Phoebe Morgan's Blog

I haven’t updated this WordPress blog for a while, but I have migrated onto Substack in 2025! The Honest Editor is a newsletter (it’s free!) designed to lift the lid on the publishing industry, and tell you the truth about how it all really works. You can sign up here – you’ll find content about acquisitions meetings, cover art processes, why it takes editors a while to reply to submissions, and more. I hope you enjoy it and thank you for continuing to follow me.

I’m currently writing book s...

This year I got my first ever American book deal. It was for my fourth novel, The Wild Girls, and I had convinced myself that it was never going to happen to the extent that over Christmas I had genuinely forgotten about the submission. We’d had interest in November time, but what with the world being in chaos and the cancellation of Christmas, I had put it out of my mind and so when my agent rang me in January to tell me that we had an offer (from a different publisher to the one who had expres...

I was talking to one of my authors last week and she said she couldn’t believe that book editors also worry about things – we likely all know that authors do worry about the publishing process, understandably so, as they are giving over their work to a publishing house and essentially relinquishing a lot of control over their book – but the bottom line is that editors definitely worry as well! So I thought I’d write a post about it to help show the human side of us all…

As an editor, I care A...

I thought I’d write a bit about submissions, after an interesting article in the Bookseller the other day. Starting with the basics, what IS a submission? (Most people reading this might know, but I actually don’t think everyone does – nor should they!) Submissions are what editors call unpublished manuscripts that are sent to them by literary agents. The aim of sending an editor a submission is so that they will consider it for their list; if an editor likes a submission and can persuade everyo...

The question I probably get asked the most at work about the books I am publishing is, ‘what’s the hook?’ It’s the question that I think about when I am reading submissions, when I’m looking at competitor titles, and when I’m talking to authors and agents about their upcoming works. So, what is a hook and why is it so important?

Essentially, the hook of your book is a one-liner that sums up the book’s USP (unique selling point). The more original and memorable the hook, the better. But why, y...

As part of continued attempts to de-mystify the publishing process I thought I’d write about a typical day as an editor, inspired by Juliet’s brilliant post about her day as a literary agent.

The wonderful thing about working in books is that each day is genuinely different, and working across a range of titles and authors as I do means I am constantly dipping in and out of different worlds (which given the current reality is so grim, is more of a privilege than ever!) I’ll take a typical Mo...

Today, in publishing terms, is Super Thursday. There are almost 600 books being published, which is good news for readers, but scary for authors because of the sheer amount of perceived competition. Combined with this, 2020 has of course been an incredibly tough year for debut authors, as the world has battled through months of lockdown, the closure of bookshops, Amazon and some supermarkets prioritising essential items, and the cancellation of book launches, tours and promotional events.

When you’re first starting out as an author, all you want is to get a publishing deal. I know – I’ve been there! But what happens if, a few books down the line, you decide you need a change? There are a myriad of reasons why an author might move publisher partway through their career – it could be a change of genre, they might be following an editor who has moved jobs, they might just want a change of scene and feel the need to experience somewhere else. If that’s you, then try not to worry – it...

On Thursday, my third book was published. Speaking to my Mum on the phone, she said: ‘well, you said you didn’t want a book launch this year – now you haven’t got one.’ She was right – I had a big launch party for my second book last year, at the beautiful Hatchards bookshop in London, with champagne and a book signing and even the presence of Bill Nighy* – and although I loved it, I also found it quite stressful, so this year I’d already sworn off the whole thing.

Of course, when the day came t...

Im writing this sat at my kitchen table, which is now where I spend the vast majority of my time. Occasionally, I move to the sofa, and once a day I go outside into the streets of North London, with their shuttered up shops, their chalked warning signs, and their strange silence that descends now like a heavy knitted blanket over our homes and our lives.

Beside me are two jugs of tulips one green, one red, because on my weekly shop I can never resist picking up bunches of flowers and this...