On both sides of the publishing fence

Michael Fishwick gets a double dose of profiling by the Financial Times and the Independent, both of whom are fascinated with the idea that a publisher – he works at Bloomsbury after a long stint with HarperCollins – can move over to the authorial side of the equation with his new novel SACRIFICES (published by Jonathan Cape.)

When things turn to his day job, he defends the big-advance practices even when others scoff at his justifications. “We may be outbidding for some books, but we are mostly matching what other people are offering,” he claims. “We are having a lot of that – it is a sort of boast.”

Ultimately, Fishwick believes he’s in a prime position to understand what writers go through. “I would like to think that I was sensitive to my authors even before I was writing myself,” he says of the impact of his writing on the day job. “But it has made me realise even more what they go through.” It also means that the word “enjoyed” has been dropped from his vocabulary.

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