Welcome to the first in a series of interviews and blog posts we will be publishing in the lead up to this year’s RNA Conference, taking place this year in Leeds. We are very lucky to have a huge number of industry professionals attending our conference this year – agents, publishers and editors – and over the coming weeks, we will be hearing from them about what they do and what they are looking for from their one-to-one sessions with RNA members over the weekend of the conference in July.

It is with great pleasure that today, we welcome Amy Durant from Sapere Books. So over to you, Amy.

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I am the editorial director and co-founder of Sapere Books: a digital-first publisher, specialising in romantic fiction, historical fiction and crime fiction. Sapere Books launched in March 2018 with seven titles, and we have now signed more than thirty authors to our list and over 100 books, including classic Regency romances by Alice Chetwynd Ley and the Lady Fan romantic mystery series by Elizabeth Bailey.

I personally oversee editorial production for all of our titles and I have the final say on which books we decide to take on. We are currently accepting submissions directly from authors and we are keen to grow our romance list (including historical romance and romantic sagas). We publish both debut fiction, new books by established authors, and reprints of backlist novels, and we are particularly looking to hear from authors who have more than one book available or who are keen to establish a long-term writing relationship with us. You can find out more about how to submit to Sapere Books here.

We offer our authors a 50% royalty of net revenues on all copies sold, including print-on-demand editions and Amazon borrows, and we invest a lot of time and money into marketing all of our titles and helping our authors to turn themselves into a ‘brand’. We create author websites, assist with social media, help set up author pages on Amazon and Goodreads and help our authors to network with a large community of reviewers and book bloggers.

My role is to work closely with authors from the moment they submit their book until the publication date, giving extensive editorial feedback and helping to shape their novels. I also work closely with our designer to create beautiful, eye-catching covers with unique author-branding, and I will always consult every author on design work and make sure they are completely happy before approving the final cover design.

I am currently working with some fabulous RNA members on their novels, including Cathy Bussey, whose debut novel, Summer at Hollyhock House will be published in August, and Valerie Holmes, whose romantic adventure novel, To Love, Honour and Obey, will be re-released later this year – and I am very excited to meet many more members at the conference!

Amy Durant

Editorial Director, Sapere Books

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Thanks so much, Amy, for taking the time to write this blog post for us. Enjoy the conference!