try my very best not to read on my computer because it’s just really bad for your eyes, audio. If authors want to read me their books and send it with submissions, I would absolutely love that. I know it’s like a pipe, but it might happen.
[01:16:30.260] – Sunyi
I think you underestimate how desperate authors can be!
[01:16:33.810] – Scott
You are about to get so many shitty audio files.
[01:16:40.930] – Sunyi
Do you accept submissions from indie authors as well? I know people have asked you about that in the past.
[01:16:47.250] – Daphne
Not at the moment. We have actually acquired one indie author, but that was me approaching her. I was a fan of her work and so I approached her about it and I made a very good case for Daphne Press and thankfully she agreed. I feel like we are getting enough submissions through agents and through agents that I have faith that they’re doing a good job kind of vetting and sending us sifting through things and knowing exactly the sort of books that we would be interested in. So thank you agents, for doing that. I think maybe at some point when say we have because obviously we only have Davi as our commissioning editor myself, who also reads and acquires and then Caitlin, who I mentioned before, and Tori are sort of the core team that sort of read and choose Daphne, what books we want to acquire. I think we’re the team to expand and we were to take on another editor, an editorial assistant or something along those lines, then maybe there would be a time, like a window where we potentially could open up to indie authors and things like that. But I think indie authors are doing amazingly at the moment.
[01:18:22.200] – Daphne
I think this is the time, right, that indie publishing is having a great boom. And first of all, I’m in awe of authors that can write so fast because they do, they produce so many books so quickly and I’m like, wow, that’s amazing. And essentially, each indie author is their own publisher. And I think that’s a great skill set to have because they’re out there, they’re marketing their books, they’re turning it into the right file formats. They’re doing their own production, they’re doing their own editing, they’re a publisher in their own right. And so many authors have found success that way. And I think if that’s what works best for you, then I think you should do that.
[01:19:14.930] – Sunyi
No, that’s totally fine. Mostly I was just curious and I thought if I don’t ask that people will write in and like bug me and say I should have asked something.
[01:19:26.470] – Daphne
I would honestly love to, because I think there’s a lot of great stories out there that are indie published, but it’s the same thing. It’s sort of the opposite question. Like, if you are a successful indie published author, would you really want to be traditionally published?
[01:19:41.230] – Sunyi
For sprayed edges, maybe?
[01:19:43.230] – Daphne
For sprayed edges, maybe.
[01:19:46.110] – Sunyi
Yeah.
[01:19:51.150] – Scott
Hey, sprayed edges are awesome.
[01:19:54.050] – Daphne
You could do a lot for a sprayed edge, right?
[01:19:58.210] – Scott
Apparently.
[01:20:02.690] – Sunyi
Yeah. Thank you so much for coming on and talking to us because I was completely psyched when you said you were willing to come and chat and tell us about the very mysterious world of crates now, hopefully yes, it is.
[01:20:20.410] – Scott
Much less yeah, you might have given away too much info. This was extremely informative. But yeah, it was a big moment for us when Sony said, oh my God, Daphne, listens to the show. I was like, what? So, yeah, this has been very fun for us.
Publishing Rodeo Podcast 