Welcome to episode 8 of Serving Books: from inspiration to publication, the podcast for every industry-outsider who, like me, has lots of questions about how a book goes from being an idea, to landing in readers’ hands. If you’re enjoying the series so far, please share it with all your writerly friends to help me reach more listeners, or if you rate, review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts this will help the algorithms do their magic 🪄 Serving Books answers questions like… ✍🏻 How do you get words on the page?📖 Which is the right publishing path for you?🤔 What’s involved in the different stages of editing?🪝 How to snag an agent and negotiate a book deal?🤝 What are the best ways to work *with* your publisher to prepare and promote your book?🗣️ How might you self-drive your book promotion, whether you’re indie or traditionally published?📕 What’s the bookseller’s view on how they select the titles they’re going to back?⬆️ How can you keep the ball rolling after publication?🔮 And how might you future-proof your career as an author? When I first started planning this podcast series I knew I wanted to speak to a bookseller about the process of exactly how books end up in book shops. Immediately, I decided that the only bookseller that would do was Ruth Wallbank-Hughes because Ruth is the founder of Drop City Books, a community-focused book shop in my home city of Stoke-on-Trent. So far, so what, you might be thinking, but if you’d indulge me for a minute I’d like to explain what this conversation means to me. Stoke is one of those places often described using that horrible, reductive phrase, ‘left behind’. It has always been a working class city so of course it bears the scars of 80s Thatcherite Britain and forty years later - for many reasons - there are few signs of the kind of regeneration enjoyed by its bigger, flashier neighbours, Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham. Stoke tends to only appear in the news headlines when there are riots, or hate-fuelled right wing protests, or when it’s been voted as the worst place in the country to live. In the months and years following the EU referendum in 2016, journalists would only make the trip to Stoke to ask why so many people voted Leave, and in the 2019 General Election the city did its bit to obliterate the Red Wall when all three of its parliamentary constituency seats turned blue. When you’re a left wing progressive who believes in class solidarity, who celebrates and welcomes difference and diversity, who thinks immigration strengthens a country, who is married to a Nigerian, and who has two brown children, it’s… complicated to call Stoke home. But I’m also proud of my home city - of its heritage and its history, of its humour and its unique accent. Stokies - or Potters as we’re known, thanks to the area’s historical ceramics industry - are self-effacing, down-to-earth, and distinctively friendly people. We call everyone ‘duck’ as a term of endearment, and in Stoke an oatcake isn’t a cheese biscuit, it’s a savoury pancake, made with secret recipes that get passed down through generations, that you load up with warm fillings, and to be honest you basically haven’t lived until you’ve eaten a hot, cheese-and-bacon filled oatcake fresh from the griddle. It’s a place where every school child learns the playground rhyme, Cos yer kick a bo agin a wall an' yed eet till eet bosts ar can cos thay, keeping little bits of a dying dialect alive. And it’s one of the few places in the country where people correctly pronounce the word, book. To repeat - that’s booook - like coooook, loooook, and hoooooook 😅 More seriously, Stoke hasn’t always made it easy to love it, but it’s still my home, it’s in my DNA. I can’t help myself. And then Drop City Books popped up in my Instagram timeline a couple of years ago - a rare moment of gratitude for the algorithms - and I got so excited! Book shops are never just shops that sell books - they’re portals to other worlds, places to be curious and open your mind to learn new things, they’re gathering places for ideas, and people - but for me, Drop City Books feels like even more than that. It feels like light and hope and belief that things can be better and Ruth’s warmth and humour, and even the colourfulness of her book shop, feel like all the best things about my home city rolled into one. So - at this point you might be thinking, for god’s sake Nicola get on with it… and I will! I promise. I really hope you enjoy listening to this conversation as much as I enjoyed having it - please welcome Ruth the founder of Drop City Books, based in Stoke-on-Trent - or, as she puts, it ‘the centre of the known universe’ 😉 Psst… Starting on Monday 31st August, I’m hosting a FREE seven day ☀️WAKE UP INSTAGRAM☀️ challenge. You’ll receive a short email each day containing a simple 10 minute task that will help you reboot your Instagram account if you’re coming back from a break, or things have gone a bit quiet. Sign up for the challenge 👇🏼 Find Drop City Books On Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dropcitybooks/ Drop City Books website https://www.dropcitybooks.com/ On Bookshop.org https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/dropcitybooks If you’d like future episodes of the podcast to land in your inbox, subscribe to Too Much by Nicola Washington, and you’ll be notified every time I release a new episode This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nicolawashington.substack.com/subscribe
