Episode 175: A guest at the reader's table, with veteran publisher and literary agent Tony Collins

My guest for this episode is someone who has spent nearly 50 years in publishing. Tony Collins has worked for a number of publishing houses, owned three magazines, published an astonishing 1,400 books, and is now a literary agent. In this conversation, we talk about the lessons he’s learned in his career. We talk about the most common error that writers make when with their work, how the author must remember they are a guest at the reader's table, and there are many other things for readers to do. We talk about the essential power of narrative, why we can’t write in the way Dickens did, the place for anecdote in non-fiction, finding the right publisher, engaging well with them, and why it's essential for your book to get the title and your hook right.

Tony speaks with decades of experience and there are some wonderful, fundamental insights here, I hope you find the conversation useful, here it is.