At 8:42 on a Wednesday morning in early May, Hadley Stroud unlocked the front door of Pelham House Press, switched on a kettle that had been bought in 2016, and sat down at a desk that was already, by her own admission, in disorder.
Stroud has been the senior editor at Pelham House for nine years. The press, founded in 1998 by the late publisher Edmund Pelham, publishes about ten titles a year — a mixture of literary fiction, narrative non-fiction, and a small poetry list that operates at a loss every year and is preserved out of stubbornness.
This piece is the record of one of Stroud's working days, shadowed at her invitation. It is not a typical day, because there is no typical day. It is offered as one day among several hundred.
At 8:51, Stroud opened her email. She had received forty-six messages overnight. She categorised them, by long habit, into five groups: agents, authors under contract, authors not yet under contract, the production department, and the rest.
The agent emails came first. Stroud had received three submission queries since the previous evening. She read each query and the attached chapter, in full, before responding. Two were declined politely. One was set aside for further reading at the weekend.
The agent triage took until 9:34. Stroud noted, without comment, that this was the calmest part of the day, because the agent decisions were her own and could be made without committee.
At 9:40, she opened a manuscript by the novelist Cordelia Bryne, whose third book is under contract for autumn publication. Stroud had read the manuscript twice already. This morning's pass was for sentence-level work on the first ninety pages.
She read for forty-six minutes without looking up. The first interruption was a phone call from the printer in Bury, about a paper substitution on a forthcoming title. The substitution was needed because the original stock was three weeks behind its delivery schedule.
Stroud agreed to the substitution after discussing it with the production manager, Petra Aleksanyan, who came up the stairs to confer in person rather than on the phone. The conversation took eleven minutes and resulted in a decision to use a slightly heavier paper at a slightly higher cost.
At 11:02, Stroud returned to the Bryne manuscript. She read for another half hour before the second interruption: an email from Bryne herself, asking whether a particular paragraph could be cut. Stroud read the paragraph in context, agreed that it could, and replied to that effect.
At 11:45, the post arrived. Among the envelopes was a contract amendment from a literary agency in London, which Stroud read, marked up in pencil, and set aside for the legal counsel who comes in on Friday mornings.
Lunch was a sandwich at the desk. Stroud said she eats lunch away from the desk on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On the other days, she does not. "It is not a discipline," she said. "It is what happens."
At 12:38, Stroud took a call from the press's distributor about returns from a chain bookshop in the Midlands. The returns rate on a 2024 title had risen above the contractual threshold. Stroud spent twenty-two minutes on the call and another fifteen drafting an internal note about whether to reduce the next print run for the title's paperback edition.
At 1:35, she returned to the Bryne manuscript. She read fourteen pages. The third interruption was a junior editor, Niamh Carragh, asking whether a forthcoming poetry title's typography could be adjusted on the title page. Stroud said yes after looking at the proof for ninety seconds.
At 2:14, Stroud joined a video call with the press's two part-time publicists. The call lasted thirty-eight minutes. Topics discussed included festival placement for two autumn titles, a review pitch to a national newspaper that had not yet responded, and the question of whether Cordelia Bryne would be willing to do a podcast tour. Stroud agreed to ask.
At 2:55, Stroud spent twenty minutes returning emails she had not responded to in the morning. By the end of those twenty minutes, eleven new emails had arrived. She returned to the manuscript.
From 3:18 to 4:42, Stroud read without interruption. She covered pages ninety-one through one hundred and forty-six of the Bryne manuscript. Her pencil marks were sparse but specific. She queried four word choices, three line breaks, and one factual detail concerning the height of a Manchester railway bridge.
At 4:46, Petra Aleksanyan came back up the stairs to discuss the autumn catalogue layout. The conversation took twelve minutes. It involved looking at four cover proofs and choosing, in two of the four cases, between a serif and a sans-serif title treatment.
At 5:08, Stroud sent a final round of emails: to the legal counsel about the contract amendment, to Bryne about the paragraph cut, to a publicist about a missing author photograph, and to a printer about a delivery schedule.
At 5:31, she switched off the kettle, locked the front door, and walked to a bus stop on Oxford Road. The Bryne manuscript came with her, in a canvas bag, for further reading on the bus.
In an eight-hour and forty-nine minute day, Stroud had read approximately one hundred and forty pages of one manuscript, three submission chapters, one contract amendment, and one paper specification. She had handled forty-six morning emails and approximately twenty new ones, and had been on the telephone or in meetings for two hours and fourteen minutes in total.
Asked, on the bus, what part of the day she would describe as editorial work, Stroud thought for a moment. "All of it," she said. "And about ninety minutes of it."