(photo credit:Ponch Hawkes)
Maggie Ball: With all of your publishing experience, is it difficult to be on
the other side; to have a publisher promoting your own book? Do you have to
resist the urge to direct?
Hilary McPhee: I did find it strange but I didn't want to direct. Writing
and editing use two entirely different parts of the brain, I think, and by
the time I'd finished the book I was feeling like an author, in that I
badly needed other people's feedback and expertise. I also made deliberate
decision not to interfere with the publishing side and I didn't. I kept out
of all that, and Pan Macmillan has done a terrific job.
Maggie Ball: Has becoming an author yourself changed your perspective of the
publishing industry?
Hilary McPhee: No, not really, but it has certainly given me a different
perspective on the promotion side. It's much more demanding than I'd
realised, I think. For example, the Sydney's Writers Festival where you
are in competition with other writers, was a challenge for me. I kept
wanting talking up other people's books, which was a bit counterproductive
since there's alot of fairly direct selling. I've also been doing a lot of
talking to medium to large groups of people where the book has been on sale
afterwards. That fact that I'm having to sell and sign copies as well as
speak is a new experience and not one I like much.
Maggie Ball: While you were in Greece, you did quite a lot of writing
yourself. Have you always thought of yourself as a writer at heart?
Hilary McPhee: Well, when you are a publisher, you often write a lot anyway. We wrote kids books for example, and there was not a time where I wasn't writing articles or putting something together.To write in a much more focused and creative way is something that I wasn't able to do for a long time, and I've loved the experience of giving myself time to go into the work in great detail. But no, I wasn't longing to be a writer all that time.
Maggie Ball: Did you find yourself over-editing your own work too soon? Was it
hard to just let go as a writer and put the editor on the back shelf until the
story was formed enough?
Hilary McPhee: It was very hard. I actually wrote about the difficulties in an
article in the Australian Review of Books a couple of years ago. When I
started out I thought I was going to write a conventional shaped 'tell-all'
