Situated in mid Wales, Margin to Margin Books is a publishing house, conceived in 2024, with a unique mission to publish great writing for marginalised audiences.

Chief reader, Gareth James, is an author of multiple nonfiction titles for Hodder Education, a former Cambrian News columnist, and regular panelist for BBC Radio Wales’s Aberystwyth Book Club (BBC Sounds). Gareth also hosted the popular Spoken Word Open Mic Events at Irie’s Bar in Aberystwyth.

The Mission

Marginalised writers are customarily employed as a form of seasonal window dressing. There is a month for every identity, a short period when a few representative authors are invited to perform their trauma for a curious public; a fleeting moment when the publishing industry undertakes a desperate bit of box-ticking and then reverts to its default settings. This is not a picture of positive publishing; this is opportunistic virtue signalling.

M2M Books have no interest in tokenistic diversity calendars; not interested in marginalised communities being offered up to the mainstream as seasonal decoration; consigned to the loft for the majority of the year; writers finding themselves exactly where they were before the brief flurry of activity; out of sight, out of mind; exposed and unsupported; publishers immediately racing on to the next marketable trend.

And in these occasional periods when publishing houses appeal for diverse manuscripts, they are all too often looking for a specific kind of trauma narrative composed for the Hay Festival demographic. They want to publish the Racism or Homophobia 101 explanation; a comfortable self-serving product drafted for the gaze of the well-meaning liberal. Literature of misery and existential justification. Marginalised audiences ignored.

So, while the industry awaits the next political trend to dictate what is marketable, our mission remains fixed. M2M Books is committed to curating robust literary infrastructure for a spectrum of marginalised audiences – an Internal Library that will remain available and active 365, year after year after year.