…with RJ Barker
This week, please join us as we talk to award-winning fantasy author RJ Barker. Despite dropping out of high school, suffering a chronic illness, losing one agent, and dying on sub , RJ has found his feet on the shaky ship of trad publishing. These days, he has 9 published books under his belt and many more on the way.
We talk about about the clash of art versus business, the ever-present spectre of self-doubt, and how to keep your sanity and perspective in an industry that very easily strips both away. And above all, the ‘pervasive and remaining joy’ that is writing–the real reason we all got into this business.
Show Notes
- Writing with chronic illness
- Becoming a writer without finishing high school
- Making a grand total of 5$ in the first thirteen years
- Dying on submission, and how/why RJ stayed upbeat
- Getting dropped by his agent
- The odds of short fiction submissions
- The odds of success
- On Being A Failed Writer by Stanley Rogouski
- The only way to fail is not to do it
- Post-book launch panic
- 9 books out, 4 in production, more on the way
- Altering your book for the market
- Fighting over titles and covers with publishers
- The horror of a Hooded Man cover
- AHREFS (link!)
- Covers being editor dependent
- Imposter syndrome
- Self-rejecting your own book as a defensive mechanism
- Changing gear with every book series
- Pitching “out of trend” novels
- Why one book being popular can open doors for other books with similar themes
- RJ’s secret method for writing that appalls everyone he tells about it
- There is a real sense of joy in writing
- A pervasive and remaining joy
- Why Sunyi doesn’t write every day
- Feeling trapped by trilogy writing
- Feeling well supported by Orbit
- Ignorance is bliss – on deleting his own access to the sales portal
- The precariousness of being midlst
Links
Transcripts (by Sunyi Dean)
[00:00:00.100] – Sunyi
Hi, I’m Sunyi Dean.
[00:00:03.400] – Scott
And I’m Scott Drakeford.
[00:00:05.130] – Sunyi
And this is the Publishing Radio Podcast. In 2022, we both launched debut novels in the same genre with the same publisher in the same year. But despite having very similar starts, our books and subsequently, each of our careers went in very different directions.
[00:00:21.480] – Scott
That pattern repeats itself throughout the industry over and over. Why do some books succeed while others seem to be dead on arrival?
[00:00:30.350] – Sunyi
In this podcast, we aim to answer those questions and many more along with how to build and maintain an author career.
[00:00:38.000] – Scott
Everyone signing a contract deserves to know what they’re really signing up for. In an industry that loves its secrets, we’ll be sharing real details from real people. We’ll cover the gamut of life as a big five published author from agents to publishing contracts, finances, and more.
[00:00:59.690] – Sunyi
I don’t know if you know the premise or if it helps to know or we can just launch in
[00:01:02.510] – RJ Barker
Just launch in. I never want to know, ever.
[00:01:06.860] – Sunyi
Okay, that’s fine. Welcome to the Publishing Radio Podcast. This week, we have on with us, R. J. Barker.. I’ve heard of R. J. For a while as a fantasy reader. I remember when I first encountered him with air quotes around that is when Lee’s Writer Circle sent me around some random email that had all of the authors who were part of the Circle. It had R. J. ‘S website. I saw that and I thought, Oh, my God, there’s a famous fantasy writer in my local writers group. How did that happen? After I signed with my editor, Lindsay Arjo reached out with a really lovely email just to say hello and assure me that I would be in good hands because Arjo is another Lindsay author originally. Although he… Well.
[00:01:57.670] – RJ Barker
She left me.
[00:01:58.960] – Sunyi
Yeah, she left you..
[00:02:01.650] – RJ Barker
She’s taken off to do Tor. She was Orbit. Yeah. But she’s lovely and I love her.
[00:02:06.450] – Sunyi
Yeah. RJ, you’ve got a really fairly long publishing journey and various things that cropped up in that. If you feel like introducing yourself and talking about some of that in a general way. It’s just a starting point. That would be great.
[00:02:18.180] – RJ Barker
Yeah. Do you want me to tell you how I ended up an author from the beginning? I’ll skip my teenage years because they’re not really relevant. But I did make one big mistake in my teenage years, which is worth warning people about, about 14 or 15, I decided I was going to be a rock star. I stopped going to school, which is not good. It took me quite a long time to realise that my lack of musical talent was always going to hold me back. Great hair when I was a teenager, but it just didn’t make up for it. I played in bands for years, and eventually I was in one that were really good. I thought, Oh, I’m not. I can’t do this. But I knew I wanted to do as a creative, and I’d always had a book in my pocket. I decided I was going to be a novelist. I think if I’d actually known how difficult it was at that point, I would not have bothered because it’s a lot of work. Of course, my English was terrible. I think it took 13 years of writing and pretending to write, writing again, getting put off writing more.
[00:03:32.680] – RJ Barker
Then I was quite… This sounds mad, but I promise you it works. I was quite lucky that I got chronically ill. I was really poorly and too poorly to work, which gave me time to write and really commit to it, which I did. And then nothing about my journey is helpful to anybody listening. I can just tell you, don’t listen to what I’m saying and thinking that’s the way to do it. I’ll follow the R. J. Model because it’s rubbish.
[00:04:03.450] – Scott
Acquire a chronic illness.
[00:04:06.090] – RJ Barker
Yeah, it’s not that helpful. I made a grand total in 13 years of $5, which I couldn’t cash. My bank just said that’s not enough money to check. I said, Oh, all right, thanks. Then Simon Spanton, who was an editor for Gollanczs at the time, and now he’s with his angry robot at the moment, and he’s lovely. I saw a short story that I’d written and it was very Yorkshire about a zombie sheep. It’s scary than it sounds.
[00:04:37.520] – Sunyi
I believe you. I’ve seen the sheep here.
[00:04:38.450] – RJ Barker
He got in contact with me and said, That story is too good to go on your blog where no one will read it. I thought, thanks, Simon. Can I put it on the Galang’s blog? And he did. And then he said, have you got anything longer that I can read? I went, yes. And I thought, brilliant. I’m going to get published to Simon Spud from Galang’s. I sent him something and he hated it. But he did say one of his authors might like it, which was the fancy writer Stephen Diaz. He did, and he put me in touch with his agent. His agent also hated it, but wanted to know if I had anything else. I just finished this science fiction novel and I sent it to his agent, and his agent read it and came back, All right, I’m just going to be straight with you. This is absolutely brilliant for the first third, and the rest is terrible. But if you’re wanting to rewrite it, let’s have a go at it. We did, and it went to market and it didn’t sell, which sounds like it should be really disappointing.
[00:05:38.610] – RJ Barker
But my mind doesn’t work like that because I couldn’t concentrate at all while I was on submission. I was just like, I don’t know what to do. Do I write a different book? Do I write more of that book? Am I actually… Can I write? What is write? I don’t know. I’m scared of words now. Then when he rang me up and said, Oh, I’m really sorry, this book hasn’t sold. I was just like, All right, like, Cool, I can go again. I was like a dog out the traps. I wrote what would become Age of Assassin in six weeks and sent it to my agent. Holy shit. I’m quick when I’m sometimes, and sometimes I’m not, and I sent it to my agent. He came back and he said, Good news and bad news. Good news. I think you’ve got something. Bad news. I’m dropping you as a client, which is not perfect what you want to hear. But he put… He put me in touch with a, I made a list of agents. And he said, Yeah, try all of those. And then at the end, he said, I would also try Ed Wilson, Johnson and Alcock.
[00:06:40.280] – RJ Barker
He is on Twitter. He’s called Literally Whoer on Twitter. And I had never thought of trying because I just think I’m not a literary writer. I didn’t quite finish school. I’m a dirty little genre writer. That’s what I love. But I sent it to Ed, and he was back in touch within a week. And he was just like, Yeah, I’ve read the first chapter. I want this. Contact all the other editors and tell them. I signed up with him. It’s been gravy ever since. It’s really weird. It’s worked out. Now I realise how stupid I was 13 years ago and I sat there and went, Well, I’m going to sign with a big publisher or nothing. I just looked back and thought, You idiot. You absolutely idiot. You should have got a proper job and that’s what you should have done. I’d have gone to college or something. But it’s too late now. Wasted.
[00:07:29.760] – Sunyi
If it’s any consolation, going to university, you didn’t do shit for me. I’ve been killed some time, and it got me to the country, I will say that. I came in on a student visa, and I had a partial scholarship to Leeds. My entire plan to university is this is just stalling until I figure out something I can do because I’m not very good at anything. I missed out when they’re handing out the special autism skills day or something. But yeah, it’s not helped in writing, certainly.
[00:08:02.870] – RJ Barker
What was the course you did at the university?
[00:08:06.470] – Sunyi
I did English because I’m boring and I can’t… I mean, I actually failed fifth grade English when I was at school. I don’t know what the UK equivalent to be.
[00:08:15.090] – RJ Barker
All the best people do.
[00:08:18.140] – Sunyi
I can’t do grammar. I remember as well. I’ve told people this before. I had an agent say to me once from reading one of my faults, if you write like this, people will think you failed fifth grade English. I thought, Well, I have. So you’ve got me pegged. But yeah, I’m even worse at maths and science as well. I can’t do people, which means most jobs are out of the question.
[00:08:47.830] – Scott
I love hearing you list all these things that you think you’re bad at because…
[00:08:52.690] – RJ Barker
Yeah.
[00:08:53.810] – Scott
Talk to the people around you. Yeah, you’re fantastic at several of those things. I can’t attest to any math or science skills, but I have read your writing and -.
[00:09:04.450] – Sunyi
My partner can attest to that!
[00:09:04.630] – Scott
Okay, well, I’ll talk to Lee sometime, but.
[00:09:09.300] – RJ Barker
- I think my agent would agree with your agent about my English because I regularly get emails, and they’re just the email equivalent of a sigh. I’m going through this now, Arjo, and I’m like, Oh, you’re not happy. It’s my fault.
[00:09:27.540] – Sunyi
It’s artistic. It’s an artistic. Also, well, it wasn’t my agent that said that, just to clear it up. I don’t want anyone to think too badly, but it was an agent I queried who didn’t sign me because they thought that my voice was middle grade. And my writing was terrible. Anyway, it’s subjective, isn’t it?
[00:09:44.140] – Scott
Evidently.
[00:09:45.930] – RJ Barker
When people say that a writer’s grammar is bad, once you’re published, that just becomes being a very voicey writer. Oh, they’ve got a unique style. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that’s because I don’t understand how it works.
[00:09:57.660] – Sunyi
Yeah, prepositions are for amateurs. Yeah.
[00:10:00.650] – RJ Barker
The weirdest thing is now I think I do understand how it works because a copy editor will… The first copy editor will teach you that just for seeing how it works and realising how much you don’t want to do that, not.
[00:10:15.700] – Sunyi
What I want. They have a deep level language that we can only marvel at. Yeah, but it’s wrong. Very quickly. What instrument did you play when you were in your band?
[00:10:24.910] – RJ Barker
Well, being lazy, I thought, well, the bass is only got four strings. That’s got to be easier, hasn’t it? I worked for the bass guitar. In theory, it’s easier, but you do need a good sense of timing, which I’m completely lacking in. There were a couple of times where my band was playing one song and I was playing something else, and I just didn’t realise. Things like that happened quite a lot. I had a really good time.
[00:10:52.540] – Sunyi
Very, very quickly. You heard of Shed Seven?
[00:10:54.690] – RJ Barker
Yes, I’m. Aware of Shed Seven.
[00:10:55.560] – Sunyi
I will have to tell you, or I’ll get my partner to tell you in person some time, the story of how he was in the Shed Seven group before they were Shed Seven. Basically, they kicked him out because he kept skipping practice to go ring bells because he did a bit bell ringing. Then after they kicked him out, they became famous. I just love them. Well, clearly, he was holding them back or something. Hi, Lee, if you’re listening to this.
[00:11:20.510] – RJ Barker
I’ve got a friend whose claim to fame is that he kicked Rick Witter, the singer from Shed Seven in the back of the knee and made him spill his drink. It was an accident, but that’s his claim to fame that he accidentally kicked him in a crowded pub and made him spill his pint. That’s what he would always say when Shed Seven came on, just guys made him spill his drink.
[00:11:41.180] – Sunyi
We’ve all got something and we need to hang on to… Yeah. When you… When you set out to start writing, did you have a sense of what success looks like? And that’s a question I’ve been thinking about a lot because we do often have guests on who they talk about having a particular shape to the dream they’re chasing and what it means to them and what it represents.
[00:12:00.120] – RJ Barker
Well, I really like crime fiction. That’s probably my greatest love. I’d watched a lot—I’m not hate it—of Murder, she wrote. Is to me, success as a writer meant finishing my manuscript in one go and then going to the Bahamas to see my editor. That, in my head, is- Getting accrued. You finished on time. Yeah, and that’s not what it’s like at all. But on a more realistic level, I’m not a very thinky person. I’m more a doing person. I very much live in the now. I don’t think about what’s gone. I try not to think about what’s going to happen because writing is a precarious beast, and you can’t not be aware of that really. But I never really thought about getting a book out. That was it. Getting a book out was success for me. To have done that was just like, Well, I’ve been published. That was more than I ever really suspected would happen. That was a win. Then the first year of my book coming out, and we went all over England doing stuff with my wife, we just at one point said, Don’t matter if this is it, because we have had the best year ever.
[00:13:21.840] – RJ Barker
It’s just been fantastic. We met all these lovely people, and that was it. Now, of course, I’m expecting millions and a yacht.
[00:13:31.510] – Scott
Millions AND a yacht.
[00:13:33.290] – RJ Barker
And a yacht. Yeah, that’s my next goal. That’s my next goal.
[00:13:37.490] – Scott
That yacht’s just a bonus.
[00:13:39.620] – RJ Barker
Yeah. Yeah, that’s the bonus from my publisher once I’ve earned the millions.
[00:13:43.520] – Sunyi
Thirteen years is a long time to strive. I don’t know. Did that slog ever get you down? You talk about being in the moment, but with every moment, you’re thinking like, This is a bad idea.
[00:13:53.010] – RJ Barker
I never thought about walking away because I’m just too stupid to do that. I just think, No, no, no, no. Everyone’s telling me I’m terrible at this thing, but I will get better. I did short stories for such a long time, and that was quite disheartening that I never, ever got anywhere near selling. Then later on you realise actually short stories is quite a weird thing. Difficult. Yeah, it’s difficult. There are markets that do seem like actually, in hindsight, maybe they had a bit of a stable of authors. I don’t know if it’s still the same now. But I know when I got… Sorry.
[00:14:41.440] – Sunyi
Oh, no, I was just going to say that C. C. Finlay said once that when he was still editor of fantasy and science fiction magazine that 60% of his submissions were from professional authors, as in 60% of stories in his slush pile are from people who were already had a track record of publishing with pro magazines, which is stackering. Because when you’re queering novels, probably 90% of people in that slash pile are not professional authors.
[00:15:04.750] – Scott
Why are so many people doing this?
[00:15:07.870] – RJ Barker
I think if you ever stop and really think about it, you just wouldn’t do it because the odds of success are just… Oh, no, this is uplifting for people listening, isn’t it? You can do it, listener. You can do it. But a lot of those other people listening, they won’t.
[00:15:28.830] – Sunyi
This is why I didn’t do it. This is why I didn’t do it for years and years because I need to know the worst that happened. I went and looked up all the stories of a failure in my 20s, and I read this article that I still reread every few years called On Being a Failed Writer by Stanley Regowski. I just had this cemented my brain that this is not a good idea and you shouldn’t do it. Therefore, I didn’t do writing for a very long time as a result.
[00:15:55.700] – RJ Barker
Of that. I think being really ill, apart from giving me timeto find another thing. I’m quite a Lassifair person in general. I’m like, Let’s just see what happens today. I’m not making plans. It’s not my thing. But I’ve Crohn’s disease and I was really ill. I weighed about six stone and I couldn’t eat. My wife referred to me as looking like a skeleton. And her thing is skinny men. She’s just sometimes saying, I know you were dying, but you looked so good.
[00:16:28.960] – Sunyi
For American listeners, Six Stone is about 84 pounds.
[00:16:34.310] – Scott
Oh, my God. Wow.
[00:16:36.080] – RJ Barker
Yeah, and I’m six foot tall, so I was like nothing. I had a constant agony, just constant pain. I’m not looking for sympathy either. It’s no one’s fault. It just was… But I’ve already got a bar for how bad things can get, and it’s very, very low. My book, Not Doing Well, it’s not going to be as bad as that. So I just… I go into things and then I have this mindset that the only way to fail is not to do it. But I am still utterly, utterly terrified every time a new book comes out. I just got slightly mental every single time. I’m surprised my agent doesn’t block me.
[00:17:17.720] – Scott
Yeah. Well, I find your story very interesting. So you wrote for 13 years on and off, it sounds like. You wrote a few stories that were rejected or people made fun of them in other ways. You had an agent drop you. And then all of a sudden, you end up with your current agent. You write Age of Assassin’s. And then you’ve gone on a tear of how many books now since Age of Assassin’s published?
[00:17:53.630] – RJ Barker
Seventh fantasy and there’s two crime novels as well. And there’s another, I have another four in the tubes, so to speak. I write a lot.
[00:18:03.720] – Scott
Yeah, well, and that’s quite obvious. Yeah, that was one of my comments is since 2017, you’ve published eight or nine or whatever it is that you’ve published, but they’re all very, very well received by everyone I’ve ever heard from. And obviously, you’ve sold well enough to keep doing this, which is not a given in this business. Do you think there was some turning point for you as a writer? Or do you think that it was really more of a matter of just getting into the system and the system helped you find an audience that might have been there all along?
[00:18:43.280] – RJ Barker
There was an amount of, if you keep doing a thing, you’re going to get better at it. And there’s a writer called Jason Arnop, who wrote a brilliant book called The Last Days of Jack Sparks, which infuriates me and makes me incredibly jealous every time I read it, and I have to ring up and tell him how much I hate it. But I always said there’s a huge element of luck to becoming a professional writer. And what he says is, Yeah, there is. But the longer you keep at it, the smaller the pool of people that luck can apply to becomes, which I think is a really nice thing. And that’s not the question we’re asking, so I’m just going to go back a little bit.
[00:19:22.380] – Scott
No, yeah, that’s a very good point.
[00:19:23.250] – RJ Barker
There’s the graft of writing and reading and writing and trying to get better each time. And then with my first agent, when we took apart the science fiction book and put it back together, I think I learned a lot about how, not so much how stories work, because I think I knew that. I think as a reader, you intrinsically do understand that. It’s just tapping into it. But I think I saw the skeletons of it in a different way after that. The Age of Assassin just clicked in my head. I can’t describe it in any useful, technical way as just saying that the whole story appeared in my head. Actually, I spoke to an editor called Matilda IMLA, who was with Head of Zoom at the time, and she really liked my science fiction novel. But sadly, she moved to New Zealand and left her job. We got completely off what we were meant to be talking about, which was my book and on to Agatha Christie.
[00:20:25.200] – Sunyi
That’s fine.
[00:20:25.840] – Scott
Keep wandering. Yeah, we love wandering.
[00:20:28.040] – RJ Barker
We started to talk about Agatha Christie, and I would say, Oh, I’d love to read a fantasy novel. It was Agatha Christie. I think that was a moment and mine just went bang, and that was Age of Assassin’s. The book you read is more or less the book I wrote. But apart from the fact that there’s a big battle at the end, which there wasn’t. My version ended with revealing who was going to do it because it’s a Who’s going to do it.
[00:20:56.120] – Sunyi
I hadn’t even thought of it in those terms. Because I do like Agatha Christie.
[00:21:02.920] – RJ Barker
But it’s a proper, like… They all get together at the end and they go, This is how it was done. They tell you that. That’s where it ended. My agent went, Yeah, it’s a fantasy novel. You’ve got to have a battle. You’ve got to have a battle. It’s just the way things work. I don’t want to read it, but I think you have to… I’m going to go, Okay, then. I did that. I think the harder things I’ve learned are things like covers and stuff like that, and stepping back and letting the publisher do their thing.
[00:21:33.270] – Sunyi
Did your title get. Changed out of curiosity?
[00:21:34.510] – RJ Barker
Yes, it did.
[00:21:36.640] – Sunyi
Because the reason why I asked that is the title and the content surprised me a little bit. I read the book and I thought this is very different from what I was expecting in a way. It felt like a. Marketing title.
[00:21:47.490] – RJ Barker
Absolutely, it is. It’s 100 % a marketing title. It was called The Uncrowned Heir, first of all, which I really liked. And then my editor-.
[00:21:59.630] – Scott
I like that. I like that a lot.
[00:22:02.060] – RJ Barker
My editor said, Look, you’re not going to like this, but there is an amount of pedants who are going to just turn around and say, I’m all as technically uncrowned. I’m saying, Yes, but you can have a Crown Prince. And she was like, Yeah, we’re not having that. I said, Okay, we need to think of a new title. And then I was desperate to call it All Deaths Well Intentioned, which I really liked. And I think it fits the feel of the book and there’s an air of melancholy to it. And they went too crimey, too history, not fantasy enough. And I think I did about 50 or 60 different titles until eventually that all got to the place that they’ve been going from the beginning, which was we really wanted to have the word Assassin in the title because an amount of people… Yeah, people will just buy a book that says Assassin. And if it has Assassin in the title, then… So I was like, All right, then. So that Age of Assassin is not my title. It’s theirs. But it has the word Assassin on it six times on the cover.
[00:23:11.040] – RJ Barker
Age of Assassin is to catch an Assassin, use an Assassin, and there’s more than that. It’s just like you completely lose all meaning to the word Assassin after a minute, you’re just like, I don’t know. It’s just noises.
[00:23:23.360] – Sunyi
It’s funny. I nearly didn’t read it because it had Assassin in the title. I thought, Oh, I’m not an Assassin book reader. But people I know recommended and liked it, and that’s why I tend to go out for books as recommendations as my friends know my taste. I think mine was originally called Paper flesh, which was precious to me because that the first line I ever wrote of the book was some quote where Devon says to you about, She was nothing more than the sum of all the paper flesh she’d consumed. And that was like the first thing I’d written the whole book around.
[00:23:57.040] – RJ Barker
It’s a. Really good title, though, it’s the Book Eaters.
[00:24:00.150] – Sunyi
I see their wisdom in it now, but I really struggled at the time. I really struggled.
[00:24:05.550] – RJ Barker
I was the same.
[00:24:05.660] – Sunyi
I think because I felt like it was generic and then it took me, I had this long bit where I wrestled with it. I realised that my book is probably always more special to me than it will be to other people. And that in a sense, my book is generic, like on some level. They explain all the stuff at it now. There’s a whole group of readers that will buy books about books, and that’s the reader you want for this book. I was like, Oh, I didn’t even know that was a thing. And my agent was like, Oh, and they have algorithms where they test out different titles and keywords. And I was like, Holy shit.
[00:24:36.500] – RJ Barker
And now it’s done really well. So you have to sit there and go, Yeah, they were right. Which is really annoying. It’s like, Oh, you’re right. It is that. It’s one of those books that you read and you’re just as an author within the first couple of chapters thinking, This is such a good idea. I wish I thought of this. I’m very cross with you, son. Very cross about this. Oh, sorry. Itried to get it up. I hated the cover for The Assassin’s Book as well. I just…
[00:25:04.940] – Sunyi
I got the e-books. I don’t even remember your cover because I just don’t pay attention on e-books.
[00:25:09.190] – RJ Barker
It’s a hooded man. I was just going, But there are no hooded people in the entire book. The whole point is they’re not. They’re like Ninja. They turn up to workmen. They’re not. They were like, A hooded man. I really want to change this. They were going, Well, you can change the colour.
[00:25:27.060] – RJ Barker
My agent did the thing that the agents are really good at, and he sat me down and said, Look, just suck it up. They’re right and you have to accept that. That’s what it’s going to be. He said, You are being precious about what you think this book is, where they are trying to sell it to people who will buy it for that cover and discover they love it, even though it’s not what they expect. I was like, Oh, okay. My editor said a really good thing. She said, This is not the cover and title for the book you have written, but a lot of people will buy it and the people you’ve written this book for will discover it through word of mouth, not the cover and the title, which was a really nice thing for it to say. But it might just have been to get me to shut up. There you go.
[00:26:17.240] – Scott
I think it has a lot to do, titles specifically, but I think it has a lot to do with simplifying a book down to that generic term or what have you, is what publishers have honed their process around, and that’s how they know how to market. And so they have created their own little environment where that’s what works for them and other things may not. And when I hear algorithm from a publisher, I just have to roll my eyes a little bit after having worked with them, because what I’m guessing they’re doing is going to Google keywords or there’s a service called Ahrefs, A-H-R-E-F-S, where you can search for certain terms or keywords and it will return interest in those keywords over time, right? Because I’m pretty goddamn sure that publishers aren’t running legit focus groups and stuff. If they are, they should tell us that, right? Because that’s amazing. I wish that publishers would run actual focus groups, actual studies on these terms, on their covers, literally just anything, honestly. But I’m guessing that their algorithm is logging onto a website that looks at what terms are most popular and most searched at the moment or over recent history and aligning with those.
[00:28:02.100] – Scott
That’s my guess.
[00:28:02.710] – Sunyi
Well, I’ll say that’s what my agent said. I’ve never actually heard that from either publisher directly. I do think the cover is often very editor-dependent. They have a sense of like, the sci-fi books have ships on them and that thing that publishers love to do. But a lot of it is about editor vision because I think from both my editors, one of the first things I said when I finally got to talk to them was like, Oh, here’s what… This is the thing we’re imagining for the cover, and they have a clear picture. I guess if they don’t, you’re probably in trouble because that’s when you’re most likely to get stuck with stock photos and clip art.
[00:28:41.120] – RJ Barker
But the weird thing was for the bone ships, it was the opposite way in that I didn’t have a title for that. And bone ships was just my placeholder type of thought. Well, I’m not going to get to call it what I want anyway.
[00:28:52.410] – Sunyi
That was the same approach I had for my second book. I thought, Right, I’m not going to get attached to it. I won’t name it. I just ended up calling the file Ghost Fucker, which has been a running joke of this podcast. My editors referred to this manuscript as Ghost Fucker. And we cannot publish.
[00:29:09.390] – Scott
It like that. If they publish that book with that title, I will take back every single bad thing I’ve ever said about publishers. Every single bad thing, I will take it back.
[00:29:23.040] – RJ Barker
They will not put that in Wolworths, though.
[00:29:26.220] – Sunyi
No. My UK editor had a chat with me earlier this year because my UK editor changed. One moved on, a new one took over. I think she sat down quite serious and said, Look, I’m really sorry, but we just can’t have Ghost Fucker’s real title. I was like, No, that’s a joke. It’s fine. We’ll have a title, but we’re still working on it.
[00:29:49.000] – Scott
Oh, my God.
[00:29:50.390] – RJ Barker
Orbit would just say, Oh, we love the bone ships. I’m like, What? Yeah, we love The Bone ships. That’s what we want to call it. And then the other two books, we had to play off because I really, really wanted the last book to be called The Boneship’s Wake. I was just going, Look, it’s lovely and poetic and wake means that they’re waking and it’s the wake of a ship and it’s after a funeral and it’s all of those things. And they were like, Can we call the second one, Call of the Blown Ships? I was like, Can I get off what I want if you do that? They’re like, Okay. I was like, Yes.. Then the new one, that again is not my title for it. Oh, no. What would you call it? I wanted to call Deep Forest right up until the end, and then they hate it. They would just say, Yeah, that’s a folk horror title, not a fantasy title. But I’ve got… They wanted it to be Wildwood, which I didn’t like that because it felt too generic to me. I didn’t really like that at all. And it meant, because it’s a place within the book is the weird wood that was Deep Forest all the way through it.
[00:31:05.930] – RJ Barker
And I had to change it all the last minute to make it work with the title. But I do like it now. It’s weird. I’ve come around to that one. I really like that title. They were right there. It works. I hate it when they’re right.
[00:31:16.270] – Sunyi
So imposter syndrome, I think you’ve written a bit about on your blog about doubt and its presence in your writing. I guess I wanted to ask you a bit about imposter syndrome, what you think of it, if you still have it, if you find it helpful or you think.
[00:31:30.240] – RJ Barker
Yeah, I do have it. I don’t like the term. I know it’s term, but I don’t really like the term imposter syndrome because I just doubt my ability. It’s not to do with not going to school. It’s just a feeling that I always think the best way of describing it is that there is a better writer just over the hill that I’m chasing. I can’t read my old books because I’m just appalled by them. I don’t just how could I write. People really like them. I know it’s me. Every time a new book comes out, I go slightly mad. I think I go a little bit loopy. I just email my agent, What if everybody hates it and all the reviews give it one start? What do we do then? Do I just have to go live in a hole? Then we have to discuss with either him or my editor where they go, You do realise you have said this about every book you have published. Every single one you have sat back on, This is a terrible book. This is the worst thing I’ve ever done, and I was going to like it.
[00:32:35.840] – RJ Barker
I was like, Oh, maybe there’s a pattern there. I think part of that is of rejecting it. And then if everybody hates it, it doesn’t matter because I’m like, Yeah, I thought it was rubbish anyway. So it’s okay, and I’m onto a new thing. And also what I will do is I will write another book because I’ve wrote Girls of the Word or we got it all edited. I wrote the second one, and it coming up to the six months before publishing and starting to put things out. And that’s when I start thinking, Well, it’s entirely different. Because there’s a sensible thing to do. You’ll know this, is to do something that’s like the thing you did before, because that’s what people want. They want something that’s like the thing you did before, and I just can’t. I just wish I could, but I can’t. My brain just goes, No, no. Let’s do something entirely different. Let’s do some different voice, different way of doing it. And an amount of your readers are going to just pick it up and go, This is not what I wanted from him at all.
[00:33:47.350] – Sunyi
It works For Jeff Van der Meer. He’s talked about that because all of his books are so different. He says with every book, he picks up readers and loses them. And I suppose he doesn’t care because he’s got loads of movies and stuff.
[00:33:58.540] – RJ Barker
Yeah, I’ve not got that cushion. I just think what… Then we get to the point of it coming up, and I’m just thinking, What have I done? What have I done? Why didn’t I just do more shapes? I should have done more shapes. Then what I do is I write a new novel. I write an entirely new novel and give it to my agent so that if everybody hits it and it all goes wrong, I’ve got something ready to go. That’s how my brain works. Instead of hiding in a hole, my imposter syndrome makes me write more to try and create a safety net. I write the new novels really quickly because the idea that I had was for another fantasy murder mystery, and I think I wrote it in five weeks. This is really clear. I understand it, and I’m gone. I desperately do not want to think about this new book that’s coming out. I’m going to think about nothing but this now. I’ll write it.
[00:34:56.940] – Sunyi
Can you guys hear my dog snoring, or is it…
[00:35:00.390] – Scott
I heard it a little bit. I thought it was a loud car going by your house.
[00:35:08.220] – Sunyi
She’s so loud.
[00:35:10.190] – Scott
Sorry. That’s amazing. R. J, if it makes you feel any better, I have a personal pet theory that the writers and artists generally, but writers who do have imposter syndrome and do doubt their own work, end up being by far the best authors or creators in terms of, I guess, the meaning that I find in their work, even if they claim that there is no meaning to be found and it’s all purely commercial, I don’t believe it. Sonia is a very good example of that.
[00:35:52.800] – RJ Barker
We don’t know what’s in our books, I think, a lot of.
[00:35:56.420] – Scott
The time. Yeah, I like that theory, too.
[00:35:58.750] – RJ Barker
Yeah. It’s like Richard Adams about Watership Down, which is one of the greatest books ever written, has always said it’s just a book about rabbits for Kids, and he’s entirely wrong. He knows he’s wrong because each chapter is prefaced from quotes from classics. He’s like, That is not what you do in a kid’s book, Richard Adams. I don’t think he knows what our book’s about. I don’t think we do it all the time.
[00:36:22.640] – Sunyi
But also when you’re talking about that disliking books is a defence mechanism, I was going to say that I think I definitely do that. I know a lot of writers who when they go on Sub, they consciously decide that they don’t like that book anymore because it just makes it easier to write off the rejections if you hate it as well, because you hated it first before those editors hated it.
[00:36:46.100] – RJ Barker
I hate it before it was cool, actually.
[00:36:48.990] – Sunyi
Yeah, exactly. I think there was a lot of that for book eaters. It was like it was written in a bad time. And then I finished it and I thought it’s just going to go to shit like the other one. So just get in early with the dislike of this book. And then it doesn’t matter what all those stupid reviewers think when they hate it too. And it comes out and I’m prepared because I’ve hated it before them.
[00:37:11.960] – RJ Barker
I think writing- And they liked it. You have to sit.
[00:37:16.280] – Scott
Sorry. Go ahead.
[00:37:18.090] – RJ Barker
I was going to say they liked it, and then when they like it, you have to sit. They’re going, How can these people get this so wrong? Yes.
[00:37:23.020] – Sunyi
I’m thinking of that all the time. Why don’t they have any taste?
[00:37:28.440] – Scott
Oh, my goodness.
[00:37:32.590] – RJ Barker
But I think over time, you developed a distance from it to see. Because I had a revelation. I was speaking to Croncaste, who were lovely, and I was talking about, and it filtered down afterwards. I was talking about what Gods of the weirdwood is about, which is a really difficult thing because fantasy books are like, Oh, it’s a fantasy book. It’s a journey, and Ghost of the Weirdwood is not. It’s about a man who’s been betrayed and cannot trust. It sticks in that bit of the hero’s journey where you refuse the coal, and it keeps going around in circles and coming back to the same place where the coal is there and he will not have it because he can’t trust and he can’t see what he really needs from life. It’s quite, I would say, difficult book. It’s not like one that invites the reader in. You have to stay with it because it’s infuriating. What is it? It’s really deliberate. But maybe not infuriating, but.
[00:38:39.190] – Sunyi
Well, no. Sell it to readers. Read my deliberately infuriating book.
[00:38:43.240] – RJ Barker
Yeah, it’s infuriating. It’s really slow. I’ve described it a few times. It’s about a man who doesn’t go anywhere. That’s the plot of book.
[00:38:53.880] – Scott
You might want to workshop that one. Yeah.
[00:38:58.900] – RJ Barker
I should try and describe it in a more exciting fashion so people will buy it because this is meant to be marketed. No, it is about a man who doesn’t go anywhere, and he’s not very nice either. But there’s a very funny monk and there’s a weasel. There’s a weasel dog thing in it, which I really… Weasels get a really bad rep in fiction. They’re always made out to be the bad guys because they’re the working class animal is the weasel, and that’s unfair. So I’m Team Weasel.
[00:39:36.990] – Sunyi
I’ll come back to the chronic illness in a second, but I just want to ask very quickly. Did you have any issues pitching the Boneship books? Because I remember you briefly talking on Twitter about the fact that everyone always said, Navy books and ship stories don’t sell in fantasy. And that’s the one that got you the award.
[00:39:56.780] – RJ Barker
Yeah, I didn’t. I tried to find out. Jenny, my editor, I love my editor, Jenny, because she… I wrote the Assassin’s books, and I think she just loved what I took all the trilogy with it. It didn’t do what people expected, and I used it to tell someone’s whole life story. I think she just had an enormous amount of trust with it. Because I didn’t do a pitch as such, I sent her a five-page prose poem that was in the voice of the book. I just said, Yeah, she’s probably not going to agree to that. But she just came back and said, Yeah, I’m down for this. Do it. I did. I found out that traditionally, ship books don’t sellout. They are often the grave of fantasy writers from another writer who mentioned it to me the week before The Born Ships came out. I was just like, That’s not good timing. I’m in the, I hate this book, Chris. Why would you say that? It was just like an off-hand. I was like, Oh, thanks. But yeah, it did all right, even though it was a ship book. I got an email from him. Well, not an email, just a message from another writer who was really dejected.
[00:41:22.210] – RJ Barker
I understand why because he’d been writing a ship book just as mine was announced. He was just like, Oh, no, that’s killed mine. I was like, No, it’s not how it works. Either my book is going to die a death and I have saved you from dying that death later on, or my book’s going to do all right and there’s going to be quite a few ship books come out afterwards, because that’s the way it works. Yeah, they have. There’s been some really good ones. I’m quite jealous. I wish I thought of that. That’s a really good idea. But yeah, I didn’t pitch it in a sensible way at all, and Orbit never wavered. Jenny was just like my champion of risk, could you say, Yeah, we’re doing this.
[00:42:03.370] – Sunyi
Okay. No, that’s fine. That’s brilliant. I guess just very briefly on the chronic illness, I was curious. I don’t know if curious is the right word, but it is something that some authors live with. I just wondered what your day looks like and what the challenges are of that intersecting with writing.
[00:42:22.060] – RJ Barker
My days are usually the same. I’m going to tell you something that polls all writers in a minute, and I apologise and just think badly of me because every writer I’ve met that I’ve said this to does. I get up and I have some coffee more because I like the ritual of making coffee than I actually like coffee itself because it’s actually quite unpleasant. But I’ve got into the habit. And then I sit and in the morning I write a minimum of a thousand words, and that’s what I do. And sometimes it’s more. Every so often it’s less. My chronic illness, it’s biggest thing as long as it’s not hurting, it is tiredness. But those two or three hours in the morning, I’m pretty good generally, no matter how long I am. And even when I am really tired, writing seems to be the last thing that goes. But the terrible thing that I do is while I’m writing, I watch television at the same time. And it’s how I watch all the things that I feel I should be paying attention to as a genre author. But I’m not particularly interested in the Marvel superhero series because I put them on the television and I watch them as I’m doing things.
[00:43:34.960] – RJ Barker
And most writers go, You watch television? How dare you? How with peep? But I think I started seriously writing when my son was a baby and I was like, Stay at home, Dad, because obviously I wasn’t going to go out to work. My wife was like, Well, you’re not getting away with doing nothing. You can look after the child. Here, here’s yours. I’m quite used to being interrupted as part of my process. So television works really well for me. It upsets a lot of the writers. They’re just like, No, silence or maybe soundtrack music, nothing else.
[00:44:09.890] – Sunyi
I’m not going to be prescriptive about your method as it works for you clearly. I mean, you’re getting words out a lot faster than I do.
[00:44:17.810] – Scott
I don’t think many people are writing one book in a matter of weeks, let alone repeating that over and over.
[00:44:24.930] – RJ Barker
I get quite worried I might burn out, but there’s been no… It’s a real sense of joy for me in writing. It is not work. I sit there and literally, when my first book came out, I can’t remember who it was, and I wouldn’t say if I could, but another writer said to me, Oh, you’re enjoying it now, but you’ll become jaded very quickly. It’s a grinder and it gets to everybody. But I don’t know, I just wake up every morning and just think, Oh, I actually get to do this. Somebody pays me to sit and do this nonsense. There are hundreds of thousands of people who would love to be doing this. There’s a real sense of joy. To create is something I’ve always dreamed of being able to do since I was about 15, and it was music and then it was writing, and I can’t draw, so that was always off the table.
[00:45:21.390] – Sunyi
Yeah, I know. I think about a lot as well. I sometimes get people ask me like, Oh, do you not find it restrictive, especially in trad publishing? It’s like, Are you… Have you kidding? Every day job you have is going to be way more restrictive than publishing. I remember writing bits and pieces and my work breaks and stuff in the brief period where I had a hideous proper job that I hated. The demands that publishing puts on me so far are nothing compared to that. It’s like, Oh, I might have to bend on the title and I can’t call it something stupid like Ghost Bucker. Well, that’s okay, because I still got to write a book and get paid for and even if it gets cold, I don’t know.
[00:46:02.750] – RJ Barker
You could write another book, Sunyi, and self pub Ghostfucker with the proper time.
[00:46:09.980] – Scott
I do like to hear that, though, because not that you’d suffer. I like to hear that there is a pervasive and remaining joy in the process because that’s how I feel about writing. And I do think that some people take writing as a career a little too seriously, and maybe that’s their own defense mechanism and attempt to ward off the inevitable downfall that finds most authors. Buti mean, I find the exact same thing. I’m very productive when I’m writing something that I want to be writing and that is fun to do in the moment. And when I go to something that I feel is necessary or maybe financially prudent or what have you, that’s when it becomes a grind. So I think having found that nice union of being creatively fulfilling and obviously people are finding joy in your work when they’re reading it. That’s very nice to hear.
[00:47:22.480] – Sunyi
Well, I think you get a load of those memes on Writer Twitter or Write Facebook, which are like, Oh, what’s the one thing writers hate doing? Actually writing. The risk of sounding like an asshole. I never identified those at all. I always read them and think, No, I really like it. I like queries. I like drafting. I like looking at outlines. Synopsies are a pain, but I don’t mind doing them that much. You get stuck? Yes. But in general, the whole process, I love doing it. I think I’ve heard a lot of writers, some of the writing guru will say, You have to write every day and all this. I get why I say that. That’s based around the whole develop a habit, and that’s assuming that you don’t want to write and you’re having to force yourself to do it. I always think, Well, I don’t write every day, and that works for me because I want to write. I write when I get the chance. I’m always happy to show up if there’s an opportunity.
[00:48:15.060] – RJ Barker
Writing trilogies is a weird… I never expected to end up… It’s really weird. I never expected to end up writing fantasy trilogies. I expected to end up writing crime or science fiction because they’re mainly what I read now. But they’re really weird because there’s an immense amount of freedom in the first book because you’ve got so much space over three books. You can do what you want. You can build this amazing thing. But then by the time you get to the third book, you are constrained by your own rules. I hate being told what to do, even when it’s me. I’m like, Why did I come up with this stupid idea? It’s all awful. You have to be checking back to the earlier books to… It’s always part of the book three where I just think, Next time, I will make a Bible for my book. So I’ve got all the stuff I need. And I have to keep going back and seeing what all these things were. And I never, ever do. Never. It’s just not in my makeup.
[00:49:21.160] – Sunyi
Well, I’m all out of general questions. I’ll hand over to you, Scott, in case you’ve got any… Some of our episodes are very focused with Kerry and the statistical stuff we went in with bullet points and some of them, like with Pete and nick, I think we were just more conversational.
[00:49:36.600] – RJ Barker
I’m not going to help you with statistics.
[00:49:39.100] – Sunyi
No, that’s fine. The episode we just recorded is a lady who did a dissertation on what makes books sell and she had it broken down into an algorithm and factors and all this cool stuff.
[00:49:49.510] – RJ Barker
Is it marketing?
[00:49:50.740] – Sunyi
Yeah. Every factor is marketing related, would you believe!
[00:49:55.220] – Scott
I think every question I had has been answered in the course of the discussion, but I think maybe one remaining that you may or may not want to answer, R. J, is around marketing. I’m just curious because your books seem to be quite well received by readers. I particularly have heard about you and your work in author circles. You seem to be quite popular with other authors. Whether they know you personally or not, they seem to like your work. Have you felt, especially since you’re in that class of author who’s having to work through a career and isn’t just handed a giant career upfront. How have you felt your books have been marketed and supported generally beyond what we’ve already discussed with covers and titles and things? What has been your general sense of how well your books have been supported by your publisher? You don’t have to answer that if you don’t.
[00:51:10.170] – RJ Barker
Want to. No, I’ve never felt not supported. My publicity office for the UK, Nazia, is brilliant, massively overworked as they all are, absolutely terrifying. I just do what she says, basically. She sends me emails and says, You’re doing this thing on this date. I’m like, Okay, then I’m doing that thing on that date. He sets me up. And all bit of really good because usually now I’d be doing lots of things, but I’ve had to say I’m just not well enough at the moment. They’re not actually sending me out that much. And Angie in the US is also just really good, but they do their thing and I don’t really have that much to do with it. I’ve always been quite upfront with Orbit and my agent. I’m going to sign with my agent. He went, How much information do you want about what’s going on? I said, Well, what I want, Ed, is I want if you were in trouble and I had to embezzle funds from one of your authors, I want to be the one you’d go to first because you know I wouldn’t notice. I have no knowledge of what is going on whatsoever.
[00:52:23.660] – RJ Barker
Or they do this thing every so often where they will send me numbers of books that are sold. That means nothing to me and just worries me. You get the Orbit author portal where you can go in. You can look in real time how your books are selling and stuff like that. They send you a password and a login number, which I just deleted the secondand I got it. I would say, No, I don’t think so. That is a quick way to send yourself mad, isn’t it?
[00:52:51.300] – Sunyi
Okay, you’re not like me, frantically refreshing author, Amazon Central every Friday morning.
[00:52:56.980] – Scott
No, no, because- You are smarter than most. You are, Jay.
[00:53:00.560] – RJ Barker
Well, as far as I’m concerned, I can’t control it. The only thing I can control is what goes on the page. And so that’s what I concentrate on, and I try and ignore everything else. I will check how many reviews on Amazon for my books in a slightly obsessive manner.
[00:53:18.550] – Sunyi
Logically, I know you’re right. But emotionally, I think if I worry about it enough, I can impact it somehow. I just have to worry hard.
[00:53:27.200] – RJ Barker
You see, that’s why I never looked. Once you’re in, that’s it. It’s a trap. And I don’t know why-.
[00:53:37.040] – Sunyi
Thankfully, we have no author portal. But yeah, look at Amazon author central.
[00:53:40.410] – RJ Barker
I don’t even know what that is. And I’m not going to thank you if you tell me. We’ll just skip. I won’t look now. I’m trained enough not… It’s like I don’t go to Goodreads.
[00:53:50.180] – Scott
She was lying. It doesn’t exist.
[00:53:52.590] – Sunyi
It’s not accurate. That’s the worst bit about looking. It’s not accurate.
[00:53:57.110] – RJ Barker
Yeah. So that went all right. But yeah, I don’t know why I’m doing all right, and I’m constantly aware that you’re only as good as your last book when you’re a midlist author. It’s a weird and precarious feeling, especially when your wife has a whole extension planned. I’m just like, Oh, God, this is very good.
[00:54:25.190] – Sunyi
I’ll ask this question because I’ve asked it for a lot of authors now. When did you first hear the term midlist?
[00:54:29.900] – RJ Barker
I first heard it, I think, from Pete McLean.
[00:54:35.580] – Sunyi
Okay. Yeah that makes sense
[00:54:36.660] – RJ Barker
maybe I didn’t. I still don’t really know what it means, but I just presume it means you’ve not sold nothing and you’re not JK Rowling.
[00:54:54.840] – Sunyi
It’s everybody who isn’t a lead title, basically.
[00:54:58.840] – RJ Barker
Oh. What’s the… See, I don’t even know what a lead title is. This is how little I know about it.
[00:55:04.020] – Scott
The weasels of the publishing world.
[00:55:08.890] – RJ Barker
Yes. Yeah, we’re the. Weasels of publishing.
[00:55:10.960] – Scott
It’s the working class.
[00:55:13.660] – RJ Barker
Oh, is the lead title the one they’re going, Oh, this is our book for this-.
[00:55:20.410] – Sunyi
It’s the books that get… There’s a gap in advances, I think, where Midlands tends to get between 25 and 50 depending on the big five imprint. Then the lead titles are the ones that are usually breaking six figures a book. There’s just nothing in between those two ranges, if that makes sense.
[00:55:41.370] – RJ Barker
The good thing is that so far, both my trilogies have earned out, because I didn’t get massive. I got more money than I’ve ever seen in my life, but that’s quite a low bar. But it was a decent amount of money and they’ve earned out. Now I get royalties, which is lovely.
[00:56:01.180] – Sunyi
If you want, R. J, could you plug yourself, tell people where they would find you if they look for you online, and maybe briefly mention the books that you’ve got out if they’re happy to look for your trilogies and stuff?
[00:56:13.570] – RJ Barker
I’m on the slowly dying Twitter. If you search R. J. Barker, don’t search my username because it’s just ridiculous. I didn’t have any vowels that day. I’m on Blue Sky. It’s a reference to the gothband, Field of the Nethalle, not a reference to H. P. Lovecraft. My website is rjbarca. Co. Uk. My books are The Wounded Kingdom trilogy, which are Age of Assassin’s, Blood of Assassin’s, and King of Assassin’s. And as Sonia has pointed out, they have very little to do with assassinating in. I don’t think there was any, I think it was one assassination in the entire… They’re murder mysteries. They’re just stabbing, close enough. Yeah, but they’re loosely based around the story of King Arthur, which very few people… I overjoyed one day when somebody sent me an email saying, Are these Arthurian? I said, Yes, they are Arthurian. It’s just buried really deeply. And then the bone ships, which is the bone ships, call them the bone ships, and the bone ships work. And I pitched those as Patrick O’Brien versus practitioner. They’re big, big naval battles, and it’s the story of somebody learning to believe in themselves, becoming a walk criminal.
[00:57:36.460] – RJ Barker
But it all works out in the end. Then my newest one is Gods of the Weirdwood, which, as I said, is about a man that doesn’t go anywhere. I’m fascinated with landscapes. My first book was The Mares. It’s all about the Mares and then the next bunch, which was the sea. Then this one is woods, and it’s about forests where there are trees that can take you days to walk around the trunk. They’re so big and you can’t see the tops of them. And it’s very folkloree and strange. And it’s about people have been betrayed, learning to trust. Oh, no, no, no. It’s the farmboy story. That’s what I keep forgetting to say. That’s what I meant to say. It’s about the farm boy that gets picked up because he’s the chosen one. And then it turns out, actually, he’s not. It was someone else. He goes off. Yeah, he goes off.
[00:58:32.270] – Sunyi
Just- He’s not the Messiah. He’s just an very naughty boy.
[00:58:34.960] – RJ Barker
Yes. We join him 30 years into his sulk about that. That’s a bit more exciting than Amanda doesn’t go anywhere in it a little bit. I’m really bad at pictures.
[00:58:46.680] – Sunyi
A tiny bit, yeah. I think your editor would approve of that description more. Yeah. You’ve been listening to the Publishing Radio Podcast with Sunyi Dean and Scott Drakeford. Tune in next time for more in-depth discussion on everything publishing industry. See you later.
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