AustLit
Sue Brockhoff is Head of Publishing at Harlequin Australia. Her previous positions include Sales and Marketing Director, Random House Australia, and Head of Fiction at HarperCollins Australia.
This conversation took place between Sue Brockhoff and Lisa Fletcher on 5th June, 2017.
(I: Interviewer. SB: Sue Brockhoff)
I: Can you tell me what drew you into romance publishing, and into commercial women’s publishing more broadly?
SB: My background is in sales and marketing. I was the sales director for Random House for many years, and that was probably the first opportunity I had to really start to see the rise of commercial fiction in Australia. When I joined back in the early 90s, there were a number of Australian authors. I guess in those days, the market was very, very different. It was quite small, but that’s when Australian publishing really sort of started to shine. But, in the meantime, there were a number of international authors who really started to resonate in Australia. So, I published authors such as Diana Gabaldon, John Grisham, Michael Crichton, and that was really the rise of the blockbuster.
We started to see a diversification in genres. As the sales director, I also got out to sell them as well. So, that sort of prompted my interest in looking at the market and looking at what people were interested in reading, and I continued with that for a number of years.
I saw a job advertised for Harlequin Mills & Boon as Head of Publishing and Communications. I decided to apply for that because I was always completely fascinated with how Harlequin were able to get so many books into the marketplace. I’d always seen the Harlequin Mills & Boon sales as part of the overall sales and thought, ‘There are a lot of readers out there reading romance, reading commercial fiction.’ So, I was very interested in Harlequin’s business model and how they were able to, first of all, get their books into retail in such a big way, but then, more importantly, talk to the reader. And so, I applied for the job and I got it, and started to learn everything.
I: So, to give us some contextual background for thinking about a book like The Patterson Girls, and this is part of a paired case study with Jilted, can you explain the relationship between Harlequin Australia and Harlequin International? When you acquire titles for Harlequin Mira in Australia, is your focus on building a distinctively Australian list, or are you always thinking of yourself as part of an international team building the Mira list?
SB: Both. I think it’s really important that, first of all, you get your sales right in Australia. It’s actually very difficult to get published overseas. Many of the big authors will tell you that they might be lucky to have one or two books published in the US or the UK, but if sales aren’t at a certain level, then they don’t get picked up again. So many authors have tried and not succeeded overseas. And so, to me, it’s always really important to make sure that we have established success for our author in our local market, hopefully getting some great reviews and great reader feedback. Then, if we feel that there is an international platform for that author, take it to the wider group.
It also depends on the rights that you’re able to buy for the book. Some authors are happy to give us world rights, so then we can speak to our sister companies about whether or not they’d like to publish the book. Other authors prefer, if they have a particular agent, and an agent who’s not in Australia, to only sell Australia/New Zealand rights. Then, it’s the agent’s responsibility to try and place the book in different markets. I think it really depends on the genre, but also the characters and the setting, and if there’s enough in a book that both the Americans or the English feel would resonate with their market, because the markets are very different in each country.
I: So, you’ve anticipated my next question, which was how often Mira titles acquired by the Australian office are published in foreign territories.
SB: Fairly rarely. I think it’s probably fairly common with all of the publishers, but for Harlequin, we’ve changed quite a bit as a company over the last few years. So, Harlequin had a number of offices in South America and Europe, and each of the offices were set up with their own publishing teams. The main premise was to publish the category lines, so the romance category lines, which are either Mills & Boon in the UK or the Harlequin range in the US. Then, they were also publishing some of the single titles, mainly out of the US.
Then, Harlequin was bought by HarperCollins about 3 years ago. And one of the reasons was because Harlequin already had this amazing global footprint that HarperCollins could see opportunities for a number of their authors as well. So, each of the offices has now changed quite a bit. There’s more focus on each of the countries developing their own local publishing program; there’s still a very important piece with the category romance publishing; there are opportunities in the global publishing program now, whether it’s a Harlequin author or a HarperCollins author. We work very closely with all of the individual countries to see if there are opportunities for our authors in that particular market. We very much rely on the experience of the publishers in that particular market to make those decisions.
I: How would you describe The Patterson Girls in genre terms?
SB: That’s a hard one. Rachael was writing amazing romances. And Rachael was not only able to write a great romance story with characters that you fell in love with, that you wanted to see where their relationship was going, she also had wonderful settings. They were generally small-town settings, with her rural titles, but Rachael also generally brought in a couple of issues into her stories. So, if you read most of her rural romances, one of the characters will have a connection, whether or not it’s a policeman escaping a past, or it’s a hero with a brother with autism. There are lots and lots of day-to-day life issues that Rachael pursues in her books. I think that’s always helped her to stand out from other authors.
She came up with this idea of the four sisters, the Patterson girls, and I said to her, ‘This doesn’t feel like a straight romance to me; this feels like a bigger book because it’s more layered. You’ve got four points of view, which is really hard to do, and you’ve got their life stories.’
So, there were still these cues that Rachael’s fans loved about her writing: the small-town setting, and the number of characters, all who had a past and were hiding a secret. There was certainly romance.
About 4 or 5 months later, Rachael delivered the manuscript and I loved it. I absolutely loved it. I rang her and said, ‘You’ve done everything that I could possibly ask of you. To me, what we’re now doing is we still want to bring along all of your fans and everybody that loves everything that you’ve written in terms of a romance and any of your stories with really strong romantic elements. But there’s a wider market out there now—people who might not necessarily pick up a book that has ‘romance’ attached to it, but are looking for a great story about a family, about relationships and family issues and things that really affect all of us day-to-day.’ So, we published The Patterson Girls.
When I was doing the cover with Rachael, we went through a number of different cover directions. For me, it was important to not make this book look the same as the other romance titles. We tried a number of covers with people on it, where we had a number of sisters on the front cover. But I felt that we hadn’t quite taken a big enough step change from where we were with the romances. So, I found this image in a photo library and sent it to Rachael and her agent, asking if they liked it. Luckily, they did. I thought it was lovely because the four hearts, to me, represented the four sisters—one was hanging off the edge, so maybe there wasn’t something quite right with this set of hearts.
I: So, it managed to appeal to her romance heartland but nevertheless do that important work of crossing into this larger space.
SB: Yes, and that was very much what I wanted to do. I wanted more people to be aware of Rachael’s writing. And we managed to retain the sales for her second women’s fiction book last year, The Art of Keeping Secrets, which was great. So, The Patterson Girls sold at a much, much higher level than Rachael’s previous romance titles.
Now, there could be two reasons for that. One, that Rachael’s still been on a career trajectory. So, from her first book, Jilted, we’ve actually increased her sales year on year, and that’s really hard to do in this environment, in this market. Second, the majority of romance books are sold in the discount department stores in Australia. Some chains sell them, but we tend to see a lot of the sales coming from the discount department stores. That’s just print, of course, and then there’s a massive digital market. But another part of what I wanted to do with The Patterson Girls was to position the book so that anybody going into Dymocks, or an independent bookshop, or BIG W, would find this book. So, that was a deliberate strategy on our behalf to broaden the market. Because, ultimately, the booksellers and the book buyers in all of the chains and department stores, they’re the gatekeepers, in the nicest possible way. They make the selections at their stores, they know their readers, the people who come and visit them on a regular occasion. So, what I wanted to do was to make sure that we provided them with a book that hopefully was going to encourage them—some of them for the first time—to stock Rachael’s book.
I: Can you tell me about your involvement in the development of the manuscript for [The Patterson Girls]? So, you got the full manuscript about 4 or 5 months later, but was there a to and fro, or a conversation?
SB: There wasn’t too much of a to and fro between myself and Rachael, apart from jumping up and down and saying I loved it. So, Rachael has a literary agent and we tend to have a three-way conversation at the very, very early stage of manuscript delivery. I do a reasonably fast read and then I’ll go back and say, ‘Right, what are the things that I really love about this book? Structurally, do I think that it needs any particular work?’ There was one particular storyline in The Patterson Girls that I probably didn’t resonate with as much as the other storylines, and so I talked to Rachael and her agent a little bit about that, and then we decided to leave it as it was until the book went to Annabel [Blay] and Lachlan Jobbins to do the edit.
But the wonderful thing about Rachael is that she doesn’t need a lot of development work. She delivers her manuscripts and they are absolutely spot on, and every time I ring her up and say, ‘You’ve done it again.’ The wonderful thing about seeing her grow and develop as a writer is clearly all of the advice that she’s had in previous books, the editorial guidance, has really helped her then to think about her craft and think about that next story.
Quite often, writers just want to write their story, and they secret themselves away and then you get the manuscript, and you actually don’t know what you’re getting, apart from maybe a discussion that you’ve had along the way about some ideas. Some authors prefer to very much keep all their ideas together and sit down and write the book. Whereas, with Rachael, we had talked about the bigger idea. For me, I was fascinated to see how she was going to write four different point of views.
So, we had some early discussions, and then I worked with Annabel, our managing editor, and we chose Lachlan to be the editor for the book. Then, we had a three-way conversation with Lachlan; we talked again about what we loved about the book and getting down into the editorial nitty-gritty. And that tends to be with character arcs, with plot flow, asking, ‘Have you got all the right point of views coming in at the right time?’
I: How long does that process take, from when you read the full manuscript for the first time, and then commission your editor, and start that nitty-gritty conversation?
SB: Fairly quickly. I think it’s unfair for an author to sit there and wait, not knowing whether you like the book even. So, with some of our authors, you quite often get the ‘How are you going?’ email after a week. Other authors will sit back, but you know that they’re stressing out every day waiting. Because it’s a big thing, it’s a huge thing, for an author to deliver a manuscript to a publisher. It’s something that they’ve been working on from anything from a few months to a few years on, and then, that’s it, they’ve sent it, and then there’s this wait. As a publisher, you’re very conscious of the fact that anything you can say in this sort of waiting period could be interpreted in any way. So, you have to sort of say, ‘Fantastic, so excited to receive it,’ and, ‘I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.’ Then, from our perspective, it’s finding the time.
I: Some contextual questions now: Harlequin is actively involved with the annual conventions of the Romance Writers of Australia. What role do you think RWA has played in the recent history of Australian romance and women’s fiction?
SB: It’s played a massive role and it’s been really, really exciting. So, I’ve only been in romance publishing for 4 years, and I’ve learned so much in that time. I love the writing community. The romance authors are all incredibly connected; I had not seen that before.
They’re incredibly supportive of each other. They network, they workshop, they share, they collaborate, they laugh together, they cry together, they do everything. And it is such a wonderful community to be part of. Yes, there’s a certain amount of competition in there. What’s been really exciting for me over the last 4 years since I joined the community is to see more and more romance authors getting more and more mainstream success.
So, they’ve always been there. But now, we’ve seen more and more writers, and again because there are so many different publishing platforms available to them now. You’ve got very contemporary writers, who love writing the really gritty stuff, that are doing very, very well in the digital space, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to print. Then, you’ve got a lot of authors, ours included, who have honed in on a number of subgenres that the readers are really connecting with and want to read more, like this whole small town or rural themes.
I: In [a] 2016 report that Macquarie University put out, a number of the people they interviewed talked about how the move to digital publishing has so radically changed the landscape. How important do you think that move has been?
SB: Very important, because I think it’s given authors a voice in a number of different ways. First of all, you can write a book at any word length these days. Our Escape digital first imprint has wonderful novellas that are 10 or 15,000 words, and then we’ve got books in there that are 250,000 words. So again, it’s about the story, and about what’s exciting about that story that makes us pick it up and go, ‘You know, even if it’s a smaller story, it’s got everything in it that we think is going to appeal to the reader.’ So, that’s important.
We’re very lucky at Harlequin that we can publish on a number of different platforms. So, we look very closely at each book as it comes in, whether it’s Kate Cuthbert is picking up for the Escape list, to whether or not we’re printing up something for our print lines; we look at the opportunities for that book and the different platforms and where we feel it’s going to have the best fit. Because, as I said earlier, there are some subgenres that don’t necessarily translate that well to print.
I: Does it work the other way? Is there some print that doesn’t translate well to digital, or does the Kindle effect mean that everything in some way is translating to digital?
SB: Most of it translates to digital, yes. But certainly, for instance, we have sold more of The Patterson Girls in print than we have digitally so far. But over the life of the book, I’m sure that we will end up selling more digitally. Because the big thing about print is that, again, with our booksellers or our discount department store buyers as the gatekeepers, they control what stock is in the store and they might decide, after a while, that they don’t want to keep a particular book in the store anymore. So, the wonderful thing about our systems is that we can always provide a book if a reader goes into a bookstore and wants to buy a book and it’s not there.
This interview was undertaken as part of the Genre Worlds project. Genre Worlds is an ARC-funded research project undertaken by Professor Kim Wilkins, Professor David Carter, Associate Professor Beth Driscoll, and Professor Lisa Fletcher.
For more information on the project, go to the home page.