20 - When Passion Meets Business, with Daphne Tonge

Publishing Rodeo: The Good, The Bad, and the Bloody Ugly by Sunyi Dean

Episode notes
In 2015, Daphne Tonge started a small "book crate" subscription service out of her London living room, with a tiny pool of subscribers. Today, Illumicrate is a well-known specialist retailer, with a thriving fanbase and strong industry presence, which has laid the groundwork for Daphne's next co-current venture: Daphne Press, an independent publishing imprint run on the same values and with the same marketing savvy. In this detailed, question-loaded interview, Daphne kindly joins us to talk the nitty-gritty of building not just one, but two industry-shaping small businesses, and how it might impact genre fiction in future.
  • The founding of Illumicrate, and Daphne’s story
  • A bit about book production, what they can or can’t do
  • How does IC choose and acquire books for its crates?
  • What IS a crate book – is there su ... 
 ...  Read more
Keywords
small pressauthor platformdaphne pressillumicrate