[00:00:00] Sophie Elmhirst: To me, what was going to sustain it as a book was this, being able to go right to travel far into their marriage and to really uncover it and to understand its dynamics and to understand them as individuals. Once I got to know them a little bit as people and how extraordinary they were as people, I realized I wanted to try and understand them as fully as I could and just sort of chart the whole arc of their lives.
[00:00:23] Bethany Saltman: Hi, I’m Bethany Saltman, a literary agent
[00:00:26] Fran Hauser: And award-winning author, and I’m Fran Hauser, a bestselling author and independent bookstore owner, and this is the Book Bound podcast. On this podcast, we talk to women writers about their
[00:00:37] Bethany Saltman: Nonfiction books, but instead of talking about what their book is about, we focus on the process of getting their book into the world. These
[00:00:46] Fran Hauser: How I Did it, conversations will help you pitch your big idea, write killer proposals, find the right agent and publisher, and live an amazing book bound life.
[00:01:01] Bethany Saltman: Welcome to the show everyone. I’m so excited to introduce you to our guest, Sophie Elmhirst. Sophie is an award-winning journalist who writes regularly for The Guardian Long Read and The Economist. She’s the winner of the British Press Award for feature writer of the year and a foreign press award. She lives in London and A Marriage at Sea is her first book. In this episode, we covered a lot from the fact that she’s not active on social media to how long her journey took and how her early attempts at fiction didn’t take off. No one was falling over themselves to discover her work, and yet she just kept going. Now she’s a New York Times bestseller, a powerful reminder to trust yourself and stay the course. We love this conversation and we think you will too. Hey Sophie, welcome to Book Bound.
Hi, thank you so much for having me. We are so excited to talk to you about this book. I’m really excited. This is one of my favorite books I’ve read in a long time, so thank you. I’m telling everybody about it. So yeah, I’ll try to stay on course for the podcast.
[00:02:09] Sophie Elmhirst: Okay. Okay,
[00:02:10] Bethany Saltman: So we’d like to start by asking everybody a similar question, which is how did you discover this was a book? We know you’re a journalist, we know that you study, you were looking at things, kind of stories like this. Walk us through that and how did you know that it was a book and also this kind of a book because it’s very different than the kind of books journalists tend to write.
[00:02:39] Sophie Elmhirst: Those are really good questions and it was exactly, you’ve kind of hit on something that I wrestled with for a long time. I’d been trying to write a book for a long time and I’d cycled through a bunch of ideas and then kept chucking them out after a bit of work or a bit of research, and I realized that what I liked most about the journalism that I did was just being able to tell a singular story and follow a singular character. Often I write a few profiles. It’s one of my favorite journalism forms I suppose, and I really wanted to write a book like that, which when I came across the story, and it was by chance, it was while I was researching a piece about people trying to escape the land in different ways. It was in the pandemic, so that was in the air I guess, and we started to read about them.
[00:03:23] Sophie Elmhirst: I was like, okay, well this, I’ve got to tell the story in some way, but just journalistically because I couldn’t believe it had been forgotten because there was this English couple from the seventies. They set off to do this thing, really incredible thing, which is sail around the world with no radio and build their own boat and end up in New Zealand and given what happens, this sort of catastrophe that befalls them as this whale hits them and their boat sinks and they’re adrift for all that time. I was like, well, this is amazing to me that this isn’t known about by country and by culture, that these people aren’t kind of household names basically, and I hardly know anyone who remembered the story. So I was like, okay, well I’m going to tell this in some way. Maybe it would just be a piece.
[00:04:03] Sophie Elmhirst: But I suppose a long way of saying in answer to your question, what made me know it was a book was once I realized that there was the material to really excavate their marriage as much as what happened to them in terms of the dramatic external events. The adventure is obviously very compelling and what initially draws you in, but to me what was going to sustain it as a book was this, being able to travel far into their marriage and to really uncover it and to understand its dynamics and to understand them as individuals. Once I got to know them a little bit as people and how extraordinary they were as people, I realized I wanted to try and understand them as fully as I could and just sort of chart the whole arc of their lives. And it absolutely makes no claim to be a full biography of both of them. There’s lots of bits missing and lots of years missing, whole chunks that I haven’t included, but it does try to start with where they came from and it tries to go all the way to the end of their lives in kind of partial form. I suppose it was those deeper human currents that I felt like were the things that made me think it could be a book or the kind of book I’d like to read more than just a sort of surface level adventure story, I guess.
[00:05:18] Bethany Saltman: That makes so much sense, and I love what you said that you discovered, you figured out that was the kind of book you wanted to read, so important, and I think that might be, I got a little goose bumpy when you said that. I think that’s so often missing for writers. They forget that you want to write something that you would want to read. A hundred percent. Yeah. That’s very beautiful. So walk us through, so you had this idea, you said, okay, we have time. We can get into that just because
[00:05:50] Sophie Elmhirst: Curious, it felt like a leap of faith to make it the sole story of the book or the sole focus of a book because at first I didn’t trust that could be a story on its own, and I was trying to combine it with all sorts of things. I thought I could do a whole kind of essayistic exploration of escapism or living in different modes and in different ways, and then I had a very useful conversation early on with someone who was just, tell their story. That sounds like a really good story. Just do that. And then practically speaking, I wasn’t represented at the time. I’d had conversations with agents over the years as a journalist, but never, I didn’t have that sort of thing I definitely wanted to do ever. So then I eventually settled on an agent and with his help worked up a proposal and it just went quite quickly from there and started the work.
[00:06:33] Sophie Elmhirst: And I know that was quite a useful exercise just obviously in nonfiction, pre–fiction you have to do a bit of sample writing as well, as well as quite a full outline. And that was just a helpful exercise in kind of teasing out the different strands and the structure and the form and the various parts of it. It became quite an important scaffolding for what I was selecting or leaving out of their story. The sample writing I found very difficult. I don’t know, it’s an artificial exercise at that point. I guess I’m someone that likes to do all the work and then write the whole thing, and only then once I’ve written a whole first draft do I really know what it’s about and then I go back and work on it. So it took a while once I was actually writing it proper to kind of knock it into shape. But yeah, I guess that was the process in many cases.
[00:07:17] Fran Hauser: So I’d love to hear a little bit more about how you found your agent, but before we go there, you said something that I think is really interesting and I think is really helpful for our listeners, which is that very often with nonfiction we might have a story and we then go to, oh, but this needs to be maybe a through line that’s a part of a big think book or prescriptive nonfiction. And I think what was so great about this story is that it was just so compelling in and of itself that it held up on its own. And so I love that and it does read like fiction, by the way. I have to tell you Sophie, I also own a bookstore here in town. It’s a fairly new bookstore, we just opened in December, and we’re hand selling your book like crazy because we just love it so much and that’s what I always say to people. I say, you’re not going to believe this. It really truly reads like fiction. So it’s just something for our listeners to think about when they’re thinking about the type of book that they’re going to be writing. So thank you for sharing.
[00:08:24] Sophie Elmhirst: I would just add to that I think it’s not that you abandon all those ideas, all those sort of bigger themes. I think by privileging the story and character, I found that actually what it allowed me to do was probably more than you would in a kind of more conceptually founded book idea, to explore lots of different ideas. You can bring in all sorts of things, but you’ve got the sort of architecture of the story that’s guiding you through and then you divert all the time into lots of different ideas rather than just, sometimes that’s a slightly artificial process of feeling, oh, well this is my big idea, and I have to tie everything to that. Whereas this way you are just being as faithful as you can to the story, but you can I think deviate in lots of different directions. It’s quite liberating in that sense. You can sort of hop off on lots of different directions as you go. I’m trying to think.
[00:09:11] Fran Hauser: I love that. That’s such great advice.
[00:09:16] Bethany Saltman: And it also makes sense because we’ve been talking about the planners versus the pantsers. It sounds, Sophie, like you are a pantser, you’re someone who needs to go into the story. You said, I don’t know what I think until I write the full draft. Writing a proposal can be really challenging for people and we’ve been kind of going back and forth with guests about is that harder to do? Are we more prone to be pantsers when we’re writing memoir or fiction? And what I’m hearing you say is that whether or not you’re that kind of person, that’s sort of a separate thing, but when you are writing what one New York Times author or reviewer called a piece of lyrical narrative nonfiction, that lyricism is something you can’t plan. The art of it, that’s craft, that’s so personal and it comes to the page in magic ways when we’re blank. So that’s a hard thing.
[00:10:22] Sophie Elmhirst: Very true, and I think I struggle with it so much. To me, the whole, because I’d done a lot of pitching obviously as a journalist and having to frame ideas and sell ideas in a particular way, but with a book, the whole way you’re communicating the idea to try and sell the idea, it almost feels at odds with actually how you are going to end up writing it. Actually, all the things I really want to write about it or that I think will be teased out of this idea in the final version of it, again, I hope feel very different to that sort of shiny version of it. I hope it won’t read like that at all. It almost feels opposite, but it’s a kind of hoop you have to jump through. I suppose it’s its own challenge for sure.
[00:10:57] Fran Hauser: It’s a different kind of writing. You’re writing a business plan for your book. So I would love to go back just a little bit to the agent. So how did you end up getting to your agent? This is something that for the writers that are listening, it’s always hard. It’s a challenge to find the right agent. Sometimes there’s cold calling and there’s asking for warm introductions and there’s doing a lot of research. Sometimes it can feel like you’re pushing a boulder up a mountain, but tell us a little bit about that experience, what that was like for you.
[00:11:32] Sophie Elmhirst: Well, I was lucky in a way, well, I mean a function I guess of my job of just having been in magazines and then as a freelance journalist for quite a few years before I even got to the point of writing a book. Over that time I’d met with probably half a dozen agents over the years who had read something and got in touch and thought and said, have you thought about writing a book? And those conversations were never go that far because, well, no. One of them did go a bit further when I was still trying to write fiction, but then that project didn’t work out, so I sort of felt like I was back to square one, but I’d had some warm links I guess. But actually that’s all slightly irrelevant because the agent I ended up with, what I never met in that period when I actually in my mind was like, okay, do you know what I’m going to park trying to write fiction for now that has not gone, that’s not gone well or at least hasn’t resulted in actually publishing a book.
[00:12:22] Sophie Elmhirst: So I’m a journalist, I’ve been doing this a long time, why not just try and write a nonfiction book? It might be more possible if I can find the right idea and come. Well, it doesn’t often come down to this, certainly it doesn’t have to come down to this, but I was lucky, I have two friends, they’re a married couple and they both work in publishing not as agents. I didn’t have any friends who are agents, but they’re both editors at different publishers. And I just said, look, who would, because I hadn’t at that point met a kind of good person for nonfiction I guess for quite a while. Anyway, I just asked them for a recommendation and they suggested who ended up being my agent, a guy called Chris Wellbelove at Aitken Alexander, and he was very receptive. I guess again, I think what helps so much for an agent is to have a body of work that they can refer to, which obviously it’s your first book you don’t have, but I had just in the form of journalism and I do a lot of long form journalism, so maybe that gives an agent slightly more of an idea of your style or your range, your subject matter.
[00:13:21] Sophie Elmhirst: He had a fair amount to go on, even though my ideas for a book were still pretty vague then and with him. But I knew when I met him, I just knew I liked talking to him. He was just a good person to talk about ideas with and that felt like the most important thing. In the end, I just decided to go with the person I felt I had some sort of intellectual connection with, I suppose in some way, or readers actually. We mostly just talked about books and books we liked and that felt like quite a good guide I guess. And then he was also just really helpful in terms of those early stages. I definitely cycled through some of these bad ideas with him. He would be very sort of valiantly getting on board with an idea and seeing its potential. I think I’m quite used to as a journalist, working with editors who are incredibly clear about what they want or don’t want or don’t like and will routinely reject my ideas, whereas he never does that and I found it quite an adjustment. I quite like, I’ve got used to being told sort of what to do almost or what works or what doesn’t work, whereas he was much more open-minded and much more like, okay, following my lead. So it took me a while then to settle on something, but I think he was very supportive. He could sort of tell that I hit on something that felt more real in some way as a project.
[00:14:32] Bethany Saltman: So you started working with him before you came up with the book idea?
[00:14:40] Sophie Elmhirst: Yeah, no, we went through at least two other ideas, fairly surface level. I would say to anyone listening that if I look back at the years really worth the forever to be unseen, the multiple abandoned ideas, the sort of outlines that will never see the light of day, all these things I do think are incredibly useful exercises at the time. As you chuck out or someone else chucks out one of them or another of them, it can feel a little lowering or you’ve maybe wasted your time, but I actually don’t think you ever have. And I think not just in this kind of unconscious sense that these things all kind of come out in other ways, but just in the literal sense, each time I think you think about an idea to pursue it or reject it, you are honing your taste and you’re honing your sense and your radar, which is something you can only do I think over a long process of selection and omission and exploration basically.
[00:15:36] Sophie Elmhirst: And that’s I think a big part of it that always kind of goes unspoken about. I think that part of being a writer, which is because you often just end up with the finished product and it’s like, of course that was going to be your next book, and of course that was your next idea for a novel or your next subject for a nonfiction book. But it’s never, of course, certainly I guess unless you’re a specialist, which I never have been as a journalist either. If you’re a specialist and you just have your track, then maybe it all feels a bit more obvious what your next project is going to be. For me, it’s always been complete mystery. So all that process of going through ideas and rejecting things and hitting on other things, it’s all a very instructive one I suppose, and quite a creative one in a way. Yeah.
[00:16:23] Bethany Saltman: Hey there, Book Bound friends. If you’re a fan of this podcast, you’ve definitely heard us talk about the agony and the ecstasy of the nonfiction book proposal. Yes, proposals are challenging and yes, they can take a while, but we truly believe that for nonfiction writers mastering the art of the book proposal — and we really do think it’s an art — isn’t just necessary to land a book deal, it’s one of the best ways to become the expert of your own topic and to sharpen your craft. That’s why Fran and I wrote our ebook. It’s called Book Bound: A Tried and True Method for Turning Your Great Idea into a Standout Book Proposal. It’s available now at bookboundpodcast.com/ebook for just 19.99. So if you’re serious about your idea but not quite ready to invest in coaching or courses, this is the perfect place to start. Download our ebook today and take the first real step toward writing the book only you can write.
[00:17:21] Fran Hauser: How did the publisher meetings go?
[00:17:24] Sophie Elmhirst: So again, it was all in COVID era, so it was a strange process and it was all sort of done remotely like this, remotely. So he sent out the proposal and I think I had three publishers that were interested and I ended up only actually meeting with two of those. I think one sort of fell away because they were sort of a smaller indie and the other two were from bigger publishing houses and they were just sort of conversations on Zooms. And I guess I was such a newbie really, and it certainly wasn’t kind of like everyone in town was wanting this thing. It was quite a select number and a choice I did have to make. I was very lucky to be in a position to make a choice between these two, and they were just very enthusiastic and could see the sort of potential and absolute credit to them.
[00:18:13] Sophie Elmhirst: They both just were really supportive of that. And it was a similar thing, I suppose, to the agent. You’re kind of just looking for that sort of sensibility match or some sort of synchrony in how, and that seemed to be a good sign to me. They were both very good editors, but I think one, it was clearer to me that one was a sort of better fit and better match. And my editor, Becky Hardie, I could see she had a sense of what it could be and a sort of vision in a way for the book, which felt sort of exciting to me too. So yeah, that was how that worked out.
[00:18:48] Bethany Saltman: And this was in the UK, right, Sophie?
[00:18:50] Sophie Elmhirst: Yes, that’s right. That’s a very good point, yes. Yeah, it was different in the US.
[00:18:54] Bethany Saltman: Yes, but it’s the same process, but these UK publishers. And then I’d love for you to talk to us about what happened to the book in the UK and then how it became sold to the United States, and then the title change because people think a lot about titles and love to hear what that process was like and how the title changed and if you think that was the right thing and anything you have to say about that.
[00:19:21] Sophie Elmhirst: Yeah, of course. Well, it was an interesting process actually because it was bought by a US publisher much later than the UK. And hence the delay. It came out in the UK a good year and a half nearly before it came out in the US. Again, it was certainly not leapt upon in the US. I think it was just quite a strange thing to try and take to a US market. It was a very unconventional route to finding a publisher in the US. My agent had tried very hard and had lots of really good contacts there and people who had expressed interest, but nothing sort of fixed and a number of rejections. And I actually came to New York anyway for a work trip, and I happened to meet up with a writer friend and I gave him a proof copy of the English version and he’s like, God, I think I know someone who might really enjoy this, and I’m indebted to him for life because he read it that evening, texted me immediately being like, I love it, and I think I know someone who’s an editor at Riverhead who I think just might get a kick out of it.
[00:20:17] Sophie Elmhirst: Can I send it to her? And I was like, sure, go for your life. I’ve got nothing to lose here. And he texted it, I think he sent it to her on WhatsApp, like a, he’s like, have you got a PDF? And he just WhatsApped it. And then she would tell the story, she sort of tells it that she then started reading it on her phone, thought it was a novel, and got so sort of hooked into it and then much later discovered that it was actually nonfiction, was surprised. And she quite quickly just made it happen. I mean, I think as I said, she didn’t have a lot of competition, so it went from… and so this is Jynne Dilling Martin who’s at Riverhead and is an absolute force of nature. And the way she talked about it was like, look, I’m going to do this.
[00:21:00] Sophie Elmhirst: I’m going to have a long run up. It’s not going to come out very soon, but I’m going to do this in this granular way. I’m going to seed this with all my contacts from literally independent bookshop to independent bookshop around America, and I’m going to just sort of almost hand-sell this around a swath of the country. And I sort of was like, sure, sure. That sounded impossible for just one person in New York to do. And I think that is basically what she did because she just seems to have managed to get these very specific, wonderful, independent booksellers to feel really strongly about it. And she’s just put a huge amount of time and effort and industry and her team — she’s got an amazing team — into it as well.
And part of that, to go back, sorry to your question, was early on it was important to her and the team there I think to repackage it in a way that she thought was going to be more communicable and just receptive to a US audience. And so I think part of that was not using their names, which are quite particular names. So the British title was Maurice and Maralyn. And so she wanted something just a little bit more epic and a little more general I think. And it does a nice play on A Marriage at Sea, and I think it’s a wonderful title as well. And she wanted to redesign it and just, she just had sort of her own separate thing for it, and I was sort of fascinated to watch that unfold. It felt like a different publishing, a different book in a way. It was like, oh, let’s see how this one does. But yeah, she’s phenomenal. Just this sort of source of unbelievable energy behind it.
[00:22:28] Bethany Saltman: And what was the UK title?
[00:22:30] Sophie Elmhirst: Maurice and Maralyn.
[00:22:31] Fran Hauser: Maurice and Maralyn.
[00:22:32] Sophie Elmhirst: Right. Yeah.
[00:22:33] Fran Hauser: I’m also curious to know, obviously the book has been so successful here in the States. How did it do in the UK?
[00:22:41] Sophie Elmhirst: I mean, it’s done fine. It’s been more of a kind of slow and steady. I think I was really fortunate to win a prize — it’s a prize called the Nero Prize — earlier this year, in March this year. And that was just when it was coming out in paperback. And so that was a really lovely bit of timing. I think in hardback it did sort of fine, but certainly wasn’t on bestseller lists at that point at all, but sort of sold respectably, I think. I don’t know, I think I’m one of those writers that just, they do send me numbers and I just sort of half look at them. I just don’t really want to know just because, I dunno, I can just elicit all sorts of unhelpful thoughts and feelings. But I won this prize, which is very lucky, and that I think gave it a big bump, or at least it’s a temporary bump. And the paperback has been selling a bit better, I think. So yeah, I think it’s done okay. But I mean, I just hope for the best and let the people who are good at that do that basically.
[00:23:35] Bethany Saltman: Well, that’s amazing. I mean, a lot of people — we were talking before we got on — that you don’t really have a social media presence either, so we would love to talk about that because so many of our listeners are really convinced that they have to have this giant platform and they think that a platform means social media presence, and social media is one piece of a platform. Your platform was your incredible work as a journalist.
[00:24:04] Sophie Elmhirst: I think. Yeah, that obviously helped a lot. I’m 44 now, I’ve been writing for 23 years and wanting to write a book that entire time. And I’ve had every advantage in terms of being a journalist and being able to publish work and knowing editors and living in London, lots of privilege in a way to draw upon. And it still took me a really long time to crack my way into publishing and to find the agent and to find the right idea. This all takes a long time, but also that sort of association I suppose with certain brands, publications that you’re writing for, I know that gives editors a bit of confidence to run with something maybe or to just know that you’ll deliver or that you can string a sentence together. That definitely helps, I think. If you have some sort of platform for your work, I would say that counts for more than a platform for yourself.
[00:24:57] Fran Hauser: Well, I think it’s just, it’s refreshing for people that are listening to see that. It sounds like you’re very intentional about social media and not being on it. So I would love to hear more about that. But I think it’s also just going to be really refreshing for our listeners.
[00:25:12] Sophie Elmhirst: I never did Instagram, although I do lurk on these things for journalism, if I had to contact people or subjects, I have to have accounts. So I do have an Instagram account, but I think I follow my nieces or something and I don’t really go on it unless I have to get in touch with someone. But I did have a Twitter account and I did use Twitter back when it was Twitter and back when I was working in magazines and part of an editorial team, and it was the 2010s, so the real early days of Twitter and really when it was in the resurgence, when it was kind of in its infancy. And so it felt like it had a lot of energy there and a lot of positive energy. And you couldn’t be a journalist really and not be on it, or that’s what it felt like. And you’re promoting the magazine’s work and then start promoting your work. And I did go on promoting my work on there until relatively recently.
And I think a lot of people, once it morphed into what it is now, it felt like a kind of pretty busted flush as a platform or just not one that I really wanted to be on anymore or take part in. But even then, completely aside from the platform itself, I was obviously not using other platforms and I had obviously had a very remote relationship with social media. And that was for lots of reasons before I was even considering writing books, just when I was a journalist, I found it took up an unbelievable amount of time in a way that I could see was really natural and fun for my colleagues in journalism. I worked in a busy magazine office and some of them, they would just have Twitter just scrolling down on their desktop the whole day and they would be working on emails, a piece — they just had that brain.
And I don’t have that brain and I can work on one thing at a time quite slowly, but to completion. But I can’t do the multi-stimulation thing. I guess I found it made me very anxious. I found writing for these platforms — I was like, I’m a writer, why do I find it so hard to write a tweet? What is wrong with me? But I found it insanely hard and I would find I would’ve spent an hour of my, then once I was a freelancer, and I felt even more like, God, I should be self-promoting endlessly and I should be just doing this stuff. And I would find, and I had a baby and someone else, my mom, would be looking after my baby, and I would have this very precious three hours in which to work. And I’d spend an hour of it trying to craft a tweet, and I’d just be like, well, this is now clinically insane. I cannot do, I can’t do this anymore.
[00:26:45] Sophie Elmhirst: So then I just really reduced it and would just be, if I had a piece out, I’d do a tweet about it. But I mean absolutely once a month, say. I would have a kind of middle-of-the-night panic of like, well, who am I kidding? I won’t be able to sustain a career if I don’t do this. And then I just sort of gradually made a pact with myself of like, well, look, if you can go on earning a living and getting work and being published without doing it, let’s just see if you can go on. And actually, it seemed that my editors didn’t seem to mind. We would start joking about the fact that I was just very hopeless at it. And given that I at maximum probably had about one or two thousand followers, it was essentially pointless from a marketing perspective anyway. It’s only a platform if you’ve got half a million of these people.
So what’s the point if you’re just like I always was, just down in the foothills talking to no one? It seemed so crazy to spend so much time agonizing about something that barely anyone was seeing anyway. So I just thought, well, look, I’ll just see if I can maintain a career without really doing it, and if I get called out on it, well then maybe I have to find other ways of supplementing my income or doing other things. But so far I’ve sort of got away with it. And actually I thought when I then was in discussions with publishers about a book that maybe there would be pressure to sort of resume or to start doing it more properly, but there really wasn’t. And I sort of think probably they know as well that at a certain level, it’s really only going to be worth it at a certain level. And below that, no one ever made the point to me, you really need to get going on Instagram. I was so behind the curve, I was so too late to the party, there was no point in trying to join the party at that point.
And thank God, because all that would’ve done would’ve caused me immense anxiety and self-loathing, and I just would’ve wasted all my time basically.
[00:29:28] Fran Hauser: So right now you’re promoting, you’re in the thick of promoting this book here in the US. What does that look like for you? Is it mostly interviews? It’s amazing. You don’t have to worry about the social media piece, which takes up so much time for authors when their books come out. So what does your life look like right now with respect to promoting the book?
[00:29:51] Sophie Elmhirst: It’s actually, it’s already a little bit quieter. It was an intense few weeks, I guess a month sort of before and after the publication. Yeah, I was just doing interviews. I came over to do an interview, sort of a video thing for someone else in social media. It’s not out yet, so I don’t think I can say, but I love talking to — because I don’t do social media, but I do really like connecting with people just in other ways. So I’m really happy to do as many podcasts or radio stuff or whatever came up. So there’s been a lot of that. And when I published over here, I wrote quite a lot of pieces for different publications in the UK, so that was quite a big part of it, but I haven’t really done that in the US. Yeah, so it’s mostly been sort of doing broadcast and media and podcasts and that kind of thing.
[00:30:39] Bethany Saltman: Well, we’re so excited for you and we want everybody to read this book. It’s so special, so good. And I feel like your story just is very, it’s right for this book. And I think it’s really important for our listeners to know that this is not a cookie-cutter situation. There are some things everybody has to do — write a proposal is one of them. Social media is not. You do have to have a platform. People need to know that you’re a known quantity in some way, that people will buy this book. But if you can show that in other ways, that’s fine.
[00:31:13] Sophie Elmhirst: I guess I just maybe idealistically — and it might, well, I’m saying this now, I’ve got very lucky with this book, it might well not last, let’s have this conversation again in 10 years’ time — but I think if the idea is good and you work hard at the work, I suppose I just feel like life is a matter of time, isn’t it? How you use your time. And I would prefer to put much more time into the work than I would into the stuff external to the work or the stuff that you have to wrap the work up in. And I also feel like there are other people employed by publishers who are like, that’s their job. They’re really good at it. They’re really good at marketing and publicity and getting stuff out into the world. And I know I’m not good at that, but we’ll see. I might be kind of really learning my lesson next time around, so we’ll see.
[00:31:59] Bethany Saltman: No, I don’t think so. You’re going to do very well, so congratulations.
[00:32:05] Fran Hauser: Thank you. Congratulations, Sophie, and everybody, buy the book. It’s amazing.
[00:32:09] Bethany Saltman: Read the book, add the book, go on
[00:32:10] Fran Hauser: Social media
[00:32:11] Bethany Saltman: And talk about
[00:32:11] Fran Hauser: The book. Yeah, exactly. Yes. Thank you so much. We loved having you, Sophie. Have a great day.
[00:32:18] Sophie Elmhirst: Thank you for having me. Thank you. Bye.
[00:32:24] Fran Hauser: We hope you enjoyed this episode. Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and consider leaving a rating or review to help other writers find us. And don’t forget to check out our Read Like a Writer book club, and our downloadable Book Bound proposal guide, both designed to support you as you bring your book idea to life. You can also find us on Instagram @BookBoundPodcast. Happy writing.
[00:00:23] Bethany Saltman: Hi, I’m Bethany Saltman, a literary agent
[00:00:26] Fran Hauser: And award-winning author, and I’m Fran Hauser, a bestselling author and independent bookstore owner, and this is the Book Bound podcast. On this podcast, we talk to women writers about their
[00:00:37] Bethany Saltman: Nonfiction books, but instead of talking about what their book is about, we focus on the process of getting their book into the world. These
[00:00:46] Fran Hauser: How I Did it, conversations will help you pitch your big idea, write killer proposals, find the right agent and publisher, and live an amazing book bound life.
[00:01:01] Bethany Saltman: Welcome to the show everyone. I’m so excited to introduce you to our guest, Sophie Elmhirst. Sophie is an award-winning journalist who writes regularly for The Guardian Long Read and The Economist. She’s the winner of the British Press Award for feature writer of the year and a foreign press award. She lives in London and A Marriage at Sea is her first book. In this episode, we covered a lot from the fact that she’s not active on social media to how long her journey took and how her early attempts at fiction didn’t take off. No one was falling over themselves to discover her work, and yet she just kept going. Now she’s a New York Times bestseller, a powerful reminder to trust yourself and stay the course. We love this conversation and we think you will too. Hey Sophie, welcome to Book Bound.
Hi, thank you so much for having me. We are so excited to talk to you about this book. I’m really excited. This is one of my favorite books I’ve read in a long time, so thank you. I’m telling everybody about it. So yeah, I’ll try to stay on course for the podcast.
[00:02:09] Sophie Elmhirst: Okay. Okay,
[00:02:10] Bethany Saltman: So we’d like to start by asking everybody a similar question, which is how did you discover this was a book? We know you’re a journalist, we know that you study, you were looking at things, kind of stories like this. Walk us through that and how did you know that it was a book and also this kind of a book because it’s very different than the kind of books journalists tend to write.
[00:02:39] Sophie Elmhirst: Those are really good questions and it was exactly, you’ve kind of hit on something that I wrestled with for a long time. I’d been trying to write a book for a long time and I’d cycled through a bunch of ideas and then kept chucking them out after a bit of work or a bit of research, and I realized that what I liked most about the journalism that I did was just being able to tell a singular story and follow a singular character. Often I write a few profiles. It’s one of my favorite journalism forms I suppose, and I really wanted to write a book like that, which when I came across the story, and it was by chance, it was while I was researching a piece about people trying to escape the land in different ways. It was in the pandemic, so that was in the air I guess, and we started to read about them.
[00:03:23] Sophie Elmhirst: I was like, okay, well this, I’ve got to tell the story in some way, but just journalistically because I couldn’t believe it had been forgotten because there was this English couple from the seventies. They set off to do this thing, really incredible thing, which is sail around the world with no radio and build their own boat and end up in New Zealand and given what happens, this sort of catastrophe that befalls them as this whale hits them and their boat sinks and they’re adrift for all that time. I was like, well, this is amazing to me that this isn’t known about by country and by culture, that these people aren’t kind of household names basically, and I hardly know anyone who remembered the story. So I was like, okay, well I’m going to tell this in some way. Maybe it would just be a piece.
[00:04:03] Sophie Elmhirst: But I suppose a long way of saying in answer to your question, what made me know it was a book was once I realized that there was the material to really excavate their marriage as much as what happened to them in terms of the dramatic external events. The adventure is obviously very compelling and what initially draws you in, but to me what was going to sustain it as a book was this, being able to travel far into their marriage and to really uncover it and to understand its dynamics and to understand them as individuals. Once I got to know them a little bit as people and how extraordinary they were as people, I realized I wanted to try and understand them as fully as I could and just sort of chart the whole arc of their lives. And it absolutely makes no claim to be a full biography of both of them. There’s lots of bits missing and lots of years missing, whole chunks that I haven’t included, but it does try to start with where they came from and it tries to go all the way to the end of their lives in kind of partial form. I suppose it was those deeper human currents that I felt like were the things that made me think it could be a book or the kind of book I’d like to read more than just a sort of surface level adventure story, I guess.
[00:05:18] Bethany Saltman: That makes so much sense, and I love what you said that you discovered, you figured out that was the kind of book you wanted to read, so important, and I think that might be, I got a little goose bumpy when you said that. I think that’s so often missing for writers. They forget that you want to write something that you would want to read. A hundred percent. Yeah. That’s very beautiful. So walk us through, so you had this idea, you said, okay, we have time. We can get into that just because
[00:05:50] Sophie Elmhirst: Curious, it felt like a leap of faith to make it the sole story of the book or the sole focus of a book because at first I didn’t trust that could be a story on its own, and I was trying to combine it with all sorts of things. I thought I could do a whole kind of essayistic exploration of escapism or living in different modes and in different ways, and then I had a very useful conversation early on with someone who was just, tell their story. That sounds like a really good story. Just do that. And then practically speaking, I wasn’t represented at the time. I’d had conversations with agents over the years as a journalist, but never, I didn’t have that sort of thing I definitely wanted to do ever. So then I eventually settled on an agent and with his help worked up a proposal and it just went quite quickly from there and started the work.
[00:06:33] Sophie Elmhirst: And I know that was quite a useful exercise just obviously in nonfiction, pre–fiction you have to do a bit of sample writing as well, as well as quite a full outline. And that was just a helpful exercise in kind of teasing out the different strands and the structure and the form and the various parts of it. It became quite an important scaffolding for what I was selecting or leaving out of their story. The sample writing I found very difficult. I don’t know, it’s an artificial exercise at that point. I guess I’m someone that likes to do all the work and then write the whole thing, and only then once I’ve written a whole first draft do I really know what it’s about and then I go back and work on it. So it took a while once I was actually writing it proper to kind of knock it into shape. But yeah, I guess that was the process in many cases.
[00:07:17] Fran Hauser: So I’d love to hear a little bit more about how you found your agent, but before we go there, you said something that I think is really interesting and I think is really helpful for our listeners, which is that very often with nonfiction we might have a story and we then go to, oh, but this needs to be maybe a through line that’s a part of a big think book or prescriptive nonfiction. And I think what was so great about this story is that it was just so compelling in and of itself that it held up on its own. And so I love that and it does read like fiction, by the way. I have to tell you Sophie, I also own a bookstore here in town. It’s a fairly new bookstore, we just opened in December, and we’re hand selling your book like crazy because we just love it so much and that’s what I always say to people. I say, you’re not going to believe this. It really truly reads like fiction. So it’s just something for our listeners to think about when they’re thinking about the type of book that they’re going to be writing. So thank you for sharing.
[00:08:24] Sophie Elmhirst: I would just add to that I think it’s not that you abandon all those ideas, all those sort of bigger themes. I think by privileging the story and character, I found that actually what it allowed me to do was probably more than you would in a kind of more conceptually founded book idea, to explore lots of different ideas. You can bring in all sorts of things, but you’ve got the sort of architecture of the story that’s guiding you through and then you divert all the time into lots of different ideas rather than just, sometimes that’s a slightly artificial process of feeling, oh, well this is my big idea, and I have to tie everything to that. Whereas this way you are just being as faithful as you can to the story, but you can I think deviate in lots of different directions. It’s quite liberating in that sense. You can sort of hop off on lots of different directions as you go. I’m trying to think.
[00:09:11] Fran Hauser: I love that. That’s such great advice.
[00:09:16] Bethany Saltman: And it also makes sense because we’ve been talking about the planners versus the pantsers. It sounds, Sophie, like you are a pantser, you’re someone who needs to go into the story. You said, I don’t know what I think until I write the full draft. Writing a proposal can be really challenging for people and we’ve been kind of going back and forth with guests about is that harder to do? Are we more prone to be pantsers when we’re writing memoir or fiction? And what I’m hearing you say is that whether or not you’re that kind of person, that’s sort of a separate thing, but when you are writing what one New York Times author or reviewer called a piece of lyrical narrative nonfiction, that lyricism is something you can’t plan. The art of it, that’s craft, that’s so personal and it comes to the page in magic ways when we’re blank. So that’s a hard thing.
[00:10:22] Sophie Elmhirst: Very true, and I think I struggle with it so much. To me, the whole, because I’d done a lot of pitching obviously as a journalist and having to frame ideas and sell ideas in a particular way, but with a book, the whole way you’re communicating the idea to try and sell the idea, it almost feels at odds with actually how you are going to end up writing it. Actually, all the things I really want to write about it or that I think will be teased out of this idea in the final version of it, again, I hope feel very different to that sort of shiny version of it. I hope it won’t read like that at all. It almost feels opposite, but it’s a kind of hoop you have to jump through. I suppose it’s its own challenge for sure.
[00:10:57] Fran Hauser: It’s a different kind of writing. You’re writing a business plan for your book. So I would love to go back just a little bit to the agent. So how did you end up getting to your agent? This is something that for the writers that are listening, it’s always hard. It’s a challenge to find the right agent. Sometimes there’s cold calling and there’s asking for warm introductions and there’s doing a lot of research. Sometimes it can feel like you’re pushing a boulder up a mountain, but tell us a little bit about that experience, what that was like for you.
[00:11:32] Sophie Elmhirst: Well, I was lucky in a way, well, I mean a function I guess of my job of just having been in magazines and then as a freelance journalist for quite a few years before I even got to the point of writing a book. Over that time I’d met with probably half a dozen agents over the years who had read something and got in touch and thought and said, have you thought about writing a book? And those conversations were never go that far because, well, no. One of them did go a bit further when I was still trying to write fiction, but then that project didn’t work out, so I sort of felt like I was back to square one, but I’d had some warm links I guess. But actually that’s all slightly irrelevant because the agent I ended up with, what I never met in that period when I actually in my mind was like, okay, do you know what I’m going to park trying to write fiction for now that has not gone, that’s not gone well or at least hasn’t resulted in actually publishing a book.
[00:12:22] Sophie Elmhirst: So I’m a journalist, I’ve been doing this a long time, why not just try and write a nonfiction book? It might be more possible if I can find the right idea and come. Well, it doesn’t often come down to this, certainly it doesn’t have to come down to this, but I was lucky, I have two friends, they’re a married couple and they both work in publishing not as agents. I didn’t have any friends who are agents, but they’re both editors at different publishers. And I just said, look, who would, because I hadn’t at that point met a kind of good person for nonfiction I guess for quite a while. Anyway, I just asked them for a recommendation and they suggested who ended up being my agent, a guy called Chris Wellbelove at Aitken Alexander, and he was very receptive. I guess again, I think what helps so much for an agent is to have a body of work that they can refer to, which obviously it’s your first book you don’t have, but I had just in the form of journalism and I do a lot of long form journalism, so maybe that gives an agent slightly more of an idea of your style or your range, your subject matter.
[00:13:21] Sophie Elmhirst: He had a fair amount to go on, even though my ideas for a book were still pretty vague then and with him. But I knew when I met him, I just knew I liked talking to him. He was just a good person to talk about ideas with and that felt like the most important thing. In the end, I just decided to go with the person I felt I had some sort of intellectual connection with, I suppose in some way, or readers actually. We mostly just talked about books and books we liked and that felt like quite a good guide I guess. And then he was also just really helpful in terms of those early stages. I definitely cycled through some of these bad ideas with him. He would be very sort of valiantly getting on board with an idea and seeing its potential. I think I’m quite used to as a journalist, working with editors who are incredibly clear about what they want or don’t want or don’t like and will routinely reject my ideas, whereas he never does that and I found it quite an adjustment. I quite like, I’ve got used to being told sort of what to do almost or what works or what doesn’t work, whereas he was much more open-minded and much more like, okay, following my lead. So it took me a while then to settle on something, but I think he was very supportive. He could sort of tell that I hit on something that felt more real in some way as a project.
[00:14:32] Bethany Saltman: So you started working with him before you came up with the book idea?
[00:14:40] Sophie Elmhirst: Yeah, no, we went through at least two other ideas, fairly surface level. I would say to anyone listening that if I look back at the years really worth the forever to be unseen, the multiple abandoned ideas, the sort of outlines that will never see the light of day, all these things I do think are incredibly useful exercises at the time. As you chuck out or someone else chucks out one of them or another of them, it can feel a little lowering or you’ve maybe wasted your time, but I actually don’t think you ever have. And I think not just in this kind of unconscious sense that these things all kind of come out in other ways, but just in the literal sense, each time I think you think about an idea to pursue it or reject it, you are honing your taste and you’re honing your sense and your radar, which is something you can only do I think over a long process of selection and omission and exploration basically.
[00:15:36] Sophie Elmhirst: And that’s I think a big part of it that always kind of goes unspoken about. I think that part of being a writer, which is because you often just end up with the finished product and it’s like, of course that was going to be your next book, and of course that was your next idea for a novel or your next subject for a nonfiction book. But it’s never, of course, certainly I guess unless you’re a specialist, which I never have been as a journalist either. If you’re a specialist and you just have your track, then maybe it all feels a bit more obvious what your next project is going to be. For me, it’s always been complete mystery. So all that process of going through ideas and rejecting things and hitting on other things, it’s all a very instructive one I suppose, and quite a creative one in a way. Yeah.
[00:16:23] Bethany Saltman: Hey there, Book Bound friends. If you’re a fan of this podcast, you’ve definitely heard us talk about the agony and the ecstasy of the nonfiction book proposal. Yes, proposals are challenging and yes, they can take a while, but we truly believe that for nonfiction writers mastering the art of the book proposal — and we really do think it’s an art — isn’t just necessary to land a book deal, it’s one of the best ways to become the expert of your own topic and to sharpen your craft. That’s why Fran and I wrote our ebook. It’s called Book Bound: A Tried and True Method for Turning Your Great Idea into a Standout Book Proposal. It’s available now at bookboundpodcast.com/ebook for just 19.99. So if you’re serious about your idea but not quite ready to invest in coaching or courses, this is the perfect place to start. Download our ebook today and take the first real step toward writing the book only you can write.
[00:17:21] Fran Hauser: How did the publisher meetings go?
[00:17:24] Sophie Elmhirst: So again, it was all in COVID era, so it was a strange process and it was all sort of done remotely like this, remotely. So he sent out the proposal and I think I had three publishers that were interested and I ended up only actually meeting with two of those. I think one sort of fell away because they were sort of a smaller indie and the other two were from bigger publishing houses and they were just sort of conversations on Zooms. And I guess I was such a newbie really, and it certainly wasn’t kind of like everyone in town was wanting this thing. It was quite a select number and a choice I did have to make. I was very lucky to be in a position to make a choice between these two, and they were just very enthusiastic and could see the sort of potential and absolute credit to them.
[00:18:13] Sophie Elmhirst: They both just were really supportive of that. And it was a similar thing, I suppose, to the agent. You’re kind of just looking for that sort of sensibility match or some sort of synchrony in how, and that seemed to be a good sign to me. They were both very good editors, but I think one, it was clearer to me that one was a sort of better fit and better match. And my editor, Becky Hardie, I could see she had a sense of what it could be and a sort of vision in a way for the book, which felt sort of exciting to me too. So yeah, that was how that worked out.
[00:18:48] Bethany Saltman: And this was in the UK, right, Sophie?
[00:18:50] Sophie Elmhirst: Yes, that’s right. That’s a very good point, yes. Yeah, it was different in the US.
[00:18:54] Bethany Saltman: Yes, but it’s the same process, but these UK publishers. And then I’d love for you to talk to us about what happened to the book in the UK and then how it became sold to the United States, and then the title change because people think a lot about titles and love to hear what that process was like and how the title changed and if you think that was the right thing and anything you have to say about that.
[00:19:21] Sophie Elmhirst: Yeah, of course. Well, it was an interesting process actually because it was bought by a US publisher much later than the UK. And hence the delay. It came out in the UK a good year and a half nearly before it came out in the US. Again, it was certainly not leapt upon in the US. I think it was just quite a strange thing to try and take to a US market. It was a very unconventional route to finding a publisher in the US. My agent had tried very hard and had lots of really good contacts there and people who had expressed interest, but nothing sort of fixed and a number of rejections. And I actually came to New York anyway for a work trip, and I happened to meet up with a writer friend and I gave him a proof copy of the English version and he’s like, God, I think I know someone who might really enjoy this, and I’m indebted to him for life because he read it that evening, texted me immediately being like, I love it, and I think I know someone who’s an editor at Riverhead who I think just might get a kick out of it.
[00:20:17] Sophie Elmhirst: Can I send it to her? And I was like, sure, go for your life. I’ve got nothing to lose here. And he texted it, I think he sent it to her on WhatsApp, like a, he’s like, have you got a PDF? And he just WhatsApped it. And then she would tell the story, she sort of tells it that she then started reading it on her phone, thought it was a novel, and got so sort of hooked into it and then much later discovered that it was actually nonfiction, was surprised. And she quite quickly just made it happen. I mean, I think as I said, she didn’t have a lot of competition, so it went from… and so this is Jynne Dilling Martin who’s at Riverhead and is an absolute force of nature. And the way she talked about it was like, look, I’m going to do this.
[00:21:00] Sophie Elmhirst: I’m going to have a long run up. It’s not going to come out very soon, but I’m going to do this in this granular way. I’m going to seed this with all my contacts from literally independent bookshop to independent bookshop around America, and I’m going to just sort of almost hand-sell this around a swath of the country. And I sort of was like, sure, sure. That sounded impossible for just one person in New York to do. And I think that is basically what she did because she just seems to have managed to get these very specific, wonderful, independent booksellers to feel really strongly about it. And she’s just put a huge amount of time and effort and industry and her team — she’s got an amazing team — into it as well.
And part of that, to go back, sorry to your question, was early on it was important to her and the team there I think to repackage it in a way that she thought was going to be more communicable and just receptive to a US audience. And so I think part of that was not using their names, which are quite particular names. So the British title was Maurice and Maralyn. And so she wanted something just a little bit more epic and a little more general I think. And it does a nice play on A Marriage at Sea, and I think it’s a wonderful title as well. And she wanted to redesign it and just, she just had sort of her own separate thing for it, and I was sort of fascinated to watch that unfold. It felt like a different publishing, a different book in a way. It was like, oh, let’s see how this one does. But yeah, she’s phenomenal. Just this sort of source of unbelievable energy behind it.
[00:22:28] Bethany Saltman: And what was the UK title?
[00:22:30] Sophie Elmhirst: Maurice and Maralyn.
[00:22:31] Fran Hauser: Maurice and Maralyn.
[00:22:32] Sophie Elmhirst: Right. Yeah.
[00:22:33] Fran Hauser: I’m also curious to know, obviously the book has been so successful here in the States. How did it do in the UK?
[00:22:41] Sophie Elmhirst: I mean, it’s done fine. It’s been more of a kind of slow and steady. I think I was really fortunate to win a prize — it’s a prize called the Nero Prize — earlier this year, in March this year. And that was just when it was coming out in paperback. And so that was a really lovely bit of timing. I think in hardback it did sort of fine, but certainly wasn’t on bestseller lists at that point at all, but sort of sold respectably, I think. I don’t know, I think I’m one of those writers that just, they do send me numbers and I just sort of half look at them. I just don’t really want to know just because, I dunno, I can just elicit all sorts of unhelpful thoughts and feelings. But I won this prize, which is very lucky, and that I think gave it a big bump, or at least it’s a temporary bump. And the paperback has been selling a bit better, I think. So yeah, I think it’s done okay. But I mean, I just hope for the best and let the people who are good at that do that basically.
[00:23:35] Bethany Saltman: Well, that’s amazing. I mean, a lot of people — we were talking before we got on — that you don’t really have a social media presence either, so we would love to talk about that because so many of our listeners are really convinced that they have to have this giant platform and they think that a platform means social media presence, and social media is one piece of a platform. Your platform was your incredible work as a journalist.
[00:24:04] Sophie Elmhirst: I think. Yeah, that obviously helped a lot. I’m 44 now, I’ve been writing for 23 years and wanting to write a book that entire time. And I’ve had every advantage in terms of being a journalist and being able to publish work and knowing editors and living in London, lots of privilege in a way to draw upon. And it still took me a really long time to crack my way into publishing and to find the agent and to find the right idea. This all takes a long time, but also that sort of association I suppose with certain brands, publications that you’re writing for, I know that gives editors a bit of confidence to run with something maybe or to just know that you’ll deliver or that you can string a sentence together. That definitely helps, I think. If you have some sort of platform for your work, I would say that counts for more than a platform for yourself.
[00:24:57] Fran Hauser: Well, I think it’s just, it’s refreshing for people that are listening to see that. It sounds like you’re very intentional about social media and not being on it. So I would love to hear more about that. But I think it’s also just going to be really refreshing for our listeners.
[00:25:12] Sophie Elmhirst: I never did Instagram, although I do lurk on these things for journalism, if I had to contact people or subjects, I have to have accounts. So I do have an Instagram account, but I think I follow my nieces or something and I don’t really go on it unless I have to get in touch with someone. But I did have a Twitter account and I did use Twitter back when it was Twitter and back when I was working in magazines and part of an editorial team, and it was the 2010s, so the real early days of Twitter and really when it was in the resurgence, when it was kind of in its infancy. And so it felt like it had a lot of energy there and a lot of positive energy. And you couldn’t be a journalist really and not be on it, or that’s what it felt like. And you’re promoting the magazine’s work and then start promoting your work. And I did go on promoting my work on there until relatively recently.
And I think a lot of people, once it morphed into what it is now, it felt like a kind of pretty busted flush as a platform or just not one that I really wanted to be on anymore or take part in. But even then, completely aside from the platform itself, I was obviously not using other platforms and I had obviously had a very remote relationship with social media. And that was for lots of reasons before I was even considering writing books, just when I was a journalist, I found it took up an unbelievable amount of time in a way that I could see was really natural and fun for my colleagues in journalism. I worked in a busy magazine office and some of them, they would just have Twitter just scrolling down on their desktop the whole day and they would be working on emails, a piece — they just had that brain.
And I don’t have that brain and I can work on one thing at a time quite slowly, but to completion. But I can’t do the multi-stimulation thing. I guess I found it made me very anxious. I found writing for these platforms — I was like, I’m a writer, why do I find it so hard to write a tweet? What is wrong with me? But I found it insanely hard and I would find I would’ve spent an hour of my, then once I was a freelancer, and I felt even more like, God, I should be self-promoting endlessly and I should be just doing this stuff. And I would find, and I had a baby and someone else, my mom, would be looking after my baby, and I would have this very precious three hours in which to work. And I’d spend an hour of it trying to craft a tweet, and I’d just be like, well, this is now clinically insane. I cannot do, I can’t do this anymore.
[00:26:45] Sophie Elmhirst: So then I just really reduced it and would just be, if I had a piece out, I’d do a tweet about it. But I mean absolutely once a month, say. I would have a kind of middle-of-the-night panic of like, well, who am I kidding? I won’t be able to sustain a career if I don’t do this. And then I just sort of gradually made a pact with myself of like, well, look, if you can go on earning a living and getting work and being published without doing it, let’s just see if you can go on. And actually, it seemed that my editors didn’t seem to mind. We would start joking about the fact that I was just very hopeless at it. And given that I at maximum probably had about one or two thousand followers, it was essentially pointless from a marketing perspective anyway. It’s only a platform if you’ve got half a million of these people.
So what’s the point if you’re just like I always was, just down in the foothills talking to no one? It seemed so crazy to spend so much time agonizing about something that barely anyone was seeing anyway. So I just thought, well, look, I’ll just see if I can maintain a career without really doing it, and if I get called out on it, well then maybe I have to find other ways of supplementing my income or doing other things. But so far I’ve sort of got away with it. And actually I thought when I then was in discussions with publishers about a book that maybe there would be pressure to sort of resume or to start doing it more properly, but there really wasn’t. And I sort of think probably they know as well that at a certain level, it’s really only going to be worth it at a certain level. And below that, no one ever made the point to me, you really need to get going on Instagram. I was so behind the curve, I was so too late to the party, there was no point in trying to join the party at that point.
And thank God, because all that would’ve done would’ve caused me immense anxiety and self-loathing, and I just would’ve wasted all my time basically.
[00:29:28] Fran Hauser: So right now you’re promoting, you’re in the thick of promoting this book here in the US. What does that look like for you? Is it mostly interviews? It’s amazing. You don’t have to worry about the social media piece, which takes up so much time for authors when their books come out. So what does your life look like right now with respect to promoting the book?
[00:29:51] Sophie Elmhirst: It’s actually, it’s already a little bit quieter. It was an intense few weeks, I guess a month sort of before and after the publication. Yeah, I was just doing interviews. I came over to do an interview, sort of a video thing for someone else in social media. It’s not out yet, so I don’t think I can say, but I love talking to — because I don’t do social media, but I do really like connecting with people just in other ways. So I’m really happy to do as many podcasts or radio stuff or whatever came up. So there’s been a lot of that. And when I published over here, I wrote quite a lot of pieces for different publications in the UK, so that was quite a big part of it, but I haven’t really done that in the US. Yeah, so it’s mostly been sort of doing broadcast and media and podcasts and that kind of thing.
[00:30:39] Bethany Saltman: Well, we’re so excited for you and we want everybody to read this book. It’s so special, so good. And I feel like your story just is very, it’s right for this book. And I think it’s really important for our listeners to know that this is not a cookie-cutter situation. There are some things everybody has to do — write a proposal is one of them. Social media is not. You do have to have a platform. People need to know that you’re a known quantity in some way, that people will buy this book. But if you can show that in other ways, that’s fine.
[00:31:13] Sophie Elmhirst: I guess I just maybe idealistically — and it might, well, I’m saying this now, I’ve got very lucky with this book, it might well not last, let’s have this conversation again in 10 years’ time — but I think if the idea is good and you work hard at the work, I suppose I just feel like life is a matter of time, isn’t it? How you use your time. And I would prefer to put much more time into the work than I would into the stuff external to the work or the stuff that you have to wrap the work up in. And I also feel like there are other people employed by publishers who are like, that’s their job. They’re really good at it. They’re really good at marketing and publicity and getting stuff out into the world. And I know I’m not good at that, but we’ll see. I might be kind of really learning my lesson next time around, so we’ll see.
[00:31:59] Bethany Saltman: No, I don’t think so. You’re going to do very well, so congratulations.
[00:32:05] Fran Hauser: Thank you. Congratulations, Sophie, and everybody, buy the book. It’s amazing.
[00:32:09] Bethany Saltman: Read the book, add the book, go on
[00:32:10] Fran Hauser: Social media
[00:32:11] Bethany Saltman: And talk about
[00:32:11] Fran Hauser: The book. Yeah, exactly. Yes. Thank you so much. We loved having you, Sophie. Have a great day.
[00:32:18] Sophie Elmhirst: Thank you for having me. Thank you. Bye.
[00:32:24] Fran Hauser: We hope you enjoyed this episode. Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and consider leaving a rating or review to help other writers find us. And don’t forget to check out our Read Like a Writer book club, and our downloadable Book Bound proposal guide, both designed to support you as you bring your book idea to life. You can also find us on Instagram @BookBoundPodcast. Happy writing.
