Amy Mae Baxter

Editor and magazine founder, Amy Mae Baxter, chats to us about balancing two roles, burnout and her contribution to making the publishing industry more diverse.

Amy Mae Baxter is editor at Dialogue Books (Hachette) and the founder and editor-in-chief of Bad Form, a multi-award-winning books magazine by and about writers of colour. She was named a Bookseller Rising Star in 2021, and a Big Issue Changemaker of 2022. She is a fan of rom-coms, Thai food and the Real Housewives.

‘Putting my face to something like this has built my confidence, my communication, and my organisation and discipline.’

Just to start us off, what are you reading at the moment?

Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler - I’ve been meaning to read it for ages. It’s about a woman living in New York who discovers that her boyfriend has a social media account as an alt-right guy. It's all written from her perspective: like a monologue and she’s talking to a fake audience. It’s a bit batshit, but it's so interesting and funny. People have had such mixed reactions to it but I would highly, highly recommend it.

You’ve had a meteoric rise in publishing so far. Can you talk us through your career and how you got started as an editor?

Before I start, I want to fully acknowledge that I'm white-passing, I'm privately educated and I went to Cambridge. I always, always want to state that. 

I was actually going to be an accountant. I had an accountancy job lined up after uni, but then I went to a talk with Simon Prosser. Simon is the publisher at Hamish Hamilton, which is part of Penguin General. They casually publish all the literary greats like Zadie Smith, Ali Smith and Bernardine Evaristo. I already knew that I wanted to set up a magazine for writers of colour [which would later become Bad Form] and when I chatted to him about it he mentioned The Scheme, PRH’s editorial traineeship for people from diverse backgrounds. The applications closed that night. I’d had a glass of wine at this event so thought…  why not! God knows how but I somehow made it through the interview process. I started in Autumn 2019 at Michael Joseph, and six months in I was offered a permanent position. My first day as an editorial assistant was the day before lockdown. 

I spent a year working for Rowland White [Publishing Director, Michael Joseph] on commercial nonfiction before I moved over to Little, Brown as an assistant editor, where I worked across three imprints for four editors. I became a full-time editor on Dialogue in July, which is now its own division publishing writers of colour, LGBTQ+ writers, disabled writers, and working-class writers. 

‘I still get Christmas catalogues now with no writers of colour in them - how is this still happening?!’

So, you were going to set up Bad Form even before you decided to go into publishing?

I think there was a part of me that knew I would always be doing something like Bad Form, especially because I couldn’t imagine not having a creative outlet had I become an accountant. In hindsight, if I'd not been in publishing I don’t know how I would have kept it going without any industry knowledge; there's just so much you don't realise you need to learn. Saying that, I do wish that working in publishing helped more than it does. Most people didn't want to know about Bad Form at the beginning and it's only really been since I've been here at Dialogue that people are interested in the magazine and what I have to say. I didn't get a review copy of anything until Black Lives Matter happened. To be fair, we didn't have the following we do now and so we weren’t going to help publishers that much with marketing their books. But I still get Christmas catalogues now with no writers of colour in them - how is this still happening?! It’s shocking.

Bad Form has taken off since its launch in 2019. What inspired you to found the magazine and how did you go about it?

I knew I wanted to promote writers of colour because I wanted to read books by Asian writers myself and I couldn’t find that many. I would have thought that someone else would have started something like Bad Form ages ago, but I couldn’t find anything. I’m still shocked that in 2019 I was the first person to start a magazine like this.

There was this statistic in The Bookseller in 2016 that less than 100 books by British BAME authors were published out of the 250,000 books published that year. That's about a day’s worth of British writers of colour. There was not a single black male British novelist published that year.

Ultimately that’s what we are working against: an industry that made that happen. 

‘I think Bad Form is really testament to how many really cool and interesting people are a part of this space.'

What skills have you developed from working on Bad Form and do you think these have helped progress your editorial career?

Bad Form is a project separate from my full-time job. There’s so much work that goes into side projects that people don't see - the accounts, the filing, the organisation, the emails - and it's so easy to become demotivated when you’re not earning any money from that work. We couldn't pay our writers for so long and I definitely wasn’t paying myself.

That’s why I try to think of it as a hobby. I really care about it and I'm really passionate about it, and if I just thought of it as a side hustle, I would have quit a long time ago. There have been so many times when I could have quit, and the only thing that keeps me going is that it is something I love doing: I love promoting writers; I love getting them book deals. I love helping them on that journey, and that's really special to me.

Putting my face to something like this has built my confidence, my communication, and my organisation and discipline. Bad Form has lasted so long because of my discipline: there have been people with much better ideas than me and in similar positions but they haven’t stuck it out. I have a lot of privilege in that sense because I’ve always had a job to fall back on and to pay rent with, but I think I also really push myself to see this vision through. 

I’m also not involved in the commissioning or the editing anymore, so I have to trust people a lot and ultimately, it’s on me. It’s on me if this goes to shit. 

What are you most proud of during your time as Bad Form’s Editor-in-Chief?

The first time one of our writers got a book deal. I'd been there for their whole journey, so that made me really emotional. Our writers are so talented, and they would get book deals without Bad Form, but being able to help them on their journey is really very special. I remember the first book I bought by a Bad Form writer: it was someone who had written for us regularly, and now I’m their publisher at Dialogue, and that has made me so proud. 

I'm proud of every issue that we put out; every time we make something physical. I think Bad Form is really testament to how many really cool and interesting people are a part of this space that I started but is no longer mine, this space that now exists outside of me. 

Is there anything you wish you had done differently with Bad Form or in your editorial career?

I wish I'd let go of the idea that I needed to move up quickly. I wish I had learned to enjoy it more instead of stressing and missing out on the cool parts of my editorial career so far. I should have focused more on what I was doing at the time when I had less responsibility and I could indulge in it. You’ve got the rest of your life to achieve more; you don’t have to do it all so quickly. 

From a Bad Form perspective, I wish I hadn’t treated it like a business from the beginning. The biggest mistake was not relaxing into it. Working so intensely is how you burn out; it’s how you end up with mental health problems. Bad Form is constantly evolving, so we have the freedom to bring out different types of content, so we decided to publish seasonally now. We realised that people don’t actually care how frequently we publish, we just put that on ourselves.

Your writers at Bad Form all come from diverse backgrounds. How did you manage this, and how can publishers actively ensure that they authentically represent a range of lived experiences?

I grew up in North West London. My background was never really questioned but when I moved away people did start asking where I was “from-from”. It was weird because it wasn't even really discussed when we grew up because it was so normal, but it’s definitely not in publishing. 

When people sign up to work with Bad Form, they have to tick a box on whether or not they identify as a person of colour. The bigger we get the more people we have asking. I’ve just had a message from someone asking if Bad Form is for them as they are white-passing. I’m passing and I created the space, so if you think you don’t count then who does?! The more popular we get the more abuse we've had, like emails calling us racist for not including white people. People write really detailed, fake applications to troll us. I mean, really, do you think we could get the spotlight for one minute? But ultimately you just have to trust people. If applications are for people of colour, then people need to respect that. 

In terms of getting publishers to diversify, that’s a much wider question. There’s a whole world of questions wrapped up in who gets to write about characters outside of their own perspectives. For me, including characters from a background the author is not a part of is different to writing a main character from a background they don’t have lived experience of. I don’t have all the answers either, but fundamentally, there are more books about white people written by white authors - but we don’t see that similarity for black and brown books by authors from BAME backgrounds. There’s an issue of white people taking up space that could be filled by a person of colour, because we don’t publish into an equitable publishing industry and so everyone is not being afforded the same opportunities right now.

‘You’ve got the rest of your life to achieve more; you don’t have to do it all so quickly.’

You’ve been vocal about racism in publishing, writing for Vogue last year about the lack of diverse authors as well as the lack of diverse creatives behind them. Do you think publishers’ approach to racism within the industry has changed? Are publishers starting to take responsibility for their mistakes?

I can't comment on individual publishers and how they work but I would say that I’m very lucky to work for the highest-ranking Black publisher in Europe. It’s wild to me how few Black publishers there are. You always have to pay attention to why diversity schemes are always entry-level. I know very few people of colour in higher editorial positions but then teams are saying that they have a diverse team. To be truly diverse you have to be diverse across all levels. 

But then again, how do you move people sideways into an industry that is so reliant on prior knowledge and contextual knowledge and industry knowledge? Penguin have started their Next Editors programme, where anyone who has three years of experience in any industry can train to become a Commissioning Editor, which is exciting. I’m very interested in how many people are already coming from a publishing or editorial background, which feels counterproductive. I think it's a really great step in the right direction and I'm curious to see how many of them find jobs afterwards, if they do stay in publishing.

You’ve said that your dream is that books by marginalised writers become so present that magazines like Bad Form are made redundant, and working at Dialogue seems ideal for fulfilling this dream. How has the recent news of Dialogue Books becoming its own division made you feel about the impact that these conversations are having on the industry as a whole?

Dialogue was the first imprint of its kind, it’s really special. Sharmaine [Lovegrove, Dialogue’s Managing Director] didn’t come from a publishing background; she came from a bookshop and ran a book-to-film scouting agency. 

Another publishing house who published writers of colour is Jacaranda; they are now under Hachette too. If other publishers can see that this is a market that they need to tap into a bit more and devote more attention to, and as making commercial sense, then that brings more competition, and that’s exciting. Competition benefits these books and the authors, because the more publisher competition there is, the better we have to be, the better the books have to be, the better our publication strategy has to be. The only way is up. 

The question of whether we should segregate into intersections in the way I have done with Bad Form is interesting but unfortunately at the moment this is just the way it has to be in order to create space for everyone. It’s the system as it is.

Can you tell us about another woman in the creative industries who has inspired you?

My boss, Sharmaine Lovegrove. I moved to Hachette because I just wanted to work for her. I was really lucky at the time, as an assistant editor role working over fiction and non-fiction came up and I was ready to move up. It was just the right place at the right time. 

Divisions don’t get made every day. That’s a really unique and special situation for Sharmaine to be in. It’s a testament to her work ethic and her brilliance as a publisher. Working for someone who is such a visionary has shown me how whole industries can be changed. I think she is really incredibly special, a brilliant mentor and lovely person. 

The other person I just wanted to flag is Molly Crawford. Molly is an editorial director at Simon and Schuster. I met her when I was doing work experience at Transworld during my time on the Scheme. She is an incredibly kind, insightful publisher, who’s very giving with her time and knows so much about the industry. She builds other women up and it’s a privilege to learn from her. 

I actually DM’d Molly on Twitter and asked her to mentor me: she had always been kind to me and I was in need of her advice - and now people message me quite a lot now and ask for advice. I said yes a lot when I was first asked so I've mentored a few people already in publishing or on one of the traineeships. I used to do a lot of cover letter work, helping people with their CVs and interview prep. But I do think getting an entry level job in publishing is sometimes just luck, which isn’t what people want to hear: you could ace your application and have a great interview but someone might just be a bit better than you, or click with the manager more. The further away I get from assistant level, the less I can relate to what is required in the initial job application and interviews. I do try to help people who are already in the industry looking to move up though.