As a senior commissioning editor at Bloomsbury, Bill Swainson looks after a list that includes everything from fiction to current affairs. Here he tells us what it takes to impress a good ‘old-fashioned general publisher’.
What is your role at Bloomsbury?
I am a commissioning editor, which means I acquire books for the Bloomsbury adult list. I left Leeds University in the mid-70s determined to work in publishing, had a job to go to before I took finals and arrived in London for the first day of my working life only to be told that ‘Mr X doesn’t work here anymore, and he certainly didn’t tell us about you!’
A year’s bookselling (it can’t be recommended highly enough for would-be editors) was followed by John Calder (Beckett, Burroughs, Duras), Allison & Busby (Buchi Emecheta, Colin MacInnes, C.L.R.James), 4th Estate (when it had 13 books on the list), happy times at Harvill (Durcan, Healy, Sebald), freelance for five years (great for understanding the value of time and money) and since 1999, Bloomsbury.
Who’s on your list?
I publish:
§ history (Frederick Taylor’s superb account of the Berlin Wall, for example),
§ ideas and current affairs (A. C. Grayling on Liberty, Edward Lucas on Putin’s Russia and Oscar Guardiola-Rivera’s forthcoming book on the new Latin America),
§ environment (Al Gore, Gabrielle Walker, Sir David King),
§ biography (Gerald Martin on Gabriel García Márquez, Wendy Moffat’s superb forthcoming life of E. M. Forster),
§ some illustrated books (Tim Birkhead’s acclaimed history of ornithology, Ian Thompson’s forthcoming history of the English Lakes),
§ plus fiction in English (Will Self, Russell Hoban, Magnus Mills and Alasdair Gray – imaginative energy and a sense of comedy)
§ and fiction from other languages (Javier Cercas, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Boualem Sansal among others, because it’s fascinating to see the world through different eyes, the way it looks familiar and strange at the same time).
In short, I’m an old-fashioned general publisher.
Describe your typical day?
The bus journey to work gives me an uninterrupted hour’s reading time each day. Monday is ‘get-a-grip on the week’ day; Tuesday is Bloomsbury’s meetings day (Decisions! Decisions! Decisions!), on either Wednesday or Thursday I edit away from the office when I can (you need those concentrated bursts), Friday is a chance to finish what has to be finished, catch the last post and end the day with a well-earned drink. Saturday morning I usually read from 8-12.
Into this broad structure are woven impromptu meetings with colleagues on the publicity, marketing, design or rights sales, not to mention phone calls, emails, conversations with authors, negotiations, emails, visits from foreign publishers, book launches, and yet more emails.
Most memorable day in the job?
When I heard that Spanish author Javier Cercas and his translator Anne McLean had won the 2005 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize with Javier’s first novel in English, Soldiers of Salamis, and then couldn’t tell anyone for a month.
How do you find new writing talent?
Ideas and suggestions come from other authors, translators, scouts, agents, European cultural initiatives like New Spanish Books and New Books in German, fellow publishers around the world, sifting through the all-too-much of book fairs to find gold dust, and my own reading.
I miss the literary magazines that flourished in the 70s and 80s – they were great places to spot new talent, and while the internet is becoming interesting it takes a while to learn how to read the new literary landscape.
But above all, a conversation is worth ten times the most persuasive pitch – things come up unexpectedly in the way that you spot things out of the corner of your eye that you wouldn’t see if you were actually looking for them.
How can an author impress you?
With his or her writing.
What advice would you give an aspiring author?
Read! Read as widely as you possibly can – and then throw away the crutches and write. I have a schizophrenic relationship with the idea that one should write only about one knows, because while it can ground your work, it can also limit it.
The Colombian writer, Juan Gabriel Vásquez said that at first he tried to follow the advice ‘write about what you know’, but it was not until he wrote to find out what he didn’t know that his writing really began to take off.
How do you nurture your relationship with authors?
It depends on the author, but almost always by being professional who is also a trustworthy friend – the kind of friend who can tell you what you may not want to hear, but who is always reliable.
What happens when a book needs a lot of work before publication?
When a typescript is delivered, the first thing to do is to read it and look at the big picture. It may be the text is too long, or that it only really gets going a third of the way through, or that research which belongs in footnotes or at least not in the book is still clogging up the narrative, or it may be that something more nuanced needs attention (authorial intervention, emphasis, tone).
This is the ‘structural edit’, and usually reaches the author in the form of a letter containing an editorial diagnosis and prescription.
When the revised text comes back from the author, it should be ready for line- and/or copy-editing.
What are the attributes of a good commissioning editor?
People say, a good eye, a good nose, flair, awareness of context and Zeitgeist. I wouldn’t disagree, but a commissioning editor needs also to be passionate about his or her books. After all he or she is the book’s ‘producer’, who must nurture the author, bring the book it on budget and still be thinking of ways to publish it and promote, long after its first appearance.
What genre would you be happy never to read again?
I can’t think of any genre that couldn’t at some point pull off a surprise worth knowing about, but I have only read two blockbusters in my life, I think, and I only finished one of them. If the writing has no energy, what’s the point?
What market trends are emerging?
I have no idea. I can’t edit that way round.
How will digital media transform book publishing?
I think e-books will become simply another platform. I use an e-reader for all my professional reading (700gms is a lot lighter than 5 x 300-page MSS in your bag for the weekend), though I will only become really excited when the same platform can work like a combination an iPhone with an e-reader-sized screen and a decent sound card (or is that a laptop)?
And no, unless we all take collective leave of our senses, content won’t be free because authors, agents and even publishers have to live.
Book you last read for pleasure?
The last two novels I bought were Saša Stanišić’s How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone and Roberto Bolaño’s magnificent 2666.
One of the great things about going on holiday is to be able to read purely for pleasure, so I’ll be packing Alan Furst’s The Spies of Warsaw and Colette Bryce’s most recent poetry collection Self-Portrait in the Dark. Then I’ll return with batteries recharged and analytical faculties in good shape, I trust.
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