This episode the hosts talk money. They discuss how it works for the pod — our money story and how it’s changed over time, paid and unpaid content and the difference between publicity and marketing, which FINALLY the two of them seem to understand.
This episode the Featured Book is brought to you by Hachette and we are delighted to be talking to Eleanor Shearer about her debut novel River Sing Me Home.
Eleanor Shearer is a mixed-race writer and the granddaughter of Windrush generation immigrants. She splits her time between London and Ramsgate on the English coast so that she never has to go too long without seeing the sea. For her master’s degree in politics at the University of Oxford, Eleanor studied the legacy of slavery and the case for reparations, and her fieldwork in St. Lucia and Barbados helped inspire her debut novel, River Sing Me Home.
Eleanor recommends debut novel 28 Questions by Indyana Schneider.
Kate and Katherine mention:
- Robert Watkins interview on Secrets of the Green Room (podcast)
- Brendan Fredericks interview on Secrets of the Green Room (podcast)
- ASA survey on writers earnings
- Angela Savage Tweet
- The difference between marketing and publicity (Jane Friedman) — includes US based information, such as ‘95% of all bestsellers get more than $50,000 in marketing and PR’
- Fiona Murphy interview here on The First Time podcast
- Oz Publishing Tea instagram
- The Economics of Publishing article by Andrew Franklin (UK, 2017)
- Questions to ask your publicity and marketing people from Penguin Random House
- ASA article on expectations on marketing from medium to large Australian publishers
- Annabel Smith and Jane Rawson interview on The First Time Podcast
Check out the other times we’ve talked about money:
- In S1 we talked about it here
- We were also very candid about how we wanted to eventually turn our podcast into a money making machine
- Spoiler: it didn’t work! And we talked about our move to patreon when the teatowel idea didn’t take off and we talked about that later in season one in this episode
- In season 2 we angst over what to charge
The First Time podcast 
I’m on Twitter but lazy about following people and I had no idea about the Twitter angst. I tracked it down because (a) I was curious, of course and (b) I couldn’t imagine what might have triggered it… you seem like two friendly people just chatting about books to me…
(I don’t usually listen to podcasts but am doing some tedious housekeeping on my blog and it’s nice to have company while I do it.)
Anyway I, took a deep breath because I curate my feed carefully so that I’m not exposed to social media pile ons, and would like to congratulate you both on your mature response to it.
I’ve had my share of people pressuring me to review their books because they haven’t had enough air, and while I feel for them, all of us in this kind of space are a bit overwhelmed by just how many new books there are out there. We cannot do them all and not all of them are going to capture our interest anyway. But even if we could do more, nobody is entitled to our time, effort and attention, nor are they entitled to lay down rules or policies about other people’s practice when they are volunteering with contributions to our nation’s cultural capital.
I make mistakes, we all do, and I appreciate it when people bring it to my attention in a fair and respectful way. Friendly advice is always welcome, and sometimes it needs to be private. I’m glad to hear that you have a lovely support group around you.
Cheers, Lisa Hill, ANZ LitLovers
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Lisa thanks so much for listening, for sharing your response and for all the work YOU do via ANZ LitLovers x
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Thanks Lisa, for taking the time to write this — so very much appreciate. xx
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Just a follow up to your explanation about how catalogues work. I hadn’t understood that being featured in a catalogue was something that publishers paid for… in my naivete, I thought that the store buyer chose from descriptions of books that sounded interesting. (Which is what I do (or don’t do) from the marketing emails I get). And when I found myself not wanting to buy anything from a catalogue, I thought it was the buyer’s mis-judgement or me being out of step with what everybody else is reading.
So here’s the question: if publishers purchase space in a bookstore catalogue to flog their latest on-trend publications e.g. (as Louise Adler described it), the Sad Girl stories but the books don’t sell because the fickle public has tired of whatever the trend was, what happens then? Does the bookseller go on putting out catalogues of books that don’t sell because publishers have paid for the space?
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