Guest Author Liz Foster

Ask the Author Podcast Transcript

Episode 42, 25th March 2024

Subscribe

Ready for the best piece of writing advice ever? Jodi Gibson, author of REINVENTING EMILY BROWN shares a tip that will transform your craft.

Intro

In the intro, Jodi Gibson talks how excited she is to welcome a second guest to the podcast. She also has her laptop back (hooray!) but accidentally injured her finger cooking dinner.

Show Notes

When did you know your manuscript was ready to submit to publishers?

So once you submit it and you got a publishing deal, how did you find the editing process with your publisher?

What advice do you have for authors seeking traditional publication?

Episode Transcript

0:00:01 - Jodi Gibson

You are listening to this podcast and, as I said, this is going to be our second guest author for 2024. And I'm excited to introduce you to Liz Foster, who is a British Australian author living here in Australia, and her debut novel was recently released and I have, I have read it. I listened to the audiobook and I absolutely loved it. So I have got her in to answer three of your questions and I'm excited to get onto that. So let's get cracking. Liz Foster is a British Australian author and writer. She has written a monthly column for her local newspaper for over six years on issues that matter, and her debut novel, titled The Good Woman's Guide to Making Better Choices, was released in December 2023. Welcome to the podcast, liz.

0:03:48 - Liz Foster

Thank you so much for having me, Jodi. It's just so exciting to talk to you. I see you doing all the hard work behind the scenes through years of pitching, and here I am talking to you as an author, so it's great.

0:03:59 - Jodi Gibson

Yay, it's so great to have you here. Okay, we're going to have a quick chat about your debut novel first up. So can you tell listeners what the novel is about?

0:04:10 - Liz Foster

Sure. So it's commercial women's fiction. Sometimes the title trips people up a bit. I think it was it a self-help guide. No, no, no it's, it's. It's very much women's fiction and it features our main protagonist, Libby.

She is a country girl who married Ludo, who's a city slicker, and they live with their family in Bondi and they live a glorious life. She's very wealthy and she comes from a farm, so more humble beginnings. But you know, she's very lucky. She appreciates she's lucky Until the day there's a knock at the door.

The police come in and her husband's arrested. So he's taken to jail for fraud and the family lose everything because he's been. He's been mortgaging everything secretly behind the scenes and they lose their swanky penthouse, all of their cars, their belongings etc. And she's basically got a hold of thought, though Her oldest boy's in the final year of school in Sydney. So there's no chance of moving back to the farm. And at the same time she feels complicit because some of the investors that he ripped off were family and people that she knew. So when she finds this out, she's in this horrible dilemma of wanting to support the husband even though he did the wrong thing. But he's sort of in the clanger, as it were. Meanwhile, she's got to support the kids, she's got to find money to make ends meet and she wants to recompense. So there's a whole series of events that lead to a quite hectic climax. Absolutely.

0:05:43 - Jodi Gibson

And look, I've just finished the audiobook, which I can tell you I absolutely loved. The narration was fantastic too, which is always good, and I'm still thinking about the characters today, so that's always a good sign. But yeah, they were just so quirky. I loved all of them and it was such a great storyline. So well done you.

0:06:03 - Liz Foster

Thank you very much. I do get. I mean, it's lovely to get compliments, of course, but lots of people say gosh, I've really never read anything like that before. It's quite unusual. So you know, I'm not thinking that necessarily when I'm writing it, but I think maybe that's made a difference. And I agree with you on the audiobook. I think it's absolutely magic the way that narrator Jennifer Valychik, I think she is, and she's an Australian NIDA actor and she just brought everything to life. It was like watching it on a stage.

0:06:34 - Jodi Gibson

So it was brilliant. So, yeah, well done, okay. So, without further ado, I have Liz here to answer three of our listening questions, so let's get cracking. Are you ready, liz? Sure am Okay. So the first question I have for you is:

**When did you know your manuscript was ready to submit to publishers? **

0:06:57 - Liz Foster

So this is the second manuscript I've written and the first one I wrote. I circled the years going back and forth, pitching kind of getting okay feedback but not getting much further, getting book group, my book group feedback and it was around sort of six out of 10. And I didn't know. People were just saying, oh, you know, that's all right, it probably needs work. Oh, I really didn't know what that work was Until I sat down and wrote another book and then I could really feel the difference between the first book and the second book.

You structure it better, you can feel the connections better. It just felt better. I can't describe it. And then when I gave that manuscript which is this book, the Good Woman's Guide, to my same early readers which, by the way, I recommend as well as for my first manuscript, obviously used close friends and family. We all do. They're lovely, but they also lovely things, so it's not useful feedback.

So I went wider to my book club, which of course is still close. But one of my book club friends in particular is like a solid amateur book reviewer. She does a whole post at the end of the year on favourite genres and most overrated, best, whatever, best new release, et cetera, et cetera, and she's when we're at the end of each book club. We always do a rating out of five and she is very harsh on this is books, by the way, by famous people that we're reading the book club, and if she gives something a three out of five then it's pretty good, anyway. So I gave her this second manuscript and it felt good, but I just had a feeling about it, but I didn't really know. I thought, oh, I'll see what this friend says, and she came back three and a half out of five. I thought that's gold.

0:08:55 - Jodi Gibson

Wow.

0:08:57 - Liz Foster

And I just knew it. The thing is, I just knew because she's got great instincts and so my instincts on my own weren't enough, but the instincts of someone that's a very widely read person, not just a friend, not just another reader, not just someone that reads in your genre, someone that reads widely. Of course it was still an early well, relatively early manuscript and she gave me lots of tips on things that weren't working, such as the timeline et cetera, but they were all very, very easily fixable. It wasn't unfixable stuff. So I don't know if anyone wants to really hear that. I certainly did not want to hear that advice when I'd written my first book because I thought can't everyone keep saying write another book, like it's easy, okay, I'll just write another book. But in the end you find yourself moving towards that anyway, because what else is there to do? You literally can't just sit there in a vacuum waiting for the phone to ring and it's not gonna happen anyway. So writing that second manuscript not only gets you more quickly to a place at the table with a publisher or an agent, but it also helps you see the mistakes in your first one more clearly. And in fact, my first manuscript I'm working on now for my second novel. So I really recommend seeking advice widely.

And I also paid for a private manuscript assessment. So a full edit is a very expensive thing. But again, for how much money do you invest? You wanna back yourself? La, la, la, la la, you know at all. And I decided look, I'm gonna commit to a manuscript assessment. And I did, and I used the same editor I'd used for the first novel, the one still in the drawer. And again, that was the same sort of thing as the continued feedback from my book club friend. She had already read work from me. She could see that there was daylight between the first one and the second one. You know, she said, all of the things that are good are still good your characterization, your sense of place, et cetera. But it's much better. But again, obviously still needed work. So I could feed all of those things through. And then I really felt confident when I was pitching it.

0:11:25 - Jodi Gibson

Yeah, that's fantastic. It's great to have that one person you can go to, who you know is, as you said, really reads widely, so you know you're getting feedback. So perfect.

**So once you submit it and you got a publishing deal, how did you find the editing process with your publisher? **

0:11:46 - Liz Foster

Okay. So my understanding of the editing process with publishers this is obviously being brand new is that once you give them your manuscript, they then come back to you with what's called a structural edit. And the structural edit is what I realise I'm now doing with my first one. It's a very painful process, but anyway. So I'm poised, waiting for this. You know my publishers signed me up.

It was only this time last year the end of March 2023, for a January release and she said to me no, it's in great shape, we don't need a structural edit, we'll just go straight to copy edit. So obviously I went into a flat spin. Of course it needs a structural edit. I don't know what I'm doing, but this actually leads back to the point I was making, for the first question is that the harder you work on it, the better you can see it and the less work it ultimately needs. And even though publishers will come back with structural edit feedback most of the time, that's still a lot of work. So if you can get something in as good a shape as possible to give them so it's only a copy edit, everyone's better off. You can get an earlier release, you're better off.

And then what happened then was the copy edit process was absolutely delightful. I had so much fun. There was this beautiful editor called Kate who came back full, full feedback on everything. But one of the points she made obviously this was kind of accidental, but I really took it on was that she said you know, it's in such good shape she's the second or third person to say that it's in such good shape that it really freed me up to be picky.

Now, if you think about it from an editor's perspective, if they get given a dog's breakfast, you know they've got only so much time to fix. You know they've got to go for the deal breaker stuff first, followed by the overarching stuff, followed by the. You know they've got no time for the niceties. So she could. There were a couple of things and there were maybe two or three chapters I had to change for reasonably significant. While I improved I weren't really changed, but right through the manuscript she was able to highlight little things, saying to one would he have said that here? And I'm not sure if? And I came to realise that that was quite unusual and an editor ordinarily wouldn't have the time and space to do that. So it made it enjoyable for me, but it was because of the early work I did with accidentally. So I really recommend like, if you think your manuscript's finished, it's not, and there's always something you can do to make it better.

0:14:41 - Jodi Gibson

Yeah, very true, yeah, and like you say, that early work that you did really paid off.

0:14:45 - Liz Foster

Hmm, I mean, I didn't know that that. I just thought that that's what everybody had to do. You know, I'm just plugging away going. Oh, everyone says you've got to work really hard at it. So I've been a bit of a hard at it, but then it turned out that I had really worked hard at it and it was to my advantage. So Absolutely.

0:15:03 - Jodi Gibson

Okay, so that's our final question, and I think you've probably answered this anyway, but if you can think of some other things, our final question is:

**What advice do you have for authors seeking traditional publication? **

0:15:16 - Liz Foster

So all the things I said before obviously keep working hard, but one thing that's really becoming very evident to me and I have heard this around the traps prior to being signed, but now it's really front and center is what publishers are looking for. Is that X-factor, that point of difference, that thing that makes your manuscript stand out above others? Now you might think you might know genuinely, you're a wonderful writer. Everyone that's read your work just loves it. It's beautiful. No one is going to get past the first page if there isn't an amazing hook. So my advice is really work on the first page, and I wrote my introduction to my book. That's out now. It's just a short prologue around the climax scene and then the story goes backwards and starts again basically from the arrest. I wrote that maybe in an hour. At the end of having written the manuscript and edited over a long period of time, I just suddenly had this light bulb moment when I thought, no, I need to bring everybody right in at that moment and not give too many spoilers. And then boom, and I have had so much feedback from people saying, god, it just got you straight away. As soon as you read the first page, I couldn't put it down. I've all I wanted to know what was going to happen.

So, whatever genre you write in, even if it's a memoir, I really recommend how you structure your book, whether it's in scenes or chapters or however you write it, basically start and finish each of those with a little hook. That's an interest that grabs you at the beginning and there's something at the end that makes you want to read on. And there are definite ways of doing it. You might think, oh gosh, well, how can I do it? There's nothing interesting happening. Well, let me tell you, there are ways. If only you thought that da, da, da, da, da. There's a thousand ways of doing it, and you'd be surprised at how much you can really create the intrigue, and then people can settle in and enjoy the story, the wonderful story you've already written, so you need to get excited Curiosity seeds, isn't it that you drop throughout manuscript, particularly, so importantly, in that first chapter or prologue or whatever you want to know.

0:17:52 - Jodi Gibson

That's really got to hook the readers in, and I think it's really today, in our low attention span days, that we're scrolling through things really quickly, so we really need to hook the reader.

0:18:06 - Liz Foster

Yeah, and, more importantly, the publisher You're pursuing to this particular question how do you get to? Publish it. So my publisher is Kelly from Affirm Press, and she contacted me within a day of reading the manuscript and said oh, can we have lunch to talk about your wonderful book?

0:18:31 - Jodi Gibson

You're lucky.

0:18:34 - Liz Foster

It seems unlikely. But anyway, the point was she wasn't going to read past even the first paragraph if it didn't hook her. And even the first line, I think people say, gosh, that's a clever first line, you know. So I can't tell you how much time and energy I'm spending on this next book, investing in my first line, because those are the things. You know there's a thousand million wonderful writers out there with great stories, great ideas. You know you're great at characterization and putting scenes together and all the rest of it. But you know you have to bring someone in at the very beginning and first and foremost it's the publisher before the reader, almost.

0:19:14 - Jodi Gibson

Yeah, absolutely Okay. Well, thank you so much, liz. There are so many great nuggets of inspiration for all budding authors, published authors, for all writers, I think, in what you've shared with us today. So it's been brilliant having you on the podcast and thank you very much.

0:19:34 - Liz Foster

It's an absolute pleasure. Thanks so much, Jodi.

In Summary

If you'd like to know more about this week's topic, you can check out my website at www.jfgibson.com.au, or if you have a question about writing or publishing that you'd like answered on the podcast, please reach out to me on my website or via Instagram, where you'll find me at JF Gibson Writer. The easiest way to find me is to Google Jodi Gibson Author, where you'll find my website and my socials, so I do look forward to hearing from you.

Well, there was definitely some great nuggets of information there for all of you aspiring authors, even for some established authors, I think. I think there's always things that we can pick up from listening to another person's experience in our field, so that was fantastic. Liz, thank you so much, and I hope everyone finds this useful. I'm having so much fun speaking with our guest authors and asking them these three questions and, like I said, it's always great to hear from someone else's point of view, because you do learn. So, and that's what this podcast is all about is giving you the tools and the information so you can go out there and do it all yourself. So I hope you enjoyed that. We'll have another guest author next month and I'll be back next week with another regular episode where I will be answering a listener's question, and it's going to be a beauty too, because I have that question lined up ready to go. So thank you so much for joining me.