‘The tide is turning’

Right now the number one bestselling novel on the Nielsen BookScan chart is All That We Know by Shilo Kino, a powerful story set in modern Auckland that explores culture wars between Māori and Pākehā, and my feeling, my reasoning, my experience tells me that it may very well hang onto its position at the summit until October 1, when the two most hotly anticipated novels of the year, Kataraina by Becky Manawatu (Auē) and Tree of Nourishment by Monty Soutar (Kāwai), are published on the same day. In short I think that a writer of colour will have the biggest-selling novel in the country until two other writers of colour publish their latest books. Hail 2024, a time of some kind of renaissance, maybe even a kind of revolution, in which a new, exciting literature in Aotearoa New Zealand continues to dominate the commercial market as readers want and demand fiction that reflects life on these islands in 2024. Helping to lead the charge is Kate Stephenson, publisher at Moa Press, who has added All That We Know to her list of number one bestsellers alongside The Bone Tree by Airana Ngarewa and Amma by Saraid de Silva. I interviewed her on Tuesday to ask her about just what is going on with the popularity of novels by writers of colour.

Congratulations on All That We Know going to number one in its first week onsale. What are your expectations?
We think it’s going to be huge. But I mean, publishing is always an unpredictable business, isn’t it? We’re sort of eternal optimists because we always think that, you know, the next book might be the one to take off. I think with Shilo’s book, obviously we’d love it to sell and sell and sell because we want everybody to read it.
We think it deserves a really wide readership. It’s such a special and important book that we want to find people. I felt that when I read it, it was the book that I needed to read, especially being relatively new back into New Zealand, having lived overseas for so long. And it made me feel sort of … slightly uncomfortable and confronted when I first read it, and that I wanted to interrogate why it made me feel that way.
So, yeah, it’s more that we obviously want this to find a wide readership because we believe in the story and the message and everything that Shilo’s sort of interrogated.
What are your expectations, though, as a commercial publisher? How well do you think it could do?
I’m not going to talk about what our sales projections would be. But we obviously had to take it through an acquisitions process and do a costing and make sure that we feel comfortable with the level that we’re acquiring. And when it comes time to print, you have to make sure that it all stacks up.
But beyond that, the way that fiction works in New Zealand, we are hoping that we’ll need to reprint from our first print run and that the demand will be such that we need to fulfil it with more print runs.
What was the journey with this book? Because you said in your launch speech that there was competition from other publishers, and you were grateful Shilo trusted you.
Shilo got in touch with me after we launched Moa Press and announced our initial list of authors, which included Saraid de Silva. So she was really interested in what we were doing and at that point she was working on her novel. When it was ready, it went out on submission to multiple publishers. And there was more than one publisher who wanted it and who made an offer and we just … We were very keen to woo Shilo our way. We so badly wanted the book for Moa Press, and believed we could do a really good job with it.
Was it a bidding war as such?
Yeah, I mean, you know how an auction works. I guess it’s not dissimilar to if you’re bidding on a property, you make an offer, and if other people have made an offer as well, then you have a chance to up your offer and put forward a really compelling and persuasive publishing pitch for how you would publish the book. And then the author, along with their agent, makes a decision on that basis.
I think Moa has helped to kind of revolutionise things in a very short space of time. You are publishing New Zealand novels which sell, and it’s happened at the same time as Michelle Hurley has come up with that brilliant idea of a commercial fiction prize at Allen & Unwin, partly in response to low sales figures of New Zealand fiction, and she wanted to do something about that. Do you have a comment on this new environment of commercial fiction in New Zealand?
That prize was happening at about the same time as Moa were launching. And it was happening at a time when it seemed New Zealanders were starting to look more inward, and value more local stories. You know, I think there has traditionally been a bit of a cultural cringe. But I think the tide was just starting to shift at that point in time.
And I think, you know, probably Jacinda Ardern’s leadership encouraged that as well, because there was also movement towards much more Māori language used publicly. An important part of what we’re doing with Moa Press is that aim to champion a diverse range of voices, representing a multitude of cultures and perspectives from within Aotearoa. And that has always been a key objective and a key goal of what we’re doing.
And so we do a huge range of fiction. Fiction is my passion and my background. Our  publishing list is heavily fiction dominated. But I never really thought that that was going to be possible. When I moved back to New Zealand, I sort of reconciled myself with the idea that I wouldn’t be able to do that because, you know, I always thought, ‘Oh the market’s too small. There’s only room for a little bit of sort of literary fiction and it’s not going to be possible.’
But in fact when I came back, I discovered a really rich kind of literary scene. There was so much going on at Penguin Random House with Coco Solid, and Bateman had that huge hit with Kāwai by Monty Soutar, and Victoria University Press with Rebecca K Reilly’s Greta and Valdin which is now finding a huge readership in the UK. There was also Huia Books and Kurangaituku by Whiti Hereaka.
And when we launched Amma, we did it in conjunction as a joint event with romesh dissanayake and their novel When I Open The Shop. We had Chris Tse speaking on behalf of Saraid, and Brannavan Gnanalingam speaking on behalf of romesh. It was an incredible event and it really did show off how rich and diverse our literary scene is in New Zealand.
But it’s hard to get the sales, even though there’s a lot of talent.
Well, you seem to be getting the sales, though. Look at The Bone Tree by Airana Ngarewa. Look at Amma, and it’s early days but obviously Shilo’s shot straight up into number one and I am predicting it will stay there for some time. All three are writers of colour. What’s going on, do you think? Everyone talks about the importance of diversity, but there’s actually commercial merit in it, isn’t there?
Well, we equally have success with Pākehā writers as well. One of our biggest sellers on the list was Olivia Spooner’s The Girl from London. But yeah. The tide is turning.  
And these writers like Shilo, the characters are so real. Her characters feel like real people, and they are representative of the world that we are living in right now. So relevant, so timely in so many different ways.
And I think that Miriama’s incredible speech at Shilo’s launch, which you put out on ReadingRoom, she made such an important point that Māori are a people, not just one person. And I think what the brilliance of Shilo’s book is the multitude of experiences and perspectives and characters that she includes. There’s so much to dig into, and it’s really key that people do dig into it because it’s what we need.
Obviously it’s still an incredibly challenging market and the international fiction does win out most of the time. But at Moa Press, we’re committed to championing these novels, these stories, and we have the full backing of our international colleagues as well. I’m always trying to find international deals for authors and it’s actually easier to do that with fiction than it is with nonfiction.
You are publishing New Zealand fiction in what appears to be a considerably bad and harrowing recession. How’s it going right now in this winter of national discontent?
Well, we are happy that our local fiction is up on last year. So yeah. We have so much faith in our incredible writers and want to do the best by them. It’s very challenging for people to buy books in New Zealand at the moment. But we are doing well.
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All That We Know by Shilo Kino (Moa Press, $37.99), the number one bestselling novel on the Nielsen BookScan chart, is available in bookstores nationwide. ReadingRoom is devoting all week to this powerful new novel. Monday: the opening chapter. Tuesday: the launch speech by Miriama Kamo. Tomorrow: an epic review by Jordan Tricklebank.