Working in publishing has done many things for me - from testing the limits of coffee consumption (five, since you ask, after that I’m shaking so much I spill more than I drink), to putting me in touch with a startling variety of ‘eccentric’ people (your unpublished, unknown book has a potential readership of 6 billion you say? Hmmm…) - but one of the biggest things it’s done is massively broaden my reading taste.

To provide context: coming out of my English Literature degree, I pretty much exclusively read novels. Serious, prize winning, canonical, literary fiction of the sort you hold up on the train to make sure the person across from you can see the cover and know how clever you are. Yes, yes, I was that person with the Virginia Woolf proudly on display, furrowing my brow and wearing - Oh God - a long, trailing scarf, glasses perched on the end of my nose, and a dodgy goatee perched on the end of my face. It was a look - not a good one to be sure, but a look nevertheless.

But the weird thing is, as bookish as I thought I was, I read hardly any non-fiction. Perhaps one a year, a Christmas present usually, but I’d never actually go out of my way and buy one myself. No memoirs, history, pop-science, anything; half of the bookshop was a huge blind spot to me.  Leaving aside the disregard English Lit degrees have for teaching non-fiction beyond literary theory textbooks (and what’s that all about anyway?), I never really thought to question this. Novels are just what I loved the most (and for the most part still do), so why would I waste my time with anything else?

Now though is different. I read a lot for work - unsurprisingly it’s much easier to market a book if you know something about it first - but also I’ve been exposed to so many different kinds of books, so many different kinds of readers, that I can’t help but take on some of their enthusiasm.  And some of the most rewarding reading experiences I’ve had have come from it: one that comes to mind (and I say this both as the marketing person for this book and as someone who completely loves it, which is why my job rocks) is Christopher Potter’s You Are Here, the only book that’s ever actually made my jaw drop, twice.

Am I a better, richer person for having my reading possibilities expanded in this way? That’s debatable. But what I do know is that by breaking down this psychological divide between reading made-up stories that tell us deep truths about ourselves, which I believe the best fiction does, and true stories that reveal the strangeness of the world outside (and indeed other people), I have countless more opportunities to have the kind of experiences I talked about above. And that may be the best reason yet for taking a chance on the other side of the bookshop for a change.