My ALLi author guest this episode is Liz Harris, a historical romance author whose path to publication took her from a lifelong love of reading and writing through teaching, travel, traditional publishing, and eventually self-publishing. She talks about how history and place shape her fiction, the freedom she found as an indie author, the importance of treating publishing as a business, and why she chose to remain indie even after returning to traditional publishing.
Listen to the Inspirational Indie Author Interview: Liz Harris
About the Host
Howard Lovy is an author, developmental editor, and writing coach with a long career in journalism and publishing. He works with writers at many stages of their careers, with a focus on helping them develop their ideas and strengthen their work while preserving their unique voices. He lives in Northern Michigan.
About the Guest
Liz Harris is an award-winning author of 30 novels, most of them historical. Her latest series, set in Scotland in the 1880s, was a joy to research for someone who loves to travel, as Liz does, and took her to Scotland for several weeks.
After graduating with a law degree in the UK, Liz moved to California, where she led a varied life—from cocktail waitressing on the Sunset Strip to working as secretary to the CEO of a large Japanese trading company. Upon returning to England, she earned a degree in English and taught at a secondary school for a number of years before developing her writing career.
Liz now lives in Windsor, Berkshire. Her two sons have left the nest and now have families of their own. In what little free time she has, she loves to travel, go to the theater and cinema, do cryptic crosswords, and, above all, lose herself in a novel.
To learn more about Liz, visit her website. Sign up for her newsletter to receive a free full-length novel.
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Read the Transcript
Liz Harris: Hello. My name's Liz Harris. Although I've written a few contemporary novels, I mainly write historical novels set in recent history. I'm not a medievalist, and I don't write books set in the Tudor period. At present, I'm completing my 30th novel, and it's the third of three sagas which are set in Scotland in 1885.
And I should probably add that I'm both self-published, which I absolutely love, and also traditionally published, so I'm a hybrid.
Howard Lovy: Okay, we'll talk about all those things. And yeah, the Tudor period has been written about endlessly, so who needs that, right?
Liz Harris: Yeah, I did that for A-level and I was Tudored out by the end of A-level English.
Howard Lovy: All Tudored out.
Childhood Reading Sparks a Love of Writing
Howard Lovy: Well, let's start at the beginning. Where did you grow up, and were reading and writing always an important part of your life?
Liz Harris: Oh, always, particularly reading to begin with. I was born in London and I was tremendously lucky to have a mother who loved books, and she had loved the books she read as a child, most of which were out of print by the time I was born.
So she scoured all of the bookshops, went to all of the libraries, and I was able to read things like Children of the New Forest, Little Lord Fauntleroy, What Katy Did, all the books that a lot of children today are unlucky enough not to be able to read. So I was extremely lucky, and I went from reading those books into Enid Blyton.
I loved Enid Blyton. When the Famous Five were traveling, they were always six, and I was at the front with Timmy.
And I went from that to Agatha Christie. I read voraciously, and always have done, and eclectically. And I read Charles Dickens in my teens. I loved them. I read the Russian authors. I read everything.
And at the same time, I loved writing. Even from an early age at primary school, if I were given a subject such as, “Imagine you're a donkey in the Sahara,” I would set to it with real enthusiasm. I loved it. And I loved writing exams. When I did my English exam, my second degree, I answered a question, for example, on Chaucer, which was such a funny question.
It was so amusing. I was laughing so hard as I was writing the answer that the invigilator came over to me and said if I couldn't be quiet I'd have to leave the exam. So I have always loved writing, but I never connected the two. I never thought I love reading, I love writing, therefore I could write a book.
It was a long time before that connection came. And that came via a friend. So I just…
Perry Mason Leads Liz to Law
Howard Lovy: Let's back up a little bit, and we'll get to that part of your life. But so then you decided to study law rather than English. What attracted you at first to the law?
Liz Harris: Erle Stanley Gardner. I read all of the Perry Mason books.
Howard Lovy: Ah.
Liz Harris: And I just really enjoyed them. At the time, in fact, I wanted to be a nurse. And I won a scholarship to France, and I spent three months when I was 17, 18, living in France. The first time I'd ever left home, and I was tremendously homesick. And when I came back to England, my parents, everybody who knew me said they were sure I'd be an awful nurse.
I faint when I see a needle, for a start, and they just didn't think I had the right temperament, which I wasn't sure was entirely a compliment. However, my mother pointed out I had always loved Erle Stanley Gardner books and liked the Perry Mason books. So I thought, “Yeah, that's true,” and I applied to do law.
It was at the time, I think, only a small percentage of people in the country went to university, and there were fewer girls, and they were probably very keen to have more girls in the law department, which is why they accepted me. And therefore I did three years. I got the law degree. I actually loved public international law best of all.
Got my first in that.
Howard Lovy: But it was literature that convinced you to study law, though, the Perry Mason books. Interesting.
California Years Feed Her Fiction
Liz Harris: Yes, it was indeed. But my parents were sort of elderly by then, and I felt I would have to take responsibility for them, perhaps a little earlier than some people did.
So before settling down with law, 'cause I wasn't sure that I really wanted to be a solicitor, I decided to travel, and I ended up in America, in California, for six years. Six wonderful years.
Howard Lovy: Wow.
Liz Harris: A year near San Francisco and five years in Los Angeles.
Howard Lovy: That must have been quite a culture shock for you at the time, from England to San Francisco, yeah?
Liz Harris: That's it. But I was lucky. I was extremely lucky. I went to look after two small children. I hadn't a clue. Elderly parents, elderly relatives. I'd never actually really seen a small child. However, I wasn't daunted, and I had never used a washing machine in a house at the time.
So the first time I did the wash, it was filthy. I kept quiet about the fact it was much better when you washed the shirts by hand. It was only the next time when I watched Phoebe, who was the person I was working for, get the washing machine ready and saw her put soap into it, that I understood my problem.
I just washed it without any soap. So it was a difficult thing, and I saw things I had never seen before, like color television, and people who lived a very different sort of life. And I absolutely loved my time in America. Loved the two little children I looked after, and have stayed close to the family.
The man died, sadly, a few years ago, and more recently the woman died, but we stayed friends for years, which was lovely. And I went back and visited them. It was super. But it gave me a big experience. When I went from San Francisco to my five years in Los Angeles, hoping to be a blackjack dealer, I wanted to do things that were very different from things I would do in England.
Otherwise, there's no point in traveling.
Howard Lovy: That's right.
Liz Harris: Unfortunately I was too late to get the work in the evening, and I didn't want to work in the day because in England you work in the day. So I ended up training to be a cocktail waitress, and I think I spent a short period of time at what is known as a clip joint on Sunset Strip.
I was a cocktail waitress, not the performing person, I should…
Howard Lovy: Ah, got it.
Liz Harris: It was a story.
Howard Lovy: Well, there are a lot of would-be artists who are cocktail waitresses in Los Angeles, actors, writers. That's how you make your living while you're… But you weren't a writer yet. You were, at that point, maybe gathering information, research for your future writing life.
Liz Harris: That's it. I don't think I realized it at the time, but you absorb everything. You absorb everything in your life, and the first book that I had published, it was a story effectively in a lot of respects of a friend of mine.
I hadn't even known that I had taken it on board and kept it. She was a friend in England. You meet all these different people, and you encounter different cultures, different worlds, different ideas, and you just look at different terrains, different areas, and you adjust your day. It's different, and it feeds what eventually I found came out of myself.
Liz Returns Home to England
Howard Lovy: So then you eventually returned to England to earn an English degree, and you became a schoolteacher. What pulled you back to your homeland?
Liz Harris: My dad died, I'm afraid.
Howard Lovy: Oh, I'm sorry.
Liz Harris: It's unfortunate. I heard very suddenly that he didn't have long to live, and it turned out to be even less.
But I did get back in time, and that meant my mother was on her own, and there was absolutely no question of my living anywhere else. I did go back to America because the company, a Japanese firm at that time with whom I was working, very kindly sent me back to America, brought me back to help sort things out, as I had to leave in such a rush.
I wasn't the greatest secretary. I can't do shorthand or typing, but I had the most wonderful job as a secretary to the boss of a trading company. I became more of a social secretary after he once glimpsed my attempts at shorthand. And I really had a good time. I thoroughly enjoyed it. But I made friends in America that I've always kept.
I've always loved the country very much, but real life had intervened, and I had to be back in England.
Howard Lovy: Yeah.
A Friend Tells Her to Write a Book
Howard Lovy: So you've written that what finally got you to start writing a novel was a friend who suggested you stop writing such long letters and write a novel instead.
Liz Harris: That's it. I wrote the most voluminous letters. They were great tomes that you basically would have to unscroll. My boys were about two or three, and it was a halcyon time in life when they were both asleep in the evening at a reasonably early hour, and they stayed asleep for a bit.
So I thought, “I can write to my friends.” And I wrote these long letters, the minutiae of my life. They must have been so tedious. Anyhow, one day a friend rolled up, and she held my letter in her fingertips, and she said, “For goodness sake, Liz, write a book.” “Oh,” I thought, “that's an idea.” And funnily enough, just at about that time, I had heard somewhere or read somewhere that for Mills & Boon you only had to write about 50 to 55,000 words, and I thought, “Hmm, that doesn't sound too many.”
And I learnt that you don't have to have character development, and you didn't have to have a subplot. So I thought, “Oh, I can do that.” So I sat down with my trusty typewriter and Tipp-Ex, and I wrote a book that I thought sounded suitably Mills & Boon. Star and the Bride, I called it. And I sent it to them.
In those days you sent the whole manuscript. When they wrote back to me, they were very sweet, very nice. They didn't comment, thank goodness, on my style. But they said there was a lot to like, but they did advise me, before I tried to write for Mills & Boon, to read a few Mills & Boon.
Because had I done so, I would know that you couldn't start a Mills & Boon with an attempted rape. Well, I had never read a Mills & Boon in my life, so that must have been quite a shock for them when they read the graphic details on page one and two. So at that time I thought, “Right, I will have another go at it.”
But it was just as the boys were beginning to be very active in their little children's social world, and they needed a chauffeur. And who else but mother? And for the next years, my husband was out a lot in the evenings at governors meetings. So for the next few years, I was just based in the evenings taking the children out, weekends hosting their friends, play dates for them.
And I increasingly started teaching myself. So it was only when our stint in Cheshire, up in the north of England, for the benefit of Americans, came to an end. We went there because of my husband's job, and we moved back to the south, to Oxfordshire, just outside Oxford, that I decided I really needed to take the writing more seriously because I didn't have to work as much and the boys were off our hands now.
Close by, but they had lives of their own. So I took out my Star and the Bride and read it, and I realized how kind Mills & Boon had been. It was way over the top, florid, overwritten prose. It was absolutely ghastly. So I thought, “Well, I've got to have some writer friends. I will join a class in Oxford.”
I went to a class called Starting a Novel. It was absolutely wonderful. Friday mornings for a year. It was superb. I made loads of friends, I learned about a very good writing organization called the Romantic Novelists' Association. And I realized my Star and the Bride wouldn't do as the material I was going to work on, which had been my initial premise, and I started another book.
And I ended up with 12,000 words of it. I'd absolutely loved the year, and I knew I was going to be writing. And I wrote and wrote and wrote, and I submitted to agents and submitted to publishers and went to various workshops and things with friends. Because it might be a solitary activity when you write, but it is never lonely, because you meet so many absolutely delightful people, so many supportive people, so many people willing to share the knowledge that they have gained with you.
Ladakh Gives Her an Original Story
Liz Harris: And I got a lot of rejections, but after seven and a half years, having heard from one or two agents that what they wanted was something really original, and it's very difficult to be original. You sit and look at the screen and think, “Right, I'm going to be original.” And all you can think of is what you've already read in the past that other people have written.
But by chance, I came upon Ladakh, an Indian province. My late uncle, who had been stationed in the 1940s in North India, had got one of the very few passes that were allowed to foreign people to go into Ladakh, and you couldn't fly into the airport in those days. And he had traveled for 28 days, all the way through Kashmir, all the way through what we now know is kidnap country, and we couldn't go there, to visit Ladakh.
And he was an erudite man, very interested in everything around him, and he compiled an album, which at the time I hadn't known about. But when I was just thinking, “How on earth am I going to be original?” his daughter, my cousin in Australia, had phoned up and asked if I could find a home for the album, because no one in Australia wanted it.
Well, I found a home. It's now in the British Library on Euston Road in the Indian room, and I collected it from friends of hers a couple of weeks later who brought it over to England. And when I read it, I fell in love with Ladakh, and instantly I thought, “This is my original.” I hadn't even known it existed.
It sounded like a made-up name.
Howard Lovy: Right, right.
Liz Harris: I thought, “Right, that's where I'm going to set my book.” And I did. That is when I said you absorb things and you don't know it. I had a very close friend, and I knew the story of what had happened to her family in earlier years, and she became the model for Patricia, the female.
And then I started researching. It's great fun. Having taught history for a long time, as well as English, I love the research. It replaces my lesson planning. And I learned that because there's no rain worth mentioning, virtually no rain, they rely on melt snow water. All of the social structures of the family affect the fourth son in the family.
And I knew the minute I read that that my hero, not an alpha Mills & Boon hero, my normal hero, Kalden I called him, was going to be a fourth son in the family. He was going to accept his destiny, though he was sad about it, but he understood why and had to do it. And I'll never tell anyone what that was, because I want them to read the book.
Romance Offers Pure Escapism
Howard Lovy: Right. So I can see how your love of travel, you found your voice through those experiences, and your love of history. So where does the romance come in? Why specifically romances?
Liz Harris: I think because they're escapism.
And my favorite author is Jane Austen, and what is Pride and Prejudice but a romance? What is Emma but a romance? I loved those books, and I loved watching how the various characters drew together. And writing about a man, writing about a woman, the mixed sexes, it is fairly normal to end up having a romance in it.
Also, although I love thrillers and I read them all the time now, I really adore them, I have never really felt drawn to write a crime story. I like having somebody in my books do wrong because that creates a conflict, and that is an interest in how the people are going to deal with it. That is an obstacle, if you like.
But I've never actually wanted to write a police procedural or a crime novel as such. I think perhaps books for me were pure escapism and, in a way, a romance. Not what I tried to do with Star and the Bride, alpha male and a gorgeous female, but real man, real woman falling in love. For me, that is truly romantic, and when they get together, that is pure pleasure as well as escapism, and totally satisfying.
Cover and Title Fights Push Liz to Go Indie
Howard Lovy: Now, you wrote for… what was it called? Choc Lit.
Liz Harris: Yeah.
Howard Lovy: So after a while you stopped submitting to them after some disagreements. Is that when you decided to go indie?
Liz Harris: Yes, it is. They picked me up with The Road Back and published that, and published altogether six books.
I went to Wyoming for my research in America when I wrote A Bargain Struck, the second book that they published, and I loved Wyoming. I had a wonderful time. I traveled all the way through it. Also, my publisher asked for a novella because A Bargain Struck sold extremely well, particularly in America.
They wanted a novella, so I wrote A Western Heart. But at the same time, while exploring and visiting places like Rock Springs, I learnt something about the history between the Chinese and the Americans, and actually I was quite appalled. I don't think that is America's finest hour. But I knew I had to write it because I hadn't read anything about it at all.
And when I was in Los Angeles, I went to Los Angeles City College and did American studies for a bit. No mention of that history. My Californian friends didn't know what I was talking about when I mentioned Rock Springs. So I wrote a book that I called Golden Tiger. Very close to my heart because I felt tremendously strongly about the subject.
It was about a 100% Chinese girl and an American man. It was interesting 'cause I also had to learn how cowboys lived at that time, fascinating. I didn't know how droves and things like that worked. But my publisher, when I saw the cover, I couldn't believe it. The book is about identity as much as anything, because Charity has a face, she is 100% Chinese, looks it, has her hair in braids, but she wears American clothes, talks with an American accent, and behaves like an outgoing American girl, not like a Chinese girl.
Yet, to the Americans, she looks Chinese because of her face. To the Chinese, she looks American because of her behavior. So identity was tremendously important, and the publisher showed me the cover, which showed a Eurasian girl, not 100% Chinese, with dark hair all over her face. My Charity had braids. And also, when you saw the picture blown up for paperback, a book set in 1870, she had lip gloss on.
So I did mention the fact that I was quite disturbed about it not being a Chinese girl on the cover, given the book was about identity. The publisher was unhappy and changed the title and called it The Lost Girl. There were a million and one books called The Lost Girl or Girl somehow or other because of the book Girl on the Train being so popular.
So it was a shame. I was so annoyed about the whole thing that I kept on writing. I couldn't not write, I love writing, but I kept on writing books, but I didn't send anything for about three years, until I decided I had to bring it to an end. I sent them something I knew they wouldn't take, and I decided I would apply to a publisher, and I did.
I applied to Boldwood Books, and they were very interested, and I was talking to an editor about two of my books, because I had a volume of material which could be series. One already had three books in the series and one had the potential for another two. And just as we were talking about it, I had to pause for me to go to Vietnam to research another book.
All of these trips are tax deductible when you're an author. It's absolutely wonderful. And when I came back from Vietnam at the beginning of February 2020, I came back with COVID, and we had COVID in force in the country. And at the end of the month, the editor to whom I was talking said that they were going to all work from home, and they weren't able to deal with anything for which there wasn't a signed contract.
So she said to me, “We will resume our conversation at Christmas, but in the meantime,” she said, “I'm afraid we'll have to call a halt on it.” And I thought about it. I knew a friend who was self-published with only a few self-published books who had earned that year an astronomical sum of money, or at least the year before, and who was thoroughly enjoying it.
And I thought, “I don't want to wait till Christmas,” because people in lockdown want to read, and because I've not been published for about three years now because I didn't submit anything, it'll leave too long a gap. Because if I wait till Christmas, all the slots in 2021 will be taken. I wouldn't be published, assuming they even took me, until 2022.
So I thought, “Right, I'm going to do this on my own.” And my friend gave me very, very good advice. She said, “Treat it as a business,” and I did right from the minute I started. I have absolutely loved every single minute of self-publishing. And when I became a hybrid, Boldwood did contact me again a year ago, and I did sign with them.
I asked for a clause in my contract that allowed me to self-publish. There is nothing more wonderful than being your own boss. I'd been angry about my cover. Now I had the cover I wanted. I'd been angry about my title. Now I had the titles I wanted. I could choose exactly what I wanted to do with my book.
I could plan when I want to bring them out. And I found that there was a whole world of indie authors willing to help. I received a phenomenal amount of advice. For example, I was holding off. I mentioned it in an indie organization, “Gosh, I can't wait till next year when I can publish my next book. I'm getting it all ready.”
And somebody wrote, “Well, it's still only about August. Why aren't you publishing it earlier?” I said, “Well, I always did one book a year.” And they said, “Well, why not one book every eight months? You give time for readers to get to know an author and to find another book before too long.” Just so much advice.
Everything I needed to know, I would say my hand was held by other indie authors, and I loved every minute. I am truly honest. I do think there are certain things it is an advantage to be able to do or to have when you start as a self-published author. If you want to make any money, I think you're very lucky if you can afford to lose a little at first.
Howard Lovy: Yeah. You have to make an investment first.
Liz Harris: You have to.
Howard Lovy: Especially to get the exact cover you want, and then…
Liz Harris: That's it. Editing is very important. Just because you're self-publishing, it just means you're a different publisher.
You're the publisher, not another publisher. Having your books professionally edited is essential. You owe it to your readers, but you owe it to yourself, and you owe it…
Howard Lovy: Oh, absolutely. When I'm not doing podcasts, I'm also an editor, so I'm a big advocate of a real-life human editing your book rather than AI.
Liz Harris: Yes.
Newsletters and Social Media Reach Readers
Howard Lovy: Now what about marketing and reaching readers? How do you handle that?
Liz Harris: Yes. Well, again, a lot of advice. I got Mark Dawson's Self-Publishing 101 because I was so non-techy that I didn't know what a browser was. I really didn't know anything, and I needed to start from basics.
And the advice was have a newsletter. Right from the time I was published, obviously, I had a website, because people reading a book need somewhere to go to find something about you. But I started a newsletter in about June 2020. And again, advice from an indie friend: I was going to do it once every two months, and she said, “Readers will get confused.
They'll not know which month it is. Do it once a month.” So I've been doing it every single last Friday of the month. It's now five and a half years I have been bringing out my newsletter. It is a newsletter. It's not a thinly veiled blog, because a lot of people are not reading blogs now.
The market is rather saturated. But that is one way of reaching readers. I have my newsletter and I have something in the back of the books about my newsletter, and obviously you can promote it on Facebook and Twitter, various social media. And there used to be one or two good organizations that you could sign up to and give a book for free to people who bid to be on your newsletter.
There would be a draw at the end, and the winning person would get a free Kindle and a copy of all the books, and I included one of my books. So there are ways of building up readers, 'cause you want people on your newsletter, though I tend to cap it at 2,500, and that's a way of reaching readers.
Also social media. A lot of people say, “Oh, I couldn't be on social media. I just don't have time. I have a book to write.”
Howard Lovy: Mm.
Liz Harris: Well, I'm on my 30th book, and I do manage to do the social media. I have always looked at it as my driving time. When I was in America, when I worked downtown, I drove for an hour in Los Angeles.
And in England, I've always had to drive to the schools at which I've taught, and that is my driving time. You don't get up and instantly start writing.
Howard Lovy: That's a good way of thinking about it. Yeah, exactly. It's necessary time that you have to spend to get to where you're going.
And if you work from home, you don't have a commute, so you spend the time on social media.
Liz Harris: That's it. It's worth doing it. And also, my husband used to run a course in Portsmouth. He was in education also, and he'd be gone for two weeks, and I'd be writing. And the minute I heard the door close behind him, I rejoiced he's gone, and I didn't stop writing at 6:00.
I normally stop at 6:00, so we watch the news together and then have dinner together. I didn't stop at 6:00. I carried on writing. But I start in the morning at about 6:00 or 6:30. I'm an early riser. So writing, writing, writing till about 7:00, 8:00, 9:00 in the evening. Every time I did my writing, the next morning I have always gone back over what I wrote the day before, got back into my characters' heads, got back into my fictional world, and wondered if I'd missed anything, if there was anything a character would have overheard that I hadn't noticed.
So I did that again. I would spend the whole of the next day editing because I'd become too verbose. I'd go way over the top. And I think you can only write good words for a certain amount of time a day, and the rest of the day you could do a little bit of social media, or you could play around.
Howard Lovy: If you want. Yeah, I'm more energetic in my writing early in the morning, and the later in the day it goes, the creative part of my brain slows down, and then I do routine things that don't involve creativity.
Liz Harris: Yes.
Hybrid Deal Preserves Her Indie Freedom
Howard Lovy: So now Boldwood Books approached you recently about joining them, and you specifically negotiated the right to continue self-publishing. Why was that important to you?
Liz Harris: Well, one of the points is the fact that I've got five books set in Asia, and I really wanted to go this year to New Delhi to write the sixth book. They're set in the 1930s, the time of the British Raj, and I love those books.
And I've been approached by an editor for sagas, so they're not sagas. They would never come out as sagas. I wanted to do that. Plus also, the very first book that I wrote with the class I went to in Oxford, that has never been published. One or two people have read it and said they think it's very good.
They've been very kind about it. But it has a dark theme, and I would have to have a slightly different name, and I don't think a publisher would want to take a chance on that. I've been told by a couple of publishers they thought it was excellent, but it would be difficult to publish such a theme, and I would get a lot of one-star reviews, they told me, by people who hadn't even read it.
So partly I had material I wanted to do that belonged to my indie life.
Howard Lovy: Mm-hmm.
Liz Harris: But I like having the control. I know I've had to relinquish it, and there's a lot to be said. There are advantages, obviously, of being with a traditional publisher. They do a lot of the work that you would normally do.
They do the blurb that you would normally do. I've always hated writing blurbs. And there is a degree of hubris, I suppose, with being with a traditional publisher. I have never felt that, but I have felt occasionally that one or two other authors have felt that because I was an indie and not with a traditional publisher, what I had to say possibly wasn't as important or as valuable as somebody who is with a traditional publisher, even if that publisher were tiny and did no marketing at all.
It's just the idea. But I have loved the money I've made as an indie, I have to be honest. When I agreed to go with Boldwood, I did hesitate for a long time, because I was taking in sufficient money to live on, the money I was making, without having any kind of pension or anything else, and I don't know that a lot of authors can say that.
And I also very much like my cover designer. I have an excellent editor. And I liked what I did. I liked my life as an indie author.
Liz Urges Authors to Keep Writing
Howard Lovy: So it sounds like you've found a really good combination. Your own career includes traditional publishing, indie publishing, conferences, retreats, and of course, organizations like ALLi. Looking back over that journey, what advice would you give an author trying to build a sustainable career?
Liz Harris: You mean as an indie publisher or just as an author?
Howard Lovy: As an author. Well, I guess doing what you've done. There isn't only one correct path to publication, I suppose.
Liz Harris: No. I think to carry on knowing that you learn. That is just generally in life. We never stop learning, and sometimes people sit back and they think they've mastered it because they've done a few books, and they just do the same thing over and over again.
There's no benefit in their books for the things that they have learned. But I think it's very important, obviously, to keep on writing. The more material you have, whether you're going to be traditional or indie, the better it is. Because in these days, a lot of publishers have grown up, I think Boldwood is among them.
And when I first spoke to them, they didn't just look at the manuscript you sent. They want to see the next manuscript, because their intention is to build a readership for your books…
Howard Lovy: Right.
Liz Harris: …which is what every indie author wants to do. And to do that, they want to bring the books out every eight months.
And when they accept one book, they want to know that there's another really ready to go into the pipeline so that they can keep it rolling. And I would think that is good advice for all authors, to keep on writing and to keep on reading.
Howard Lovy: Mm-hmm.
Liz Harris: And the other advice I think I would give is something I actually learnt. Perhaps advice is the wrong word.
When I was accepted for publication with The Road Back, I went into a panic when I suddenly realized, after I'd handed it in, I had one book a year, my deadline was September, that I didn't know what I could give them next. Although I'd been writing solidly for seven and a half years, I had written a lot of different sorts of books, different genres.
I've enjoyed all of them. I did a contemporary, four girls sharing a house, I was inspired by Penny Vincenzi's early novels, called The Best Friend. I loved that sort of book. But a lot of different books, but not one of them was the same genre in which I was now about to be published.
So I think if one is building a career, possibly it's wiser, instead of doing what I did, just go for it and write whatever I felt like for the moment, perhaps do that for a certain amount of time, but then decide what you're really happiest writing and then stick to that, so that when you do have a body of material and you approach a publisher, or you become an indie author, because both of them need a body of material behind you, that material is the sort of thing that the people who read your book will actually want to read, and they will expect you to be turning out.
If I had delivered The Best Friend, not that the publisher would accept it, but had I been an indie publisher and after The Road Back had given out The Best Friend, I would've lost my readers. So I think possibly have fun for a bit, but then perhaps decide where your writing career is going to be focused, and make sure that the body of material you build up is set in that.
And also, obviously, take note of what's happening in the publishing world. I always have the headlines of BookBrunch and of The Bookseller. And over the years, book lengths, for example, have changed. It used to be you could easily send in 150,000 words, 120,000 words.
Then with the pressure on paper prices and the cost of printing, publishers were saying under 100,000. It is now much more common to see 75 to 80,000. So you don't want to be writing a great tome like The Fall of the Roman Empire.
Howard Lovy: Right. Right.
Liz Harris: Publishers are looking for shorter, and they're not interested. So while you're building your body of material that is consistent in terms of genre, at the same time, be aware of what is happening in the publishing world around you.
Howard Lovy: Well, that's all excellent advice, Liz. Thank you so much for sharing your journey with us, from your childhood love of books and your travels to traditional and indie publishing.
And best of luck to you.
Liz Harris: Well, thank you very much, and thank you very much for interviewing me and asking such interesting questions. I've really enjoyed it.
Howard Lovy: Thank you, Liz. Thank you. Bye.
