Oliver Malcolm on agenting, honesty and what really moves the needle for authors
Publishing expert Oliver Malcolm shares candid advice on agenting, book sales, the 10k reads tipping point and building a long-term author career.
What’s covered in this post
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Why Oliver has moved into agenting and the kind of authors he wants to work with
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The number of reads he thinks is needed for a meaningful tipping point for momentum for a novel
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The four-quadrant model he uses to think about author careers (and why it’s controversial)
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What publishers get wrong about rising stars, ROI and long-term investment
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What to do when your book isn’t breaking through
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If you’ve been around UK publishing for any length of time, there’s a good chance you’ll already know the name Oliver Malcolm.
Oliver spent years in senior roles, including at Penguin Random House, HarperCollins and Hachette where he was Managing Director of Hodder & Stoughton. He set up Oliver Malcolm Publishing Transformation a couple of years ago to help publishers, literary agents and authors strive for success in this crazy world called publishing.
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I know Oliver from his time at my first publisher, HarperCollins. As their Publishing Strategy Director, I found he was one of those rare senior figures who stayed visibly hands-on with editors and authors.
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What particularly stood out to me was his transparency. He was direct about numbers and clear about priorities. He was the one who said the quiet parts out loud.
When I heard that Oliver was moving into offering representation to the author community, I wanted to find out more. Partly to understand why agenting, but also to pick his brain about some fundamentals that matter to authors right now.
Honestly, it’s super fascinating so read on…
Why Oliver Malcolm moved into literary agenting
In a LinkedIn post, Oliver announced his move into agenting. He’s already been working hands-on with authors through his consultancy, particularly around commercial strategy and international rights. This included working with the multi-million copy selling L J Ross who describes him as “someone who understands modern publishing inside and out and can help you secure the right partners globally.”
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I asked him why’s decided to move into the agenting side too. He told me the key driver was demand, with authors he was working with asking if he’d consider representing them.
So what is his approach to representation? He describes his approach as something closer to a sandbox than a lecture hall: a space to test ideas and look honestly at what the market is doing.
“What I’ve really enjoyed lately is ideating with authors until we suddenly land upon something,” he says. “Once they get that flicker, you suddenly unleash momentum.”
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He’s particularly enjoyed working with authors who already exist in the market and are trying to work out what comes next. That includes self-published authors who may not need an agent in the conventional sense, but do need experienced guidance on direction, timing and long-term strategy.
His aim, he says, is always the same: to help authors reach as many readers as possible. While he can and does act as an advocate when needed, he told me:
“What I’m interested in is helping authors understand what’s blocking momentum. Whether that’s the proposition, the positioning, the timing, or the form.”
Honesty as a tool for motivation and mojo
To sum it up, what Oliver’s trying to do is help authors get their mojo back. As I see myself in the Savvy Writers’ Snug group I run on Facebook, what surprised Oliver the most once he began working directly with authors was how demoralised many of them were.
“I don’t think I realised quite how disillusioned and demotivated authors are,” he says. “But as part of that, I also realised how quickly you can get their mojo back.”
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I asked how authors were getting their mojo back. He noticed that ‘mojo’ shift often came not from reassurance, but from clarity.
Transparency, as I’ve already mentioned, is a big thing for Oliver. He’s outspoken about how often language is used in publishing to obscure rather than enlighten, particularly around numbers, algorithms and prioritisation. Authors, he believes, are often discouraged from understanding the commercial reality of their own careers.
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The 10k reads idea: when book sales start to gain momentum
Part of his transparency is a willingness to put actual numbers on things. For example, he talks about experience showing him that 10k reads is what he calls a “confidence threshold”. By ‘reads’, he means all formats and even proofs read by bloggers.
What matters, he said, is consumption: people actually reading the book.
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“The thing about word of mouth is that it’s basically an exponential growth curve.” He talked through the logic. “If you get to 1,000 people, each person only has to tell one other person to get to 2,000, and each of those 2,000 need to tell one other person to get to 4,000, then 8,000.”
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We know this already: that snowball effect we all crave as authors. What I find particularly interesting about Oliver’s 10k reads threshold is the shift from push to pull.
He explained it like this. A good publisher will aim to give a book the best chance it can by doing the heavy lifting with ‘pushing’: marketing, discounting, visibility.
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But it’s when that 10k threshold is reached that the ‘pull’ begins. This is when readers start to do the work by recommending, sharing, triggering algorithms. I’ve seen it myself with my own books.
And if a book doesn’t hit that 10k mark within, say, a few months? Oliver was blunt (and personally, I appreciate this): a book will rarely ‘take off’.
(Side note from Tracy: It could be argued that different genres have different thresholds. But we’re talking about commercial reality here, and financial gain. So say a literary novel takes off after winning The Booker Prize or being made into a film, for example, it still needs to hit that 10k reads to get momentum. And financial momentum means an author can do what they love as a job, part-time or full-time. They can see it as a business, not a hobby.)
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Key insights from Oliver Malcolm
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Oliver describes 10,000 reads as a potential "confidence threshold" where reader recommendation can begin creating greater organic momentum.
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He believes emerging authors should be viewed as longer-term investments rather than judged purely on first-year ROI.
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His four-quadrant model considers authors as Question Marks, Rising Stars, Brands or Exits — while recognising authors can move between those stages.
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When sales stall, changing genre, form, proposition or positioning can sometimes reset an author's momentum.
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Taking a ‘quadrant approach’ to publishing
That 10k read threshold feeds directly into another idea Oliver has written about publicly: a quadrant approach to author careers. For those of you unfamiliar with it, he broadly divides authors into four stages:
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1. Question marks: not yet consumer-tested and vulnerable to failure through timing, saturation or poor fit
2. Rising stars: showing traction, where reads matter more than immediate ROI, and where a three-year view on brand-building is critical
3. Brands: established, high-selling authors with portfolio value
4. Exits: authors who fail to find market momentum
Oliver is blunt about where he thinks publishers often go wrong: too much time and money is absorbed by the third quadrant – established brand authors – leaving little space to properly break new talent.
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As he puts it, publishers can end up “spending all their time on the big, big, big guys”, while emerging writers struggle to cut through. Drawing on an FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods) model, he argues:
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”Brand equity and brand launches should be treated differently, with established names managed for long-term portfolio value, and rising authors given focused investment to build momentum at launch. So essentially, you have one team working on question marks and rising stars, and another on brands.”
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Oliver is particularly wary of how rising authors are assessed using short-term return on investment. He argues that treating emerging writers the same way as established brands misunderstands how careers are built.
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For him, rising stars should be viewed as long-term investments rather than year-one profit centres:
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“You might lose money in the first year, you might get terrible ROI in the second year, but the yield comes in year three and four.”
The problem, he suggests, is that publishing’s fixation on one-year fiscal cycles leads to underinvestment at precisely the moment when advocacy, momentum and readership need time to accumulate.
So what happens to ‘Exit’ authors?
The final category in that quadrant is, inevitably, the most controversial. Oliver admits one of the hardest but most necessary decisions he had to make when working in senior positions at publishing houses came when he decided to stop pouring money into authors whose books just couldn’t find traction over time. This allowed his team to redirect their energy towards writers who still had genuine growth potential.
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Sometimes, he argued, holding on too tightly does more harm than good.
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“It can actually be better to let an author go so they have a better chance elsewhere. So it wasn’t as clearcut as giving up on an author. It was also to say: ‘perhaps we don’t know how to publish this author.’”
Why authors need to pivot
One obvious challenge to this quadrant theory is the reality that careers aren’t smooth curves. Authors dip. They recover. They pivot.
Oliver was clear that the quadrant model isn’t static. Authors move between stages. Pivots — of genre, form or positioning — can reset momentum entirely.
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The key, he argued, is recognising when persistence becomes inertia.
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That’s where clarity, rather than blind optimism, becomes essential. So authors who don’t react to static sales by pivoting in some way will struggle in the publishing world. But those who pivot can thrive.
I’ve found this myself in my career. When sales are static for too long a time, I pivot as I did by writing a romance novel.
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One of Oliver’s favourite examples of the power of pivoting is Lisa Jewell. After several years in which her women’s fiction titles sold progressively less, she shifted into domestic psychological thrillers. This was a move that transformed her career and saw her become one of the biggest crime authors in the UK, and a major name in the US as well.
He had a great analogy for this:
“You can’t keep wanting to only write concertos and symphonies if the consumer is showing they want studies, cantatas and sonatas. You can still have the integrity of your voice, but you need to be able to flex the form. And that form doesn’t need to necessarily mean you’re selling out. It’s just a new way in which you’re expressing your voice.”
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He admits some authors are reluctant to pivot and he understands why. But to survive in this tough business, you have to make tough decisions.
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The ‘throw novels at a wall’ approach in digital publishing
Oliver also has some interesting thoughts on how digital and traditional publishers make decisions in fundamentally different ways. I asked him about a topic that’s come up in the Savvy Writers’ Snug, about what some authors see as a ‘throw as many books at a wall and hope one sticks’ model that some non-advance paying digital publishers take.
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While he agrees that model means some authors don’t get the oxygen and marketing spend needed for a book to take off, the flip side is the systems are super efficient and many authors do benefit.
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This has much to do with the ‘high frequency output’ digital publishers excel at.
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“Pushing books out quickly under an author brand or in a series generates loyalty or, as I prefer to put it, obsession. We want readers to get obsessed with a voice, so they need to devour more and more of those books. And this kind of reading addiction is caused by ready availability.”
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The hard truths authors need to hear
Oliver and I ended our conversation by talking about some truths authors need to begin accepting. We both agreed authors often overestimate how many levers publishers have available to pull. While publishing can feel mystifying from the outside, he argues that success is rarely driven by one magic intervention like a big review, a single retailer push or a viral moment.
What makes the difference is the cumulative effect of many people doing their jobs well, at the same time, with shared conviction. As he puts it:
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“What you’re really getting with a publisher is humans… individual expertise on your book. No one thing does it.”
Oliver is also clear-eyed about unpredictability. While publishing is never an exact science, he doesn’t believe success is entirely random either. Reflecting on books he’s worked on, he admits there were many where he “sort of knew” they would land, because the hook was right and the positioning clear.
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He believes often, true breakouts don’t come from nowhere. Sure, many books fail when people hope they’ll work. But more often, they succeed because the groundwork, belief and preparation are already in place.
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What really stuck with me after our conversation was this: author careers wobble. Books don’t always land. Confidence takes a hit. But clarity, even when it’s uncomfortable, gives you something to work with.
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Publishing and authors could use more of that transparency. Less pretending we know why we’ve cracked it or fumbled it, and more openness about what’s actually going on… including using numbers and frameworks as tools, not truths carved in stone.
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Interested in chatting to Oliver? Find out more on his website.