Juliet Rogers on how to get published and what makes a successful book

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: It’s great to be back on the pod with another amazing guest. This week we are talking to book publisher and industry expert Juliet Rogers, that I think will be really inspiring for our listeners because we all think we have a book in us. Well, I sometimes think I had a book in me, then I wrote it and now I don’t have any more books.

Lynne: You’re done, are you? I think it’s a good question for our guest, Juliet, because Juliet has had a legendary career in publishing, and I know she’s got lots of knowledge and some good stories to share. So, why don’t you do the intro?

Rachel: Yes, love to! 

Juliet Rogers has spent her career in the book industry working across every sector, including book selling, publishing, and author advocacy. She was managing director of Random House in both New Zealand and Australia, followed by ten years as CEO of Murdoch Books. She then set up her own small publishing and consultancy business, The Wild Colonial Company, before taking up the reigns, as the CEO of the Australian Society of Authors from 2016 to 2020.

Juliet has also held the roles of Chair of Booksellers New Zealand, President of the Australian Publishers Association, and she was the inaugural chair of the industry’s charity, the Indigenous Literacy Foundation. She’s recently moved to a consulting role after being managing director and publisher at Echo Publishing.

Welcome, Juliet! That sounds like a lot. 

Lynne: Welcome! 

Juliet Rogers: Possibly more to do with how old I am. 

Rachel: We won’t go there! 

Lynne: Wow, you’ve had such a long career in publishing, so you must have seen some amazing changes over that time. Tell us a little bit about some of the big things you’ve seen.

Juliet: Yes. Look, it’s always interesting to talk about change because there have been some big changes, but it feels sometimes slightly same. Same, but different. I guess when you look back on publishing in Australia and its current form, it’s actually relatively new. I mean, they were publishing in the late eighteen hundreds on. But in the form that we know it, it’s more sixties, seventies, before the publishers, the big guys were coming in and setting up proper publishing houses. I was at the tail end of that. That got underway, then by the late eighties and really, I guess that the big things from then have been digital and the eBooks, which of course you know, was going to be the death of print.

I think more recently audio because back in around the two thousands, trying to sell an audio book was impossible. Now they’re becoming more and more significant every year. And I think the final one really linked to the digital books is social media and self-publishing. Which, you know, self-publishing was very much a very tiny part of it up until then and more for just vanity publishing if you had a lot of money and nobody wanted your book. That’s changed dramatically, so it’s upheaval, but somehow the print book continues to survive. 

Lynne: It does, doesn’t it?

Rachel: I would love to ask you, given that you know, there has been so much change, what do you choose to read? Is it an old school print book or do you like to listen to an audio book, or do you have a Kindle or maybe all three? 

Juliet: Look, I’m not a great audio listener yet, but that’s probably because to be honest, I’ve been reading manuscripts because I did all the acquisitions at Echo. I’ve totalled them up to almost 700 manuscripts over four years. 

Rachel: Wow!

Juliet: I read those digitally on the tablet because you can’t print off acres of paper. For me it’s a print book, it’s such a treat. I only got back to New Zealand on Saturday and I’m onto book four with actual covers on it, and it’s a delight.

Lynne: Not the slush pile.

Rachel: How lovely. Well, we talked a little bit offline about some of your big publishing successes, but tell us on the record, what are the greatest stories that you’ve got? 

Juliet: Oh, look, there’s so many when you look back because Random House, of course we had some of the biggest authors of the day. People like John Grisham but thinking more about the ones that have actually hands on, I guess. It was good looking back to see how much passion and the feeling of the team can create these successes because Memoirs of a Geisha came to us as just a proof copy. You know, you might like to read this, we’re doing something with it and of course, that turned into one of the great phenomena of all time. 

Salman Rushdie was a real success for us, but a notable adventure really, because he came to New Zealand and toured for three days. We had him there when the fatwa was still very much playing out. 

Getting him there was the most enormous challenge, I have to say because his security in London couldn’t actually work out the time difference. So, his chief security officer, would ring me at three AM quite regularly with an update, and Salman was on his way from Australia and there was an announcement that the airline he was flying on had folded and we had to work out how to get him there because the main airlines wouldn’t fly him. We had to drive from around the country and he was there with his security detail the entire time. That was an adventure, and the book sold. 

I think something like The Blue Day Book, which was Bradley Trevor Grieve. That was the first of those and what people don’t quite understand is it is not just pictures of cute animals with little captions. When I left Random House that had got to more than 600,000 copies in Australia. That was a big highlight and BTG and I’ve remained in touch and he’s now on the Echo List I’m delighted to say with a new book coming in another year. Then for Echo, you couldn’t possibly go past Heather Morris. She is the author of Tattooist of Auschwitz and a number of other books, two of which are linked. Heather’s a Kiwi and now lives in Australia and has done for many years. As I say, before she started writing books at 63, there is great hope for us all and has now sold 19 million copies worldwide. It has been an absolute phenomenon. 

Rachel: Fabulous! Gosh, I love that. I love hearing about older authors who got success later in life. 

Juliet: So do I, Rachel!

Lynne: Well, Bonnie Garmus I heard speak at the Sydney Writers Festival on Lessons in Chemistry. After having a really successful career in advertising, one day the boys club just pissed her off so much that she just sat down and instead of doing her work, she wrote the first chapter of Lessons in Chemistry and then that’s it. She’s in her seventies too, so it’s amazing. I love those stories. 

Rachel: That’s a great story. I love that story, and the show as well was fabulous. 

Juliet: Yes, that’s wonderful book. 

Lynne: Many of our listeners are writers and journalists. In fact, most of them are, and they might be interested in writing a book, whether it’s non-fiction-fiction or fiction. So where do they start? If they’ve got an idea or maybe a dusty manuscript, where should they start? 

Juliet: Look, I think firstly, obviously they decide what they’re going to write, but, and it’s a truism, but correct nonetheless, that I think people forget the fact that they have to practice that writing. You know, nobody expects to pick the violin up and knock off a Mozart Concerto the next day, but they do think they can pick up a pen because everybody can actually write. It’s very different to writing a book. I think it’s really important to read in the area that you’re going to choose to write in. If you’re a crime novelist and you don’t read crime, I think the chances of a successful book are very small. 

I think it’s great to have support. Writer’s groups in particular, if you get a good one, they are remarkably helpful because I think that they are knowledgeable about what they’re doing, and you’ve got a bit of a community around you. I think some of the courses can be great, particularly targeted ones. If you are looking at specific areas of self-help, non-fiction-fiction or memoir, or there are courses that help with that about the structure and because every book regardless, needs that narrative arc. You’ve got to be able to drive your readers from the beginning through to the middle and through to the end, and they’ve got to feel satisfied. So, although the genre are very different, it’s a fundamental principle and some of those skills are able to be learned. Not all I’d have to say. 

Rachel: That’s such great advice. We had Jenny Valentish on recently and she does writers groups on a Sunday, for six weeks for people who can bring their manuscript or whatever and I think that those are really popular. But also what you said about reading in your genre reminds me of, we were at the festival on Family Day and my kid wants to become a comic book author as so many young little boys want to and we waited in line for a really long time for him to meet Jeff Kinney and when we got there he said, can I ask you a question? And he said, what should I do to become a comic book author? And Jeff said, you should read as widely as you can in the genre that you want to write in, that’s the best advice I can give you.

Juliet: Often authors get it wrong or potential writers and think that they’ll be imitative if they read too much in the genre and they want to be fresh and new. But there are, particularly in genre and things, there are conventions and strategies that you do need to understand before you’re going to be successful. 

Rachel: Amazing. What about agents though? Do you need an agent and what can an agent do for you that you can’t do for yourself? 

Juliet: This is always an interesting question, and the easy answer is an agent is wonderful if they’re good and no use to you whatsoever, if they’re not. 

Rachel: How do you know? 

Juliet:  That is the trick. Unfortunately, I do, but that’s not something I can say. Look, I think that would be one of the fundamentals to people is to do the research. I even had a lot of authors at Australian Society of Authors (ASA) coming and saying they’ve been offered a deal and then say, should I get an agent? Well, that’s slightly closing the stable door after the horse is well down the road. I think that agents have a real place, and a good agent really does, largely because they can negotiate on your behalf, which a lot of people, particularly somewhat trepidatious, first-time authors feel reluctant. You know, they just feel great, I’ve had an offer, I’ll just grab it. So that is helpful. I think agents are also incredibly helpful for actually sending manuscripts to the right publisher. The publisher who likes that genre or specialises in an area they’ve got the relationships, they’ve got the business nous.

I think that the good ones are very helpful, but I don’t think that potential writers do enough to research and really, most agents have all their client list up on their websites. Talk to people who are represented by them, and really see if they stay in for the long haul. Because actually you want your agent when things going a bit amiss, not just to take their cut of your advance when it comes in. So, it needs thought, but yes, they can be great. But we are still fortunate in Australia that unrepresented books do still get to publishers and that’s very uncommon internationally unless you’ve been a very, very successful self-published author. Most authors would be represented by an agent internationally.

Lynne: That’s interesting. You wrote on the ASA Guide to Getting Published, which came out in 2022. We love that. So, from a publishing perspective, how can you get your manuscript further from that slush pile, that pile with all those manuscripts. How do you get them? How does it get to the top?

Juliet: Look, it is hard. Most publishers are still doing some form of slush pile. Be it restricted to a day, a month or whatever. I think that there are very good courses now and it’s all in how you pitch it. No publisher wants to read three pages of every intricacy of the plot. I think having that real, genuine elevator pitch for the book is hugely important. I think that you really need to think about who your target market is, and it’s no help to me if they’re women from the age of 18 to 65. That is not going to help us position or market book your book. I think also that you really need things like comparables but, only if they genuinely give you a sense of where the book sits.

There’s no point in everybody saying their crime novel is as good as The Dry and that’s just not going to be the case. Again, it’s research, who is publishing in which areas. Echo’s got a very strong crime list, for instance, so they’re a good destination if you’re a crime writer, but pitching poetry to a mainstream trade publisher is going to be quite hard unless it’s something quite different.

Doing the research about the publisher, doing the research about the actual acquisition’s publisher within that publisher, because they all specialise and then it’s really basic things like, don’t get the names wrong. My name is actually in my email address and people still spell my name wrong. It’s not a great start when you are thinking, I’ve got 150 submissions to read and so I think it’s to keep it really focused. ASA does some great pitching courses, some of the writer’s centres do, and just really think about its place in the market because why will I read this book?

Rachel: That’s great advice. Just to do a bit of a swift sidestep, we see many writers opting to self-publish these days. What are the pros and cons of doing that, in your opinion? 

Juliet: Yes, it has changed significantly since the rise of social media. The fact is that in self-publishing, it’s the same profile of sales as it is for traditional publishing. There is a tiny group at the top that sell mega numbers. They’re the 50 Shades of Grey that then get picked up by a publisher. But the average self-published book is selling well under 150 copies. It is suited more to particular areas if you are in non-fiction and particularly an area, of specialty, like in marketing or a particular medical field.

If you’ve got your own community that you are really aiming at, they’re the target market. It can be very successful and arguably more successful than a trade publisher. Genre is also much stronger, so obviously romantasy and that whole fantasy area that’s just ballooned of late crime, romance, they can work well.

I think that negatives of it are that it is a lot of work to do it well. You are doing everything. You can make the book as good as a traditional book now, if you’re prepared to spend the money on a good editor and a good proofreader and a good cover designer. People still stint on that, and you can pick a self-published cover from a mile off in many areas, not all. So, you do really have to be prepared to put the hard yards in because you’re going to do the lot, including the promotion. I think the biggest negative though, which people don’t really fully understand is that if you want to be in a bookshop in Australia, you are not going to get there by self-publishing. There are only one or two distributors who would even look at doing self-publish because there are so many they can’t get them in. 

Booksellers used to try in the beginning and maybe stock the authors book from their local area, they’ve been inundated. So, you won’t get physical presence, you can’t get to the distribution channel. It’s why so many of the sales are eBook because they are being marketed by incredibly clever authors who are doing all that social media promotion. But if you want to walk into Dymocks and see your books, self-publishing, it’s almost certain that won’t happen.

Lynne: Interesting. Well, you talked a little bit about social media and everything, because I’ve heard it really helps to have a bit of a public profile if you want to get a book published. Is that true? I know when I’ve worked in cookbooks that having a strong following, particularly social media, makes a difference when it comes to getting a publishing deal. Do you need to establish that first?

Juliet: Look in in certain areas? Yes. I mean, we’ve all seen, well look at Nagi, and Recipe Tin Eats, but it makes me a bit sad to think that you could be the most wonderful writer who knows nothing about social media, and you can’t be published because of it. In certain areas it is almost essential. Again, that’s targeted areas of non-fiction. It is particularly lifestyle, gardening, cooking. We are just doing a gardening book at Echo, and the author is wonderfully connected into that world, and that is a huge help because their social media presence also spreads the message so it, it can be useful.

Romance and crime are probably the two areas where the author community is something you shouldn’t neglect either. Authors are generally almost always incredibly supportive of one another, and they really will lift up the new writers and support them with their networks and things. Romance authors are particularly good at it, but crime authors are as well.

We’re just publishing a debut crime in a month or two from a new Perth writer and he’s done an amazing job of being involved in that crime writing community early and he was able to get fantastic endorsements for the book, including people like Christian White and people like that. All that really helps because like I say, they amplify the message. So, if you do have it, yes. If you’ve never done it, it is unlikely that you will have quite the resources or knowledge to build anything that’s going to be useful. 

Lynne: Interesting. 

Rachel: Just continuing along this whole promotion line, are we seeing budgets changing with publishers so that a lot of the legwork is now up to authors to do the promotion? Or is it just dependent on the book and how much money the publisher chucks at it? 

Juliet: I think that the budgets probably haven’t reduced, but they’ve concentrated and it’s one of the areas where a smaller publisher like Echo is able to focus on those thirty books a year and really give them each a lot of support, both financial and in time.

But if you are Penguin Random House or Collins, you’re going to be doing, I don’t know, one hundred and fifty to two hundred books a month. It isn’t realistic to put a budget against all of those. And so, I think that the budgets are going into those enormous authors when you see a book being published really well. Look at Jacinda Ardern’s book, has there been a single opportunity that hasn’t been taken for an interview or whatever. A lot of that is publicity, not necessarily paid. So that is working to put a bit more work back on the authors where they can because if you are not in that super lead category, the reality is that there isn’t much resource to do anything.

I think that as publishers we are not terribly good at social media and that is something I think there’s an opportunity to have more personality. We are relying a bit on, here we are, this is what we’ve launched this month and here’s the pretty cover. The audience is a lot more sophisticated than that, and they really want to build a connection.

I think that there’s more that we could do in the social media world that would support the promotion a bit more than we do. But festivals, events are still really worthwhile when you see the crowds. Words on the Waves has just been on recently and that was a hugely successful festival and events, particularly in regional areas, people really come out. You can get a hundred people in a room, in a not particularly big area and those things, it’s word of mouth. It’s still really important. 

Rachel: For authors that aren’t those big authors, and the onus is more on them, would your advice be set up your own events, set up your own book launches, do a little mini tour, even if you are funding it yourself, and that will create the momentum?

Juliet: I think a lot of authors do it very well locally and ours is coordinated all through us, but your local libraries really getting to know your local bookshop because the booksellers just work so hard at this stuff and are really supportive. So being willing and I mean it’s one thing that Heather who wrote, Tattooist of Auschwitz, she is an absolute trooper, and she will go somewhere and if there’s 25 people in the room, they get Heather at full Heather, she doesn’t compromise and she is willing to put in the time to build that audience. 

Somebody like Bryce Courtney famously did it. You know, there can’t be a memorial hall in the country that Bryce didn’t speak at it some time. He wasn’t just an overnight success. He worked really, really hard to achieve what he did.  

Lynne: Are you still surprised by what sells? Have you had some books that you thought would be huge and they’ve flopped or ones that you didn’t think were much and have just taken off? 

Juliet: More than I could possibly bore you with! 

I remember when I first started in publishing as a very young rep at about 21, and they had sold in what was to be an enormous mass market paperback called Always. It was a romance with a red heart on the cover. I arrived just at the time when the returns were starting, and all the booksellers referred to it as Hardly Ever, and we got about an 80% returns rate. So, you can get it colossally wrong.

It’s one of the things that when you buy a book as a publisher, nobody ever sits down and says, I know, let’s buy a dog today. You know, let’s buy a successful one. You believe in them so much, and it’s heartbreaking when they don’t do what you believe they could and should. But it is encouraging for me that things come out of nowhere, you know, Harry Potter. Of course, we all know what it is now, but there was a time when nobody would take it and when it was a cautious first print run. They had confidence in it as a publisher, but they didn’t envisage millions. 

Somebody like Dan Brown – I was at Random House before Da Vinci Code was, my usual, impeccable timing, and I remained for all of Dan Brown’s titles. Before that, you couldn’t sell Dan Brown for love or money and then The Da Vinci Code comes along, which without being rude, is not completely dissimilar to his earlier books, and that’s the one that came from nowhere. But you think of things like Lessons in Chemistry and things, there is room for imaginative new writing that grabs people’s attention. So, no, you never know, and I say it is the eternal heartbreak that a beautiful book sinks beneath the waves and that’s really hard. 

Lynne: Well, certainly Bonnie Garmus did say she’d written another book, and it had 99 rejections and so I always wonder whether that was terrible and then she wrote Lessons in Chemistry. So, there you are, 99. 

Juliet: I think part of that problem is actually it’s almost a kind of systemic problem in publishing that authors feel very rejected by the publisher. But I often say to them, look, they haven’t actually read your book, there’s a vetting process. It’s actually getting through that first funnel. I did actually read them at Echo, and we didn’t get the full, I requested manuscripts when I wanted to read more. So, the rejections are awful for authors, but they don’t necessarily mean that it was a terrible manuscript. It means that the person reading it that day was obsessed with romantasy, and they were not writing that genre. 

Rachel: Didn’t we have Emma Grey on The Last Love Note? Remember Lynne? And, she said she kept all her rejections on a calendar or something in her kitchen?

Lynne: She had a big wall of rejections to keep going. 

Rachel: She’s doing fabulously now. We have to ask the million-dollar question for our listeners who all want to know, can you make a living as an author in Australia? I’m thinking, no. 

Juliet: Well, you can, and people do and there are very obvious examples of it, but look it is really hard. 

My dad was a publisher in New Zealand, and he used to say that the bestselling authors for him were himself because he had put together the New Zealand Calorie Counter Little Pocketbook, which he did at home on the kitchen table and that sold squillions. The very fortunate man who wrote the basic accountancy book where every single student studying accountancy read it isn’t as bleak as that.

New Zealand’s famous for Mills and Boone. Successful authors, they’re lurking. I say we have some spectacularly successful and wonderful writers in Australia, but on the whole, it is impossible to forge a career solely on your writing. Again, some non-fiction authors can do that, but if you are not in that top, Chris Hammer, Jane Harper level, you don’t earn enough. Nowhere near it. And the ASA’s average earnings are, I think that’s probably $14,000 or something a year. It really is very difficult. 

Rachel: Is there a tipping point if you get to a certain number of books where you can drop the supplemental work and move into making a full living as an author? Does that work? Is there some kind of formula? 

Juliet: No, not really. I mean, it helps. I was looking up Stephen King because that was one of the things I meant to say. His book on writing is one of the most respected books about it and with people having a look at it. I just kept scrolling down the screen. I had no idea he’d written so many books. 

A lot of it is if you’re going to just write one book, it has to be Tattooist of Auschwitz, if you are ever going to make any money out of it. The sweet spot is being able to write books that sell strongly and well, ten thousand plus and keep on selling because it’s back sales. That ongoing, this book is still selling, five years, ten years, twenty years later. That’s what really delivers the sustainable income and some of the children’s authors, if you can get to that spot – that is just magic because that generation keeps coming along. The top ten children’s list, eight out of those ten will look pretty similar to what they were in the eighties and nineties and classic picture books, for instance. That’s really the trick to try and build up a whole portfolio of books that are going to stay in the stores. 

Lynne: Interesting. Well, we did have Kayte Nunn on quite a while ago, remember? I think she was on her sixth book, and she said she was now starting to make a decent income on by her sixth book. Basically, that was doing quite well and she’d won a prize, not a huge one, but in America and that gave her with her fifth book, and helped with the sixth book and then people were reading the back list and there was a whole, they were getting to that point, I think. 

Juliet: Yes. Well, a lot of these authors that are in the romantasy area, they’re republishing older titles that, when they had that breakthrough one and then you get that momentum really building. 

Lynne: I certainly know with my son-in-law, Craig Silvey, his Jasper Jones is on the school list in a couple of states. So that means he gets regular income from it, particularly in Western Australia and New South Wales, I think. But yes, and that gives you a regular income as well and I’m sure there are a few books that those classic kids’ books or sort of young adult books that make it onto the schools list. That must make a difference too. 

Juliet: It does, and you mentioned prizes and awards. For something like Deborah Dank’s book, We come with this place, that we did, that has won multiple prizes, including four Premier’s Awards in New South Wales for the first time that’s ever been done. That really built very strong ongoing sales and sparks off other things, which is events, and Deb’s an academic and a wonderful speaker, but there is peripheral income that comes as well, and public lending rights (PLR) and educational lending rights (ELR). I think a lot of authors forget that there are many children’s authors in particular, or backlist authors who earn more from their lending rights and libraries, than they earn in royalties two or three years after the book’s been released. So that is also useful income. You can earn a living as a writer, perhaps more difficult to earn it just as an author if you can’t supplement. 

Lynne: Well, Charlotte Wood, when we had her on the podcast, what had changed her life was winning the Stellar Award. 

Juliet: The Stellar is one of the best at cutting through to sales. Those and the CBCA awards, the children’s awards really work as well. They can have a very strong impact on sales. 

Lynne: Because a lot of librarians buy off the Children’s Book Council Awards, don’t they? 

Juliet: Yes, they do and it really, it can. Most of those books that would win those category awards and things, they will go straight into reprint.

Lynne: Fair enough. Talk to us about the actual publishing industry. We often hear a lot about media shrinking, but is the publishing industry similar? Is it hard to get a job in publishing and has that changed? 

Juliet: It’s always been difficult, and it still is, unfortunately. I think that there is more that we could do to spread the net more widely because diversity stats in publishing are woeful. I think it is because there aren’t that many jobs, and it has helped if you’ve got connections. If you actually know somebody, again, doing the research and seeing where you might fit in. I think that it is also important for people to think about what they really mean by wanting to get into publishing, because almost invariably people are thinking they want to be an editorial and editorial is wonderful if you are the right person and personality for an editor, which I profoundly am not. I’m a publisher and I can do the big structural, we need to be looking at it this way but sit me down to edit a book and I’d go mad and the author would go mad, and I’ve had so many young ones who have real flare and even the purchasing of books, the product area, the sales, the marketing, the publicity.

There’s actually quite a lot of interesting work in publishing where you’re in the world and you’re part of the team that’s driving the passion for those books that isn’t necessarily, really focused on the detail work of editing, and I have the utmost respect for editors. It’s not that, but there a lot of people, I think, who you’re thinking too narrowly about the options and it’s showing interest in the area. Go to the festivals, go to volunteer, work in a bookshop, get knowledge of the market. Show that you are really keen because a lot of the time you are actually appointed people in and recruiting them on fit and personality. Does being in the book world light their fire and can they spread?

You need to be not too precious. I don’t much like the obsession with everything has to be literary and wonderful. Now, a wonderful, beautifully written literary book is a thing of beauty, but it is about books being the best in whatever category they’re doing and some people, they’ll come along for the interview and say they only ever watch SBS and ABC, and they never listen to commercial radio, and they never listen to a podcast, and they never read a mass market magazine. I think, oh, well how on earth do you know what people are thinking. We are meant to be forging trends and in touch with the audience and if you are only tapping into a very small percentage of that audience. Be hungry, really. 

Rachel: It’s interesting what you say as well about not having this fixed idea of, say, wanting to be a book editor and looking at the other options that may exist in the industry because we often see with a lot of graduate journalists, they only want to be on a certain glossy magazine and that’s their dream and they’re not willing to look beyond that or work on a trade magazine to build relationships and kind of do a sideways step.

Juliet: That’s exactly the same thing, Rachel. It is all about connections. I’ve obviously employed a lot of people in publishing in my time and you do come across people and if somebody says, can I come and have a chat, I always do. One time I did and a wonderful woman who was part of the Dymocks buying team, and she asked if she could have a chat and I went back to the office the next day at Murdoch and said, I know we don’t have a job, but she’s just amazing, we just need to employ her and we’ll work it out from there, which we did. Twenty years later, she’s still very happily and successfully in publishing. Making that effort and being interested, but not lobbying every publisher at a party, if they’re having a quiet drink, they probably don’t want either your manuscript or your job application. 

Rachel: What about using freelancers? Do publishers still, do they just have their stable of book editors that they strictly use? Or can you get in there in some way? 

Juliet: That is worth thinking about because most publishers, the in-house editors will be more project editors, so they will be actually managing the process of the production of the book. The actual editing is almost all freelance and you can really build that up again if you’ve got a specialty. We do work with a group of very trusted editors, but when we get a specific category. We had a different category of book this year and we sought out a new young editor whom we knew had worked in that area, and we started by asking her if she would do a read of the manuscript as a paid assessment and she did an amazing job of that assessment, so we went on to employ her. She edited the book. 

IPEDs probably something to look at. That is an area where you can list there. So, freelancers, yes, are used and the good ones get very booked up so, there is a bit of room there. 

Lynne: I presume ghost writers as well, because quite a few of our audience, a lot of them were journalists or are journalists, they do a bit of ghost writing, particularly memoirs, biographies, that sort of thing. 

Juliet: It’s really actually quite difficult to find ghost writers, I suppose it’s because they’re ghost writers.

Rachel: We see what you did there. 

Juliet: I think that it is a skill of being able to get that voice. I’ve done a couple of little ones, and I’ve been a real estate expert in my time. If that’s something that trained journalists are the best because they are used to interviewing, they’re used to distilling a lot of information and research. They’re used to actually writing for a specific audience. We also love journalists because they don’t mind being edited. Some debut authors think that their words were written on the tablets of stone and cannot be changed under any circumstances. Journalists are much more robust than that. They’ve been ruthlessly subbed, and they are very engaged in the editorial side, which is lovely. 

Rachel: Well, we do love to ask all our guests about their tech tips, the tools of the trade they find useful. Are there any programs or systems that help you communicate and work with authors?

Juliet: I have to confess now that’s a terrible question for me, Rachel because I don’t. Things like all the SharePoint and shared files and all this sort of thing are just hugely helpful for us. Most of the authors are still writing in Word and we are doing track changes and things. AI’s the area of course that we are starting to use in areas like meeting minutes and things. In fact, thanks to Lynne, we started on that and things like that are magic. It also, of course, has implications for publishers, about how that is going to work out not to mention the fact that of course a lot of content built by AI wasn’t paid for. That’s going to be the big next challenge about how we harness it sensibly to help with some of the very clunky and rather manual processes and production still, but while also being sure that you’re not compromising any of the standards.

Rachel: Absolutely! 

Lynne: Oh wow. Juliet, I could talk to you for hours in fact, I think I have before! Where can people find you and find out more about what you do or maybe through Echo perhaps?

Juliet: They can always get referred from Echo because I’m doing some consultancy work there, but also on LinkedIn. I’m about to do my big update of a profile there and become much more diligent about answering my messages. But I promise I will answer the messages and they’d be very welcome to contact me there. 

Rachel: Amazing! Oh, Juliet, thank you so much. I think this is really going to be a fascinating chat and so useful for so many people out there, whether they’ve got that dusty manuscript in the bottom drawer or are thinking about it or just want to know more about the whole publishing industry. It’s just been great, so thank you Juliet. 

Lynne:  Thank you, Juliet. 

Juliet: It’s been lovely to talk to you both. Thank you so much. 

Lynne: Alright, that brings us to the end of the show this week, and thanks to everyone who’s listening and connecting with us and sharing, don’t forget to leave a rating or review if you love the show, which I’m sure you do, and we’ll have the show notes in your podcast app, and you can find out where to connect with Juliet. 

I’ll see you next week! 

Rachel: Thanks everyone. 

Lynne: Bye! 

Rachel: Bye!

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Credits:

Connect with Juliet via LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliet-rogers-84598328/ 

Find Lynne www.lynnetestoni.com 

Find Rachel www.rachelsmith.com.au 

Rachel’s List www.rachelslist.com.au 

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