Sharmaine Lovegrove is the managing director of Dialogue Publishing, a division of Hachette UK oriented towards inclusivity. Now a star of the British publishing world, Lovegrove began her career as a bookseller, working at various bookstores in London before founding her own shop in Berlin.
It only operated as a brick-and-mortar for five years across two different locations, but it birthed an event series, a consultancy for authors, a scouting business, and an imprint-turned-division at Hachette – all of which, charmingly, shared the name Dialogue. On the 15th anniversary of Dialogue the bookstore, we visited the London-born Wahlberlinerin to reflect on her journey from bookselling to publishing and beyond.
How did you land here in 2009, and what made you open a bookstore?
So… the B-word. Berghain. (laughs) As a Londoner, it’s really funny when people talk about “brat summer” – is that not just literally your entire teens and twenties? So I had a brat decade, which included going back and forth between Berlin and London, and I fell in love with the potential of Berlin. I found the city fascinating; I felt I could be part of it.
Germany has this Buchpreisbindung, a legal guarantee about book pricing. And Berlin was a cultural capital where there were enough people speaking English, but it didn’t have a great central store dedicated only to new English books. I felt really strongly as a 27-year-old that the most important thing was not secondhand stores but the new books ecosystem, which brings money to the authors. I love seeing gaps – and here was a gap. So I decided to fill it.
What did you like about bookselling?
What I love most about bookselling is when somebody comes in and you can’t tell what they’re going to want. You get into these very live conversations; the discourse between you can go in any direction. You get put on the spot. It’s great for the synapses. And you can’t pretend to know what you don’t know, which creates connections between people, so then they trust you, they trust the story, and they trust the whole experience more. There’s something very beautiful about that. And, I mean, who doesn’t just want to be surrounded by thousands of books all day?
Our responsibility is to think about the breadth of society, and how readers could be anyone.
How has that experience shaped you as a publisher?
I draw upon my knowledge from having been a bookseller every single day of my career. A lot of books get seen really narrowly in terms of their scope, because most people in those positions haven’t worked with readers so directly. Whereas I am aware of the full scope of readership, and I tend to think about all the different people that we might be able to get different books to. On top of that, I’m very much aware of the fact that it takes eight to 12 hours to read a book – you’re asking people to step away from their friends and family, to step away from their phone, and basically enter into this other world. So the book has got to be good.
What do you mean by the scope of possible readership?
I mean, if you only have the same type of people working in publishing – middle class white women – then they are all publishing books directed to their mums, or to their younger sister, but that’s not what our society looks like. Our responsibility is to think about the breadth of society, and how readers could be anyone. Publishers massively underestimate Black readership.
They also tend to assume that someone like me wouldn’t have read Anaïs Nin because she’s a white woman, or Joseph Roth, or someone from an Arab nation, or that I wouldn’t love John Berger or Sebald from quite a young age, just because they don’t look like me or come from the same place as me – which is wild. And it’s a total misunderstanding of what we come to books for. We want to understand the stories of other people.
Have you got any reading tips for us, from your Dialogue list or otherwise?
I can highly recommend a cookbook called Classic German Baking by Luisa Weiss, and I really loved Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin. I think Berliners would really love that one because it’s about living in an apartment – in this case in Paris – and it’s about the coincidences and the choices in the life that you lead. I’ve also published some books by people who live in Berlin: Doing It All by Ruby Russell, which is about the social power of single motherhood, as well as Permission by Saskia Vogel, Blueprint by Theresia Enzensberger, Cygnet by Season Butler, Tim Mohr’s history book Burning Down the Haus, and the Olivia Wenzel novel 1000 Coils of Fear.
- Check out the bell hooks’ memoir Bone Black and other new releases by following Dialogue on Instagram.
