By Lucy Powell, Jess Scaffidi Saggio, Katie Farr, Ayman Sabir and Iona Fleming
As a team of publishing enthusiasts and avid book readers at The Publishing Post, knowing where to begin when approaching an author can sometimes be a daunting task. How do you go about generating ideas for articles? What’s the best way to research an author, let alone interview them?
Here, we have compiled our insights into how we best manage this process – hopefully, this inspires you, should you wish to interview an author yourself!
Sometimes it can be quite overwhelming to pick from a range of authors, all of whom write in different forms, genres and on different topics. So, how do we go about this? The best thing we’ve found useful is to be organised. After we’ve surfed the Internet for the next up-and-coming authors and their books, we keep track of who we’d like to contact and if we’ve contacted them already. Keeping everything organised helps us to ensure that for every issue, we’re exploring a different author with a different genre or theme.
Another useful thing we do is to make sure that issues cover both fiction and nonfiction books. For example, if we’ve interviewed three fiction authors consecutively, the team will then try to find an upcoming nonfiction book so that our readers get a wide variety of different narratives. Choosing between fictional and non-fictional stories is easier than choosing by each individual genre because everyone has their own favourites and it saves any overlap that may occur.
Context is key, so research into the book and author before writing questions is vital. The author has been kind enough to give up their free time for an interview, so the least we can do is ensure that we know as much as possible about their book! Sometimes agents provide us with information about the author’s background and the book itself. But we always do further research, and this often comes in the form of watching other author interviews on YouTube, perusing the author’s social media pages and reading other people’s reviews of their book. Even if the book has not yet been published, there are always plenty of ARC reviews provided through sites such as Goodreads and Netgalley.
One thing we, as a team, look out for in this process is making sure there’s a good spread of questions across topics like character, setting, inspiration and writing process. No question is a stupid one! Looking for common themes or threads within an author’s work can provide an interesting avenue for questioning – why does the author find these subjects so compelling? On the other hand, when authors have done very different forms of writing across their career – such as Nathan Lane switching from playwright to novelist for his book One Last Song, or Patti McCracken going from journalist to author for her book The Angel Makers – it provides a great opportunity to explore how writers approach different mediums and genres. Questioning authors over how their work may have been inspired by personal experiences is something that always has to be approached with respect and sensitivity, but when authors are happy to share their experiences, this often makes for the most touching and fascinating insights.
Now that your preparation is done, next up is the interview itself. Over a call, it is best to have sent questions beforehand, and we like to use that list to structure our interviews. Sometimes it helps to have additional context on your question list, things like the author’s day job – if they aren’t a full-time writer – or any notes about more recent history, at the top of a page. For example, in our recent interview with Sarah Brooks for Issue 99, it was fascinating to hear about her day job working at the University of Leeds, and how much she enjoys the freedom of writing as a break from the world of academia.
One of the key things to remember when interviewing is that authors are people too! In situations like this, having your favourite author on the same Zoom call as you can be a bit daunting. As simple as it sounds, it’s good to treat the interview as a conversation or a dialogue. Sometimes the authors are nervous about being interviewed themselves, so we have to remember we’re all in it together.
After the interview, don’t forget to send a thank you email to the author and agent, since they’ve given up their time for this interview. We always record interviews so we can focus on the conversations themselves, then watch them back afterwards for quotes. Then it’s time to write the article. If you’re not including the question, remember to include a brief explanation – you know what question the author is answering, but your readers won’t. Paraphrase some things the author has said, then choose their most interesting quotes.
We’ll usually start thinking about article structure when coming up with questions, and this is reflected in the question order: questions about literary influences may come at the beginning, and questions about possible sequels usually finish up the interview. This makes the writing process easier, but sometimes we need to move paragraphs around once everything is down on the page. Play around with structure and see what works – reading it aloud is also helpful to check each section flows naturally.
Write up an introduction and conclusion once the rest of the article is finished. Then you have your article!
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