The question at the heart of Margin to Margin Books is not complicated to state. There is a difference between publishing for marginalised communities and publishing about marginalised experience; between putting a reader from the margins at the centre of every editorial decision and producing books about that reader’s life for someone else’s consumption. That distinction shapes everything we do — what we commission, how we edit, what we put on a jacket, what we will consider success.
It sounds straightforward. In practice it sets M2M Books apart from almost everything else currently happening in mainstream publishing.
Our founding essay, now live on Substack, makes the full argument. It begins somewhere most readers from marginalised communities will recognise immediately — the book that is apparently written for you, that turns out to have been written about you, for someone else entirely. It moves through what that pattern reveals about how mainstream publishing actually works, who is doing the curating and for whom, and why goodwill alone has never been sufficient to change much.
The essay also introduces M2M Books properly — our two titles in print, the five arriving later in 2026, our recent London Book Fair Trailblazer shortlisting, and what this Substack is for. Not a newsletter in the conventional sense; a space where we think in public about books, decisions, and the wider argument about who literature serves.
The gap between what the publishing industry says it values and what it offers is wide enough to build a press in. That is precisely what is happening here.
The founding essay is at Margin to Margin on Substack. Subscribe there to follow the argument as it develops.
Margin to Margin Books 