Phil W. Bayles

Or: How I Learned The Publishing Industry Isn’t All Doom And Gloom

If you’re following me on social media (which you can do here on Bluesky and here on Instagram), you probably know that at the end of last year I was chosen to take part in the mentoring scheme hosted by Writing East Midlands. (For the record, I didn’t know until I applied that I live in the East Midlands now; apparently I’m right on the border. Gotta love a technicality!)

WEM is a wonderful organisation funded by Arts Council England, designed to give support to new writers like me! In the last couple of weeks I’ve met my fellow mentees — authors and poets from across the region who all seem a) incredibly lovely and b) extremely talented. We all had the opportunity to speak to literary agents about some of the ins and outs of the industry; not only was it very informative, but it also left me feeling pretty hopeful.

It can feel like there’s a lot of doom and gloom in the writing world right now, whether it’s the threat of generative AI looming over everyone’s heads or the increasing difficulty of standing out in an ever-saturated market. So it was a real pick-me-up to listen to people in the industry talk about their work (and the authors they work with) with such enthusiasm!

I’ve also met the author who’s going to be mentoring me for the next year: the brilliant Jamie Mollart (whose website you should totally check out). Once I started reading his novel, Kings of a Dead World, it quickly became clear why WEM put the two of us together. Hopefully this’ll be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

I’ve been working on my novel for roughly five years at this point, and my aim has always been to get to the point where I could look for an agent and try to get published. But for the first time it’s starting to feel like something that’s actually feasible. All I have to do is keep persisting, and keep talking to all these wonderful writers that I’ve been introduced to.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, this next draft won’t write itself…