Episode 24: Callie Garnett – “There’s a Cheerleader Inside of Me”

We spend a killer ep. 24 with Callie Garnett, poet and editorial director of fiction and memoir at Bloomsbury Publishing. (FYI Callie acquired and edited Hilary’s 2025 novel State Champ.) Callie pulls back the curtain on acquisitions at a thriving mid-sized independent, sharing some actual sales points, talking comps and their pitfalls, how publishing is a business of consensus and “getting people onboard,” pitch meetings and “speak[ing] the language of the money people,” and what it’s like answering 300 emails a day. Tons of inside knowledge gets generously shared and we also dive deep on reading itself and the modes in which we are, aren’t, should, and maybe shouldn’t be doing it. We talk sales tracks and “frontloading” in fiction, grad school vs. everything else, publishing as political work, poetry in the attention economy, and the slow collapse of the institutions of the humanities.

A lot gets mentioned including the great books Outlawed by Anna North, Red Clocks by Leni Zumas, Revenge of the Scapegoat by Caren Beilin (published by Dorothy, check out Index for Continuance ep. 2), and A Field of Telephones by Zach Savich (published by 53rd State Press, see ep. 19). Pick up Callie’s collection Wings in Time here. The Song Cave is edited by Ben Estes and Alan Felsenthal. Hilary gets mad again about how few of you have read Christian TeBordo’s Toughlahoma but hey it’s never too late.