My Values: Readers’ Champion

• Siobhan O'Brien Holmes
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Next up in my blog series exploring the values and beliefs that drive me and my business, I’m going to talk about being a readers’ champion and what that means to me.

Although you, the writer, are my customer, there’s somebody else I always have to keep front of mind when working on your manuscript: the child who’s going to read it. 

Helping you love your book is SUPER important to me. I want you to be so proud of your work that you skip around the house in your pyjamas singing ‘Roar’ by Katy Perry and can’t stop looking in the mirror and saying ‘you, yes YOU, are the best darn writer there ever was!’

That’s my dream.

But I wouldn’t be doing my job if I stopped there. Because it’s not enough that you love your manuscript. We want readers to love it too, right? 

I feel very strongly that children and teenagers deserve excellent books that aren’t just fun or exciting but that make them feel seen, recognised, important, less alone. 

They deserve books that help them see the world in new ways and understand the experiences of people who are different from them. 

Your book can help children and teens develop empathy, cultural awareness, tolerance and kindness. 

And it can help them realise that they deserve those things from others, too. 

I care a lot about increasing and promoting diversity, representation, sensitivity and conscious language in children’s books, not just as a professional editor but as a parent and school library volunteer.

I also feel really strongly that children should be allowed to read whatever they enjoy, whether it’s comics, fairytales, horror, big books, short stories or literary fiction. That’s how they learn to love language and stories. That’s why I want to help you tell your story, because it’s unique and important and might just make somebody fall in love.

So here’s my mission statement:

Young readers deserve…

– the best books

– authors who care about their readers and what’s important to them

– to see themselves reflected in the books they read

– to feel valued and important

– stories that help them see the world in new ways

– to read whatever stories make them happy

and I couldn’t be more excited to lift you up and support you while you create those stories for them.