Let’s talk about the publishing process – Jay, you’re with Flanker, and Jen you’re with Breakwater. How did those relationships start?

JW. I did it the old fashioned way. I actually sent 15 applications or submissions out in the one day. I had worked my butt off, because, you know, every submission to every publisher, they wanted something completely different.

JM. One wants you to print it off and mail it. Another one, you need to send three chapters to an email. Another, 30 pages.

JW. One wants a full book, one just wants a book proposal. So I had to do all the work, and then I sent them all in one day. And it was almost a year and a half after that I had heard from Breakwater. And that was it.

What about aspects like the cover design?

JM. I’m very adamant about having any characters of my book on the cover being [shown] back on, because I want that left to the reader’s imagination. Because I like to visualize the characters when I’m reading the book. I’ve said this to Flanker a bunch of times: sometimes you gotta tell me, stay in my lane. But they’ve been really good to me about that. You know, we are who we are. A title, a cover, it’s going to be associated with us. Ship Moms is something that will be a part of you forever.

JW. It’s still our babies.

What’s the overall NL book scene like these days?

JW. I’ve done three book signings now. I’ve never done them before. I didn’t know even what to do. Like, what happens? So it’s been a learning experience, chatting with the people, and sometimes you don’t think you did well. My first one, Coles at the Village, the manager came in, and said, ‘My God, you did fantastic. You sold eight books.’ And I was thinking, Oh, I didn’t realize that that was good. That is great. But the other thing I noticed that I thought was fantastic, is every person who walked past me just whispered to themselves, Ship Moms. They just glance over and go, Oh, Ship Moms. So, even if they’re not buying, even if they didn’t chat with me, it’s something now that they’ve seen. But it’s been a fun experience. I will try to do as many signings as I can.

JM. Cause there’s something to me about spending the time at the table talking to strangers, right? To a certain extent, our family and our friends are going to support us. And I think we have a really supportive market. There are people who go, ‘I always buy both local books for family for Christmas.’ Or, ‘I always likes to have the newest local book.’ But people you don’t know, to get the book in their hands.

JW. I was at Chapters on Kenmount Road yesterday. And I thought it’d probably be one of the busier ones that I did, but I found it was actually the slower one. People hesitated to contact me, because I guess they felt like, ‘Oh, if I talk to this person, then I feel obligated.’ But I said to people, Listen, you even just talking to me and having a chat means the world, thank you so much.

JM. And one of the pieces of advice from a book store staff member was they’ve seen that sale of the original book will go up when you put a second one out. And they said the ‘Signed By’ sticker is important. I would never have guessed that. If your book’s in the store, there on the shelf, and there’s two books, and yours has a ‘Signed By’ sticker, that does increase the likelihood [of a sale]. That suggests that, somehow, a signature on it makes it a bit more valuable as a gift. It’s not important to me, but to some people, according to the staff, it is.

JW. I love talking to people, love having chats. I try my best to make people not feel obligated to spend money. I quite often will say to people, Listen, if you don’t have any money and you’re interested, my favourite place on Earth – Newfoundland Labrador public libraries. Go take it out. It’s in all the locations. But, yeah, singings are an interesting situation. My first one, I remember feeling like, no one’s going to show up, and it’s going to feel so weird and awkward, and then I just happened to stumble across this article, Margaret Atwood was talking about one of her first signings. And how she showed up and no one came. And then only one person approached her for the whole signing, because they thought that she worked there, and they were looking for Scotch tape. And it’s Margaret Atwood, right? So go into it with no expectations.

JM. Wait, tell you what’s really cool, though, I’m starting to get people going, ‘I read the first one.
’ Like, I love that. Oh, my God, so much. Like, it warms my heart so much when you can tell someone actually read it, and they want to ask you little details. It makes me so happy. And a colleague of mine said to me, ‘Do you ever think about, like, someone’s going to give your imagination as a gift?’ I hadn’t framed it like that. My imagination as a tangible thing,

But the broader Newfoundland scene, I feel like we have a supportive base here. People who buy our local literature product. It feels like we got more publishers than ever. You got Breakwater, 50 years, Flanker, 30 years, Engen, After Books. Seaweed now this year. Running the Goat. It feels like there’s more options. And Flanker this year, I think it was 15 or 16 publications, and Breakwater was in double digits. And people consume ebooks. Not me, but people do like ebooks as opposed to a physical book. I get a lot of people ask about audiobooks.

JW. Yes, me too. That’s a very common question.

JM. But Sears had a very supportive market in this province. 
Sears still went, you know? Sears used to exist, and it doesn’t anymore. So I don’t know where it’s going. There’s definitely a big rise in self-publishing.

JW. And a rise in the support for self-publishing, and in, I don’t know if this is the right word, but the credibility of self-published books. That was going to be my plan. Oh, I’ll self-publish this. This is just for me and my friends anyway. Of course, it did snowball. And now that I’ve been through this publishing experience, I am beyond thankful to have had a publisher to support me, and the editors, the lawyers, the marketing. The cover design. I can’t imagine taking all that on myself.

Jay, do you have a timeline for your next book?

JM. We’re looking at fall 2027. I still got a ways to go. I got it in my brain. It’s just, I need to get it on the screen.

And what about you, Jen? Will you do another writing project? 


JW. I would love to. I would love to do a Ship Dads. And the other idea that keeps kind of popping in my mind is other similar industries that have very similar cultures [to working on cruise ships], like airline crews for example; they live a very similar type life. So, you know, I definitely want to do something else. I do have a little, I guess, borderline fiction/nonfiction thing that I’ve also been working on, but, like I said, when it comes to fiction writing, I feel so intimidated, so that one is staying a little close. But maybe I’ll feel the confidence to try it, to actually pitch at one of these days.

JM. What’s the worst that could happen? They can say no. That’s the worst that can happen.

JW. My first rejection letter, I kept the letter, and I actually posted it up next to my desk, because the letter essentially said, ‘We’re not interested. Thank you so much. We’re not interested because we are a literary publisher, and we feel like this is a commercial book.’ So I posted that up next to my desk, because I took that as a win. You know? I’m like, so he thinks that my book will sell well in a commercial market. That’s a win in my mind. So yeah, I posted it up next to my desk and I still keep it there to this day.

JM. And can I ask you a question? Would you consider yourself a writer?

JW. It has been … a journey to do that. And I still find myself uncomfortable with it. It feels like a title that I haven’t earned.

JM. I struggle with it as well. Uncomfortable is probably a good word. A word that I can get on board with. My social media self is Jay McGrath Writer. In my mind, I’m not. I got to get better at enjoying some of this more, Because I always wanted to do this. I always wanted to be an author. If I’m having a bad day, I can go to Chapters. and walk through and see the book on the shelf, and that’ll cheer me up on a bad day, right? But I, I also love writing a good line. You could summon what I was trying to say with Hurricane House in one line. And it’s towards the end, and it’s a bit of a spoiler, right? But Joey says to Junie, ‘It ran in our family until it ran into us.’ And I went, I just wrote that really good line … and no one’s going to read it for probably another six months. The whole thing is a weird kind of process.