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Irish Examiner

Books are my business: Tramp Press founders Sarah Davis-Goff and Lisa Coen

Sarah Davis-Goff and Lisa Coen are founders of Tramp Press, an independent Irish publisher which was established in 2014. Authors it has published include Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Mona Eltahawy, Sara Baume and Mike McCormack. Tramp Press authors have won many accolades, including the International Dublin Literary Award, the Goldsmiths Prize, and the Rooney Prize. How did you get into publishing? Sarah: I was quite a sickly kid, and I missed a lot of school, so I read a lot. But it never occurred to me that working in books could be an actual job. I did a liberal arts degree in the US, in a college in Santa Fe. I was hired as a writing assistant there and then I could see how this might work as a career. I went on to Oxford Brookes University for a masters in publishing and then I worked for Dalkey Archive and briefly for Continuum, a non-fiction publisher based in New York. I met Lisa when I was covering someone's maternity leave in a Dublin publisher, and we started talking about trying things in a different way. All around us, we saw publishers throwing a lot of books against the wall and hoping that something would stick. We were wondering if we could just find those few books that may or may not be supported by the market. We weren't overly concerned with the perceived commercialism of the books that we were reading. We just wanted quality, quality, quality. It is part of the reason we publish so little, between two and four books a year. Lisa: I did my undergrad in Galway, and then I worked in magazines in Dublin for a while. I was going to work in publishing or academia, as I was really interested in research. I did a PhD on Irish theatre, and it was clear to me that academia wasn't something I was suited to at all. I wrapped my PhD up and then started an internship where I met Sarah, she was in the role temporarily and I thought that soon we'd both be out there competing for the very few jobs there were in publishing. It was dismaying because she is so impressive — she was telling everybody to read Donal Ryan way before his first book was published. We were talking about what we would do if we were publishers. At the time, literary fiction was left on the table a little. We started the company in a moment where there was a lot of contraction in publishing, a lot of anxiety and conservatism. I was really interested in people taking risks and setting the agenda themselves. It all kicked off from there. What does your role involve? Lisa: We're very lucky how complementary our work styles are. From the early days, we were competitively doing as much as we could, but now we both have small kids. We're able to give each other grace when that gets tricky. There's a lot of understanding around getting projects over the line together, as opposed to demonstrating presenteeism or being seen to go to meetings or whatever. We both do operational things, the admin that comes from just running a company. When it comes to editorial, I have traditionally taken the lead. When it comes to production and marketing campaigns, Sarah takes the lead. She is very thorough, energetic, and passionate — there is nobody who talks about books with such passion. I tend to take the lead on the social media stuff, so if we get cancelled, it will be my fault. Sarah: To some extent, I do take the lead on publicity, but a lot of the time that is just putting Lisa in front of a book buyer and letting her talk about a book, because it is very hard for them to say no to her, she's the Babe Ruth of pitches. It's very useful for us to be both across everything, we're small and we plan to remain small. It's just ourselves, our part-time administrator, Siobhán, who is amazing, and a team of exceptional freelancers. I love that, for the most part, we have very similar tastes and we get excited about the same things. What do you like most about what you do? Sarah: That sense of discovery is amazing. I'm usually the one who reads incoming subs, and there's a sense of possibility when you're opening up something, and you read the first couple of pages and you think: 'Oh, this is good'. There is no better feeling in the world. Lisa: It's really interesting when somebody allows you to see their creative process, it's very intimate and trusting. The writer does all the work, they have all the responsibility, it's their name on the cover, but getting to help them with the mechanics of that, I feel like that novelty will never wear off. It's such a privilege. To hear what somebody's trying to do and to help them get there, it's so exciting and energising. It really fills your soul up. What do you like least? Sarah: I don't like the responsibility sometimes, because no publisher, unfortunately, really knows what's going to happen when rubber meets the road. So you can have an extraordinary publicity campaign, exceptional reviews, and still the book won't sell, and that's devastating. Unfortunately, it happens fairly often, because this is publishing, and this is what the business looks like. But when you've worked so hard, when you're such a fan of the author, and when you know they deserve better, it's really hard to see. Lisa: I hate how sales have to be tied to a sense of accomplishment. I think the accomplishment is that Sarah found a book in the slush pile, or that we recognise a talent and we have brought it to market. That readers can get that either in their bookshop or in a library is a huge achievement. Three desert island books Sarah: Problems by Jade Sharma is a book we brought out some years ago, the voice is extraordinary and the ballsiness of it, it's great stuff. Persuasion by Jane Austen, which I'm rereading again. I just love it. I'm near the end now, and it's very tense — is Captain Wentworth going to come to Anne's father's house or not? I would also pick The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin, which is the first part of the Broken Earth series; it's not one for new mothers or new parents. It's really heartbreaking, but it's so beautiful. The greatest thing a book can do is open up your mind to different ways of thinking about things, and it does that across the board. Lisa: Because I'm fairly recently post-partum, Making Babies by Anne Enright, which is one of the finest pieces of writing on one of the most mundane and extraordinary experiences a person can go through. The Children of the Famine series by Marita Conlon McKenna; O'Brien Press recently brought out a beautiful green hardback special edition in a collaboration with Kenny's of Galway. For a lot of us, reading Under the Hawthorn Tree in primary school was a really formative moment. My third pick is Solar Bones by Mike McCormack. I absolutely don't have a favourite Tramp Press book, I'm not allowed to, but that book is an extraordinary moment in Irish literature. It really speaks to what we wanted when we were setting up the company, which is that the books you publish should matter. I think Solar Bones is the first line of our obituary.