Opinion - Publishing Monday, 23 April 2018

I love publishing because it doesn't play to formulae, and something always happens that no-one could predict. It keeps us all on our toes. I can't think of a time when there haven't been challenges in publishing or when the industry hasn't adapted to meet them, but at this moment my particular worry is that the market is being led by the success of a smaller number of titles, and that we are looking at a polarised publishing climate that makes risk-taking more difficult than it should be, particularly for literary fiction. There is a feeling of feast or famine, both on submission and publication, but is this a problem?