I read all submissions; every single one.
What is noticeable, when going through these manuscripts, is that a substantial number are (for our appetite) addressed to the wrong reader. The author has written about their community, carefully, lovingly, with evident knowledge; then aimed the text squarely at someone who has never lived inside that community. A tourist trip. The community in question would find the work, at best, a little patronising, at worst, irrelevant.
This is a critical obstacle; an immediate rejection from M2M Books. And the shame is that I often feel this author from an underrepresented community is so completely conditioned to write for the mainstream that they are oblivious to doing it.
This is why I say these words again and again to every writer I meet:
Before writing a word, think long and hard about who the imagined reader is.
When we put our poetry anthology, I Zig and I Zag, together, we did not think about the reader who would need a map. Masaka Madeda’s poem does not offer guidance; a hundred pages of a Kenyan man walking the Malindi coast, observing, remembering, entirely at home in his own reference points. Love and Happiness was written the same way; Harriet Bush’s story is told without the explanatory scaffolding mainstream publishing tends to require before it will touch a subject like trans-racial adoption.
There is a version of both these books that does not exist. The version where Masaka Madeda pauses every few pages to explain what the Taita Hills are and why they matter; where Harriet Bush’s experience of being Black and adopted in white Cheshire is held up to the light for a reader who has never been near the adoption experience. Those versions would have been perfectly publishable. They would also have been, for the reader inside either experience, like embarking on a guided tour of their own front room.
I Zig and I Zag and Love and Happiness are the versions that think only about the reader who knows; the adoptee who encounters Harriet Bush and finds, possibly for the first time, that this novel is not explaining the adoption experience, sanitised and fantasied, for someone else’s comfort.
What we hoped for, and what has resulted, is that most readers who come to these books from outside these experiences do not report getting something lesser from the books. They overwhelmingly describe a more emotional and memorable experience, more akin to going on holiday and staying with a local family rather than confined within the perfectly painted walls of an all-inclusive hotel; the friction, the specificity, the slight vertigo of being somewhere that was not arranged for the outsider’s comfort and convenience. They felt like they had shared something unmediated, authentic, more intimate, and more powerful. The all-inclusive resort, it turns out, is not the real deal.
The mainstream UK publishing industry knows precisely who they publish for. The reader they have in mind is not from where you’re from. The question is whether they comprehend what they’re missing when so focused on a single audience.
If your manuscript addresses a reader from a community marginalised in UK publishing, then we are eager to read your work. We seek literary fiction, nonfiction, children’s books, and poetry collections. We read everything submitted, without exception, without a closing date, without a stack abandoned when the submission window shuts.
Further information here.