Here at Hobeck, the question ‘Where do I sign?’ is our music. Those words don’t come too often and we hadn’t heard those words for a few months. However, those words came to us this week, over zoom, from the lips of our latest signing, Harry Fisher.
Let me take you back a few months.
Since mid-November, Adrian and I have been really quite slow reading submissions to Hobeck. We started off our Hobeck journey with high hopes of being able to respond much more quickly than other publishers. In that ambition, we were perhaps a little naïve. We thought we’d have time. At first, we were able to maintain our promise. Every two weeks or so we’d park ourselves in a local café with two Americanos and the submissions binder, read, swap, read, swap, and either tick or cross at the top.
Then, we got busy. The, we got even busier. As 2020 came to an end, it was clear that we’d have to temporarily close our doors to new offerings as the offerings were building into a bit of a hillock. Harry Fisher’s submission was in the hillock. The frustration we felt was that we knew that one or two of the submissions in amongst the bulging binder were going to be future authors and hopefully also future friends. We had the enthusiasm, we just didn’t have the time to seek them out.
About a month ago we decided to dedicate a random Monday morning to submissions. We sat together on comfy chairs with coffees (pretending it was a café) and we silently read, swapped, read, swapped and either ticked or crossed. As we read Harry’s submission, we looked at each other, the look which said ‘yes, love this one’. I can’t quite tell you what it was about Harry’s submission that sang to us. We just knew. We asked for the full manuscript. Then, we got busy again.
Then last week we both had a window of time and decided to read. We selected Harry’s book. After a few paragraphs, I kicked myself that we had waited this long. Then as if the lucky version of lightning was striking, Harry popped up in the Hobeck inbox. He gave us the incentive to finish, which we did over the weekend. We decided quite quickly that Hobeck had to publish his book. We just had to. It was meant to be, surely? But sometimes ‘meant to be’ doesn’t happen. But, we were in luck.
Less than 48 hours later, Adrian and I found ourselves sitting side-by-side on the sofa when those magic words travelled from the North East of Scotland to our ears: ‘Where do I sign?’
The rest, as they say, is the future. I would like to thank Harry Fisher for uttering those words to us and for making our week that bit more colourful than it would otherwise have been.
As much as a writer might feel they are lucky to have found a publisher, speaking as a publisher, we always feel lucky to have found a writer. We never take the specialness of that for granted. The day that happens is the day we will stop doing this.
We are still pinching ourselves when we think about the stable of authors we have gathered in just twelve months. They actually want us to publish their books! We thank them all for having faith in us, and this week, we thank Harry for joining to team.
Welcome, Harry Fisher (pictured here with his wife's god-daughter, Zoey Clark, Scotland and Great Britain 400m/relay multiple medal winner). To find out more about Harry please see the author page on our website.