BB: London is truly metropolitan in the sense that, if you are interested in a career in publishing or indeed writing in the UK, it is the only destination – unlike Australia, where there are two distinct centres, Sydney and Melbourne, and strong communities of writers in other capitals. In London, despite the numbers, everyone in publishing knew one another much better than they do here.

The second difference is that something like half of the books that you see in our bookshops are distributed titles. No Australian publisher or editor has worked on them. For readers this may be fine, but it does mean that those working in publishing here can only be interested professionally in a section of the books. In Australia we publish Orhan Pamuk and David Foster Wallace, and we have just bought Paulo Coelho, so we do – where possible – publish international authors as do some other publishers.

A third difference would be due to our copyright legislation and the digital world. We are much more aware of what’s happening in the rest of the world than England ever was. This is going back quite a while, and things may have changed, but at the time you didn’t worry about US publication dates in London, because you could make your own event happen, or not. It was in your hand. In Australia now, however, for the most part we have to publish at the same time as an international publication.

CA: Before you went into publishing, did you always know you weren’t going to become a writer?

Fiona McFarlane, 2013 (photograph by Andy Barclay)

BB: There are few publishers who try their hand at writing, but only a few for a good reason. For one thing, you realise how hard it is. You need to be pretty sure of your talent and your ability to create something new. You also need to feel compelled to write, and I simply don’t. But I derive a lot of creative satisfaction from what I do. For me, editing, thinking about jackets and copy, and those sorts of things are creative endeavours. I am lucky enough to spend my days reading Peter Carey, Tim Winton, and Fiona McFarlane. They put to shame anything I could write.

CA: You have spoken of the publisher’s ‘curatorial role’. Given the way people publish online these days, in what has been called a more democratic process, what exactly do you mean by this? Does this curatorial role ultimately lead to publishers acting as literary gatekeepers?

BB: Most publishers wouldn’t want to see themselves as gatekeepers, but as lighthouse keepers.

CA: That’s a nice analogy.

BB: It may fall apart as I attempt to elaborate! I don’t think publishers delude themselves that readers waste time speculating about who is ‘behind the books’. What’s vital is that people pay attention to the author and the subject of the book.

That said, we are trying to send messages to the trade and to the literary establishment about certain qualities a book might possess. I do think publishers hope to convey to readers: ‘Rather than searching through the great sea of books that are out there, we have done some of that work as experienced readers, and these are the books that we think are particularly worthy of your attention.’

‘Most publishers wouldn’t want to see themselves as gatekeepers, but as lighthouse keepers’

CA: You have said the sexiest thing in publishing is a new voice. How do you find new talent?

BB: At Penguin we have the Monthly Catch: we invite people to send us their stuff. But we also read as widely as possible. We found Fiona McFarlane because I read a couple of her stories in different publications. We also commission books from writers whose work has appeared in small magazines.

The best route to a new author, in my experience, is via recommendations. Some authors who are out there doing their own filtration processes are kind enough to steer us in the direction of interesting writers.

For a long time we didn’t accept unsolicited manuscripts. We didn’t think it unreasonable to discourage unsolicited material, given that in a country with such a small population it’s not hard to know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody. This may sound a little …

CA: Incestuous?

BB: Ostensibly, but not really. The contact doesn’t need to be a writer; it could be a journalist or someone working in publishing. It’s a good test of somebody’s gumption. You need that in bucket loads if you are going to be successful.

We interact with new writers in different ways. Formerly, we used to take three chapters and then reply to them. We can’t do that anymore. Given that people can submit work electronically, there is an understanding that if they don’t hear back from us, then it’s a ‘no’. That makes it much more manageable for us.

Of course, we doubtless miss all sorts of things in that process, because the system is imperfect. But I do think that writers should utilise all their contacts to spread the word. Don’t just sit at home. And if you can get your stories or your non-fiction published somewhere, that’s a great start.

CA: How often do you find a new talent in a slush pile?

BB: That is such a terrible expression! I think we need to find a new term. I’m not really sure if we still get hard copies or not. I’m sorry to say that I think anything that doesn’t come in through one of those other channels is likely to be regarded as the slush pile. Publishers used to regard it as a terrible bore, and a duty – nothing was ever going to come of it. But I don’t think publishers think that way now. After all, we live in the world of disintermediation. The direct conversation between a writer and a publisher can happen on a daily basis.

So we do look at this material as much as we can. I can’t tell you precisely when we last found somebody this way, but it is a fairly regular event. We often request full manuscripts, the next stage after the initial chapters. This should be seen in the context of Penguin being a reasonably mature publisher, in the sense that we have got a lot of authors. The number of new authors we take on is quite limited. But we do find them this way, as well as through agents.

CA: You have said that, present-day technology being what it is, it is better to have no track record than a bad track record. This fascinates me. In the past, attracting a publisher was about building a track record (albeit a strong one). Can you elaborate on this?

‘You need to be pretty sure of your talent and your ability to create something new’

BB: Perhaps it was my inclination towards a slogan rather than a considered truth! It is certainly true that you shouldn’t publish anything you don’t believe in – because it will haunt you. Whoever you are, the first question booksellers ask is ‘What did the last one do? If your last book did well, that’s great. But if it didn’t sell, you are worse off than if there was no previous one. It seems to be easier – and not just in book publishing – to say, ‘Who is the bright new thing?’ Everyone is intrigued by that. People aren’t so interested in who has written his or her great third novel. It does get harder, and you only have one shot at newness.

But really, those are secondary considerations. The ultimate one is writing the best book you possibly can. You have to accept that if lots of people say ‘No’, maybe you need to put it aside and write a different book. It’s admirable that people believe so robustly in their work that they want to persevere with it ad infinitum – but not to the exclusion of thinking, ‘Well, maybe these people know something that I can’t currently see, and I would be better off writing another novel.’

Peter Carey wrote a string of novels before he had his first one published. It is far preferable to be knocked back for weak work than for that work to see the light of day. There are a lot of half-baked books being published. It doesn’t do readers any favours, and it certainly does the writers no favours. Instead of building a career, they may be queering their pitch.

CA: What role does social media play in publishing these days?

BB: A big one! It is a fascinating phenomenon. (Not that I would claim to be the full bottle on it.) At nearly every level of publishing social media is highly influential. First, depending of course on what sort of book you are writing, the fact that you have what Americans would call a platform (with a certain number of people knowing who you are because they follow you on Facebook or Twitter) is an advantage. It can help you get signed up. Publishers become aware of your work. We monitor, as much as we can, what is being read on Twitter and Facebook; what is ‘trending’.

Second, social media is hugely significant on publication. You can mobilise a pre-existing fan base of a couple of thousand people. That’s a good sale for a first novel. What has become apparent in recent years is that, while a lot of the publicity work we do, such as having works reviewed here or there, or being mentioned in The Sunday Age, say, is valuable, it is equally potent as having your book cited by someone with a big Twitter following. Take John Safran as an example: he published Murder in Mississippi last year. The press coverage for it was good, and John did a fantastic job, but the book really began to bite when Eddie Perfect tweeted about it. Eddie Perfect has about 40,000 followers. Then Louis Theroux and Peter Serafinowicz tweeted about it. Serafinowicz has 714,000 followers, which is many more than the circulation of any publication we could get into – and the right community. When Josh Thomas tweeted about it, we thought, ‘Well, the people who follow Josh Thomas are absolutely the kind of people who we want to read this book.’ I think it genuinely shifts the power balance between the press, whom I sometimes think of as gatekeepers, and the author. Suddenly, the author is able to get his or her message out through other means. It can have a massive effect.

Then, of course, in a marketing sense social media (in its widest form) can be so targeted that it makes conventional forms of advertising seem crude. In ten years’ time, people are going to laugh at us. They will say, ‘What, you used to put an ad on a bus and hope that somebody who saw the bus was interested in what you had to sell? That’s insane!’

Targeted marketing can be creepy, but it makes perfect sense. We are very focused on online marketing, because it enables us to reach those who are interested in a particular subject rather than scattering grains of wheat over stony ground.

CA: You emphasise the word ‘communities’ when you talk about writers and readers. I guess that word has changed over time; an online community is now a legitimate form of community. How do you see these communities of writers and readers cohering?

BB: It happens in all sorts of ways. Social media is just one of them. Authors of ours who have large social media followings generate a kind of direct and interesting conversation with their readers. Social media doesn’t suit everybody, of course. There are plenty of other ways to create communities for readers. They might be genre-based websites or something like Penguin’s True Stories, which is a different form of storytelling that includes video, text, and some book stills. There is no feedback, it doesn’t start a conversation, but it offers a different way of participating in the story. And then we’ve got all the other mechanisms – websites, newsletters and so forth. They are hugely important.

I’m becoming very interested in reading groups. You can communicate with people quite directly, not just for the purpose of selling them something, but for something more. Take Anna Funder, for example, whose novel, All That I Am, we published three years ago. It would be good to refresh our reading group notes and even create a video, for people who have already read the book. Publishers have a role in perpetuating the conversation, even if that doesn’t lead to extra sales. You help the author to continue his or her relationship with readers, in ways that will sustain a readership regardless of whether you win the Miles Franklin Award or have a major promotion at Dymocks.

When I was in the UK it was all about getting your book on Richard & Judy – or Oprah. You could sell a lot of copies of that book! But you mightn’t necessarily sell many copies of the next book. Why? Because those people don’t follow authors; they follow Richard & Judy. This is a problem for authors as well as publishers. What we need to do is capitalise on that moment in the sun and try and create as meaningful a relationship as possible, rather than just reading the next book that everyone is talking about. For readers to sign up for the subsequent book, that conversation needs to be properly nourishing, and publishers have to assist in that process.

CA: Tell me about your personal style as an editor. How collaborative is the process?

BB: I’ve never thought about it. I hope I try to see the book from the author’s point of view. It’s vital to understand what authors are aiming for and to help them to achieve it. That varies radically from book to book. Sometimes there is very little to do. Other times you have to be terribly strict.

CA: Some publishers I’ve spoken to have said that their clients have become their friends. Wouldn’t that make it difficult to be ‘terribly strict’ with those authors?

BB: I like my authors tremendously, and hope we have a terrific relationship. But it would be a terrible mistake to forget that the principal consideration is the quality of their work and that you are there to be an editor, not their friend.

CA: Finally, which book would you have most liked to publish?

BB: (Long pause). As I Lay Dying perhaps.

CA: That’s a fabulous choice!

BB: Imagine the conversations you would have had about that book.