The situation

Deborah had been writing for years. The manuscript existed, in one form or another, long before she came to us. What she did not have was a route to publication, and testimony of this kind is not something you hand to a print-on-demand service and hope.

It is a genuinely difficult editorial problem, not a squeamish one. Over-edit a survivor’s account and you lose the voice that makes it evidence. Under-edit it and a reader with no background in the events cannot follow what happened. The book had to work as a personal story and as historical testimony at the same time.

What we did

Editing was structural rather than stylistic: clarity of chronology, and enough context for an unfamiliar reader, without smoothing the voice out of it. We worked through it with her rather than around her.

Cover design was treated as an editorial decision rather than a marketing one. It had to carry both the gravity of the subject and the hope in it, because the wrong cover would have undermined everything inside.

Distribution was configured for reach rather than sales rank: print and ebook through Amazon, Barnes & Noble and the wider trade, with metadata and categories set so that people researching the subject could find it. That configuration is what makes institutional acquisition possible, and it is the part most self-published books get wrong.

This is also the one book in our back catalogue that had a marketing strategy attached. We took it to readers of history, human rights and survivor accounts, and positioned Deborah as an advocate rather than only as an author.

What happened

The book is being used in schools in Rwanda.

In the UK, Salford Community Leisure acquired copies for its library network and then invited Deborah to headline an author evening at Walkden Library in June 2024, where she spoke about her writing process and what lay behind the book. The library service publicly described itself as proud to stock it.

Between the two, the book has opened international platforms for her to speak from.

That is the full arc of what a book is supposed to do. It reached institutions on two continents, and it turned a private manuscript into a standing invitation to be heard. Neither of those is a sales figure, and both are worth more than one.