Brought to you by Penguin.

Hello and welcome to this very special drop of the Penguin podcast.

If you are somebody who would like to write and maybe get

that writing in a book in somebody's real, real hands, this is the episode for you. We're going to be

doing a really big deep dive into how the whole process works. What is an agent? How do I get

published? What even is writing? Who am I? We're going to find out some of that today and we are joined by some really,

really special guests. Derek Ousoo is the author of That Reminds Me, which was published in 2019 to

huge acclaim. I was looking at the kind of quotes you got for your book and I was just like,

this is a roster of all the most incredible writers in Britain at the moment. We've got Crystal,

who is his agent. Hi, Crystal. Hi, nice to be here. And at the end, we've got Tom, who is the editor of the book. So we've got the three stages of the process. I'm going to be quizzing everybody on their part in what made this book real, important, amazing. And we're going to be getting down to some of the mysteries that are behind the curtain of publishing. Because it's kind of a confusing process, right? If on the outside before

any of you kind of worked in publishing or got published, it's a bit of a weird system.

It's still confusing. You're still like, you're like, I'm not really sure that happened.

Derek, let's start off with you.

Tell me a little bit about the idea for the book, how it got started, and how you started writing it. Because it's kind of, it's even scary, just put pen to paper sometimes, I think. Yeah, it is. And I think the good thing about the book when I started writing it, when I started writing it, kind of like as poetry, as vignettes, is that I wasn't thinking about getting it published. I wasn't thinking about any of that. I wasn't thinking about audience or anything I was kind of writing it for me and to try and get a better understanding of me and where I was mentally at the time. And I was just kind of having fun. I just felt like I could do whatever I wanted, writing it whatever way I wanted to include

whatever I wanted. So that's what I was doing. And then I was actually just in Tom's office and we were just talking about a podcast. I can't remember the podcast is cool, but it basically takes rap albums and breaks them down. What's it called, Tom? Dissect. Yeah, we're talking about Dissect. yeah, we're talking about dissect and talking about Kendrick Lamar's new album.

And then, because we were talking about podcasts, I mentioned, oh, I might be doing a podcast with my little brother. And Tom really liked the idea. And he was like, oh, we should try and turn this into a book sort of thing. And then that's when I first was like, oh, book. Oh yeah, I'm writing some poetry stuff at a moment as well. And he was like, okay, just, you know, just kind of send it to me and whatnot.

And then I ended up going to meet Aquila, who was Stormsies manager. This was maybe like a year after Merky Books got launched and they published two books at that point. And I sent her some of the poetry. And she was like, oh yeah, it's great. She was like like we want to publish nonfiction but we've already

done two nonfiction books already so we maybe we can just kind of lead with what you're writing the

project thing are right and yeah and that's that's how i guess that's how it will happen i think you know

right place right time luckily stormy's manager liked what i was writing as well the perspective

because right from a garnian working class perspective she is a working

class guardian as well so obviously it resonated with her in that sense and that's how it all

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