‘You need to kind of kick off this persuasive chain reaction and enlist people to the cause of your book.’
In the book trade, James Spackman is known as ‘The Pitch Doctor’. From an illustrious start to his career in the post room at Bloomsbury to sales, marketing and agency roles at Hachette, Osprey and now The bks Agency, his passion has always been to communicate a passion for books.
As he explains, the success of a book depends in large part of a ‘chain of enthusiasm’ that has to begin with the author and ultimately – hopefully – reaches the reader through a complex ecosystem of agents, editors, sales reps, marketers and booksellers. This is the art of the pitch, and because it ends with the reader, that’s where the crafting of it must begin too.
In this week’s conversation we discuss the fact that publishing is ‘a business of persuasion rather than a meritocracy of texts’, and what that means for authors. We also talk about the extraordinary route that James took to publish his own book, why measures of success are deeply personal, and why doing things your way is so damn rewarding.
The Book Pitch Doctor site: https://www.bookpitchdoctor.com/
The ‘banned list’!: https://www.bookpitchdoctor.com/the-book-pitch-banned-list
The bks Agency: https://www.thebksagency.com/
James on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-spackman-3b97885/
Alison on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-alison-jones/
The 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge: www.proposalchallenge.com
The Extraordinary Business Book Club on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1447064765612358/
Practical Inspiration Publishing YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@piptalking
Alison Jones: I am here today with James Spackman, who has worked in books since his eye-catching ’96 debut in the postroom of Bloomsbury Publishing, how refined. From there, he moved on to sales, marketing, and management roles for Hachette and Osprey. Currently, he combines his work as an agent at The bks Agency. I don’t know if that’s how you say it, Books Agency, bks, brilliant, there you go, with coaching publishers in presentation skills as The Book Pitch Doctor, and he’s the author of How to Pitch a Book.
So first of all, welcome to the podcast, James. Fantastic to have you here.
James Spackman: Thanks, Alison. It’s great to be here.
Alison Jones: Really good to see. And I know you from your IPG work as well. You’ve done some terrific work for the IPG Skills Hub, which has been really, really great.
So let’s start with that kind of premise behind the book. And I was really taken by a phrase in the book, which is that you say, publishing isn’t a meritocracy of texts, it’s a business of persuasion, which is awful, isn’t it? You don’t want it to be that way, but it is, and it really rung true to me. So, just tell me a little bit more about that premise.
James Spackman: Yes, thank you. It’s actually, it’s a phrase I find myself using quite a lot and quite often with authors actually. I quite regularly teach a course with the Arvon Foundation, and it’s something that I find myself talking about with those students because they’re writers who really want fair treatment.
You know, they want to do a good job and for that to be recognized with being published and selling well. But yes I think the harsh truth is that there are so many factors which are beyond the control of the author and sometimes beyond the control of the publisher and it really isn’t a meritocracy.
And even if it was, who’d be in charge, you know, who’d be judging? We have to, it’s a commercial business, we have to let the market decide. And the market includes readers. And it includes retailers and media and all the rest of it. So yes I think it, I suppose it’s just a way of reminding ourselves that we need to be a bit pragmatic about it.
But hopefully not lose all hope because, you know, we can do a good job ourselves and give our books the best chance
Alison Jones: And, you’ve got sort of layers here, haven’t you, of target reader because in the old days, a publisher’s job was to pitch the book to the trade, to the booksellers who would then, if they liked it, you know, display it and so on, and you might get it on Radio Four and you know that that’s how it used to work.
In a sense, we have a slightly more level playing field now because you can go direct to consumer and, you know, Amazon has opened that up. But there’s such a slew of stuff out there that any kind of benefit of that almost feels like it’s been wiped out. So tell me, when you are writing, you’re writing for publishers, I know in a sense, but you are also writing for authors because they have that opportunity to go direct now, don’t they?
James Spackman: Yes, I mean my primary audience for the book is publishers and my primary audience, obviously for the workshops I do as The Book Pitch Doctor is publishers. But I’m keenly aware that a lot of the stuff in this is relevant to authors because sometimes they do go direct, but also they are part of a, kind of a chain.
You know, I talk about pitching is publishing and the reason for that is that it’s absolutely not something which is very easy to do successfully, just as an individual. I mean, yes, you can self-publish successfully, but the conventional model requires the author and the agent and the editor to be in a kind of a chain of enthusiasm where the way they talk about the book and the way they frame the book, they can not only persuade their, say sales colleagues but they can also give their sales colleagues something that they can take on to the retailers. And, eventually this stuff goes all the way down to the readers.
I was talking with an industry friend, Helen Garnons-Williams, who you I’m sure you know, she was talking about a book of hers and in fact this was also the Arvon thing, where she was able to show that there’d been a kind of a chain reaction of phraseology about a particular book of hers where, yes a phrase that the author had used had been adopted by the agent. She’d adopted it and it morphed a little bit as it had gone through, but it’s now on the back of the book. And it’s probably part of the way that independent retailers and, you know, booksellers of all sorts, recommend it to members of the public and, indeed the way that people, you know, that readers recommend it to one another.
It’s almost like there’s memes of recommendation, little verbal packages, which you’re passing down the chain. And that’s why I think, even if you’re an editor, even if you’re the shyest person in the world, even if you don’t see your yourself as a kind of shiny suited salesperson, you still need to kind of kick off this persuasive chain reaction and actually enlist people to the cause of your book, if that makes sense.
Alison Jones: I love that phrase about a chain of enthusiasm, that makes complete sense to me.
James Spackman: I think I borrowed that from someone, I’m not sure who.
Alison Jones: Well, I’m going to credit it to you in the podcast notes, I’ll tell you that. But I think that will come as a surprise to some authors who will see that their job is to pitch the book to a commissioning editor and won’t be kind of aware of all the bodies that stand behind that commissioning editor.
And I think it’s also, you know, I always think of a publisher, or an editor particularly, as a sort of the ambassador for the reader, but actually the editor is also the champion of the author when it comes to translating their ideas and igniting that enthusiasm in that whole book supply chain, isn’t it?
James Spackman: Completely right, yes. And, I think it’s a huge theme of mine is understanding your audience and what a successful editor can do is understand what the author’s trying to do, but also then translate that into language which will be relevant to their audience. And if their audience includes the publicity director and it includes the marketing person, you know, they might find themselves framing it in quite specific insider-ish genre terms like.
You know, I mean, it is becoming a common term now, but romantasy for a good two or three years, that would’ve been quite a niche term and maybe authors might have been writing in that genre without even knowing it. Whereas, you know, the editor might use that expression in order to help their colleagues understand what category we’re in and they can maybe use quite pragmatic language about market share and positioning. And the author maybe wouldn’t do it that way because they’re a bit more kind of ‘pure’ in inverted commas.
But yes, it is just another example of having a really strong understanding of the mental agenda of the person you’re talking to, or the people that you’re talking to, and saying things which are relevant to them.
Alison Jones: A lot of this isn’t, as you say, directly relevant to authors, but I love that point about that kind of meme that the author creates, the sort of the phrase that they come up with that then populates through that entire chain and becomes something that people immediately get.
I mean, do you have any advice for authors on how to create that kind of level of copy, that sort of persuasiveness, that way of articulating what their book’s about, that’s going to really stick with people?
James Spackman: I think playful experimentation and practice, really try to get in the habit of talking to as many people as possible about it, and not just have a line and repeat it, but try to just have just half a second of thinking about what might be relevant to the person you are talking to, how you might explain it differently to them.
And also don’t necessarily do it sort of in the same register, I suppose. I mean, because there are some settings in which you’ll want to be talking about your own book in a way, which is professional and industry-ish and you know, using categories and being quite kind of pragmatic about it, but then maybe there’s other moments in which you actually might want to be a bit kind of looser about it.
And I always think it’s worth remembering that, you know, we all have different modes, don’t we? Like when I started in the industry, I was very, very shy and inhibited socially. In a professional setting, if you know what I mean. Like I was, you know, famous for blushing in the office like all the time.
But I did also know that I was the person in my social setting who was always recommending stuff, who was always enthusing about stuff. I always, when I do Pitch Doctor courses, I always tell people, you know, remember that you’ve got your kind of Pret mode. You know, say you’re queuing for coffee with a friend or a colleague and somebody says, oh, what are you reading. Because you’re in publishing, and this applies to authors too, because you care about books, because you’ve got something to say, you’ll find yourself enthusing about it in a really natural way.
And remember that you have access to that mode, as well as potentially being able to talk about your book in a much more sort of sober, maybe commercial way as well.
Alison Jones: Up against the competing titles and all that kind of objective analysis that you do, yes. But if you, as the author are not passionate about your book, what chance has anybody else in that line got about that catching that enthusiasm?
James Spackman: Yes absolutely. No, I think you’ve got to have that passion, but as with a lot of things in books, yes, I think it is a balance of, you know, the passion and the savvy, I suppose.
Alison Jones: Which why we love publishing because it’s that blend.
It’s so idealistic, but it’s also sort of crass commercial and we love that.
James Spackman: Yes completely. It’s actually something I’ve heard Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing With Feathers, a complete genius, he talks about that really interestingly as an author and a publishing person, and he always advises authors to sort of go easy on themselves in the sense that that dual consciousness of being completely pure with your art, you know. And it is art, even if we’re writing, you know, nonfiction about a practical subject, being totally pure about your practice, but also being completely savvy and street smart about the industry you’re trying to get in.
It’s actually, it’s not possible to be both things perfectly at once and all you can do is try to be mindful about which headspace you are trying to occupy at any one time. And know that you’ve got to do a bit of both.
Alison Jones: Yes and that phrase used about the register, finding the right register in the right situation. I think that’s a really helpful way of looking at it.
James, tell me more about the story behind the book, because obviously you have been doing this work for a long time. When did you go, I need to write a book about this and then what decisions did you take about that?
James Spackman: It is been brewing an awfully long time, and I’ll try not to give you the entire origin story, but it did, I can absolutely trace it back to being this very shy postroom boy at Bloomsbury and being given the job as sales rep and having to go out there talk to people about books, being quite inhibited about it at the start, but then realizing that actually I did relish that sort of way of the game of turning your enthusiasm about books and your commitment to books into persuasive messages that resonated for the people you’re talking to. So there was that.
And then when I was a Sales Director at Hodder and Stoughton, my boss at the time, Lucy Hale, asked me to help a couple of junior staff who were about to go into customer-facing roles, to get them a bit more confident about doing that because they had all the brains for it, they had all the commitment, they could write a great email about a book, but it was just the sort of performance aspect of it they struggled with.
So, we did a kind of role play, which I called Book Pitch Doctor, and it really helped. And so when I went freelance, I was actually itching to try that out on the open market.
I started doing it with groups of people at Hachette and then at PRH and then at various indies and all sorts of others, and I think for quite a while I’d known that I wanted to put it into a book. Because even though I’m not a kind of a writer, writer as it were, like I don’t do it for self-expression, you know, I’m not like a poet or whatever.
I do enjoy writing for a purpose and to communicate ideas and I enjoy my writing self, if that’s not too wanky, it feels like a version of me that I like and so yes, to answer the question properly about four years ago, I decided to do it.
And I started to, I was on holiday and I was just swimming and I just started to kind of write it in my head and it came pretty quickly and pretty easy. I actually really struggled then to kind of keep going with it because my day job as an agent and a pitching coach, I would always find myself putting that stuff first, and it felt difficult to give myself permission to write.
I would block out two hours and then find out, I’d used 90 minutes of it replying to emails saying, oh geez, you know what, when am I going to make progress on this? But I was still enjoying it when I did give myself permission to to write. I was still enjoying it enough that over about a year, I got together about, you know, a third of the book. It’s only a short book, but I got about a third of it together and then I decided to kind of go immersion on the rest of it.
And I got the train, my wife’s family have a small place on the coast in Scotland and a really kind of quiet, quiet bit of Dumfriesshire and I basically borrowed the house for a week and I took the train up there with my bike, cycled from the train station, got some groceries on the way, and then basically stayed there for a week, you know, doing the sort of rather monastic, it was amazing.
And then this was the first, I mean, before the recording started, we were talking about parenting and stuff and it occurred to me while I was there, it’s the first time I’ve been alone and silent for a week, not really deliberately, but because I wanted to immerse myself in the writing.
Alison Jones: They are real enemies of ambition, aren’t they? Kids.
James Spackman: But, although I have to say they’ve also been really supportive of the book. And, you know, reading bits of it and commenting on it. And actually my daughter is a really good illustrator and she did my chapter heading.
Alison Jones: It is so lovely.
James Spackman: Yes and you know, that to me, we can talk about this, but that’s one of the massive satisfactions I think of being in charge of your own book. It’s just doing what you want and just enjoying it yourself.
But yes, no, I finished it off then and then yes kind of, maybe we’ll come onto this, but yes, started to make decisions about what to do with it.
Alison Jones: Talk me through the publishing strategy because it’s so interesting.
James Spackman: I started with with lots of different options and I deliberately didn’t make any decisions about it until I’d actually finished a manuscript I was happy with or at least happy enough with to send to a copy editor.
I then had a day of chat, very generously, with my friend George Walkley, who some of your listeners will know, if you’ve even had him on the…
Alison Jones: He’s coming on actually, I think you’ll be before him though. But yes, he’s coming on talking about AI, which is, yes I mean, he’s just amazing. He knows about everything.
everything
James Spackman: Well, and funnily enough, he’s working on a business book himself, but he can tell you about that. But he’s, yes, he knows, in addition to doing everything about AI, he also just knows everything about the business of publishing and particularly self-publishing and audio and things like that.
And he really generously helped me kind of strategize about this. And I think, and well, I remember being quite unenthused about some of what felt like inevitable stuff, like putting it on Amazon, doing the metadata, you know, the keywords and stuff, the pricing, the ebook, which I knew would be difficult to get perfect. The print on demand stuff, which felt inevitable. Dealing with reviews and stuff like that, and it didn’t feel quite right.
And I was really grateful to George for reminding me that it was really important that every time I picked up the book in order to do anything with it, send it to someone, give it to somebody, refer back to it, that I felt the sense of pride.
And that really, and that wouldn’t necessarily be the same for all authors. For some people it’s, you know, it’s kind of pragmatic in a different way. And, you know, there’s kind of commercial imperatives or sort of reach imperatives, which might mean that, you know, doing it in a particular way, you know, maybe low price or digital or whatever might work.
But for me, making sure that I enjoyed every single step of the process and was really proud and happy with every element of the thing itself. Actually, that turned out to be the most important consideration. And so, rather than do an ebook, rather than do it print on demand I used at his suggestion actually, Riverside Publishing Solutions, who I think for me, were right in the sweet spot of doing affordable self-publishing solutions but also being very human.
So I, you know, I had a personal contact there, Duncan, who I think is the owner of the business, who was incredibly responsive and patient, and he knew that I was in the business and so I would have opinions about em-dashes and stuff like that, all that geeky business. But he helped me work through all that and I couldn’t have been happier with the result.
And along the way, you know, I made a point of asking friends to help. So, and there’s a woman called Katherine Venn that I used to work with at Hodder. She was my copy editor.
Clare Faulkner, who’s online as Small Dots. She’s used to be a colleague at Bloomsbury doing marketing. She’s a graphic designer now, and she did the cover, which I absolutely love. I mentioned my daughter and, yes and just being able to kind of gather a little mini team to help with it.
And, irrespective of any outcome whatsoever, the process and the thing have made me very happy.
Alison Jones: And it is, you are right, very different to most people’s experience of almost losing control of their manuscript once it goes to a publisher. But the outcome of that is that basically if you want to buy the book, you buy it from you, it’s just not out there in the supply chain.
James Spackman: Yes.
Alison Jones: I was really like, oh, that’s a really interesting decision.
James Spackman: I know and it’s not necessarily forever, I sometimes feel like it is slightly perverse, but I do also quite like it because, not least because if somebody buys it from my website, I see their name. I see…
Alison Jones: You have got that direct relationship.
James Spackman: Yes. So I, you know, I hand write a note to them and I put it in with the book and I stamp the envelope with a woodblock, which a guy in India made for me based on my logo. And it’s very person to person. It’s very, all quite artisanal to use that slightly hackneyed word, but it’s genuinely personal and I really like that.
In future, I mean, I don’t know, like I’ve had a couple of people asking me about, you know, do you want to translate it into French or Italian? And yes, that might happen and yes, I haven’t done an audio version of it, but I could do and I think my feeling about it is doing it at my own pace and under my own control.
Not in a neurotic way, but just as a, you know, this is something that I love and I really care about how people receive it, but I care more about how they receive it than how many of them receive it. And, I suppose the other element of this is that, and then this will be very familiar to a lot of your listeners and guests, is that it integrates into a broader business strategy.
Alison Jones: And in a sense there’d be no point whatsoever in taking that strategy if you weren’t connecting with people, if they didn’t get to know about the book directly through you.
James Spackman: Exactly right, yes. And so, you know, if like next week I’m doing a workshop with people from Penguin Random House and you know, I bundle in a copy of the book for each of them to take home at the end of the course. That’s lovely. I’ve sent out gratis copies to people either who might recommend it to their staff or who might think, oh, this is interesting. You’ll use it as a calling card. You know, oh, this is interesting. We’ll get this guy in to do some workshops with us .
Because it’s, you know, it’s laying out the methodology and the tone actually, and it’s making it very, very, obviously book specific, which is, you know, it’s obviously a key thing for me that I’m not just a generic public speaking coach. It’s about pitching books, so it makes that point pretty bloody obviously. So, yes it just kind of works for my personal interests.
Alison Jones: It works for your target market because it’s a relatively small target market and you can reach directly. So yes it makes complete sense. Just such an interesting strategy and genuinely never had anybody on whose strategy was not to be able to get their book into every channel absolutely possible. And you know, it’s just fascinating. I love it.
There’s so many different aspects to which you could take an approach to this question I’m about to ask you. So I’m really fascinated where it’s going to go, but I always ask my guests for their sort of, one best tip for somebody who’s just starting out on this journey.
So, I guess with your Pitch Doctor hat on and with your publisher hat on, I’m being greedy now, I know, I don’t care. What would you want people to understand?
James Spackman: I think, I mean, I was going to actually say that I would could pass on that advice that George did to me about, I suppose it’s more broadly than just do something that you’ll feel proud of, because that’s not necessarily the number one thing for everybody, but be completely certain, really, really be clear with yourself about what success is.
Because it’s quite easy to kind of plough ahead without really knowing that. And I think, you know, is it that you’ve made a million quid? If so, great. Is it the number one bestseller, that’s a different thing, but also great. Is it getting it reviewed in, you know, The Economist or The Spectator or whatever. Is it simply that everyone at your company gets to read it.
But knowing almost what the lowest bar is, not because you can’t shoot higher than that, but at least knowing where success is going to start. When will you know that you’ve done well in your own terms and by your own standards?
I think that that’s, it’s really hard to overestimate how important that is.
And, I suppose I would also like sneakily add in another thing, which is very much a Pitch Doctor maxim, which is think about the audience. You know, like really, really understand who’s in the bullseye of your audience. Because it’s very, very tempting, I know this as an agent and a publisher, and authors I think always struggle with this, is you want to be able to say, well, everyone should be able to read this, this is relevant. But go through the mental process of zeroing in on who it is most appropriate for and write for them.
And you sort of can’t go too far wrong with that.
Alison Jones: You have got a lovely sort of forbidden list on your website, haven’t you, never ever use these phrases. It’s so helpful.
We’ll put the link on, don’t worry, on the show notes,
James Spackman: And they’re all things I’ve done myself.
Alison Jones: Well, that’s nice to hear as well, actually, that’s good because I had looked at it and I thought, I’m sure I’ve written that in copy before. Never mind…,
James Spackman: Oh yes.
Alison Jones: Give us a, recommend us a book, will you, James?
You are not allowed to recommend your own.
James Spackman: No, okay. There’s two, one is Perfect Pitch by Jon Steele. I’m assuming it’s still in print. It’s basically a massive rant about PowerPoint and how crap it is. How you shouldn’t ever, it’s worth it for that. And, you know, I’ve borrowed, I’ve stolen so many lines from it, including ‘your slides are not your presentation; you are your presentation’, which is really good.
It’s also got in the back, a terrific case study of the London 2012 Olympic bid and how they beat Paris. Suppose, I mean, some people think it was a big bribe. I choose to believe that it was because their presentation was fantastic and, this is all about understanding your audience because the Paris bid was all about Paris. The London bid was all about we are going to inspire a generation of athletes.
Alison Jones: Yes. interesting.
James Spackman: It spoke to the audience and I won’t go into, I could talk for hours about that. I can’t not also mention this as well, which is almost like the text version, Blurb Your Enthusiasm by Louise Willder. So I aspire to being as good at verbal pitching as she is at blurb writing because she’s worked for Penguin for 25 years writing their cover copy, and she’s absolutely fantastic at it, but also has written this wonderful book, which is about cover copy, but it’s about so much more about books and about how we write about books, how we recommend books. So it does actually, thematically, overlaps a lot with my work.
Alison Jones: Hmm.
James Spackman: But she’s a brilliant writer and one of the quietly most, quiet that sounds really condescending, she’s extremely clever and talented and accomplished at what she does, but I suppose partly because of just what her job is and what it isn’t, not that many people have heard of her, you know, she’s not like an attention seeker like me.
Alison Jones: Well, you’re not, but she’s very much in the business of showing you other people, isn’t it, that’s sort of what she does? Yes.
I like to think that she had the title and then decided she had to write the book.
James Spackman: You know, I think she actually writes that, at the back, there’s, she does this really clever thing where she gets four or five people and an AI to do an alternative blurb for her own book. It all gets a bit meta. There is something in there somewhere about the title. I think, in fact, I think there’s a chapter about titles and she talks about the alternative one.
So really, really getting under the hood of that kind of word play but yes, I agree. Blurb Your Enthusiasm is pretty much unimprovable.
Alison Jones: It’s unimprovable and that’s marvellous.
James, if people want to find out more about you, more about your agency stuff, the Pitch Doctor stuff, where should they go?
And particularly about the list of never do this, which is gold.
James Spackman: Yes bookpitchdoctor.com, that’s where you can get the book. That’s where you can find the banned list. That’s where you can find out about workshops that I do online, offline, long, short, whatever.
And the bks agency, and I slightly wish we’d never called it that because it’s bks because it’s Bartholomew Killingley Spackman. So Jason Bartholomew, Jessica Killingley, James Spackman, BKS. Yes, it works better in print. It’s a curse but yes we are the bks agency. We’re part of Midas, which is our parent company. And we’re a very good literary agency.
Alison Jones: Fabulous. James, thank you so much for your time today.
It’s been fascinating. It’s been really interesting hearing the story behind the book. I’m hugely inspired by the purity of your vision for this. If let, let’s just take it down a register. I just love the way you did what you wanted to do. I think that’s absolutely fantastic.
Very, very inspiring and there’s been a huge amount of really, really valuable stuff there for the listeners as well. So thank you for your time.
James Spackman: Oh, thanks Alison. It’s been a joy.
