A few weeks ago I posted an interview with Poppy Hampson, Senior Editor at Chatto & Windus. However every imprint is different, and has its own way of working, so to counterbalance this I thought I'd interview someone with the same title at a different imprint - this week, please meet my friend Alex Bowler.

Alex is Senior Editor at Jonathan Cape (under publisher Dan Franklin), where he gets to edit books by Audrey Niffenegger, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Julian Barnes. His recent acquisitions include The Hollow Man by Oliver Harris, City of Bohane by Kevin Barry, Grant Morrison’s Supergods, Reality is Broken by leading digital games expert Jane McGonigal and the Booker shortlisted novel C, by Tom McCarthy. When not working, he says he spends most of his time reading indie comics.

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RW (that's me by the way) Hi Alex, welcome to the blog and thanks for agreeing to be interviewed. First up, how did you get where you are now? Well, Victoria line to Pimlico like the rest of us I imagine, but in a larger sense?

AB Ridiculous fold-down bike, in fact.

I did an English degree, graduated in 2003. Decided I was tired of books, so spent a couple of years in the wilderness playing bad bass guitar, working for a charity and then working in the Commons. In the Commons (alert Wikileaks!), I had a lot of free time and started reading again in earnest and thought, What the hell am I doing? Get into books again. Get into publishing. So I wanted to work for Cape straightaway – loved Amis, Hemingway, etc., etc. – and wrote a careful email to Dan Franklin. He got back straightaway – which I still can’t believe – and within a week I was doing work experience in publicity. A few weeks after that there was a reshuffle in that department and I got the publicity assistant job. Eighteen months after that Dan pulled me across to editorial and here I am. So basically: fluke.

RW Too modest! So here you are – where’s here? Can you describe your office a bit – glamorous penthouse with a fridgeful of champagne? Or dusty garret with rats gnawing at your manuscripts?

AB I’ll come back to your rat-infested garret in a moment.

I don’t have an office as such. I work on this little, scruffy island in the middle of our open plan office. In front of me is a window full of Pimlico chimneys. To my right I have piled 900 pages of medieval history, to my left 20 photocopies of Oliver Harris’s debut novel. Then there’s a mess of pens and cups and – this seems a peculiarity of mine – a lot of rubber shavings. Essentially, it’s not an ideal editorial space – someone’s phone rings every two minutes.

Which leads me to that garret. I now tend to do most of my editing at home, at the top of my flat, in the roof – so literally a garret. No rats, but also no heating, and recently there have been workmen playing a lot of Snoop Dogg. 

RW Mmmm. Sounds glamorous... well rats and Snoop Dogg aside, what are the best and worst things about your job?

AB The worst thing is the editing, and the best thing is the editing. For example, I’m just coming to the end of a fortnight on a really deep edit of a wonderful book. When I’m halfway through an edit that length, I have usually worked out what the problems are in a text, but not what we can do to solve them. That always terrifies me. But then a week later, things have distilled into this neat little collection of – you hope – helpful notes, and there is something wonderful about that feeling. Then there’s reading, which is just as two-sided. I find myself going for weeks reading submissions I don’t like, and that’s a labour. Then you read something amazing, read it in one night, and want to publish it, and not many things are more exciting than that.

RW So what makes a perfect submission for you? And conversely, is there anything that really makes your heart sink?

AB You don’t know what the perfect submission is until it comes. I didn’t know I wanted a novel on technology and mourning set in the early 20th century until I read C; I didn’t know I really loved ultra-contemporary London noir until I read Oli Harris’s book; I didn’t know murderous, near-future West of Ireland was going to seduce me until I read City of Bohane. I think jealousy is a good reaction too – you know, if you start thinking, I wish I’d written that. Why didn’t I think of that?

Familiarity – if I’m thinking, Not another one of these – that makes my heart sink. But I’m not one of those people who says crap like, One simply never continues with a novel if the weather is mentioned on the first page. I’ve never met one of those people, but they’re rumoured to exist. 

RW What are you working on right now?

AB I’m actually not allowed to say. But it’s rather good.

RW Ooh how mysterious! [Cranes over towards Alex's desk...] Any advice for aspiring authors? Apart from write a bloody good book, obviously.

AB Really, I’m not qualified to give anybody advice on anything, but I’d say: read. Read a lot of bloody good books. Or go and live an extraordinary life and hope you possess the ability to refract and condense that experience into a bloody good book.
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Alex, thanks so much for answering my questions. If anyone else out there has a question for Alex, please post them in the comments box below and I'll get him to come back and answer them.

And for more insights into publishing, Snoop Dogg and indie comics, you can follow Alex on twitter @alex_is_editing

Next time I'll be speaking to a publicist, which, as we all know, is probably THE most important role in the whole of the publishing industry. Not that I'm biassed.