Transcript
Speaker: To listen without ads, head over to patreon.com slash rightandwrong.
Speaker: Ooh, a spicy question.
Speaker: I love it.
Speaker: Because the writing is sort of everything, right?
Speaker: Like you can fix plot holes, but if the writer... So some readers love that and some readers are like, but I wanted more of this.
Speaker: So it's kind of, it's kind of a gamble.
Speaker: Hello and welcome back to the Right and Wrong podcast.
Speaker: On today's episode, I'm joined by journalist turned New York Times bestselling author, Sandy Jones.
Speaker: Hello.
Speaker: Welcome.
Speaker: Hello.
Speaker: Hello.
Speaker: How are you?
Speaker: I'm very well, thanks.
Speaker: How are you?
Speaker: I'm very, very good.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: So good to have you on.
Speaker: Let's get straight into it, starting with the upcoming novel, which will be out by the time this airs, your sixth published book, The Trade-Off.
Speaker: Tell us a little bit about it.
Speaker: OK, so, yes, this is this is actually probably my favourite book so far.
Speaker: Not just to write, but also, as you mentioned, because it's a deep dive into the world of being a journalist, which my sins I used to be.
Speaker: And specifically the links that a tabloid newspaper will go to get a story.
Speaker: At the heart of the book are two very strong-willed women.
Speaker: We have Stella, who is the deputy editor of The Globe, and she will stop at nothing for a headline, whilst Jess is the rookie reporter and is led very much by her moral compass and only wants to report the truth.
Speaker: So she's appalled by the underhand tactics that are employed by the tabloid.
Speaker: And when a celebrity she's chasing takes her own life because she can see no way out from the pressure that the media is forcing upon her, Jess is then determined to hold the newspaper accountable.
Speaker: You know, she wants to right the wrongs and change the narrative.
Speaker: But Stella won't go down with a fight.
Speaker: And Jess, I guess, has to decide whether the truth is worth dying for.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: You know what?
Speaker: It's so kind of real.
Speaker: This is fiction, of course, but psychological thriller as a genre, what makes it so compelling is when it's so close to the truth.
Speaker: And this is like real things that really happen.
Speaker: You're always hearing about the kind of most recent kind of terrible thing that a certain journalist has done to get a crazy story and stuff like that.
Speaker: So yeah.
Speaker: And then it, to be honest, Jamie, it wasn't actually supposed to be, I wasn't hope, I was hoping rather that it wasn't going to be as relevant now as, as when I started writing it a year or so ago.
Speaker: It was inspired by events a few years ago when, you know, a TV personality found that they couldn't carry on under the pressure and the scrutiny of the media.
Speaker: And I honestly genuinely thought that by the time,
Speaker: I'd written this and it was being published, I thought that that would be, you know, something of the past and it, and the book actually wouldn't be as relevant and as apt as it was once was.
Speaker: But unfortunately, even, you know, the events of just last week alone, you know, I just, it's, yeah, I don't know what the answer is, but it is not, it's not getting any better and it's not going away, unfortunately.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yes, you're referring to the royal family stuff that happened a couple of weeks ago.
Speaker: Just wild, insane things that were happening there.
Speaker: Just crazy.
Speaker: But you also mentioned you spent many years as a journalist.
Speaker: Was a lot of the kind of setting and placement of this, was that drawn directly from your experience in that?
Speaker: Not directly.
Speaker: I was always freelance.
Speaker: I was never staff.
Speaker: You know, I spent time on a newspaper and on magazines and things like that.
Speaker: But I never, I was always, you know, whatever I wrote was verbatim.
Speaker: So as in, you know, I would have, I would line up celebrity interviews and, you
Speaker: I'd go there with every word that they said would be printed or certainly be, hold on, let me take that back, would be in my copy.
Speaker: Okay, rephrase.
Speaker: It would be in my copy.
Speaker: It would be sent off to said editors of certain establishments.
Speaker: And, you know, when I first started writing, it was for what I would call like the friendly magazines, you know, the woman's weeklies and that kind of thing.
Speaker: And it was all good.
Speaker: But as time went on,
Speaker: my words or, you know, the celebrity words were taken out of context or they would be
Speaker: created in such a way to to for an inflammatory headline um and it you know and it really changed the way I felt about it and I think that's well I'm pretty sure that that is a very very big part of of why I've you know ditched it and I'm now doing something completely different because it just wasn't um it just wasn't how I like to work you know I don't I don't want to go sort of
Speaker: looking through people's dustbins to try and find secrets.
Speaker: And, you know, and that's kind of where, where it's getting to now.
Speaker: And I just don't want to be a part of that world anymore.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: It's the kind of clickbait era of journalism.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: But interesting to know that you were, you know, the thing, your kind of focus was largely on celebrities and sort of interviews and talking to them.
Speaker: So you are kind of related to the aspect of the book, which is a focus on sort of the hyper fixation the media has on some celebrities.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And as I say, even more so now, I think social media, although it came to us for all good reasons, I'm sure I just don't understand where the road it's taken us down now.
Speaker: Certainly, as far as the media are concerned, they are purely...
Speaker: reliant on celebrities' social media now.
Speaker: And I think, you know, that's the only way they're getting their stories.
Speaker: And again, they're still twisting.
Speaker: You know, you could see a post on Instagram or Twitter and read it for exactly as it is, how the celebrity wants it to be framed.
Speaker: And then, you know, the next day's paper, you see exactly the same story and the same post, but completely twisted around to create, you know, an entirely different story.
Speaker: And it's just...
Speaker: Yeah, nothing is, I'm not quite sure, as I say, I'm not quite sure what is going to change things, but it still feels at the moment we're going down the wrong road.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: It's almost, it's information overload, right?
Speaker: It's too much.
Speaker: Everyone has an opinion and they're not necessarily being fact-checked or anything like that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: No, of course you can say, yeah, you can say whatever you want, can't you online?
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: And also I think, you know, from somebody that's in the public eye, it's like all of us, you know, you get a thousand positive comments and one not so.
Speaker: And it's the one that you kind of, you know, the one that
Speaker: troubles you and it's the one that you think about it's um and i think that's just human nature unfortunately but there's just there's just no getting away from it from for those people you know it's it's it is in our homes it is our bedrooms it's you know it's there's no you can't escape it anymore no you can't we're all plugged in um
Speaker: Welcome to you.
Speaker: Spending a lot of time doing those kinds of things, doing those kinds of interviews, you must have really honed that craft.
Speaker: I'm wondering if those sort of lines of questioning, do you implement that in your writing process when you're designing your characters?
Speaker: Ooh.
Speaker: Possibly, yes.
Speaker: Possibly.
Speaker: I haven't actually ever thought of it in that way.
Speaker: No, you could be onto something there, Jamie, actually.
Speaker: Yeah, because it is like you when you're preparing for an interview.
Speaker: It's a very, very different discipline, isn't it?
Speaker: It's very.
Speaker: And I guess also from certainly from my personal perspective.
Speaker: um experience i love for me the almost the best part of an interview would be the research i would love going off and doing all the research and you know getting under the skin of the person i'm about to kind of meet just so not necessarily that i'm then going to ask them about it but just so i can go in you know i used to have nightmares about going to interviews where i wasn't prepared you know that would be my worst oh that would be i couldn't imagine anything worse
Speaker: So, yeah, I think that from the research point of view, that has definitely shaped what I used to do and kind of, yeah, I've definitely brought that into what I do now, actually.
Speaker: But I hadn't put the two and two together until you mentioned it.
Speaker: Well, glad I could enlighten you on that part of your process.
Speaker: And on from that then, and this is something that's always interesting to me when you, you know, you're writing psychological thrillers, which it's par for the course that you'll have twists and turns along the way, sometimes very dramatic.
Speaker: How much do you plan ahead for your stories versus just kind of have an idea and run with it?
Speaker: Oh, I don't plan at all.
Speaker: I really, I really want to plan.
Speaker: I really wish I could plan.
Speaker: And it drives my publishers absolutely crazy.
Speaker: But I, I, I don't, I have a, I will have a beginning.
Speaker: I will have a very, very vague middle.
Speaker: And I have absolutely no idea what the end is going to be.
Speaker: Really?
Speaker: So, yeah, I and I just and I have tried to to work differently because I do see huge advantages of knowing what your end is.
Speaker: I think that puts you in great stead.
Speaker: But it just doesn't happen, Jamie.
Speaker: I just can't.
Speaker: It's just not the way my brain works.
Speaker: You know, I have to start at the beginning.
Speaker: I write chronologically.
Speaker: you know, every character.
Speaker: And even if I'm kind of chopping between timelines, I still write chapter by chapter.
Speaker: You know, somebody said to me the other day that they kind of slot the past chapters in, you know, they do one set of chapters first, as in present day, and then they do the past.
Speaker: And I just, I have to do it literally as I go along.
Speaker: Otherwise, yeah, I don't know.
Speaker: I don't know how other people do it, but I really want to be them.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, lots of people have said similar things.
Speaker: But at the same time, I think there's people who don't plan and you've tried and it hasn't worked for you.
Speaker: There's a level of authenticity that comes with that in terms of the decisions that the characters make and things like that.
Speaker: Do you ever get sort of surprised when you're writing a book and you reach a point and you think, oh, wow, I didn't realize this was going to happen, but this is where we're going?
Speaker: Every day.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Every single day.
Speaker: And that's what I love about this is that, you know, you could wake up in the morning, have no idea where you're going.
Speaker: And by the evening, your story has completely turned on its axis and you had no idea it was coming.
Speaker: And I love that part of it.
Speaker: And I suppose, going back to whether I'm a planner or a pantser, I suppose for me, that's
Speaker: If I was a planner, that actually wouldn't, you know, it wouldn't kind of get me excited because I'd know exactly where I'm going.
Speaker: But with this, I do genuinely, I love the turns.
Speaker: And it sounds really kind of, you know, but I do love the turns that my characters take that I don't, I genuinely don't feel in control of.
Speaker: They do, they just, they just run, run amok.
Speaker: And I just kind of sort of let them go and see, see where we end up.
Speaker: I love it.
Speaker: It's great.
Speaker: Do you always know kind of what the twist is or at least sort of which character is like the one that did it kind of thing?
Speaker: Or is that?
Speaker: No, this isn't going very well.
Speaker: I'm not coming across very professional at all.
Speaker: No, this is great.
Speaker: No, I haven't got a clue and I will change.
Speaker: I mean, certainly with The Other Woman, my debut, the ending was wholly different to where it ended up, completely different.
Speaker: And even with the trade-off, the...
Speaker: baddie, as it were, was somebody completely different.
Speaker: And yeah, and that kind of, in my first draft, I deliver a first draft and I genuinely think that that's ready for the shops now.
Speaker: That's going straight in.
Speaker: I won't need to touch that.
Speaker: Obviously, I'm completely delusional because it comes back about four or five times.
Speaker: And, you know, from the structural ed, it's a huge.
Speaker: And it's at that point that I invariably change things around quite radically.
Speaker: And my goodie becomes my villain and vice versa.
Speaker: That happens all the time.
Speaker: That's, you know what, you're not actually the first author I've spoken to who writes in and around this genre of thrillers who doesn't know who it is and is kind of shocked by the time they find out who, you know, who done it.
Speaker: And I think there's a, there's a certain sort of, I think there's, it's positive in many ways, because if you, the author while writing it, don't even know who did it,
Speaker: you would hope then that also the reader wouldn't like, how would the reader know if you don't even know?
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: That's why I do.
Speaker: I knew there was a reason.
Speaker: That's why I do.
Speaker: Just trying to keep the reader on their toes.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: And you know, it's, if it's shocking to you, it has to be shocking to the reader.
Speaker: And a lot of, a lot of the kind of joy of these things is to have that moment where you go, Oh goodness, it was that person all along.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And I think also, you know, you are you are slightly on a disadvantage when you're writing psychological thrillers, because I think, you know, the reader is waiting and looking for those twists.
Speaker: And it's it's you're under a lot of pressure, you know, to deliver and to satisfy.
Speaker: And I think that's sometimes when you say if the writer doesn't know what's coming, then hopefully that will kind of satisfy the reader a little bit more when it when they do eventually happen.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: It's like, it's like if you see an M. Night Shyamalan movie, and it's like, well, we've all seen The Sixth Sense.
Speaker: We've all seen a couple of other movies.
Speaker: We know there's going to be a massive twist.
Speaker: And I'm looking at every detail.
Speaker: I'm trying really hard to see where this twist is.
Speaker: And are you disappointed when you do actually find it?
Speaker: Or do you beat them to it?
Speaker: You know what?
Speaker: The twists that if I'm watching a lot of time, a movie or a TV show or something, you can predict the arc of the thing.
Speaker: I'm pretty good at not guessing.
Speaker: I guess I'm bad then at guessing the twists in sort of psychological thrillers and stuff.
Speaker: I think I feel like I'm always, I'm always just like, wow, I never saw that coming, which is great.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: That's exactly what I want from that genre.
Speaker: So yeah.
Speaker: Yes, absolutely.
Speaker: I'm happy to not be good at guessing the twist.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: So you mentioned that you don't plan these out in such thorough ways.
Speaker: As far as I know, publishers love when you can present them with a pitch, which will be kind of the outline of the story.
Speaker: Do you do that with the publisher?
Speaker: Is it always based on a pitch?
Speaker: It is, which is why I don't think I'm their favourite author.
Speaker: And I also think the difference between writing my first book was an absolute piece of cake because I didn't have to do that and I wasn't having to fulfil a brief.
Speaker: I was just literally writing for myself and just seeing where it took me.
Speaker: But obviously, as soon as you become a published author and then hopefully get another contract, they do
Speaker: understandably, want to know what they're getting.
Speaker: And I really would much prefer to write a 100,000 word novel than a three-page synopsis because, as I've said, I have no idea
Speaker: what I'm going to write until it's written.
Speaker: So, you know, I kind of, you know, I faff about an awful lot on my synopsis and I'm really, really vague.
Speaker: And it's all for me.
Speaker: It's I'm just forcing it all the time, which is not a good place to be.
Speaker: So I think now we're kind of six books in and I think my editors know that about me.
Speaker: And they kind of, they do get kind of a very airy fairy sort of sketchy idea.
Speaker: But I really try to hone, but I think we all know, although we don't say it, that it's actually going to bear very little relevance to the final result.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But it's really hard.
Speaker: I think writing a synopsis for something you've not written is really hard.
Speaker: Yeah, it's a sentiment I've heard from lots of authors.
Speaker: It's the, a lot of people say that they find writing the kind of, once they've been published, then writing the follow-up, the second novel can be a real challenge because of, because it's totally different.
Speaker: The context, like you said, the context with which you're writing it is you don't have that freedom.
Speaker: You don't have all that time.
Speaker: You don't have room to kind of do whatever you want and then cut it back and then do whatever you want.
Speaker: You're on a time schedule.
Speaker: You're writing to a brief, you know, there's a lot more pressure in some ways.
Speaker: And obviously it also is the notorious second book, isn't it, that you do have to hopefully live up to the success of your first.
Speaker: And so you've got that kind of piling on as well.
Speaker: So yeah, that's a little bit of a tricky moment, but it's a good one to have.
Speaker: It's a good problem to have.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: I mean, and especially I would say in your case, your first novel, The Other Woman, published in 2018, New York Times bestseller, translated into 14 languages, Reese Witherspoon's book club pick of the month.
Speaker: That must have been both amazing, a bit surreal.
Speaker: And then, like you said, coming into a second book, following up the success of that one must have been a little bit terrifying.
Speaker: Completely.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely terrifying.
Speaker: But actually it's,
Speaker: when I think back to that time now, I know you say it was so surreal, um, what happened with the other woman that it didn't actually feel like it was happening to me.
Speaker: Um, and I really do mean that.
Speaker: And it still doesn't actually, I mean, it's just ridiculous.
Speaker: It's,
Speaker: you know, to nobody was supposed to read my book, you know, not my husband, my mother.
Speaker: And then all of a sudden we've got Reese Witherspoon reading it on the other side.
Speaker: I mean, it was just, yeah, it's totally crazy.
Speaker: So, yeah, I think the only pressure I felt the second book was purely, I think, probably the pressure I put myself under because it really didn't feel like,
Speaker: all the events surrounding the other woman had happened to me and you know therein lies the kind of whole imposter syndrome um problem that I always seem to struggle with that doesn't seem to be getting any easier to deal with um and I'm not quite sure how how you overcome that but um
Speaker: It just doesn't feel real, Jamie, to be honest.
Speaker: This was a really flighty idea that I had.
Speaker: I'm finding myself here talking to you and having written six books.
Speaker: I still can't get my head around it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So even after six books, you're still sort of not entirely sure that this isn't just a dream.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: I'm still waiting to be found out.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Well, I think you're in good company there because I've spoken to many authors in the same time.
Speaker: I spoke to Katie Ford, who's been writing romance for forever, I think, and is a total legend in that genre.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: and she she said exactly the same thing and she said yeah it's every every time every time you know she's on like 20 plus books at this point and it's like every time i write a new book i have the doubts and i have and i think they're going to find out you know the gig's going to be up why do we do it to ourselves i don't know it doesn't make any sense either because it's like you're proven already even if you wrote a dud at this point it wouldn't change anything i'd get away with it i don't know i mean
Speaker: People would just be like, ah, you know, she just, she didn't land it with this one, but the others were all great.
Speaker: You know, they're not all, they can't all be bangers.
Speaker: But am I right in thinking, getting back to the book at hand, the current, the trade-off, am I right in thinking you narrated the audio book for this one?
Speaker: I had a little go.
Speaker: I just read the prologue.
Speaker: But no, then it was taken over by an expert and professional because as much as I enjoyed being in the studio, I mean, that's a really hard job.
Speaker: That is a really, really tough thing to pull off.
Speaker: And I was useless at it, even though I knew every single word that was coming next.
Speaker: You know, my mouth dried up.
Speaker: I kind of got all blurry eyes.
Speaker: I didn't have, you know...
Speaker: The speech wasn't right and the expression wasn't right.
Speaker: And I kept getting kind of, no, stop that.
Speaker: Start that.
Speaker: Start again.
Speaker: No, stop that.
Speaker: And it was, I was literally just doing the prologue.
Speaker: So hats off to, you know, those narrators because they are absolutely brilliant.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it's hard work and it's very long.
Speaker: I actually had a narrator on the podcast a few months ago and it's very long hours.
Speaker: You know, they're in the booth for basically all day reading these lines and working to get the best take to do it all with as few cuts as possible.
Speaker: It is very taxing and I'm always impressed by
Speaker: When you listen to all your book and it's just a really great narrator and you think, wow, this probably took a lot of time, many takes, and they've just done such a good job with it.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And then, then you do get in the studio and you see actually that the, you know, the, the really good ones, they don't, they just don't miss a beat.
Speaker: They just kind of just, you know, they go and switch in and out of all the accents between male, female.
Speaker: They just, it just, it just flows.
Speaker: They could just do chapters and chapters at a time without being pulled up.
Speaker: I just think, I think it's really incredible.
Speaker: It's incredible to watch actually.
Speaker: And that, well, if you ever look at the,
Speaker: The limited experience I've had sort of speaking with people like in the, in this area is you look at their, they'll have their own kind of version of the document and stuff, and it will just be covered in notes and notations.
Speaker: And you can see the amount of work that's gone into this before they've even got into the studio.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Yes, that's what I found so fascinating the first time was all the kind of the color coding and, you know, so that they knew before they started a sentence where the intonation was and how they needed to finish that sentence.
Speaker: And I, yeah, I just thought that was, as you say, it was a lot of what you forget how many hours they're in the studio for.
Speaker: It's days worth of prepping for something like that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it's, you know, they've read the book multiple times and then done all the notes and then reread it with the notes and this, that, the other.
Speaker: And it's like, it's like musical notation at a certain point.
Speaker: They're literally like annotating the whole thing with a series of coded symbols that you're not entirely sure what they mean.
Speaker: It is.
Speaker: It's brilliant.
Speaker: It's absolutely brilliant.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Oh, it's really cool that you read the prologue though.
Speaker: That's a nice touch.
Speaker: And I kind of connect you with the audience when they come to listen to it.
Speaker: Yes, hopefully.
Speaker: Yes, I did enjoy it.
Speaker: But that page and a half was about my limit.
Speaker: Amazing.
Speaker: Before we get to the Desert Island question, there's a fun little question I'd like to ask, especially when I have an author on who has been doing this for a while, has many books out.
Speaker: And that is, you have written primarily psychological thrillers.
Speaker: Are there any other genres or maybe even age groups that you've thought, maybe I'd like to try writing that someday?
Speaker: I really would love to write children's books at some point.
Speaker: I know it's complete departure.
Speaker: But yeah, I'm very involved in a children's book charity and where we kind of give pre-loved books to children that wouldn't otherwise be able to own a book.
Speaker: And certainly in London and that kind of thing.
Speaker: So I would love to write.
Speaker: I've no idea what it would be about or what the message would be.
Speaker: But I would love to try that at some point and get a really cool illustrator on board and do a collaborative project.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: So, Illustrator, I'm guessing you're thinking like younger, like picture book?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I was going to say, Thriller's very big in YA right now.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: It stays kind of in your lane, but also moving a bit.
Speaker: Is it really?
Speaker: Is it a big deal in YA at the moment?
Speaker: Oh, huge, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Is it?
Speaker: Cynthia Murphy and people, yeah, lots of stuff happening with sort of teenagers murdering each other in sort of borderline supernatural circumstances.
Speaker: Right, okay.
Speaker: Yeah, see, I don't think I could go there.
Speaker: I don't think I could do supernatural.
Speaker: I'd like to think I could, but I don't think I've got that kind of imagination.
Speaker: I guess it doesn't have to be supernatural.
Speaker: A lot of them are dark academia.
Speaker: So like boarding schools where people are getting murdered and it's kind of whodunit, but it's very dark.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Well, how cool that young adults are still reading.
Speaker: That's great at that kind of level.
Speaker: If there's still a demand for it, that is really good news.
Speaker: It's great news, isn't it?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that brings us to the desert island question, often considered the most difficult question of my interviews.
Speaker: So Sandy, if you were stranded on a desert island with a single book, which book do you hope that it would be?
Speaker: I would hope that it was I Let You Go by Claire McIntosh.
Speaker: Would you like the why?
Speaker: I would love the why.
Speaker: Only purely because it was the book that made me fall back in love with reading.
Speaker: You know, I'd gone a good 10 years really without picking up a book.
Speaker: And it made me fall back in love with reading and ultimately has led me or did lead me to try my hand at fiction writing.
Speaker: So it's, yeah, in my world, it's a pretty big book.
Speaker: Yeah, and that's what I would like to, if I ever needed inspiration, if I ever need, that would be the book that I would like to be on a desert island with.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: So that book was a real kind of moment for you.
Speaker: It really kind of changed the course of your life in many ways.
Speaker: Completely, yes.
Speaker: And I think also it was not just the fact that it made me fall back in Love is Reading, but it just, the first time I felt a real buzz around it.
Speaker: And I think I'd talked myself out of even trying something like this because
Speaker: Just going back to what we were saying, I didn't think there was still the demand for it.
Speaker: I didn't think that people were still reading books to the level that they used to.
Speaker: It was a bit of a dying trade, as it were.
Speaker: And yeah, there was a real buzz.
Speaker: And people, my friends and family, they were all kind of picking it up somehow.
Speaker: And they were finding it, reading it, and we were all kind of talking about it, which we hadn't ever done before.
Speaker: with a book.
Speaker: So yeah, it was, it was a, it was a really big turning point for me, that book.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: That's, I mean, the one thing I have here from people who were working in publishing is that publishing is always in quotes dying and like books are always dying, but at the same time it's bigger than it's ever been.
Speaker: So it's just a kind of weird thing that hangs over publishing all the time.
Speaker: I think that's not really true.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: It's that constant contradiction, isn't it?
Speaker: All the time.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think I think apart from the kind of scene is that there's certainly in terms of book slots, you know, in supermarkets and Smith's and stuff.
Speaker: I think that's a bit of a concern.
Speaker: But, you know, hopefully the Indies will start coming up strong to take their place.
Speaker: That would be good to see.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it's also, I guess it's more the kind of evolution of how the medium is being distributed, because I know that audiobooks are like kind of growing exponentially and it's never been bigger, the audiobook market than it is right now.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And eBooks as well, obviously, you know, just the existence of audiobooks and eBooks, that's going to take books, physical books off shelves because so many people are just going to buy their, consume their books that way.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: How do you read your books, Jamie?
Speaker: Do you read audio or?
Speaker: I recently got into using a Kindle, but I have a lot of physical books.
Speaker: I try to go back and forth between using my Kindle and using physical books.
Speaker: But I read a lot of epic fantasy and some of those books are so big that I have to just like, if I want to read it in bed, I have to have it on my Kindle because I can't, my arms get tired holding these books.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Do I need a Kindle in my life?
Speaker: I'm really on the cusp of, is it?
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: It's just very convenient.
Speaker: And I bought like a strap to go on the back so that I can just hold it with one hand.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: And they're all backlit, are they?
Speaker: Or you can get ones that are backlit because my iPhone's not great.
Speaker: But it's not, I don't know what the science is behind it, but it's not blue light.
Speaker: It's not like a phone light or a screen light.
Speaker: It's like a very kind of soft light.
Speaker: So it doesn't feel the same as looking into a phone or something.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: No, I could so easily be tempted.
Speaker: I'm literally sitting on the fence at the moment and I'm about to go away and I'm looking at my case with my six books and thinking this would be so much easier with a Kindle.
Speaker: So yeah, I could be tempted.
Speaker: If you have to go on a trip, it's incredibly, if you have to like travel, it's very, very useful because you can have all of your books.
Speaker: You can have a hundred books on this small little tablet that you just carry around with you, which is great.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, that's a no-brainer really, isn't it?
Speaker: When you put it like that, it's a no-brainer.
Speaker: This episode is not sponsored by Kindle, but it could be if they wanted to sponsor me.
Speaker: Yes, hello, Kindle.
Speaker: That brings us to the end of the regular episode and into the extended cut where I'm going to ask Sandy a bit more about agents, queries, submissions and Reese Witherspoon, exclusive to Patreon subscribers.
Speaker: So anyone listening who hasn't yet joined the Patreon, please do think about it.
Speaker: It goes a long way towards covering the cost of running this podcast.
Speaker: That's it.
Speaker: You just need it.
Speaker: Like, like with the book, six times the charm.
Speaker: I just need more practice and I'll be fine.
Speaker: Amazing.
Speaker: Well, that's awesome.
Speaker: And it's been great chatting with you, Sandy.
Speaker: Thanks so much for coming on the podcast and telling us all about.
Speaker: your writing and your books and your adventures in publishing.
Speaker: It's been awesome.
Speaker: It's been awesome chatting.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: So good to talk to you.
Speaker: And for anyone listening, if you want to keep up with what Sandy is doing, you can follow her on Twitter at RealSandyJones, on Instagram at SandyJones underscore author.
Speaker: or on her website, sandyjones.com.
Speaker: That's Sandy with an I and an E at the end.
Speaker: To support the podcast, like, follow, and subscribe on your podcast platform of choice, and follow along on all socials.
Speaker: Join the Patreon for extended episodes, ad-free, and a week early, and check out my other podcast, The Chosen Ones and Other Tropes.
Speaker: Thanks again, Sandy, and thanks to everyone listening.
Speaker: We'll catch you on the next episode.
