Shaun Loftus runs The Book Whisperer from a Tuscan hillside in a house she shares with an ever-changing cast of dogs, cats, parrots, hens, and a couple of opinionated goats. She came to books the long way round — through the theatre, as a director and dramaturg with fifty-odd productions behind her, and through the early web, where she taught herself to code to pay the rent. She calls it having an artist head and a nerd head, and that turns out to be a rare and useful pairing when the job is helping writers reach readers.

This conversation sits right in the middle of what this show cares about: keeping the human at the center as the work gets more automated. Shaun is candid about being allergic to hustle culture — the ROI-everything, produce-produce-produce reflex she left behind when she left the States. Her aim is to carry the business weight so her authors can stay focused on the writing. When Janet named the obvious thing — that on paper the two of them might look like competitors — Shaun's answer set the tone for the hour: colleague, not competitor. It was never a zero-sum game.

From there it gets practical. Shaun talks through why a cover gets a single nanosecond to sell its genre, how aggressive ARC campaigns surface problems early enough to fix them — including the time a stalled book was rewritten overnight and went on to become a bestseller — and why she'll tell half her authors to slow down and the other half to speed up. There's a clear-eyed tour of selling in translation: why the German market reads historical fiction all year, why Italy still reaches for print, and where she thinks authors quietly leave money on the table. And there's an honest accounting of what doesn't work — the genres she stays out of, and the successes that simply can't be copied.

They close on the Indie Unconference, the small, generous gathering Shaun runs in Italy — why an "unconference," why it's built for participants rather than an audience, and why it's on pause until 2027. A fitting end to a conversation about doing good work at a human pace. You can find Shaun through The Book Whisperer and on Reedsy — and, as she half-jokes near the end, if you get an email from "Shaun Loftus" offering you services, it isn't her.