Lucy Bloom is a keynote speaker and consulting CEO with a background in advertising and international aid. Her novel The Manuscript is her first fiction title after previously publishing two nonfiction books: her memoir Get the Girls Out, and Cheers to Childbirth, her ‘man-manual on the tricky business of childbirth support’. Independent Publishing spoke to Lucy about The Manuscript, how she approached writing fiction, and what she has learned about publishing and selling books.
Please tell us what your book The Manuscript is about, and some of your inspirations for writing it.
The Manuscript – a story of revenge, is about a woman who is writing a book. And as the people in her personal life treat her badly, she writes them into the story and kills them off. But what she doesn’t realise is that karma is dealing with those people far more brutally than she could ever imagine.
Some of my inspiration for this book came from personal experiences. After I divorced, I had a partner who treated me badly and I thought, ‘One day, I’m going to write a novel and I’m going to write a character that reminds me of you and then I’m gonna kill him off.’ Therapy!
I adore the humour and the surprising, stylised violence of Killing Eve. I loved the Australian context and Aussie humour in Rake. Those were both huge inspirations for me, even though those are screen-based and not books. I wrote the kind of novel I would like to read because I find it almost impossible to find fiction that floats my boat. For this reason, I usually read memoirs.
Please tell us a little bit about yourself and what your background is with writing. How did you approach your first fiction title, and what made it different from working on your other titles?
I led an advertising agency for 20 years. So, for a long time, I was a professional writer, just not a published author. In 2010, I published my first book, after a major client left the business and I had a sudden gap in my workload. I wrote Cheers to Childbirth: A dad’s guide to childbirth support in about four months. No one wanted to publish that book because it was for a niche market. I’m so glad because that prompted me to create my own publishing imprint, and that book has made me a very tidy penny.
My next publishing opportunity was in 2015 when HarperCollins approached me to see if I had another book inside me. I had just been fired from a high-profile CEO role so I suddenly had time on my hands. Get the Girls Out was published in 2019. Only two years after that, HarperCollins was nice enough to give the licence for that book back to me so that it also comes under my publishing imprint, Flamingo Publishing. Then in 2021, when the world was going Pandemic mad, I wrote The Manuscript during a long lockdown. Every time I’ve produced a book, I’ve had the luxury of a professional pause. At the time of writing The Manuscript, I was full-swing into my third career as a professional conference speaker.
My writing approach was this: I woke up at 4 am because my neighbour upstairs set her alarm for that time and left her phone on her bedroom floor which would buzz for 30 minutes. I just went with it and used the time to write from 4 am to about 9 am. The first person on the list of acknowledgements for The Manuscript is my neighbour Cheryl. If she hadn’t set her alarm so flipping early, my first novel would not exist.
First I laid down the stories I knew I wanted to tell from experience and observation. Then I came back over that and wove an interconnected narrative through those wild stories and added further character development and contextual detail.
When I started writing I had no idea where the story would end up. I didn’t write this book in order from the beginning to the end. In fact, I wrote the very first chapter, second-last. I had 65 beta readers who read the first draft of The Manuscript, and some common feedback from them was that they wanted to know more about the main character Edith. They wanted to love her before her crazy journey began. So I wrote a new Chapter One to show the reader who Edith is and what she had been through from that awkward time between birth and age 40.
When the book was about to go to press I decided it needed a final chapter—one more twist. Just before the artwork was approved, I added Chapter 25 for a double-whammy ending.
Cheers to Childbirth, was a non-fiction research piece. I treated each chapter like a big juicy article. I interviewed academics, midwives and obstetricians. Then I interviewed 15 high-profile Australian men. It was like a 100,000 word piece of medical consumer journalism.
Get the Girls Out, my memoir, is the hardest thing I have ever written. It’s so awful to write about yourself and I did this agonising dance between telling an authentic story, making sure I didn’t include so much truth-telling that someone would want to sue me; and not embarrassing my mum. I found writing that book so impossibly hard that I almost gave the advance back. The team at HarperCollins were generous and wonderful, suggesting that I give it another six months. And about six months later, I got my mojo back and I finished that darn book. It now sells about 10,000 copies a year.
The Manuscript was wildly different to the nonfiction books I’ve published. It was a lot more fun to create and I’m very proud of it.
Can you tell us about any services you used in the process of publishing your book and what your experience was like with them?
I use the most wonderful editor Kerry Davies. I found her online at the Freelance Editor’s Network. She took my rough and ready first draft and did a structural read, a copy read and a fact-checking read all at once. She was incredible.
I also worked with a brilliant cover designer Lisa Reidy. I didn’t want this book to look like chick lit. I would rather vomit than publish a book that looked too much like a fluffy summer read. There’s a beheading in this book. It’s pretty gritty, so it couldn’t look too light. Lisa was patient with me and produced a series of designs that I hated. Then she vanished on me for three weeks, so I started working with another designer and I still wasn’t happy with those designs. Then Lisa reappeared out of the wilderness with a brilliant cover design which is the one that was published. She’s an absolute star.
I think my best advice is to work with the professionals who also work with the major publishers. Don’t go cheap-ass. Also allow stacks of time. You need more time than you think for good cover design, accurate editing and print production. It was Kerry Davies, my editor, who gave me the best advice: ‘Lucy, publish your book when it’s ready, rather than giving yourself a punishing deadline.’
I print all my books in Australia using Macpherson’s Printing in Victoria. I found them to be on par for cost when compared to printing in China, because you save on freight.
Where have you been selling your book, and how else have you approached the marketing and publicity of your book? How has this differed to the campaigns for your previous titles?
I sell only about 5% of my books through bookstores. I have a great relationship with a book distributor, Woodslane. They distribute all three titles to bookstores nationally and to libraries.
I sell Cheers to Childbirth through the national childbirth education program I created. If you can find a channel very specific to your niche and sell your books through that channel, you are onto a winner. I sell that book by the carton.
My memoir and my novel sell at major events where I am the keynote speaker. About 30% of my audience will stampede to buy both books after a speech and signings are a lot of fun. Sometimes the client will buy books for every delegate. Selling 1000 books in one go is cooking with gas!
Marketing a novel is a different beast to non-fiction and the campaign for The Manuscript was best at grassroots level. I am a big believer in public relations and wrote this opinion piece for the Financial Review. We will never know if it sold books though. I don’t believe the exhausting month-long book tour sold enough books to make the effort worthwhile. I have had success with Book Clubs and have created book club notes for my latest two books. But the magic in book sales really happen at events for me.
What advice would you share to someone looking to publish their first book?
Ask yourself a very important question: You might have a story to tell but do you have a story to sell? Write a solid pitch for your book before you start writing. This will make you consider if there is a market for the book and practicalities of delivery. Here is a link to a corker pitch template.
Never comment on book reviews. Ever. Even to thank people or start a literary convo. No one told me this rule and I commented on a book review. Next thing you know, 65,000 haters slammed into my socials and told me to eat shit and die. This is a true story and you can read about it here.
And lastly, have fun. Why publish a book if it isn’t fun?
