Deep inside The National Library of Wales, in one of those rooms with suspect acoustics and uncomfortable chairs, I sat alongside Alex Wharton and Jade E. Bradford and we talked about writing for well over an hour.

We spoke about what it costs to write when you work full time and have a life. About first drafts that are supposed to be terrible, and what reading has to do with writing, and whether the two are separable at all.

Jade wants, she said, the permission to be radically boring. The right to write about ordinary life without that life being read as a statement of identity.

I’ve been doing this long enough to know why that permission is difficult to obtain. The mainstream expectation of the Black experience has a shape. We explain. We translate and tone down. We make the particular legible to a reader who arrives from outside our experience. That shape is commercially proven and culturally rewarded but irrelevant to the readers the book is actually about.

The full panel discussion is available above and is entirely worth your time.

Gareth James | M2M Books

Twenty-five years ago, I named our first son, Jem (my daughter only just dodged ‘Scout’). I had grown up convinced To Kill a Mockingbird was a text integral to me as a Black person. I now know that this canonic story of American racism was not written for me at all; I’m not American, and even as an infant I was well aware that racism is horrible. A closer read reveals that Tom Robinson’s characterisation serves not as subject, but as an object, a plot device that enables white character developments. In a nutshell, I finally noticed that books written about marginalised communities are not the same as books written for marginalised communities. 

I should have spotted this distinction sooner; a vivid memory from primary school, as the only Black child in my class, was being routinely exposed to tuneless renditions of ‘The Ink is Black, the Paper is White’; humiliation and my ethnicity unhelpfully highlighted. A ditty, not composed for the Black kid, but to educate the white children that somehow all races are on the same team. The irony? I’m certain the teacher thought they were doing me the favour.

Like my teacher, UK publishing has for decades treated ‘for’ and ‘about’ as synonymous. They’re not. And those working in the book business should know ‘words matter’ more than anyone.  Especially when the distinction between the two is where significant progress in their diversity, equality, and inclusion initiatives can be found

Diversity Shelves Are Not For Us

Browse the titles on any ‘Black British’ bookshelf. What do they have in common? Slavery. Racism. Migration as suffering. The wounds inflicted by injustice. The struggle to overcome. Now ask: who is learning from these themes? Who is the imagined reader sitting across from the author, being patiently educated? Not Black readers. Black people did not need Beloved to tell them that slavery was a human catastrophe. They were not waiting for Girl, Woman, Other to confirm that marginalisation is complex and painful. Black readers need no lessons in the daily realities of endemic racism. These books explain the Black experience to people who have never lived it. This is not the same as serving the communities the texts represent.

The same argument can be made for all communities marginalised by UK publishing.

But we take what we can get, it seems. Those of us from marginalised communities have been well-trained to feel grateful for any books that feature characters that look like us, and to treat critique of the diversity canon as ingratitude, or worse, betrayal. We know what we’re supposed to say: these books matter, they opened doors, they made us visible. Questioning them feels like pulling at a strand that holds the whole project together. 

The career arc of Colson Whitehead tells us everything we need to know about what narratives the publishing industry values. His early novels; The Intuitionist, a noir-adjacent story using lift inspectors as a metaphor for racial progress; Zone One, a literary zombie novel, both earned critical respect but modest mainstream reach. Then he wrote The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, both centred on slavery and racial violence, and won back-to-back Pulitzer Prizes. The publishing machine rewarded Colson most lavishly precisely when he was writing about Black suffering. 

The problem is that the ‘diverse’ books published, that win prizes, that we’re told are essential reading, are almost always written for an imagined reader who is white, middle class, straight, neurotypical, and non-disabled – a fraction of the book-buying population. Why? Because books commissioned, promoted, and pressed into the eager hands of marginalised communities are being chosen, overwhelmingly, by people who are not from those communities. In practice, they are commissioning about ‘exotic’ communities, for the ‘mainstream’; then calling the skewed process representation. I might call it bait and switch. This is not a matter of spite, quality or taste. It is the cultural disconnect between who the books were intended to represent and who has been making the decisions.

The Cost

For marginalised readers, repeatedly consuming narratives centred on their own oppression is not a neutral act. It is neither educational nor a leisure activity. A Black reader working through Beloved is not only encountering great literature; they are required to inhabit, in sustained imaginative detail, the degradation and destruction of people who look like them; whose suffering is the inheritance they currently carry.  A queer teenager handed a reading list of coming-out trauma narratives is being asked to rehearse pain they may not yet have processed. This is traumatising. 

Trauma-informed research is clear that there is a meaningful difference between processing pain in a supported context and being repeatedly exposed to traumatic material with no therapeutic purpose. A mainstream reading list offers no psychological support; does not ask whether the reader is ready; ripping open wounds and describing this as diverse culture. That marginalised readers keep engaging with this literature says something about availability and resilience; says nothing about whether UK publishing is serving these communities well.

The detrimental effect on younger readers from marginalised communities cannot be overstated. A Black child handed a reading list consisting entirely of books about slavery, the civil rights movement, and racial trauma is informed that books about people who look like them are always about their suffering. Small wonder so many conclude that reading simply isn’t for them.

Writers Know This

Filtering our narratives does not start at the acquisition meeting. It starts inside the writer, years earlier. Black British authors, and writers from other marginalised communities, are not naive about what UK publishers want and reward. They attend the same writing workshops, read the same prize lists, study the same rights announcements, and field the same notes from agents about what is and isn’t commercially viable right now. The message is consistent enough that many internalise the mainstream brief before they’ve written a word: write about the wound; make it legible; give them suffering in a form they can shelve and celebrate. Some writers resist this instruction and pay the price of rejection. Others adapt and we’ll never know what important literature might have been written instead. This is how UK publishing currently operates.

What makes this restrictive structure hard to shift are the underlying economics. Trauma narratives from marginalised writers are more legible to the UK acquisitions culture; more legible means an easier argument to make to the sales team; easy argument means a larger advance and a bigger marketing budget. A larger advance and bigger budget feel, from the inside, like validation of the process. The literary prize confirms their choices. So, by the time the adapted book lands on the diversity table, everyone involved (agent, editor, publicist, critic) genuinely believes the choices made along the way were purely literary ones. This is the damning indictment; not bad faith, but a prejudiced structure so entrenched that good faith can operate freely within it.

Writers are not imagining the incentive to conform; the incentive to write for the mainstream is very real. The writer who follows the path to fortune and prizes is not a sellout – they correctly read the market. The same pattern holds across every marginalised community. LGBTQ+ literature celebrated in mainstream spaces is overwhelmingly coming-out narratives, or stories of violence and survival. Disabled writers who get published and promoted tend to be writing about disability as the defining subject. Indigenous authors are expected to write about colonisation. The instruction from publishing’s diversity agenda is clear and consistent: make your pain legible to people who haven’t experienced it. 

A Different Way

There is a cleaner solution than diversity quotas, reading lists, or award categories, though these are the strategies rolled out, again and again, with each new cycle of industry self-examination. Publish for the marginalised audience. Not about them, not in their name, not as an act of representation composed for someone else’s gaze, but as the intended reader. When that becomes the starting point, the diverse writer problem resolves itself. Writers from that community find their way to publishers whose audience is their audience. No lists are drawn up. No writer from outside that community is told they cannot contribute, only that the reader comes first.

The logic doesn’t stop with the writer. A publishing house genuinely built around a marginalised readership acquires differently, yes; but it is also staffed differently. Commissioning editors, creative editors, proofreaders, cover artists, designers, all need to come from those communities too, because cultural fluency matters, and your reader will notice every false note. This is not a quota by another name. It is a quality argument. You cannot serve a readership you do not understand.

The most important consequence is what this model does for younger readers. Children’s and YA literature built on this principle; written for young Black readers, young queer readers, young disabled readers, as whole human beings with appetites for adventure, mystery, humour, and worlds far beyond their own, produces something the current system has never managed: young readers who feel that reading belongs to them. That is not a small thing. It is the whole thing. Because it is only from this cohort, young people who grew up with books composed for them, that the next generation of writers, editors, artists, and publishers from marginalised communities will come. Every other diversity initiative in publishing works backwards, retrofitting inclusion onto a structure built for someone else. This approach seeds the ground. The current model produces award ceremonies. This strategy results in a new publishing culture.

What Next?

Start with your own shelves. If your books featuring Black characters, or LGBTQ+ characters, or disabled characters, are mostly about those characters navigating oppression, ask why. Not out of guilt. Out of curiosity.

Go looking. There is extraordinary writing by Black authors, queer authors, disabled authors, and neurodivergent authors that is not about trauma; that is about life. 

The diversity our bookshelves need is not more books explaining why marginalisation is bad. It is books that treat marginalised readers as readers with appetites, imagination, and an absolute right to stories written for them, not about them.

Such books are out there. More are being written, right now, by authors mainstream publishing has decided to ignore. The question is not whether these titles will eventually reach the diversity shelf. The question is whether the diversity shelf is where our stories belong.

Gareth James | Chief Reader | Margin to Margin Books

👨🏾‍💻 We rebuilt our website this week because there is a moment when you’re building anything, when the question changes. You stop asking whether it looks right and start asking whether it works. Ours was this: if Harriet Bush walked in, could she find her own story?

Harriet is the protagonist of Love and Happiness; a trans-racial adoptee in North West England in the 1970s and 80s. Her story is not a case study. It is hers. The test was whether a reader who already knows that life could find the book quickly; without being made to feel they were the subject of someone else’s education.

The same question applied to Masaka Madeda, whose poem is the spine of I Zig and I Zag. One sequence. 100 pages. Does the website give this epic the space it needs?

We are a small press. Based in Tre Taliesin, population a few hundred. We are not competing with Faber. What we are doing is publishing books FOR marginalised communities; not about them for a mainstream reading list. The website starts from that assumption. The reader it imagines is already inside the experience.

Print and ebook, direct from us: m2mbooks.com

The myriad steep cast-iron stairs of London Olympia would be a struggle for an old fella’ not used to the Welsh hills. They are everywhere. The London Book Fair occupies the whole building, level upon level; stands and banners, bright lights and the kind of ambient noise and hurlyburly that makes it difficult to detect where one conversation begins and another ends. I had my complimentary invitation somewhere near the bottom of my bag, my simple pitch in my head (books about Black people are not the same as books for Black people), and a vague knowledge of, I think, two people in the building. First day at primary school. In central London. In March.

The concept behind Margin to Margin Books had resulted in a shortlisting for the 2026 London Book Fair Trailblazers Award. On the 12th of March, 1:45pm on the main stage, alongside real proper book people, I collected a very fancy certificate. The ceremony lasted about twenty minutes. Quite exciting. The rest of the day was footwork; stand to stand, conversation to conversation, telling anyone who’d hold still for a moment what M2M Books is actually about; why I’m so committed to the project; what we publish; who we publish for; not a difficult concept to grasp. I spent all day this way – planting seeds. 

I got back home to Wales on the Friday. The same day the submission window for the Margin to Margin Anthology closed.

Writing rejection emails is an aspect of publishing that nothing can prepare you for. The writers on the receiving end of these negative notes trusted us with their work; no small matter. Some submissions needed more time and more work. Some weren’t the right fit for this anthology. I’m not going to give more explanation; editorial decisions require no public justification. What I’ll say is this: the writers we couldn’t include this time are not staring at a closed door. Hopefully, just a deferred conversation.

The writers we accepted have set the foundations of the anthology. Twenty-eight contributors. The beginning and the end are locked. The middle is still finding its order; there’s a moment in curating any collection when it stops being a list and starts being a sequence, when you can feel the shape of the book taking form beneath the individual pieces. We’re close to that moment. Not there yet. Close.

Forms. Each new publishing project triggers an avalanche of required paperwork. Contracts; grant applications; budget lines; schedules; ISBNs. Getting a book into the real world is less like releasing something and more like a detailed application for permission to exist. I say this without complaint (mostly). The infrastructure exists for good reason. But the pathway between a poem arriving in my inbox and that poem existing in a book a writer can hold in their hands, is longer and more administrative than most people would imagine. We’ve completed the forms. That bit’s done.

Last Saturday, I was back in Aberystwyth, planting seeds at the National Library of Wales, for a Black Literature Panel organised by Kumbu Kumbu. On the panel with me: Alex Wharton, Children’s Laureate Wales 2023–25; and Jade E. Bradford, a writer from Barry, whose work has been recognised by Literature Wales and the Black British Book Festival. Linking up with established Black writers is a special treat. I spend most of my time discussing the range of communities M2M publishes for. This event was all about mine. We spoke for ninety minutes about Black Welsh writing; about what it means to write for our community rather than for an imagined outside observer; about Welshness, language and belonging. These conversations continued long after the mics went off. Valuable exchanges, alone worth turning up for.

Easter this week. The pace shifts. But there are plenty of tasks still to finalise, two children’s books, a second anthology to produce, a novel set in south Wales in the pipeline. The work won’t stop. 

Whether the seeds I planted at Olympia and the National Library will take root, who knows. At home, the tomato and lettuce seeds are sprouting. Unfortunately, I’m yet to spot any shoots from the sweet peas. This is how it goes.

There’s an exciting submission sitting atop my submissions folder. Came in on Tuesday, little in terms of a covering note beyond the basics, three poems that assumed I was familiar with the experience they were describing. I did recognise the experience. And that’s the point. We’ve been open since January; we close Friday 13 March; and in this final week of submissions for our next multi-community anthology, I still get a buzz of excitement when this most assumed style of writing falls across my desk.

We’ve read bundles since January. Poetry, short fiction, creative nonfiction, plus some work that resists categorisation and is generally better for it. The breadth of writing we’ve consumed has been broader than Broadway; the quality, remarkably high. What separates the work that stops us in our tracks, from the work that doesn’t, isn’t craft, exactly (though craft matters). It’s the direction the writing faces.

The work we’ve turned down this round isn’t lacking. Much is careful, considered, well-intentioned, but then pauses to make sure an outsider is following, glances over its shoulder to check the reader is keeping up. That glance is a disqualifying tell; it means the writer has imagined a reader who needs the experience explained, and so has written towards them. We’re not that publisher. We’re the one that never offers that sort of direction.

We publish work that assumes its reader to be the insider. Poetry that doesn’t tone down or interpret its own language. Prose that doesn’t contextualise for the uninitiated. If that is the work you’ve been sitting on, please send it to us. Margin to Margin Books are a small press and we read everything.

The Anthology submission window closes Friday 13 March 2026.

📣 If you know a writer who should be submitting their creative writing to M2M Books, please point them in our direction. The poetry and prose we’re looking for doesn’t always find its way to us without a gentle nudge from someone who recognises it.

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.

Gareth James
M2M Books | Chief Reader

The submission window for our second anthology closes in two weeks. Friday 13th March. That’s it. If you’ve been sitting on a poem, a short story, or an essay — and wondering whether to send it to us — this is the moment to stop wondering.

Margin to Margin (working title) will be our second multi-community collection, following I Zig and I Zag, and will be published in late 2026. We’re looking for poetry, narrative fiction, and personal essays from writers whose communities sit at the edges of what English-language literature usually notices. Not work about that experience, written for a mainstream audience. Work from inside, written for the people who live there.

We launched M2M Books in 2024 with a clear conviction: that marginalised communities deserve their own internal libraries — literature that offers solace, resilience, and intellectual armour, neither explanation nor apology. That conviction has not changed. The importance of our mission has been recognised this month in our shortlisting for the 2026 London Book Fair Trailblazer Awards. But nominations do not build libraries. Writers do.

If your work is ready; edited, redrafted, as good as you can make it; we want to read it.

Read M2M Books submission guidelines and FAQs, then send your manuscript to info@m2mbooks.com
Deadline: Friday 13th March 2026.

We’re waiting.

Gareth James | Chief Reader

📣 We have some rather significant news to share. Our founder and Chief Reader, Gareth James, has officially been shortlisted for the 2026 London Book Fair Trailblazer Awards. For those outside the publishing industry bubble, the London Book Fair is the UK’s biggest literary event, and the Trailblazer Awards are designed to recognise “rising stars” who are effectively rewriting the rulebook of publishing. But here is the kicker: Gareth has just made history as the oldest-ever nominee for this award.

Breaking Records (and Stereotypes)

Usually, “trailblazer” is a term the industry reserves for the twenty-somethings. But at Margin to Margin Books, we’ve always been a bit rebellious. We know that innovation isn’t a byproduct of youth; it’s a byproduct of having a vision that the rest of the world hasn’t caught up with yet. Being an independent press in the current climate requires more than just a love for books—it requires a radical rethink of who those books are actually for.

The “For, Not About” Philosophy

When Gareth founded M2M Books, he did so with a specific, stubborn goal: to stop publishing books about marginalised communities for a mainstream audience, and start publishing high-quality literature for those communities. It sounds simple, but in the world of UK publishing, it is a total shift in the power dynamic.

“I am thrilled and excited to be shortlisted for this award, especially at the UK’s biggest literary event,” says Gareth. “The nomination so early in our publishing journey is a meaningful acknowledgement of our game-changing philosophy. We publish for the people in the margins, ensuring they are the primary audience for their own stories. To be recognised as a trailblazer at my age simply proves the importance of our message and that you’re never too old to set the industry on fire.”

What’s Next?

The final winners will be announced at Olympia London during the fair (10-12 March). Whether we take home the glass trophy or not, being shortlisted is a massive win for independent press culture and for Welsh publishing as a whole.

We want to say a huge thank you to our readers and authors. You are the reason we do this. Congratulations to all the other nominees, and thanks to LBF for broadening nominations to include us over-thirties.
See you next week in London!

Here we go again. The internet ablaze with performative fury. The source of this latest fuss? The suggestion that Lupita Nyong’o has been cast as Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan’s upcoming adaptation of The Odyssey. Predictably, press and social media platforms are awash with the rantings of fragile white people.

We have been here before – many times: when the BBC cast David Gyasi as Achilles in Troy: Fall of a City; when Halle Bailey was cast as Ariel; when Bridgerton reimagined the Regency; Doctor Who, of course; the perennial speculation about an incoming Black James Bond. The noise is always the same; tired and predictable arguments recycled by the usual suspects; levels of vitriol that are overt, hurtful, and increasingly extreme.

I want to propose a radical shift in how to engage with this divisive discourse. The debate about the skin colour of Helen of Troy (the Western canon’s ultimate signifier of beauty) is not a debate for Black and brown people. It is the ideal example of a conversation that whiteness needs to have with itself. For People of Colour, engaging in this exhausting, pointless nonsense is nothing but a distraction; a distraction that validates a premise that should be dismissed before wasting a single breath.

The Myth of Accuracy in a World of Monsters

Let me briefly address the surface-level argument, if only to dismantle it so we can move on to the more important message:

Detractors crying foul over a Black Helen often cloak their racism in the guise of intellectual rigour. They demand historical fidelity for a story involving a woman hatched from an egg by a swan-god, a ten-year siege interrupted by divine intervention, and a hero who battles a cyclops and navigates between six-headed monsters and gigantic whirlpools. Sensible people have long highlighted the absurdity of demanding rigid racial realism in mythology while at the same time suspending disbelief for magic, monsters, and divine intervention.

However, to point this out, or that Ancient Greek concepts of race do not map onto modern whiteness, is to lose the game before we have started. By responding with facts, we implicitly acknowledge that their objections are somehow rooted in logic. We kid ourselves that we may change minds if we just provide enough footnotes.

Minds won’t change. Because this ridiculous debate is not about accuracy nor history.

Helen and the Monopoly on Beauty

So, why is Helen of Troy such a flashpoint? Why does she provoke a fiercer reaction than a Black Zeus or a Black Achilles might? Because Helen is not just a character; she is a symbol. She is “the face that launched a thousand ships”. Helen of Troy represents the zenith of desirability, a woman worth the burning down of a whole world.

For centuries, Western culture has conflated ‘classical’ with ‘white’ and ‘beauty’ with ‘whiteness’. This Eurocentric standard of beauty relies on the assumption that the apex of human aesthetic value must look a certain way. To cast a Black woman as Helen is to disrupt the visual language of white supremacy at a most primal level. A casting that suggests beauty worth destroying civilisations for, could be a face that looks like Lupita Nyong’o.

Such a notion obviously sends a tremor through the foundations of whiteness. It triggers a deep-seated anxiety that their monopoly on beauty is being challenged. The outrage is nothing to do with preserving the integrity of Homer; it is about preserving the hierarchy of desire. If Helen can be Black, then whiteness is no longer the default setting for beauty.

This is why the debate is so visceral. We are witnessing an internal crisis of confidence within whiteness itself. What we hear is the sound of a cultural hegemon realising it can no longer exclusively cast itself as the protagonist, the hero, and the prize.

The Exhaustion of Engagement

For People of Colour, particularly women, stepping into this arena is an act of emotional self-harm. To debate your right to be seen as beautiful, or even to simply exist in the realm of fantasy and myth, is a degrading and pointless exercise.

When we engage with these bad-faith actors, we are essentially pleading a case to a jury that has already decided we are guilty of intrusion. We are forced to perform our humanity, to cite historical precedents, to explain that People of Colour are both architects of, and players within, the human story. And for what? To be met with gaslighting and racial abuse?

The process is exhausting. It drains the spirit. It saps energy that could be used for creation, for joy, for community, and pours it into a bottomless pit of internet futility. Every time a Person of Colour explains why representation matters, or why Greek antiquity was not a monolith of white skin, we are doing unpaid labour for a demographic that refuses to learn. But more than that, we are granting the detractors power. We are treating their playground tantrums as legitimate discourse.

A Conversation Whiteness Must Have with Itself

This is why I argue that we should step back. Racism is not our mess to clean up. The anxiety that white audiences feel when they see a Black Helen is their problem to solve. It is a symptom of their own limited imagination and insecurities.

Whiteness needs to ask itself: Why does this bother me? Why do I feel erased by the presence of others? Why is my enjoyment of a story contingent on the exclusion of Black people? These are uncomfortable questions that require introspection. They require white people to confront the way they have been conditioned to see themselves as the default. When we intervene, when we try to hold their hands through this process or shout them down with logic, we interrupt the necessary work they need to do on their own.

Let white allies in the independent press compose the opinion pieces dismantling their community’s racism. Let white historians correct the record on Bronze Age demographics. Let white parents explain to their children why people are angry about a movie casting. It is for whiteness to police its own boundaries and confront its own demons.

The Power of Opting Out

So, what should People of Colour do instead? We should opt out.

Opting out does not mean silence; it means refusing to play by their rules. It means refusing to center our reaction on their outrage. Instead of defending Lupita Nyong’o’s right to play Helen, we should simply celebrate a casting that we can recognise is meaningful.

We should be wholly focussed on: Is the script good? Is the cinematography compelling? Does the performance move us? We should treat the casting of a Black woman as an entirely positive occurrence, because to us, it is. We know we exist. We know we are beautiful. We know we belong in every story.

By refusing to engage with the controversy, we deny them oxygen. We delegitimise the debate by treating it as unworthy of our attention – with a collective shrug of the shoulders. Imagine if we simply bought our tickets, enjoyed the film, and let the detractors scream into the void. There is a profound power in indifference. It signals that our validity is not up for negotiation. It signals that we are done with pleading for permission to be seen.

Let them have their own debate. Let them write their bilious posts and boycott the art. Let them mourn the loss of a world where they were the only ones who mattered. It is a painful process for them, evidently. But it is not our burden to bear.

Our job is to preserve our peace, to nurture our own creativity, and to support art that reflects the world as we know it to be: vast, diverse, and full of colour. The next time you see the timeline filling up with rage about the skin colour of a mythological queen, keep scrolling. Go outside. Read a book. Create something.

Let whiteness talk to itself. We have better things to do.

I am curious to hear your reflections on this suggested shift in perspective. Have you already found power in the collective shrug, or do you feel we have a duty to tackle these controversies differently? If you are a Person of Colour, how are you choosing to protect your wellbeing during these predictable cycles of digital noise? Share your thoughts below.

Gareth James | Chief Reader | M2M Books

At Margin to Margin Books, we’ve always believed that the most compelling stories are not found in the well-trodden centre, but at the edges; in the margins where identity, culture, and creativity collide. As a newly established independent press based in the heart of Mid Wales, our mission is to provide a permanent home for these voices, ensuring they are heard on their own terms.

M2M Books do not believe in tokenistic diversity calendars or trauma-mining narratives. We believe in excellent literature. Today, we are looking for partners in the literary community to help us share that vision.

To celebrate our inaugural titles, we are opening up a number of review slots for reviewers, bloggers, Bookstagrammers, and BookTokers who share our passion for diverse voices and literary excellence.

Debut Titles

We are seeking reviews for:

• Love and Happiness by G.I. James: A punchy, sophisticated work of literary fiction. It deconstructs the complexities of the adoption experience and the lifelong quest for a sense of belonging. It is a debut that refuses to pull its punches.
• I Zig and I Zag: A vibrant poetry anthology that brings together a chorus of multi-community voices. A collection that is a testament to the zigzag nature of life on the margins—resilient, unpredictable, and beautiful.

Join Us

If you have an established platform and a dedicated following of readers who crave stories that move beyond the mainstream, we would love to collaborate with you.

We are offering a limited number of physical review copies for those who appreciate the aesthetic, as well as digital ARCs for our international friends or those who prefer to read on the go.

How to Request a Copy:

Please send an email to info@m2mbooks.com with the subject line “Review Request.” Please tell us:

• Which title(s) you are interested in.
• A link to your blog or social media platform.
• Your preferred format (Physical or Digital).

As an independent press, we rely on the passion of the literary community to help these stories travel. We can hardly wait to hear what you think of the work.

Let’s move the margins, together 🤝