This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
Caroline Hogg has worked in publishing for almost ten years, at Little, Brown Book Group and more recently at Avon, HarperCollins. She's currently at Pan Macmillan as Senior Commissioning Editor for Commercial Women's Fiction. She knows her stuff!
Today's question comes from a Novelicious reader who asks:
What do you read for pleasure? Do you try to get away from the genre you edit as you work with it in your day job and who are your favourite authors?
Caroline says: I don’t read for pleasure as often as I’d like! I spend some of my spare time reading for work, so if I get weekends or holidays with a nice big chunk of free time, I want to spend it reading something I know will be really entertaining. So, I do sometimes read ‘the book everyone’s talking about’ as you can’t get a better recommendation than word of mouth. This is how I ended up addicted to the Hunger Games trilogy, and recently read Dearest Rose by
Rowan Coleman and now I’m part-way through Gone Girl. But in the main, I still read women’s fiction simply because it’s my favourite thing to read. It’s why I do this job. Some of my favourite women’s fiction authors include Sally Beauman, Jojo Moyes, Marian Keyes and Harriet Evans (I’m leaving out authors I’ve worked with so you can’t accuse me of being totally biased! But it goes without saying I absolutely love reading the authors I publish; that’s how I’ve ended up publishing them). One of my all-time favourites is Lazy Ways to make a Living by Abigail Bosanko. Oh, and Bridget Jones’ Diary, of course.
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