Summertime

Simon Rimmer holding up Thuy Diem Pham’s new book on Sunday Brunch

The sun has blazed for the past weeks and the parties have been in full swing.  Boldwood kicked us off with their annual summer gathering at Fulham Palace and since then we’ve had the Women’s Prize celebration in Bedford Gardens, the AAA’s glam get-together on the rooftop at Shoreditch House, HarperCollins’s Author Party at the V&A (the first under new CEO Kate Elton) and Bookouture’s bash at the Renaissance Hotel at St Pancras.  It’s such a pleasure to have these moments where we come together to remind ourselves of the publishing community. It takes an army to get a book out into the world but it’s also a good thing for authors to meet each other to share thoughts. There has been lots of talk about AI of course, editors are seeing plenty of proposals about its potential to transform or destroy us, but as literary agents our current major concern is that the authors we represent understand their contractual obligation to produce original work.   As the models become increasingly sophisticated, it will inevitably become harder for us to easily identify text that has been generated by a machine.  And as people start to treat Claude or Chat GPT as their own private editor or researcher, there is a growing temptation to cede creativity itself to the bots.

Aside from quaffing rose and angsting about artificial intelligence, there has also been plenty of book promotion and hard graft.  Thuy Diem Pham was on Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch in June, Rachel Trethewey talked to a packed chapel about the Mitford clan at Nevill Holt Festival, Adam Hart and Helen McGinn have been haring around the country in the heatwave talking about their books and Molly Green’s WARTIME SECRETS AT THE MAYFAIR CLUB has had a national roll-out in Tesco stores as one of ‘Fern’s Picks’.