In October 2023, I joined the Edinburgh Literary Salon’s Selling and Marketing Team. The Salon is run on a voluntary basis and holds a monthly meet-up with speakers from creative industries. It is funded by its supporters, the Buy Me a Coffee scheme and the sale of organisation funded anthologies. 

For a placement, we were asked to sell and market The Golden Hours, a new publication by the Salon, which is an anthology of work from writers and poets in Edinburgh. We worked with Jaime, the host of the Salon, John and Anita.  

As part of the selling team, we struggled to decide the best place to start to sell The Golden Hours. The sheer number of bookshops in Edinburgh was daunting. My initial thought was to sell the book on the Edinburgh Napier University’s Merchiston Campus; as that is what I had done to create sales and presence at my university with The Quarryman: a journal that I was the editor of during my time in my undergraduate. 

The sale was truly a success and we sold not only The Golden Hours, but also the Edinburgh Literary Salon’s first anthology: Lost, Looking, and Found. We were able to entice sales by giving away an additional free book from the Scottish Book Trust. We held the sale during Book Week Scotland, created by Scottish Book Trust, who create a free book every year by receiving submissions from people all over Scotland.  

We sold fifteen anthologies and raised £143 for the Salon through sales of the books, and I took on the task of transferring the money to the Salon. Due to small setbacks, sometimes the administration tasks in projects can be the most tedious; but they are also the most important and you must follow through. With the money from the sale, the Salon can continue to rent a space for writers and get speakers to speak at the events and potentially another anthology! 

Networking can, in fact, lead to that first job or to professional advancement’ and is crucial at the beginning of a publishing career. – Joseph G. Gerard 2012.

In the initial month, Anita created two workshops that focused on speech and performance to prepare us to sell The Golden Hours to bookshops to writers and the creative community at the Edinburgh Literary Salon. We were asked to come out of our comfort zone with icebreakers and prepare for the unexpected aspects of working in the creative industry. It gave us a moment to refocus on what we expected the publishing industry to entail and understand that this would not be the last time we were out of comfort zone. 

This workshop prepared us for networking opportunities at The Salon. This is the kind of ‘networking [that] can, in fact, lead to that first job or to professional advancement’ and is crucial at the beginning of a publishing career (Gerard, 2012). The best thing I have gained from this placement is that I have been in a safe creative space where, after each Salon, there is a networking opportunity that is relaxed and usually with a small crowd. I have made friends and contacts for the future that are outside of my degree.  

If I had the opportunity to do the placement again, I would combine the selling and marketing teams in meetings so that we could motivate, and bounce ideas off each other. As time went on, several students were not able to commit fully to the placement. We lost them and our group soon became much smaller, but still required the same amount of work. I also think that without specific leaders and task allocation, a lot of tasks were floating and there wasn’t a strong sense of motivation without deadlines. Self-directed projects sometimes fall into these pitfalls.  

That is why it is so important for writers to share their work and try produce a publication of upcoming writers especially with the strong community surrounding the Edinburgh Literary Salon. They use an independent publisher, Merchiston Publishing, and designers and editors from the Edinburgh Napier MSc Publishing course to create a low budget, but high-quality book.  

The funds from the sale of The Golden Hours go back into running the Salon and helping to publish another anthology, in the future. 

Here is the link if you want to support this creative space: 

Shop | Edinburgh Literary Salon 

Edinburgh Literary Salon is Monthly Salon & Biannual Anthology (buymeacoffee.com) 

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