Building a career around books and reviewing, with Nicole Abadee

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Rachel Smith: Hello and welcome to The Content Byte, a podcast for freelancers who use their words to make money. I’m Rachel Smith, a freelance journalist, copywriter, and content producer. I’m also the founder of Rachel’s List, a jobs board and community for Australian writers and other creatives. 

Lynne Testoni: I’m Lynne Testoni! I’m a journalist and content writer as well. Rachel and I are your weekly co-hosts, and every week we bring you all kinds of tips, tricks, and some fabulous guests to help you make the most of your freelance business.

Rachel: Lynne, we are talking reviews today. Something that’s a bit close to my heart because I was a movie reviewer for ten years early on in my freelance career and it feels a very long time ago now. But it’s great to talk to another reviewer who’s still going strong. Nicole Abadee, she’s the main book reviewer for The Sydney Morning Herald’s, Good Weekend. I think this is really a must listen both for book lovers and authors, don’t you? 

Lynne: I do think so. I think there’s also a bit of a divide between authors and book reviewers for obvious reasons. I also think the whole world of reviews and book reviews and publishing is so interesting. Do you want to introduce Nicole? We’ll get her in the hot seat. 

Rachel: Yes. Love to. 

Nicole Abadee is an interviewer, moderator, and journalist who’s worked in the book industry since 2010, following her first career as a barrister. I think we’re going to talk about that. Nicole appears regularly as a moderator at writers’ festivals around Australia, including Adelaide Writers’ Week, Canberra Writers Festival, Sydney Writers’ Festival, and the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

She’s interviewed International and Australian writers and has been a judge of prestigious literary prizes and awards. Nicole also writes about books, writers and other things for Good Weekend, Spectrum, Australian Book Review and Harper’s Bazaar. 

Welcome, Nicole. You must always have your head in a book, do you?

Nicole: Yes, I really do. Thank you so much for having me on the show, Lynne and Rachel. I do always have my head in a book, and I work from home in my own office. My husband’s now retired and he’s only been retired for the last few years, and I did have to explain to him sometimes if I was sitting in the lounge room reading a book and he’d come to talk to me about something, I’d say, this is me working. I’m not having a break. This – when I’m doing this, sitting in a chair reading a book, that’s working. It’s a lovely job to have.

Rachel: No one believes it, do they? 

Lynne: It sounds like books have been such a big part of your life, but you started as a barrister, which is interesting because there’s more writers who’ve been a barista rather than a barrister, so it’s quite a change going from the bar to writing. What drew you to writing? 

Nicole: That’s a really interesting question. I have always absolutely loved English literature and reading. I did, back in the old days, we called it three-unit English at school. I studied Jane Austen and Jane Eyre and a lot of those old classics. So, I’d always loved English.

I did arts law at university. I did want to be a barrister, but I majored again in English literature. That had always been a passion. And then I worked as a barrister for about ten years and people always say, what made you change careers? And it’s a very quick answer, having my son so I went from being a busy barrister at the time. My husband was also a busy barrister, and there are absolutely different views on this, but for us, it wasn’t going to work with both of us having very demanding careers as barristers. So, I thought about what I might do to take a step back to make a career change, and a very good advisor just said to me, well, what are you really passionate about? If you don’t want to be a barrister or a lawyer anymore, what are you passionate about? And I said, I’m really passionate about books. I’ve always loved them, and I’ve been incredibly lucky to turn my passion into my career. So, I’ve done that, I guess for about fifteen years now, I’ve worked in or around books.

Lynne: Wow. 

Rachel: Wow. That’s so lucky, isn’t it? I think so many people listening would love to have your job. What do you love about publishing? What do you love about what you do? 

Nicole: So, the way that I got in was I did work in publishing for Penguin Random House. I worked for an imprint called Lantern Books. A fabulous publisher called Julie Gibbs, who remains a very close friend of mine, she gave me the opportunity. A friend knew her and said, do you want to have a coffee with Julie Gibbs? And I was like, yes, but why would she be interested in an ex-lawyer that might want to get into publishing? Anyway, she gave me the opportunity and doors opened for me from there and I stayed there for seven years at Penguin.

So, why did I want to get into publishing? It seemed like a great place to start. When I first made the change in my early forties, got into publishing, I didn’t really know where it would lead, but I think probably at that stage I hoped that perhaps I would work my way up the publishing ladder, maybe even end up publishing my own books. But it didn’t work out that way. Sadly, a lot of readers will know this – Lantern, the division that I worked for within Penguin was disbanded. We all lost our jobs when I was seven years in. I was a senior editor and a lot of people said to me, well, you are okay, you can go back to being a lawyer. To which I said, I don’t want to go back to being a lawyer. I’ve worked in books now for seven years. I want to stay in books. So, one thing, and this is a tip I do give everyone by that stage I was in my mid-forties, I guess mid to late forties. I didn’t know what I would do next. I knew I didn’t want to go back to the law. 

I had a cup of coffee or tea with so many different people that I had met through the book industry, just not to ask for a job, but to bounce ideas off them as I thought about different things that I might do to stay in the books industry. And then I got very lucky. Katrina Strickland, who has for a long time, been the editor of Good Weekend. She’s only recently retired from that, but at that point she was the editor of Financial Review Magazine, a glossy magazine that came out every Friday with the Financial Review. They were looking for a books writer. Their books writer who’d been with them for 20 years had just left. So, she took a chance on me and gave me that role.

And that was how I then really started the career that I have now as a freelance reviewer and interviewer of writers at writers’ festivals. So, I really enjoyed the time in publishing my six or seven years, and I learned a lot there. And then I had really enjoyed the transition into what I do now, which is reviewing books and interviewing authors either on the page or at festivals.

Lynne: Wow.

Rachel: I’m curious, did you find your work as a barrister translated into you becoming a good interviewer? 

Nicole: I think definitely. I don’t feel they were wasted years. I really enjoyed it while I did it at that time in my life from when I was twenty-five to thirty-five. That was a really rewarding career. But yes, definitely I feel the skills as a barrister, I guess some of the skills are that you’re a talker, you’re an advocate, you’re used to interviewing and asking questions. So definitely, in my oral interviews with writers and in terms of writing, reading a lot, you’re reading a lot of books, working out which ones you are going to review, digesting a lot of material. Again, as a barrister, you’ve acquired those skills of reading, large volumes of material. I mean, in my case, many of the reviews I’m doing are a hundred words, and that’s often a four-to-five-hundred-page book. So, the skills of distilling large amounts of material into sort of short bite-sized pieces, definitely. So, the short answer is yes, the career as a barrister has absolutely helped me in this career. 

Rachel: Interesting. 

Lynne: Oh, that’s so interesting. So, you mut get so many books sent to you and or to the offices of the newspapers. What makes a book stand out to a review? 

Nicole: I think that’s a really good question. For me, often, often I’ll know the writers, so I’ll have certain, I don’t mean personally. I do know a lot of Australian writers personally, but I’m familiar with their work. So, if they’re authors whose work I’m already familiar with, I know that they’ve last their liked, really enjoyed their previous work. Obviously, that’s great. But if that was my only principle, debut writers would never get a chance. So, I guess the obvious things, you know the blurb I read, the blurb I’ll take in what the book’s about. I will certainly look at endorsements from other writers. That’s definitely relevant. It sounds silly, but a cover is also relevant. I was thinking about this. I don’t think I probably have any input that great marketing and publicist people won’t know. One thing that is, I’ve made a note, a good persistent publicist. So, somebody who sends you the book and then follows up. But also, something that is persuasive is if there’s something personal from the author. So, some publishers with what some of their big books will include a personal note from an author and that can be very powerful. If you read from a fiction author or a nonfiction author why they’ve written this book, where it’s coming from, that can be persuasive as well.

Rachel: So interesting. We have a lot of authors who listen to the podcast, so that’s a really great tip for some of those. Do you have any other suggestions for getting your book into the hands of a reviewer like you and getting it onto the short list for review.

Nicole: As I say probably not. There’s no magic to it. Nothing, as I say. So obviously if you’re, unless you’re self-published, if you’ve got a publisher, I guess I would say some of the publicists with the big firms, I guess they can get very busy. So, I think you as the author, need to be vigilant to make sure that they are, who have you sent my book to? Which festival organisers have you spoken to? It doesn’t hurt. Authors need to be on the ball about that sort of thing. I mean, sorry, something else I should have mentioned that again, won’t be news, but social media is very important now. I’m old school. I’m a dinosaur and that means Instagram is probably the main thing that I look at.

But I know you’ve got a question coming up about BookTok and some of those others, they’re probably more relevant, I think, to younger audiences. For me, it’s Instagram. I follow a lot of authors on Instagram and a lot of reviewers, so I do get ideas from there as well as for international books for reading international reviews.

Often for me, I am getting blurbs about the books or getting the information about them two or three months before they’ve been published. So, with Australian books, there often aren’t any other reviews at the time the book comes to me. The things I suppose that stand out do I know the writer already? Do I know and trust this publisher and publicist? Let me read the blurb. Who else has endorsed it? And, what’s the buzz on social media? Probably things that all of your good authors are going to be aware of, I suspect. 

Lynne: It’s tricky because you must have, there must be some amazing books and I think I read the piece that Sarah Jessica Parker did about judging the Booker and how many books that she read and how few of them, even though she read so many amazing books, how few of them go to the long list and the short list. That must be your everyday life where you get twenty amazing books that month and you can only, or that week and you can only highlight four and they obviously can’t be four romances or four crime. How do you distil which ones make the cut? 

Nicole: It is very hard. What I do, I have done traditionally for Good Weekend over the last six or seven years is really three big pieces a year. Books to buy for Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and Christmas. And for each of those, I’m given eight hundred to a thousand words. It used to be two pages, now it’s only one page, so that’s eight hundred to a thousand words. I try to pick ten books. So, in the ten books that I’m picking on each of those occasions, I want a mix of fiction and nonfiction. I try to do fifty-fifty. I want a mix of International and Australian. Again, I try to do fifty-fifty. I want a mix of men, women, non-binary. Again, I go for a combination. I want a cultural mix.

So, you’re bearing in mind all of those factors as well as just choosing the very best books. So unfortunately, if you think about that, if I’ve only got ten books to review, five fiction, five nonfiction, and in the five fiction that covers International and Australian, you can see how few there are. So, certainly for me, there’s one test that I have, and you might call it brutal, but to get to the ten best books, I will read the first fifty to a hundred pages of a lot of books to get to the ten that I think are the best. So, my own personal test is if it hasn’t really grabbed me, I give it fifty to a hundred pages.

The advice I’ve always had from my editors is, we all know this is subjective, what the reader is wanting is your trust and your value judgment. So, I think if it hasn’t grabbed me and I don’t really love it with it in those fifty to a hundred pages, then I put it aside because I think then how can I persuade my readers that this is a book that I love. It is personal, it is subjective. You can miss out. There might be, around Christmas time, obviously there might be ten, usually more really great books out by Australian authors, but I’m only going to, let’s talk about fiction. I’m only able to do five in my article. It’s really hard. It’s a matter, as I say, it is subjective, obviously.

Lynne: That’s so interesting. 

Nicole: So, the obvious thing, openings and those first a hundred pages are really important. Yes. 

Rachel: What do you do with all the books? I mean, do you have book libraries down your street that you are constantly popping book? Do people just love knowing there’s a reviewer there and they wait for the box to appear outside your house? 

Nicole: That’s a really good question. I’m glad to get the opportunity to talk about it because there’s two organisations I’d like to promote. So one is, there’s a fabulous organisation called the Footpath Library, which is a not-for-profit organisation, started by a wonderful woman called Sarah Garnett many, many years ago. And what they do – they now operate in a number of states – but in New South Wales, every Tuesday night they take a bus into Martin Place, filled with books, and they give out tea, coffee, biscuits, and books. It’s called a library, but the books are given away for free to people experiencing homelessness.

So that’s where a lot of my books go. The ones that I received that I haven’t read, or even excess ones, if I get a couple of copies of them. So, that’s where a lot of my books go and then I’ve just started again, something that I did do a while ago and I’m going to do it again and again. I would really encourage people; the prison libraries are looking for books. So, I got onto the librarian at Corrective Services again recently; to say I’ve got some boxes of books, I’d like to donate them to the prison system, and they’re going to come and pick them up. So, I really encourage people, either of those. So, one is the Footpath library. If you Google it, you will find the details. And the other is, Department of Corrective Services. If you fiddle around, try and find the library and contact them. So, yes, I do have a little street library at the end of my street, but that wouldn’t begin to cover the volume of what I get. I do occasionally put something in there, yes. 

Rachel: I was going to ask because coming from, I had a reviewing job for ten years, which was an incredible time of my freelance career. So, I know it’s hard to get these gigs. It’s still really hard to get a gig as a book reviewer, people keep these jobs forever. Are you a rare breed? I don’t want to say a dying breed.

Nicole: We’re definitely not going to say a dying breed. It is getting harder. I’ve been doing it now for about ten years. First for AFR Mag, and then for Good Weekend. I’m a freelancer. I’m not on staff as a book editor. I would have to say that you’ll see that certainly the major in New South Wales, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian, I don’t think there’s a literary editor. At Spectrum there are certainly people in charge of books but there’s no reviewers that are there on salary. We’re all freelancers, at The Australian, they’re mainly freelancers I think as well. So, it’s not like they’re indentured roles. A lot of them increasingly are freelance now, though, I suppose with some magazines there would be people who are the regular writers for some magazines, but, I have to be frank, yes, they’re difficult roles to get and more and more it’s freelancers that are doing this sort of work than people that are actually the books or literary editor.

Lynne: It’s interesting because I know from working in magazines in years gone by, it was often a nice little gig. So, one of the subeditors would do this semi in their own time but also would write and that would be a nice thing. But that was in magazines, things like The Woman’s Weekly and stuff that I worked out.

Nicole: I was thinking of The Woman’s Weekly, actually. That was one of the ones I was thinking of.

Lynne: That used to be just a little in-house role, and it was a bit of a privilege, that just like the travel editor was one too. And I know that there’s a lot of blogs and websites and things, and some of those reviewers, they don’t get paid, I think, and they often are paid in books or, I know if they’re an arts reviewer, they get paid in tickets to performances. I presume some of the major media, like The Sydney Morning Herald still pays its reviewers, does it? 

Nicole: Absolutely. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. We get paid an hourly rate as freelancers. You’re paid per word. Same as other journalists. And I write also for Australian Book Review. So that is also a wonderful publication. That’s an Australia-wide, literary magazine that’s been going for a very long time. I write for them occasionally; I write reviews for them. They pay you an hourly rate. I’ve also got an additional gig I write for Harper’s Bazaar. I’ve been doing that all of this year. That is not so much about books. That’s more I interview interesting and influential women about their careers. Again, I’m a freelancer there. I get paid per word. 

Lynne: Oh, that’s good. Good to know. 

Nicole: Absolutely. 

Rachel: So, when you say you get paid an hourly rate and a word rate? No?

Nicole: No, no, no. So, we want you to write eight hundred words and we’ll pay you blank per word. 

Rachel: Wow. That’s a lot of work that goes into what you do. 

Lynne: A lot of work for eight hundred words. 

Nicole: It is. 

Rachel: So, you’ve got to be passionate about it. 

Nicole: And, the other obvious one is, with writing what I do and what a lot of people in the space do, freelance, journalists like me, we love, love, love doing writers’ festivals and book launches and things. But what you are paid for a session. So, I’m not saying this, any of this to complain because I love what I do and I’m incredibly privileged to do it. But for people listening, thinking, could I make a career out of book reviewing and interviewing writers at writers’ festivals very difficult. You don’t get paid very much, as an interviewer and that’s not because writers’ festivals are stingy. It’s because they don’t get very much funding from government. So, it’s all the problem goes up higher than them. They’re all running on a shoestring. So as many of us who work in the arts, you do it for the passion and that’s a great privilege. And also, I should add, by the way, I’m sure doing up the sums, I do better at the end of the year than most of our wonderful writers. You would probably know that an Australian writer, the average salary is about $18,000 a year. I feel like I’m a parasite in the literary system. I’m not the creative person writing the books, but it’s even tougher to be a writer than to be a reviewer, certainly financially. You do other things as well.

Rachel: So, if you can’t really make a living just out of reviewing or out of being a moderator at festivals, what else do you do to round it out, I suppose? 

Lynne: Pay the mortgage. 

Nicole: Well, you write for different publications, you try to get as much work. I mean, the written work is more remunerative than the festival, so you try to do as much of that as you can. And I’m very lucky that I have a range of publications that I write for. I don’t, but a lot of writers or people who do what I do might also teach, they might teach at a university or teach creative writing. People set up editing businesses.

When I started, I’d come from seven years as an editor at Penguin, so I set myself up as an editor as well. A manuscript assessor. I don’t do that anymore, but people do that as well, so that’s certainly something you can think about. I often have requests from authors saying, before I even submit to a publisher, I want to find a good editor or a manuscript assessor. So that’s something else you could think about if you were setting out on a freelance career like mine. 

I also sit on a couple of not-for-profit boards, but again, they’re not-for-profit, so I don’t get paid for them, but I think government boards, you do get paid something for. So that’s something else to think about.

Rachel: Interesting.

Lynne: So interesting. I think one of the things I noticed, and you talked about it briefly, was about the arts coverage is shrinking. I know when, back in the day that The Sydney Morning Herald say would’ve had two or three people in there. In the arts department, one looking at music, one at theatre, and maybe one in, in looking at books. But do you feel that’s all shrinking? There are more freelancers, hardly anyone. So does that make your role even more important and particularly doing it well? Because there’s a few cowboys out there. 

Nicole: I think so. I don’t want to blow my own trumpet, so it’s probably bit difficult for me to answer that. But it is important for all of us freelancers to do our job well, definitely. And I think so too the role of the reviewer is really, I like to think important because there are so many books produced each year, and I know for some people it must feel over. I imagine how it used to feel for me to walk into a video store back in the old days and look around at all the videos and think, where do I start? So, I imagine some people must feel like that in a bookshop. So, you hope that you’re giving them guidance, you’re giving them ideas. And I am for any others considering doing what I’m doing, I am also not hyperactive on social media, but I’m pretty active. I post about what I’ve written. I do some posts generally. So that’s something else, I suppose. You do try to build up you r profile through social media, through LinkedIn. I guess one of these ways is how you’ve contacted me. 

Rachel: You talked a little bit earlier on BookTok and there’s also good reads, there’s YouTube reviewers. All of that has sort of shifted the reviewing landscape a little bit. Do you keep track of it? Do you ignore it? I mean, how does that factor into your day? 

Nicole: I can only speak for myself, and I’m probably got to confess I’m a dinosaur. I don’t do those things. I don’t do BookTok and Goodreads. I’ve really got mixed feelings about Goodreads. I think it’s able to be, you hear about writers who can get very upset by people who really often are not hugely well-informed writing, nasty reviews. So, look, the, the honest answer, and I’m happy to say I may be a dinosaur, and that’s a product of my age as much as anything else. I think I don’t dabble in any of those, but I should say publishers do put a lot of stock on all of those things and on BookTok, and I know that’s particularly great for younger people. So, I mean, at the one other thing, and this is a bit tangential to what we’re talking about, but the advice I would give to anyone starting out as an author is absolutely to build your profile on social media and in TikTok and all those things. These days, I think it, back in the old, old days that your publisher would provide a market for you. These days, if you’re a young aspiring author or an older aspiring author, any age publishers are very much looking at to you to bring at least a market to them. So, if you’re thinking about writing a book, start establishing a social media.

It’s one of the first things I know that was looked at when I used to, I didn’t go to acquisitions meetings, but when I started right at the bottom, when I went into my early forties, I started as the whatever the most junior person was called. Can’t remember what it was, but that’s what I was – intern probably. And it was my job to go through the slush pile, the tray of proposals, which obviously would all now be online. Some of it was online, but one of the first things I’d always be asked when I’d go forward to talk about the ones that I wanted to really put forward was, what’s their social media presence?

Something else that you have to be comfortable with these days that, again, you didn’t have to in the old days I suspect, is that what I call taking the show on the road? You have to be comfortable and able to appear at writers’ festivals, to answer questions, to sign books. I often feel bad for writers because I think a lot of people, or certainly maybe in the old days, maybe became writers because they were introverted, quiet people. Well, these days you’ve absolutely got to be able to be out there talking at festivals and book launches and all of that. 

Rachel: I wanted to ask; do you get a lot of self-published books? I mean, we see it’s exploding. We get a lot of pictures from publicists who are, spruiking, really good self-published books now. Is that something that you factor in when you’re reviewing? 

Nicole: Look to be, so the answer to the first bit of the question is I do sometimes get pictures from self-published authors. I’m afraid given the if I was writing ten book reviews a week, maybe. But given what I’m doing, three big articles a year, ten books each, you do the maths, it’s not very many for all the fantastic books that are out there. So, I’m afraid, I know it’s harsh and I know it’s very difficult these days, increasingly difficult to get published. But no, I wouldn’t review a book that was self-published. 

Lynne: Okay, interesting. We were talking a bit about writers’ festivals and I’m pretty sure that all our listeners are really keen on writers’ festivals. I’m a regular and is that a hard gig to secure being involved. Did you have to put in years of networking? I guess that years at Penguin Random House would’ve made a difference to establish your credentials. 

Nicole: I think that’s a really good question. I feel that I have been incredibly lucky. I worked very hard, but I have had, I feel like I’ve had a lot of lucky breaks. So how did I, initially, the very first, I had been like, you probably – both of you, going to writers’ festivals for twenty years. I love writers’ festival, particularly at Sydney Writers’ Festival, my hometown. So, when I had fairly early days started the job at AFR as the book’s writer. I was then really thinking, gosh, I’d really love to do some writers festivals. I’d really love to get to interview some writers. And the way those first ones came about, as these things often do, is through an introduction. 

Someone who knew a board member at Sydney Writers Festival, they introduced me to the artistic director who was then Jemma Birrell. Now, the head of publishing at Powerhouse. And Jemma took a chance on me, gave me a couple of good gigs in that first year, and then it has grown from there.  You get your first gigs there. Then I was also, maybe partly because it was a second career, but I would encourage others. I was pretty, what’s the word? Teflon, about being rejected. I just thought, what’s the harm? I’m going to just write to and pitch myself to all of these different writers’ festivals. And that’s something I’ve sort of always kept doing is that if I’m rejected or they say no, they don’t want me, I just take it on the chin. It’s not quite true, you do get hurt and disappointed, but I guess outwardly I was like, well, what’s the worst that can happen if I pitch to Melbourne or Perth or Adelaide or whatever, they can say no to me. So, I just built it up from getting Sydney and then I can’t remember the order in which it happened, but you get that and then you get that and then you’re able to say to the next person, you pitched to well, I’ve appeared at Canberra, Rose Scott, and Sydney, and these are the people I’ve interviewed.

So, it built on itself. So how do you get that first opportunity? A lot of it is luck and somehow being connected to someone at that festival. But if you’re not, Google the festival you’re interested. Start with if you haven’t been doing it for a long time, look at some of the small ones. There’s a lot of smaller regional festival these days. Start with a smaller one. Just go in, look at their website, find out who it is you make the submission to, and as I say, just be a bit Teflon coated about it. The worst that can happen, is they say, no. Sooner or later, hopefully someone will say yes, and then you build on that.

Rachel: I love that because I think that panels and in conversation events are also becoming much more popular, especially with writers. Is that also a bit of a source of income for you? 

Nicole: Do you mean, at writers’ festivals, Rachel? 

Rachel: If someone is at a book launch and they need someone to interview them at the launch.

Nicole: Yes, that is also a source of income. You do get paid for those as well, for doing a launch in a bookshop, definitely. Or a gig in a bookshop. 

Lynne: We’ve both done that. Rachel and I have done that.

Nicole: Good! It’s fun. 

Lynne: It’s good and it’s nice to support an author, usually their first time out or close and give them a good platform so they can share their story, I think. 

Nicole: I always say I’ve got the dream job reading and talking about books. I couldn’t love it more really. And interviewing authors, writing about books, reading. I feel just so incredibly lucky to have landed in this second career that has just brought me so much joy working.

I’ve made wonderful friends, I’d have to say, particularly women friends. The book industry is largely dominated, well, not so much the writing, I suppose, but the people in the overall industry. It tends to be more women than men, or certainly in what I’m doing in terms of moderators and things, and I’ve made some really wonderful friendships, with authors, some of whom I had been reading for many years, and they’ve now become personal friends. So that’s an absolute joy. I just feel very, very lucky. It’s a pinch me job. 

Lynne: That’s lovely. Now, we talked a bit about podcasts as well because that’s a big growth area for authors as well. And I know you told us offline about your podcast and books during lockdown and covid. Tell us a bit about that and how that medium has impacted print and digital reviews. 

Nicole: Yes. I feel like a bit of a cliche when I say this. I started a podcast during covid, along with many other people. 

Lynne: Many people did. 

Rachel: It’s definitely a meme, I’m sure. 

Nicole: I know. I think it is. So, I was quite early. It was probably April or May 2020, and I was watching my own diary just crossing out one event after another, one festival, one launch, one event after another. And because I’d worked in publishing, I was very conscious that for a writer whose book’s coming out, the writer may have worked on the book for years, and then they’ve got a publisher and then the publisher is invested in the book and worked on it for years. And you get to the pointy end where the book comes out, and I know from that experience that the first three to four months after the book comes out is peak time where you really want your author to be out at festivals and events talking about the book. So, I was so conscious of writers and publishers losing that platform.

So, I started a podcast called Books, Books, Books. And the whole idea was that it was a writers’ festival from home. I interviewed individual writers about their latest books, and I think I was quite early on, back in 2020, there are a lot of books, podcasts now and some very, very good ones. But when I did it, there weren’t quite as many and because it was during covid and a lot of other avenues had been shut down and because I suppose I’d been in the space for six or seven years, publishers knew me I was very fortunate with the calibre of writers that I got to interview. So, that was a great thing. That’s a body of work. I think I did eighty-five episodes in two years. I was doing one a week and I will never regret that. I loved doing it, but I have to say I didn’t make any money out of it. There are ways, I’m not sure what the answer is. I think I stopped in about twenty-two. So, what, three years later?

I think there probably are ways. I initially got some funding from the copyright agency, the cultural fund. For, people who had pivoted during covid. I did get an initial grant of five thousand dollars, which covered my website, my paying a sound person, and I was able to pay a small amount to people who I interviewed. But that ran out after about six months, and after that it was self-funded. So, it wasn’t just that I wasn’t being paid, I was actually paying out money for each episode. Now there are different models now. I think there’s, oh, what are there? I mean, you guys would know more, but I think there are ways to monetise it, or at least to cover your costs that I’m not savvy about. 

Lynne: Yes. It’s tricky. Well, we love our sponsor and that’s made our lives different. 

Rachel: He helps a lot.

Nicole: Well, that’s fantastic. If you’ve got a sponsor, congratulations. That’s fantastic. It is. That’s good. 

Rachel: Well, something that we ask all our guests is their favourite tools of the trade. Is there anything you would be absolutely lost without perhaps how you organise what you’re going to review? Or do you have some crazy Google Doc system? What do you do? 

Nicole: I don’t have a Google Doc system. Gosh. Tools at the trade that I’d be lost without. Well, possibly because I’m an ex-lawyer one of them is my highlighter. One of them is my sticky tabs. The other is my lead pencil. I’ve never, as I read, I can’t read a book, and I never used to be a person who did Facebook. But now, because of my job, I try, if I’m interviewing an author, I will try at a festival. I would try or review doing a big review because I do longer ones as well, I would always try to read a book twice. The first time I’m reading it, I can never not read with a lead pencil in my hand now, so I’m always doing a little bit of underlining, bit of a sticky tab here or there for things that are really significant. I do try to keep abreast of international books, international reviews.

I love the Guardian bookmarks that comes out on the Sunday night. I love the New York Times book review. I love listening to their podcast. I’m going to give a shout out to a podcast that I love that many of your listeners will be familiar with Secret Life of Books by Sophie Gee and Jonty Claypole. Sophie was a professor of literature at Princeton for many, many years. She’s now back in Australia. Jonty is a CEO of Red Room. He used to work at BBC, and they have a fabulous podcast where they do a deep dive each week into a classic, whether it’s The Great Gatsby, whether they recently did a four-part series on Virginia Woolf. Right at the moment they’re doing a Henry James, Portrait of a Lady, which is one of my favourite books.

So that is a podcast I really love. I don’t, authors may be interested, and I know there are some great ones in there, I’m not aware of tools of the trade type podcast where people talk about the skills of writing. But I know there are those out there as well. 

Rachel: I don’t think we’ve ever had anyone say that a highlighter is their tool of the trade. So that’s a first, which is great. 

Nicole: I’m very happy. Call me a dinosaur, unless a highlighter and yellow sticky tabs. So that will also reveal something that I largely read the paper book, not digital books. Yes. If I’m traveling and I’ve got a lot of reading to do, then obviously I will get the books downloaded onto my iPad. But I know I’m revealing my age and what a dinosaur I am. I infinitely prefer the hard book in my hand. 

Lynne: Oh no, I do too. Rachel’s a big fan of the Kindle now she’s discovered it, but I prefer the hard copy book. 

Rachel: I will say I got a Kindle. My husband gave me a Kindle for my birthday about four years ago, and I went from not reading at all to reading a book a week and just became so much more passionate and making time for reading. And also, because with a Kindle, you can put a kid to bed and be reading in the dark and there’s all those other opportunities to read when you can’t with just a normal book. 

Nicole: That makes complete sense. I think the thing that I find difficult, and it’s probably just that I would need to get more proficient, is I like to go backwards and forth sometimes, and a character comes in, and I can’t quite remember where they first came in, and I find it easy. 

Lynne: I like flicking of the pages. 

Nicole: Yes, but you’re going to tell me that there are devices on Kindle where I could put in a search term. 

Rachel: If you love your highlighter and your notes and taking notes and sticking things, the Kindle is beautiful because you can highlight anything and create a note, and then at the end you just click a button, and it emails you all your annotations.

Nicole: Okay. Alright. I’m paying attention now, Rachel. Thank you.

Rachel: It’s so funny because we did have an author, and I can’t remember it for the life of me who it was, but I said, because sometimes you know when you’re on the Kindle and you’re highlighting.

Lynne: Oh, it was Charlotte. Charlotte Wood? 

Rachel: Was it Charlotte? 

Lynne: Yes. 

Rachel: And you, you say, and it says under it, three thousand, five hundred people have highlighted this exact paragraph. Right? 

Nicole: Oh, my goodness. Wow.

Rachel: And so, you get those metrics as a reader. But I said to Charlotte, do you get a report saying how much those paragraphs have been highlighted or how much they resonated with readers and all of that and she didn’t even know that. 

Lynne: They don’t know that existed.

Nicole: No, I wouldn’t have known that. 

Rachel: So, isn’t it sad? Can you imagine how thrilled you’d be as an author to get a report saying ten thousand people loved that particular paragraph of your book.

Nicole: Amazing. That is really amazing. I didn’t know that. I do love that. 

Rachel: So, there you go.

Lynne: Oh gosh, Nicole, we could talk to you all day. I mean, we both are big readers and like all writers. All writers are great. Any, all writers are big readers. I think so. So lovely to talk to you and hear about 

Rachel: Absolutely. 

Lynne: So, tell us where people can find you and find out more about what you do.

Nicole: I think the easiest is my website. If they just put my name in, I have a website where I have links to, I don’t know if they go through the whole article. Some of them are behind a paywall, but it’s got information about people that I’ve interviewed. It’s got all of the podcast episodes on it. So, if anybody wanted to go and hear me do particular interviews, there’ll be a photo of the author. I’ve had some pretty amazing opportunities. I was incredibly fortunate to interview Dame Hilary Mantel before she passed. I’ve interviewed George Saunders. I’ve interviewed Helen Garner, Kate Grenville, Markus Zusak, lots of interesting people. So, people wanted to go back and listen to podcast episodes. If they wanted to read my articles, they can. All of my articles are there. So, just my website and there’s a way, if people want to contact me, there’s a form submission on that. 

Lynne: Fantastic. 

Rachel: Perfect. 

Lynne: Thank you so much. 

Rachel: Thank you. This is just like a lovely chat that, brings us to the end of the show this week. If you’re out there listening, check the show notes for info on where to connect with Nicole. And don’t forget, you can revisit our old episode transcripts on the website as well and this one will be up shortly. 

Nicole: Lynne, thank you so much and Rachel, both of you, for reaching out and for having me on your wonderful show.

Rachel: Absolutely. It’s been great. 

Lynne: Thanks a lot. See you next week. 

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Credits:

Connect with Nicole via her website: https://www.nicoleabadee.com.au/ 

Find Lynne www.lynnetestoni.com 

Find Rachel www.rachelsmith.com.au 

Rachel’s List www.rachelslist.com.au 

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