A Little Bit of Cross Pollination...

There are so many brilliant people writing on Substack with such varied specialist topics, if you scroll down on my homepage you will find the publications that I am recommending and one of them is The Book Forge by Milli Hill.

Milli is a journalist and author of three bestselling books: The Positive Birth Book, Give Birth Like A Feminist, and (for preteens), My Period, and she is charting the journey of her fourth book on her own substack.

On Friday, she published a newsletter entitled Is There Any Money in Books? and I was halfway through reading the copy that landed in my own inbox when Milli messaged me to say that she’d given The Book Room a mention – hurrah! A post of mine from last week about the realities of making a living as a bookseller had coincided with an Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) report which revealed that the average wage for writers has plummeted to £7,000 a year, with black and brown writers earn on average 51 per cent less than their white colleagues.

Milli and I had plenty of thoughts on this topic and so we met to record a podcast together and talk about the realities of making a living, not only as a writer, but with my new experience as a bookseller.

You can find Milli’s post here, and listen to the podcast either in the post itself, or listen here on Apple Podcasts. I think those of you interested in books, either in the writing, publishing, selling or indeed buying of them, might find it interesting because we also talk about what each individual consumer can do to help.

And you can always subscribe to Milli’s substack too!

Let me know what you think in the comments.

Anna

• Don’t forget you can find me popping up inside The Bloom Foundry, 55 St John’s Road, Tunbridge Wells, TN4 9QG until Christmas Eve. I am there Tuesday to Saturday 10-5, and Sunday 11-3.