Kathryn Faulke’s ‘extraordinary’ debut selected for BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week

EVERY KIND OF PEOPLE, the ‘life-affirming and utterly humbling’ (Caroline Sanderson, The Bookseller) memoir by care worker Kathryn Faulke has been selected as BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week. Published on 24 October by Penguin Fig Tree, this vital and vivid memoir will be serialised on the radio station at 11.45 each day throughout the week, starting on Monday 28 October, with the full series available on BBC Sounds for the next 30 days. The book will be read by Ayesha Antoine, who also narrated Penguin’s audiobook, and was abridged and produced by Jill Waters of the Waters Company for BBC Radio 4.

You can listen or catch up online at BBC Sounds here.

This week Kathryn also featured on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week, where she was invited to discuss the adult social care crisis, and how to fix it, alongside journalist and editor David Goodhart (author of THE CARE DILEMMA), social policy expert Anna Coote, and host Adam Rutherford. You can listen to their discussion on BBC Sounds here – where Adam Rutherford says EVERY KIND OF PEOPLE is ‘full of love and full of warmth’ and Anna Coote adds that ‘Kathryn is the greatest recruitment officer for carers – everyone should read her book.’

After the programme EVERY KIND OF PEOPLE leaped up to Number 40 on Amazon’s ‘Hot New Releases’ list. The Daily Mail also featured an extract from EVERY KIND OF PEOPLE and Kathryn was interviewed by the Guardian about her experiences and writing the book.

Kate – as Kathryn is referred to in EVERY KIND OF PEOPLE – never expected to become a home care worker. But when she left her senior role in the NHS, burnt-out and disheartened, she thought caring for people in their own homes would be a simpler job. Despite being determined not to become too involved with her 'customers', she soon found herself developing firm friendships, forging deep connections and bearing witness to the extraordinary drama to be found in ordinary lives.

With energy, compassion and clarity, her memoir gives an astonishing insight into this unsung – and often maligned – profession, and into the hidden lives of the housebound and infirm. From Beryl who screams like a banshee whenever Kate tries to wash her, but collapses in giggles when her toes are tickled, to bawdy Mr Radbert who 'promised to give me his car when he can remember where he left it'.

EVERY KIND OF PEOPLE is a clear-eyed about the challenges facing the NHS and the care system. But it is above all a celebration of humanity and of the life-changing impact of caring, on those who offer it and those who receive it.

About Kathryn Faulke

Kathryn Faulke was runner-up in the Wasafiri International New Writing Prize in 2020, and in 2021 she won the Mslexia Memoir Prize for an earlier version of her debut, EVERY KIND OF PEOPLE. She has now moved out of London but continues to work in care in the South East of England.

EVERY KIND OF PEOPLE: A Journey into the Heart of Carework is a vivid, moving and unforgettable memoir recounting Kathryn Faulke’s experiences as a careworker in London. It was selected as a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week and has received widespread praise and media attention.

Praise for EVERY KIND OF PEOPLE

‘A deeply compelling story of one of the most unsung professions, brimming with anecdotes to make you both laugh and cry. A vital book.’ – Anna Bonet, ‘The Best New Books Out in October’, i

‘Marvellously life-affirming and utterly humbling.’ – Caroline Sanderson, Editor’s Choice, The Bookseller

‘Not just essential reading for anyone curious about the realities of care work in this country; it’s also the work of a natural storyteller, and a book full of empathy, humour, and – yes – care.  All kinds of brilliant.’ – Jon McGregor

‘An extraordinary and important book that will make you laugh, cry, admire and despair in equal measure.  Beautifully written, it is both heart-warming and inspiring… a wonderful achievement.’ – Dr Sir David Haslam

‘Kathryn Faulke is an extraordinary person and this is an extraordinary account of what it is to care for others; of the labour of caring, which is both physical and emotional, but also of the joy of caring and the blessing that there is in giving time and attention to others… This book is a compassionate invitation to get up close to the human condition and those who attend to it.’ – Gwen Adshead

‘I am in love with Kate's storytelling, her ability to see the person and her fabulous, dry humour. This is a book about caring, and it's also a book about being in love with humanity’ – Kathryn Mannix

‘This is a fantastic and important book. It reads like a novel, complete with vivid characters, humour and tragedy. Above all, it is an insight into the hidden life of a care worker. I was lost in admiration.’ – Tom Shakespeare

‘Kathryn is the greatest recruitment officer for carers – everyone should read her book.’ – Anna Coote, Principal Fellow at the New Economics Foundation

‘EVERY KIND OF PEOPLE talks about what it’s actually like to be a carer: it’s full of love and full of warmth.’ – Adam Rutherford

BFLA Open Week: Why Audio Rights Matter

Written by Roya Sarrafi-Gohar

The rise in the popularity of audiobooks is one of the biggest changes in the publishing industry in the past decade. While this means that audio rights to books are potentially worth a lot of money, many authors may not know that these rights can be sold separately to an audio publisher, rather than to the book’s print or eBook publisher. It isn’t always possible to hold back audio rights, and it is much more likely with some publishers than others.

If an agent can hold back audio rights when doing a book deal, then sell those rights separately to an audio publisher, this is most often likely to mean extra income for the author, as it usually comes with a separate advance, and a separate stream of royalty income once the advance earns out. Sometimes it is even helpful to have a separate offer for audio rights just to show an author the monetary value of those rights.

As with book design choices, control of the production of the audiobook, including choice of narrator, is ultimately with the publisher, but generally the publisher will at least consult with the author on their narrator choices. Choosing a narrator can be an exciting opportunity for an author to bring their work to life in a new way, and sometimes authors narrate themselves, if they pass an audition. Narrating a whole audiobook can be more taxing than it first appears!

Sometimes an agent will also try to hold back radio rights and try to sell these separately. This is usually a straight reading of an abridgement of the work on programmes such as BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime. A very small proportion of books get picked up for radio, but this is again a potential additional source of income. What’s more, it can often give the book sales a boost, as a lot more people become aware of the book, and if they listen to the whole abridgement, they might want to read the full unabridged version too.

This all goes to show that there can be a lot more to a book than just a print copy or eBook – there’s a variety of ways that a book can find audiences, and bring in more income for authors.

Kaite O’Reilly’s PRIDE AND PROTEST on BBC Radio 4’s Drama of the Week

Kaite O’Reilly’s PRIDE AND PROTEST – a powerful examination of disability rights, anger, friendship, and womanhood – was BBC Radio 4’s Drama of the Week (13th May 2022).

Julie McNamara recording PRIDE AND PROTEST. Image credit: Kaite O’Reilly (@kaiteoreilly) on Twitter

Featuring disability actors Sara Beer, Mared Jarman, and Julie McNamara, Kaite’s play tells the story of Seren, a once fierce activist, who is nostalgic for the old campaigns and frontline high jinks. She can’t get over her daughter’s anxiety and apathy about climate change, but is slow to understand the impact of her disability activism on her daughter’s childhood.

PRIDE AND PROTEST is now available on BBC Sounds to stream and download for free.

Praise for PRIDE AND PROTEST:

‘Kaite O’Reilly’s play is a thoughtful, often shaming treatise on the predicament of those disquieted by injustice: to what extent can or should someone dedicate their life to a cause?’ – Jack Seale, The Guardian

‘Although these insights into contemporary disabled life are horrific, O’Reilly carries them with a lightness of touch… Harnessing hope and rage in equal measure, Pride and Protest examines the complex issues of identity politics, disability rights, and queer relationships with a playfulness that can’t help but charm the listener.’ – Natasha Sutton Williams, Disability Arts Online

About Kaite O’Reilly

Kaite is a multi-award winning playwright and radio dramatist.

She has won many awards for her work, including the Peggy Ramsay Award, Manchester Theatre Awards best play of the year, Theatre-Wales Award and the Ted Hughes Award for new works in Poetry for PERSIANS for National Theatre Wales. Widely published and produced, she works internationally.

Her plays are collected in the critically acclaimed ATYPICAL PLAYS FOR ATYPICAL ACTORS, published by Oberon, with the forthcoming THE ‘D’ MONOLOGUES about disability, difference and diversity published to coincide with the UK Autumn tour.

She has written extensively for radio, and she wrote and directed ‘Mouth’, a Screen Gem, back in 2000. Her first screenplay THE ALMOND AND THE SEAHORSE, co-written with Celyn Jones, was produced as a feature film in 2021 starring Rebel Wilson.

A veteran of the disabled peoples’ movement, she received two Cultural Olympiad Commissions for IN WATER I’M WEIGHTLESS, part of the official Olympiad Festival during the 2012 London Paralympics/Olympics. A leading figure in the UK’s disability arts and culture, she is patron of Disability Arts Cymru and DaDaFest.

BFLA OPEN WEEK: What’s Right for Rights?

Written by Roya Sarrafi-Rohar

Many people don’t know what a literary agency does, and most new authors are no different. Some might have been surprised to learn that their manuscript’s journey to publication is likely to start with a literary agent (or assistant!), rather than with an editor at a publishing house, and wonder why that is. In response, an agent can explain all the things they do to help books find their readers and help authors build careers. But we can also explain it in more hard-nosed terms: an agent’s job is ultimately to sell rights. While this might not be the most exciting topic for an aspiring author, it’s helpful to understand what we mean by rights and why they matter.

An author will (usually) own the copyright to their work. A book deal (generally) involves an author granting the publisher a licence to print, sell and promote their work in book form, although many other rights might be included too: the author will still technically “own” their work, but the publisher has the right to use it in the ways made clear in their contract, and with certain conditions.

When we grant rights to a publisher, they are always defined and limited: they will cover specific formats and languages, across specific territories (e.g. UK and Commonwealth, or US + Canada), for a certain period, and each of these rights will be exclusive or non-exclusive. Rights can be split up by and agent and sold to different publishers, and non-exclusive rights can be sold more than once. This means that an author and agent can find lots of new sources of income from one book, in different territories, languages or formats, and can decide which publisher would be best for the book in each case.

What all this looks like in practice will vary a lot from deal to deal, and there are a lot of factors the agent and author need to consider when deciding what rights to grant or hold back. But in a UK book deal, the exclusive rights are most likely to be limited to the English language, in the UK and Commonwealth territories, for full term of copyright, in print, eBook and often audio formats too, along with certain other rights.  

If you have a UK book deal that looks like that, it means that the author and their agent have held on to a lot of other rights that you can sell elsewhere. You can sell rights to publish in the US to a US-based publisher, where they are probably best placed to sell the book to local readers, or you can sell French translation rights to a publisher based in France. If you have a licence term of 5-8 years, as you often do in audio or translation deals, you can renew or sell the same rights all over again after that term has expired.

It is a huge task to keep track of all these available rights, all the deals made, the various editors and publishers in the picture, as well as the trends in markets across the world – it’s extremely challenging for an author to do alone, and this is what a literary agency specialises in.

There are also other rights your agent might license, which don’t strictly involve publishing the work as a book. There are straight reading rights, for example, for when the work is abridged and read on the radio (for example, as Radio 4 Book of the Week). The most significant of these additional rights is probably film and TV rights, although that world works very differently to book publishing. Some literary agencies, including Blake Friedmann, have an in-house media department which can handle book-to-film deals for our authors.

All of this might make it clear why an author should care about what happens with the rights to their work – it can mean that they earn more money, that their book available to more people, and they have more control over what happens with their book/s.  

If an author has the option of a book deal directly with a publisher, and they are wondering whether it’s worth getting an agent, one thing they should consider is what will happen with all these rights if looked after by the publisher. Often, when an author deals directly with a publisher, many more rights will be granted to the publisher, as an unagented author can’t do much with them anyway. The publisher’s rights department might then sell the rights they aren’t exploiting themselves on to other publishers, such as audio or translation publishers. They will take a cut of the income from these sublicences and pass the rest on to the author.

In theory, you could get very good financial terms in a deal like this, if your work is with a publisher with an active rights department, meaning you are no worse off with a publisher handling these rights than a literary agency – but this is often not the case in practice. An agent is vested in finding as many revenue streams as possible for their author, and building them long-term publishing relationships around the world. A publisher may not have the same resources or financial incentive to sell rights. So if an author thinks their book can lead to lots of separate deals in different formats and territories, they are likely to be better off with an agent.

Of course, this is only one aspect of what an agent offers an author, and the decision whether to find an agent, and which, should be considered alongside the value of industry expertise, vision for the book/s and editorial input, not to mention the personal relationship between author and agent. We could be considered a little biased on this issue, but we have an incredible Rights team who are keen to see our books translated around the world and possibly even watched on screen!