Episode 016 - Drawing Back the Publishing Curtain with Lisa Regan
February 26, 2020
USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestselling author Lisa Regan shares the details of her voyage through the traditional and indy publishing worlds, and shares some great advice for making a success of both.
Lisa Regan is the USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of the Detective Josie Quinn series as well as several other crime fiction titles. She has a Bachelor’s degree in English and a Master of Education degree from Bloomsburg University. She is a member of Sisters in Crime, International Thriller Writers, Crime Writers Association, and Mystery Writers of America. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband, daughter and Boston Terrier named Mr. Phillip.
Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is Lisa Reagan. Lisa Reagan is the USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of the Detective Josie Quinn series, as well as several other crime fiction titles.
She has a bachelor's degree in English and a Master of Education degree from Bloomsburg University. She is a member of Sisters in Crime, International Thriller Writers, Crime Writers Association, and Mystery Writers of America. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband, her daughter, and her Boston terrier, named Mr. Phillip.
And if for no other reason, you have to follow Lisa on Facebook just for Mr. Phillip's Monday Mood, this is the standing feature with Mr. Phillip.
The reason I had asked Lisa to join us on The Indy Author Podcast is I got to hear her speak recently at the Hockessin Bookshelf in Hockessin, Delaware, and, Lisa, you shared some background about your history and your publishing journey.
And I realized that it's not something that people get to hear about a lot, maybe a couple of their close author friends, they get to hear how they got to where they are now. But in a lot of cases it's sort of a black box and it's very mysterious.
You were generous enough to offer to share that story again with our listeners and allow me to jump in periodically with questions. I'm just going to open the floor to you and ask you to tell us how you got from your very first foray into the publishing world to being the bestselling author you are today.
Lisa: Okay. Do you want me to start with the agent search?
Matty: Yes, that would be great.
Lisa: Okay. I believe it was April of 2006 I had finished a draft of Finding Claire Fletcher, which would go on to become the first novel of mine that was published, and I thought, this is something that might actually be readable. So I decided to look for an agent and I took four years, from 2006 to 2010, and I queried over 150 agents. You'll see a lot of times in my bio, it says that I was rejected by over 150 agents. The actual number is 154.
I took four years of querying to land an agent. And we signed the contract, went on submissions, and she was pitching to every major house and they were all saying the same thing, which is that they love the book, but no.
Matty: I'm curious, what were you doing during those four years when you were querying the agents? Were you working on other books?
Lisa: I wrote my second novel, which was originally published as Aberration and has since been retitled To Kill for You. I was working full time and I had a toddler. I wasn't quite as productive as I am now, so I spent most of that time writing that second book.
And by the time I got my agent, that book was finished, and she did sign me for that one as well.
Matty: Is it possible that she would have accepted your first book and then you would have gone elsewhere to find an agent for the second book if the first agent wasn't interested in it, or once you're locked in with an agent, are you locked in with them for practical purposes for all your books?
Lisa: I have talked to writers who say that it's a book-by-book thing, and then I've also talked to writers who say, no, once an agent takes you, they take you on for the duration of your career, unless you part ways. And this particular agent was interested in whatever I was writing.
As a matter of courtesy, if I wrote something new, I certainly wouldn't shop it elsewhere without talking to her first. So we went on submissions. The publishers loved the book, but they didn't want to publish it. And then we went to medium-sized presses, smaller presses. And everybody said the same thing—this book is a home run, this is great, it's really strong. But, no, we don't want to publish it.
Matty: As your agent started working through the list of publishers she was taking it to, when you started out, did you have a sense of, "I'm willing to go this far and no farther," and did that change as you worked your way through the list? Or did you know right up front that you really wanted to keep working through the list until you found a publisher that was interested in taking it on?
Lisa: I think every writer that goes this route, you want a big publisher to be interested in it, but I certainly was never closed off to going with a mid-sized publisher or a small press. I just wanted someone who felt as passionately about the book as I did. Any reputable publisher was fine with me. I wasn't really concerned with how big or small they were.
Then we spent two years on submissions and in the meantime, I've had friends who had agents and they're only spending say six months on submissions.
Matty: How involved were you in the submission process or was the agent doing all the work and she was just keeping you informed of what was going on?
Lisa: She did all the work and she would send me weekly updates in terms of who she had pitched to and if there were any responses, and then anytime she got a response that was more than "thanks / no thanks," she would send it on to me or anytime she got someone who said, "I'm halfway through it and I love it. I'll be back in touch," she would send that to me to keep my morale up. And anytime we got a rejection after they had read it, then she would send that as well.
Matty: Did you consider or act on making any changes to the manuscript during that two-year period as a result of what you were hearing from the publishers?
Lisa: Not at that point, because that four years that I spent looking for an agent, I actually had agents who really loved the book, but had suggestions for changes.
So I had done a ton of revising in that four years. There was one agent in particular who really worked closely with me to revise the book to what it is now. It was a two-year process. I was in touch with him and we're working on this book and revising it and he's giving me all these suggestions and I'm implementing them. And the book was so much better.
And then at the end of that two years, he said, "I'm leaving the agency I'm with, I'm going to start my own agency. Would you like to come as a potential client?" And, we had just done two years’ worth of work on the books. I was like, of course.
He took me as a potential client. And then about three or four months after that, I sent him an email saying, I really need to know if you're going to pick up this book or not, and he said no. So, to this day, I don't really understand why you would invest that much time because he really helped me make that book a million times better than what it was.
By the time I actually landed an agent and we were on submissions, when the book finally got published and went to editing, there were no suggestions. Maybe because I had worked so intensively on it while I was looking for an agent. I would say, if I hadn't worked that hard on the book already, I would definitely take another look at it after so many rejections and say, maybe I need to revise it.
So two years went by on submissions and we were kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel and then this new press opened up. I had a friend, Nancy, who got a contract with them and she was really happy with them. I talked to my agent about it and she said she would get in touch with them. And the acquisitions editor there at the time loved the book, and she immediately wanted it.
We had a couple of other small presses that hadn't said no yet. She went to them and said, "Do have an offer? Do you want to make a counteroffer or what are you thinking? Do you want to take this book or are you really interested? Because if not, we're going to take this offer."
They both declined, so we ended up with the small press. They were called Sapphire Star Publishing. It was basically run by two women who had had experience in publishing, and they got together and formed a publishing company.
Everyone that I knew that was in the business was like, this is a huge mistake. You have to let publishers be open for three years before you even think about publishing with them, because they're probably going to go bankrupt and close.
But at that point, it was that or nothing. And my agent was invested in this. She wanted to go with a small press and I really liked them. I liked the editor I had because she was so happy about the book and so passionate about it.
They signed me for both books, Finding Claire Fletcher and Aberration, and Finding Claire Fletcher came out December 6, 2012, and did much, much better than I think anybody anticipated, especially with a small press. And then June of 2013 Aberration was due to come out, and in May of 2013 we heard from the publisher that they were going to have to close their doors.
They said to those of us that had books coming out, we'll honor the contracts that we have, but we're not going to take on anything new. And they offered to revert our rights back to us, or we could ride out our existing contracts, which were for three-year terms. I talked to my agent and her suggestion was, especially because of the momentum that Finding Claire Fletcher was getting, she didn't want me to pull the second book and then lose that momentum while trying to place it elsewhere. We decided we were just going to stay with them and then Aberration came out and that did okay. Not as good as Finding Claire Fletcher, but it did okay.
Matty: Do you feel as if any of that was due to the fact that the publisher didn't have the resources anymore to throw behind marketing or any of the things that you might've had going for you for the first book?
Lisa: Possibly. But I think it had more to do with the constantly changing effectiveness of certain things. Like when Finding Claire Fletcher came out, the big marketing tool was Twitter. Twitter was huge. And Kindle Nation Daily was the most expensive ad, which now BookBub makes that look dirt cheap. And, they were just starting to reach out on Facebook. And so, I did lose a lot of that with the second book, but by the time Aberration came out, there were other things marketing-wise that were bigger, and they just didn't have the resources to tap into those.
I think it was a little bit of both. Just they didn't have the resources and also the market changed and the places that readers were going to find their books changed, so that made it kind of tough.
Matty: I guess this is perhaps more applicable to when you were looking for an agent than when you were looking for a publisher, but did you consider indy publishing?
Lisa: Yeah, definitely, I did. The conflict I had with my agent was that when we were getting to the bottom of our list of publishers with Finding Claire Fletcher, I would have been happy to self-publish it, but that doesn't benefit her in any way. So that was kind of the problem.
That was a problem for me. Actually, what happened was after Aberration came out, it was kind of like, "What do we do next because this publisher is no longer taking books?" And then I wrote Hold Still, and I went to my agent and I said I'd like to look for a publisher, but if we don't get any serious interest in nine months, then I want this back to self-publish it. And she just wasn't willing to do that. We were kind of at an impasse there.
At that point, I didn't sign with her for that book because I wanted the option to self-publish and she just wasn't willing to allow that. I ended up self-publishing that book, the third book.
By then I had a pretty decent following. I think it was out for two months and I had sold 5,000 copies. I was at that time some unknown paralegal writing in her spare time. That was a huge amount for me. I think it still is. And, that had been out for a month and Thomas and Mercer approached me and said that she had read it and loved it and they'd like to pick it up.
Matty: Thomas and Mercer is the Amazon imprint for mystery and crime, is that right?
Lisa: Yes. That was kind of a no brainer with their marketing reach. I had a full-time job, so my survival was not dependent at all on my writing income. Any royalties I got after I paid the taxes, I would use that money to buy ads. It was like putting it back into the pot and trying to get more readers.
Matty: What were you putting your money into and what year was that?
Lisa: That would've been 2013, 2014. So, it wasn't a lot. I mean, my first royalty check was $3.16.
Matty: What were you spending the money on at that time?
Lisa: Oh, mostly Kindle Book Review and a Digital Book Today. Kindle Nation Daily, if I could get that much money up. I did look at BookBub when that became big, but I never put up that, at that time. Any little ad that I could find on a site where readers came to look for books, I would try to put the money there and just try to get the book out there where readers might see it.
Matty: I think it's interesting that even though you had a publisher, when needing to invest money yourself and the advertising, I think it's starting to be an accepted thing that having a publisher doesn't absolve you of responsibility to do marketing activities. But I don't know if it's always so clear that it also doesn't absolve you of investing marketing dollars.
Lisa: No, it doesn't. That was my choice to do that. I heard a lot of writers at that time who were also with smaller presses complain that they're not spending enough money to market my book.
And I thought, well, because they're small, they don't have a big author, say like James Patterson, who's bringing in a ton of revenue, where they can afford to take some of that money and put it behind their unknown authors to try and drum up sales.
These are small presses that their whole list is mid-list or unknown. They just don't have the money necessarily to invest in advertising. So that was a choice that I made to do that, because I didn't need that money to survive at that time. I just had this idea that I would just keep reinvesting it into the books.
Thomas and Mercer had picked up Hold Still. And it's Amazon, so their marketing reach, that was a no brainer. I wasn't going to get that kind of reach on my own. I signed with them and it was a dream working with their editing team. I mean, they were wonderful. They're very author centric. They care very much about your vision for the book and what you want to do creatively. That was really cool.
That editor kept saying to me the whole six or seven months—they picked up the book in May, and I think it came out in November—she kept saying to me, you should really think about writing a sequel because this might make a good series . And I wasn't understanding what she was trying to tell me, which is that you really need to jump on this quickly because if the book comes out and it doesn't do well or it only does moderately well, then the editorial board is not going to want to pick up a sequel because it's just not going to make sense financially.
I was working full time and I had a family and, I was like, well, I can't just sit down and write a sequel. These things take time. I think it was a year to write the sequel. And by that time my editor had left and pretty much everyone on the staff from top to bottom had changed. I was in touch with whoever their president was at the time. Contractually I was obligated to pitch them whatever I wrote next. I said, here, I wrote the sequel, would you look at it? And he assigned some new editor to it.
Ultimately, they said exactly what I thought they would say, which was that the book is good but your sales on Hold Still weren't good enough to warrant us investing in a sequel. So I self-published that. And I was happy with it and it did as well as I thought it would do, which was nice.
Then my daughter had medical problems and life just kind of got in the way and I was kind of directionless cause I said I'm not going to write a third book in a series that nobody wants to read. I just didn't know what to write next.
My agent was still in contact with the woman who was running my first publisher. There was still one person working at the publisher overseeing the existing contracts that they had out there, and she had mentioned that she might want to give it another try with the company, and would I write a sequel to Finding Claire Fletcher?
At first I said, no, cause that was never something that I considered. But I was getting messages from readers all the time asking for it. And I had some ideas for a sequel, and I thought, I know that this publisher is not in any hurry cause she's trying to get the company back on its feet, so I could take my time to write it.
And I did. And then, I think it was June of 2016, she wrote to myself and my agent and said that it just wasn't possible for her to keep the doors open.
Matty: Just orient me timeline-wise—who is she associated with?
Lisa: Sapphire Star Publishing. They opened in 2012 they published my first two books. And in 2013 they said they would have to close, but they were honoring my contracts. She was giving me the rights back and I thought to myself, I'm not going to crap around with this. People are reading these books, so I don't want there to be a big lag between them having them and me getting them back out on the market. And I talked to my agent and I said, do you think you could place these elsewhere? We had a long discussion, but basically she said no.
Matty: Did she give any detail behind the no?
Lisa: One of the things was that no publisher in their right mind would touch a book that had already been published by another publisher.
which I have not found to be necessarily true, not just in my own experience, but in speaking with other writers. By that time, I had sold 40,000 copies of Finding Claire Fletcher. And, I said, everything I'm reading is saying, 40,000 copies for someone that nobody knows with a small press, that's a lot of copies. She said, if a big publisher really wanted the book, they would approach us and try to work something out or that they would buy out the smaller publisher or something like that. And I didn't really think that that was true. I didn't agree with her. I mean, certainly I'm not an agent, but I didn't agree with that.
And then there was still a matter of the sequel. I was almost done by that time and I was like, if you're not going to place this book anywhere else, now I've got this sequel that's three-fourths written and what am I going to do with it?
So we decided that we would part ways and I took my rights to my first two books, Finding Claire Fletcher and Aberration, and I self-published them. It was the fall of 2016 cause my daughter had skull surgery that year. And it was after watching her go through all of that, I said to myself, I really need to be worthy of this warrior that somehow came out of me. This is my dream. I really want to try to push this a little further.
In the meantime, I had written a sequel to Finding Claire Fletcher. I had sent it to four or five of my beta readers. And, a few of them said I really don't think you should self-publish this. I think you should try to look for a publisher because their feeling was that a publisher would publish it. And I said, it's a sequel to a book that's now been published by a publisher and by me, it's got this checkered past. I don't know if that's going to be a hard sell. But I thought what have I got to lose? The worst thing that they're going to say is no, and I'm doing pretty well self-publishing, so that'd be fine.
There were only two publishers that I really wanted to work with. Which would be Thomas and Mercer again and Bookouture. They actually opened in 2012 as well, but by that time they had sold millions of books and every time I opened Amazon to look for something to read, it was one of their titles or two or three or four or five of their titles would be right at the top of the bestseller list or the Recommended For You list. And I had read a bunch of their authors' books, and I really loved Angie Marsons' Kim Stone series. I was like, Oh, I would love to work with them. I love their books. They're always, topping out these lists, and that would be a lot of fun, to try and get something going with them.
I sent Finding Claire Fletcher and the sequel, Losing Leah Holloway, to Thomas and Mercer. By now they have a new president, Grace Doyle, and I approached her and I just said, "Hey, you guys published me couple of years ago." I explained to her the situation and she was just awesome.
She was so gracious and very welcoming. She said, "No problem. I'll take a look at this and see who I think the best fit is." She assigned an editor to read them to see if they wanted to acquire them. Then I didn't hear from them for a couple of months, which is the way of the business.
At the same time, I submitted them to Bookouture and the Bookouture editor got back to me first and she said that they weren't strong enough. But she really liked my writing and she thought I was really talented. She said to me, "What else have you got?"
She asked for my second book, which was self-published. She read that and she didn't think that was really what they were looking for. She's kind of like, "What else? What else is there?" So I sent her every half-finished book that I had and she still was kind of like, "These aren't really a good fit, but, but I still want to work with you."
Then I just started writing proposals for ideas that I had. I sent a proposal for what is now Vanishing Girls, the first book in the Josie Quinn series, to her, and she came back and said, "I really love this."
Because what she had said to me initially when we were going back and forth trying to decide what I could give them that was what they were looking for, she said they wanted to do a rogue detective, someone who doesn't necessarily follow the rules, but he's got a strong sense of justice and he gets the job done and he hasn't always colored within the lines.
I said I'd love to do that. I want to write it as a woman. And she thought that was a great idea. Then I sat down and wrote the proposal for Vanishing Girls. I sent it to her, and she really liked it and she said, "If you can write this quickly and give me a proposal for two more books in the series, then we'll talk."
Matty: What did the proposal look like that you sent her? How detailed was it? How long was it?
Lisa: It was 10 pages, single spaced. And, it was basically the whole book from beginning to end, almost chapter by chapter, but a lot of it was still pretty undeveloped. If I were to do that now, it would be like 30 pages, but then it was about 10 pages long.
I sat down to write that, this time I was like, not going to let this opportunity slip away like I did with the sequel for Hold Still, where the editor was like, "Listen, you really need to write a sequel," and I was like, do-de-do-de-do. So I'm furiously writing it. In the meantime, Thomas and Mercer comes back and they say, "Oh my God, we love these books. They're very strong. We want to publish them."
I had tens of thousands of medical bills at the time, my daughter's surgery, so I just was like, I can't turn this down. We need this now, so I have to go with them. We did that contract and I made sure that in the contract, should I finish Vanishing Girls within the next three to six months, I would be able to still pitch that to Bookouture.
I signed with them and we got down to editing and then, I finished Vanishing Girls, which back then was called, Found Alive. I sent it to the editor at Bookouture with my proposals for two more books. She was excited about it and they offered me a three-book contract for that. So that's the start of the Josie Quinn series.
Matty: One thing that stands out to me is it doesn't sound at any point as if you were thwarted in your plans by a contractual limitation.
Lisa: No, I was really careful about that. When I got the contract for Hold Still, I believe there was a clause in there that I couldn't publish anything or authorize another party to publish anything for six months before the book came out, which was fine because I had no irons in the fire. Then on the back end, it was 18 months from the book being published, I couldn't publish or have somebody else publish anything. And with digital publishing, 18 months is a lifetime. With Hold Still, I negotiated that down. I don't remember exactly what it was, maybe six months to a year.
But then when I got the contracts for Finding Claire Fletcher and Losing Leah Holloway, they had already shortened their terms and then I just asked that they be shortened even more. I think it was three months and three months, that's what I wanted. and I had a literary attorney look over everything before I signed it and she went over it and told me what to ask for and why and that sort of thing. And then I just took that information and I went to the publisher and said, this is what I'd like to do.
Matty: At this point, you did not have an agent, is that correct?
Lisa: No.
Matty: If you had still had the agent would the agent have been doing some of that legal review for you, or would you have still gotten an independent legal review of the contract before you signed it?
Lisa: She would have been doing all that. But I worked for lawyers and I'm a little bit of a control freak, which is another reason I don't have an agent. I probably would have insisted on a third-party review anyway, just because, having worked in the legal field, I really feel the need to cover those bases.
But my understanding is that it's the agent's job to take care of all of that. And they're looking at contracts every day, so they know what to look for, what needs to be negotiated, and what are red flags. And it's my understanding that that's what they're getting paid to do.
Matty: It sounds like when you got a lawyer, you got a lawyer who specialized in the literary field. How did you go about finding that person?
Lisa: Just Google. Actually, I recognized her name because she had also been an agent for a time. I had seen her name during my agent search many times. By the time I was looking for an attorney, that's what she was doing, so it was very easy for me.
Matty: It seems like there are a lot of lawyers in the mystery and crime writing community, you could probably track one of them down for some specific advice.
Lisa: Yeah. The other thing that I can say, though, having worked for a lawyer, is that you really have to get someone that specializes, at least in contracts, if nothing else. Because lawyers really do specialize and the field that they know, they know it really, really, really well, but the stuff that they don't know, it's going to be somebody like me, the paralegal, researching it. So, if you do have an attorney review a contract, you want to try and get someone with experience in the industry or someone that works with contracts a lot.
Matty: You don't want to just go to your neighbor who's a corporate lawyer.
Lisa: No, I would not. Or you know, a family lawyer or a personal injury lawyer. Lawyers are there a lot like doctors, you wouldn't ask a heart surgeon to repair an orthopedic injury. I mean, they could probably do it, but--
Matty: —you might not be 100% satisfied with it. Especially if it was the orthopedic doctor doing heart surgery, that probably wouldn't be good.
So, continue with the saga of Josie Quinn because it gets even more exciting.
Lisa: Oh, yeah. So, the book was called Found Alive when I turned it in, and they thought that was too gory. They changed it to Vanishing Girls, which was fine. My feeling with Bookouture was, as a reader, every time I bring up Amazon, there's like five of their books topping the charts. I thought, I'm going to let them do their thing. I'm not going to try and interfere and be this diva author who thinks she knows everything about everything. I was like, if that's what you think is going to sell, that's fine with me.
Then a wanted to change the name. Josie's name was Vanessa Sloan in the first draft, and they thought that was too posh. You know, I think they were right. I sent them a list of first names and last names that I could live with, and they chose Josie Quinn. Now I'm eight books in and I can't imagine her being called anything else.
So I had finished Vanishing Girls. We were editing that. And then I had the three-book contract, and I'm thinking, especially based on my experience thus far in the business, that this is it, this is going to be a nice little trilogy and it's going to tank and I'm going to be back out there looking.
While I've got this chance to definitely get three books in, let me make this a complete arc, cause I certainly never expected that the series would continue beyond three books. So the first three books were a pretty complete arc in the story, in the subplots, and in Josie's personal life.
Then Vanishing Girls came out in January of 2018 and it had the best cover, my favorite cover of all time. And then after two weeks, they came to me and said, "Listen, it's not really selling the way we thought it would sell and we want to change the cover." And I thought, "Oh no, I love that cover so much."
But again, I'm looking at this publisher and I'm seeing that everything pretty much that they do is successful. I said, okay, I'm going to trust you with this. Do what you think is the best thing. And they changed the cover. It's kind of blue now. It's got the creepy old house. And overnight the sales doubled.
Then it just started to pick up speed. and by the time the second book came out in April and that book hit the USA Today bestseller list. I was just astounded. I don't understand what's going on here. Then they were really excited. And the third book came out in July, and that spent nine weeks on the USA Today bestseller list.
It was funny because on the ninth week, I sent an email to my editor saying, "Oh my God, it's not me. It's, I can't believe it." And she's like, "Let's see if we can make 10," and then it fell off.
But by that time now the series is doing really well, beyond my wildest expectations. and they said, let's do another three books. And I said, absolutely. Now I have to think of more stuff because I did that complete arc.
Matty: This is arc number two.
Lisa: Yes. So, we're just moving forward. I'm just writing away and, I think all of the books hit USA Today bestseller list. And, I think all but one of them reached the Wall Street Journal bestseller lists in fiction eBooks. Then at some point the publisher came to me and they wanted to do a longer contract.
That was for six books. And it's like a no brainer to me. I mean, the readers are going crazy for the series. They love it. I get to write this awesome character. My editor, I would die without her. She's the best editor. I don't know that I could write a book without her now.
As long as I get to keep Josie, let's do this, and now I'm at 12 books. And book seven was coming out this past December 2nd <2019>, and right before Thanksgiving the first six books across the series sold 1 million copies.
Then right after that, my publisher offered me another contract for eight more books.
Matty: What's the grand total? Cause I've been having trouble with the math.
Lisa: I know, everybody does. It's 20 books. And you can't turn it down. I talked to other writers that are pretty successful and they're still having trouble selling new stuff. And I thought, if somebody is going to let me write books then I'm there, let's do it. And I love my publisher. There's nowhere I'd rather be.
Matty: And fortunately, you're writing full time now. You're not going to juggle a full-time job anymore, which would be truly horrific.
Lisa: Oh, it would be horrific. And it was getting really, really stressful. It was around this time last year, I started having really debilitating headaches and cognitive problems. I went to the neurologist and he said, "I think you're having mini strokes." And he asked me about my life, and I said, I work full time as a paralegal. I'm writing these books and I have family. And he said, "Well, you need to stop doing something." He was like, "Pick something and stop it."
Then after that I was having horrible stomach issues. Couldn't eat anything. I was sick all the time. I was throwing up all the time. I went to the GI doctor and they did an endoscopy. And she kept saying to me, “I've never seen that much inflammation in one person. It's just all up and down your upper GI tract.” And of course, there's nothing wrong. They did the biopsies and everything, everything's fine. And she says, "Well, it must be stress. What's going on in your life?" And I tell her. And she says the same thing to me. "Well, listen, you got to pick something and stop it. You're going to give yourself stomach cancer." And I was just like, "Oh, yeah, okay." And I kept going to work.
And then, I was in the ER for chest pains and, there was something abnormal in the EKG. And so we go to the cardiologist. He does all these tests. I'm fine. And then he says to me, "You know, this has got to be stress." And, he leaves the room and my husband is like, "Listen, just quit your job. Now we've had mini strokes and GI inflammation, and now we're at the cardiologist. It's time to make a change."
Matty: Yeah, that's a pretty clear message.
Lisa: Yeah. So we decided we were going to choose writing.
Matty: Thank heavens. It would have been more stressful if you had chosen the job.
Lisa: Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah. I just couldn't do all of it at the pace that I was going for much longer.
Matty: Something you had said earlier, I thought it was interesting about the letting Bookouture do what they do best, which was the marketing side of it, and the fact that they both changed the title and changed the cover of the book. I think it's very interesting because it's gotten so that “girls” in the title of a book is telegraphing something about the book.
After Gone Girls, there was a rash of books with “girls” in the title, and it's sort of a signal for readers that it's going to be a certain kind of book, that they have a certain expectation. And I think the same is true of the cover.
I remember scrolling through Facebook and I went past a book cover that I thought was Vanishing Girls and I went back to see what was going on with Vanishing Girls, and it was a different book. Because there is this trend of greenery or the woods and then the creepy house and a certain kind of font.
And I think what's really interesting about that is that as an author, each author's baby is unique and you want something totally unique to wrap your baby in. But from a marketing point of view, I think that those sorts of conventions are conveying a very important message to readers and readers are glancing at books on a shelf or they're glancing at thumbnails on Amazon and those kinds of signals that this is that kind of book are really valuable. A lot of times an author can't bring that perspective to their own book. It takes somebody else knowledgeable about it who can bring that perspective.
Lisa: It's true. Even I was kind of resistant because I really loved the cover that they initially did, and I thought it was really different and unique and creepy. And the funny thing is that a friend of mine, she also writes in this genre, she said to me, “Oh yeah, you'll either get the creepy house or the woman in the red jacket running away.”
And I was like, Hmm. That's true. I do see those all the time, and I think you're right, as authors, we're just a little too indulgent. We just want everything to be super-duper special and unique and original. And, sometimes the hard truth is just that, that doesn't necessarily draw readers.
There are certain things that draw certain readers to them that catch their eye. And so, maybe your book looks like 10 other books, but if it’s drawing readers to it, if they're reading the description and maybe clicking to buy it, then I don't see anything wrong with that because ultimately we want people to read our stories.
Matty: The other thing I thought was interesting is some of the timelines that we're describing are very fast, and at least in the indy community, and even a lot of times in the traditional community, there's the sense of the elongated timeframes that are involved in traditional publishing. And yet you have a couple of examples where your publisher was able to really turn on a dime, in a couple of weeks, have a whole new cover, a whole new approach for it. That's sort of heartening to hear that.
I think that the traditional publishing is learning some important lessons from indy just as indy learned some important lessons from traditional publishing. And I think that need to turn quickly in those circumstances is an important lesson.
Lisa: I think it is too. And the longer that I was with Bookouture, and I'd seen them change titles, even like they would put a book up for preorder, and if it wasn't performing to where they wanted it to, they would even change the title before it was released.
I realized, you look around traditional publishing, they get this book ready and they kind of just slap a cover on it and push it out into the world. And however it does is how it does. Of course, now with digital publishing, it is possible to quickly rebrand a book or do a new cover or new title, but it's not really that possible in traditional publishing. I understand that. But I really think this idea that if something's not working, let's try something else is really valuable, especially to writers.
After I saw that, I looked at my backlist and the I only two books I really had control over were Aberration and Cold-Blooded and Aberration had really never done that well, and nobody could ever remember the name of it. Or spell it. I said, I'm going to rebrand it. I'll give it a new cover and a new title, something that's easy for people to remember.
And it went from selling like 60 copies a month to selling 400 copies a month almost immediately. I think there's really a lot of value in rebranding, and I really like being with a publisher that is aggressive about, something's not working, let's figure out what it is and try to change it.
Matty: That's great. Lisa, I appreciate so much you being willing to share the backstory of your journey through publishing. Just a ton of lessons that we can learn from that. So let people know where they can find you and your books online.
Lisa: Okay. The easiest place would probably be just to go to my website, which is www.lisaregan.com and you can follow purchase links from there to anywhere you would like to purchase books.
Matty: Great. Thank you so much, Lisa. It's been great.
Lisa: Thank you.
She has a bachelor's degree in English and a Master of Education degree from Bloomsburg University. She is a member of Sisters in Crime, International Thriller Writers, Crime Writers Association, and Mystery Writers of America. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband, her daughter, and her Boston terrier, named Mr. Phillip.
And if for no other reason, you have to follow Lisa on Facebook just for Mr. Phillip's Monday Mood, this is the standing feature with Mr. Phillip.
The reason I had asked Lisa to join us on The Indy Author Podcast is I got to hear her speak recently at the Hockessin Bookshelf in Hockessin, Delaware, and, Lisa, you shared some background about your history and your publishing journey.
And I realized that it's not something that people get to hear about a lot, maybe a couple of their close author friends, they get to hear how they got to where they are now. But in a lot of cases it's sort of a black box and it's very mysterious.
You were generous enough to offer to share that story again with our listeners and allow me to jump in periodically with questions. I'm just going to open the floor to you and ask you to tell us how you got from your very first foray into the publishing world to being the bestselling author you are today.
Lisa: Okay. Do you want me to start with the agent search?
Matty: Yes, that would be great.
Lisa: Okay. I believe it was April of 2006 I had finished a draft of Finding Claire Fletcher, which would go on to become the first novel of mine that was published, and I thought, this is something that might actually be readable. So I decided to look for an agent and I took four years, from 2006 to 2010, and I queried over 150 agents. You'll see a lot of times in my bio, it says that I was rejected by over 150 agents. The actual number is 154.
I took four years of querying to land an agent. And we signed the contract, went on submissions, and she was pitching to every major house and they were all saying the same thing, which is that they love the book, but no.
Matty: I'm curious, what were you doing during those four years when you were querying the agents? Were you working on other books?
Lisa: I wrote my second novel, which was originally published as Aberration and has since been retitled To Kill for You. I was working full time and I had a toddler. I wasn't quite as productive as I am now, so I spent most of that time writing that second book.
And by the time I got my agent, that book was finished, and she did sign me for that one as well.
Matty: Is it possible that she would have accepted your first book and then you would have gone elsewhere to find an agent for the second book if the first agent wasn't interested in it, or once you're locked in with an agent, are you locked in with them for practical purposes for all your books?
Lisa: I have talked to writers who say that it's a book-by-book thing, and then I've also talked to writers who say, no, once an agent takes you, they take you on for the duration of your career, unless you part ways. And this particular agent was interested in whatever I was writing.
As a matter of courtesy, if I wrote something new, I certainly wouldn't shop it elsewhere without talking to her first. So we went on submissions. The publishers loved the book, but they didn't want to publish it. And then we went to medium-sized presses, smaller presses. And everybody said the same thing—this book is a home run, this is great, it's really strong. But, no, we don't want to publish it.
Matty: As your agent started working through the list of publishers she was taking it to, when you started out, did you have a sense of, "I'm willing to go this far and no farther," and did that change as you worked your way through the list? Or did you know right up front that you really wanted to keep working through the list until you found a publisher that was interested in taking it on?
Lisa: I think every writer that goes this route, you want a big publisher to be interested in it, but I certainly was never closed off to going with a mid-sized publisher or a small press. I just wanted someone who felt as passionately about the book as I did. Any reputable publisher was fine with me. I wasn't really concerned with how big or small they were.
Then we spent two years on submissions and in the meantime, I've had friends who had agents and they're only spending say six months on submissions.
Matty: How involved were you in the submission process or was the agent doing all the work and she was just keeping you informed of what was going on?
Lisa: She did all the work and she would send me weekly updates in terms of who she had pitched to and if there were any responses, and then anytime she got a response that was more than "thanks / no thanks," she would send it on to me or anytime she got someone who said, "I'm halfway through it and I love it. I'll be back in touch," she would send that to me to keep my morale up. And anytime we got a rejection after they had read it, then she would send that as well.
Matty: Did you consider or act on making any changes to the manuscript during that two-year period as a result of what you were hearing from the publishers?
Lisa: Not at that point, because that four years that I spent looking for an agent, I actually had agents who really loved the book, but had suggestions for changes.
So I had done a ton of revising in that four years. There was one agent in particular who really worked closely with me to revise the book to what it is now. It was a two-year process. I was in touch with him and we're working on this book and revising it and he's giving me all these suggestions and I'm implementing them. And the book was so much better.
And then at the end of that two years, he said, "I'm leaving the agency I'm with, I'm going to start my own agency. Would you like to come as a potential client?" And, we had just done two years’ worth of work on the books. I was like, of course.
He took me as a potential client. And then about three or four months after that, I sent him an email saying, I really need to know if you're going to pick up this book or not, and he said no. So, to this day, I don't really understand why you would invest that much time because he really helped me make that book a million times better than what it was.
By the time I actually landed an agent and we were on submissions, when the book finally got published and went to editing, there were no suggestions. Maybe because I had worked so intensively on it while I was looking for an agent. I would say, if I hadn't worked that hard on the book already, I would definitely take another look at it after so many rejections and say, maybe I need to revise it.
So two years went by on submissions and we were kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel and then this new press opened up. I had a friend, Nancy, who got a contract with them and she was really happy with them. I talked to my agent about it and she said she would get in touch with them. And the acquisitions editor there at the time loved the book, and she immediately wanted it.
We had a couple of other small presses that hadn't said no yet. She went to them and said, "Do have an offer? Do you want to make a counteroffer or what are you thinking? Do you want to take this book or are you really interested? Because if not, we're going to take this offer."
They both declined, so we ended up with the small press. They were called Sapphire Star Publishing. It was basically run by two women who had had experience in publishing, and they got together and formed a publishing company.
Everyone that I knew that was in the business was like, this is a huge mistake. You have to let publishers be open for three years before you even think about publishing with them, because they're probably going to go bankrupt and close.
But at that point, it was that or nothing. And my agent was invested in this. She wanted to go with a small press and I really liked them. I liked the editor I had because she was so happy about the book and so passionate about it.
They signed me for both books, Finding Claire Fletcher and Aberration, and Finding Claire Fletcher came out December 6, 2012, and did much, much better than I think anybody anticipated, especially with a small press. And then June of 2013 Aberration was due to come out, and in May of 2013 we heard from the publisher that they were going to have to close their doors.
They said to those of us that had books coming out, we'll honor the contracts that we have, but we're not going to take on anything new. And they offered to revert our rights back to us, or we could ride out our existing contracts, which were for three-year terms. I talked to my agent and her suggestion was, especially because of the momentum that Finding Claire Fletcher was getting, she didn't want me to pull the second book and then lose that momentum while trying to place it elsewhere. We decided we were just going to stay with them and then Aberration came out and that did okay. Not as good as Finding Claire Fletcher, but it did okay.
Matty: Do you feel as if any of that was due to the fact that the publisher didn't have the resources anymore to throw behind marketing or any of the things that you might've had going for you for the first book?
Lisa: Possibly. But I think it had more to do with the constantly changing effectiveness of certain things. Like when Finding Claire Fletcher came out, the big marketing tool was Twitter. Twitter was huge. And Kindle Nation Daily was the most expensive ad, which now BookBub makes that look dirt cheap. And, they were just starting to reach out on Facebook. And so, I did lose a lot of that with the second book, but by the time Aberration came out, there were other things marketing-wise that were bigger, and they just didn't have the resources to tap into those.
I think it was a little bit of both. Just they didn't have the resources and also the market changed and the places that readers were going to find their books changed, so that made it kind of tough.
Matty: I guess this is perhaps more applicable to when you were looking for an agent than when you were looking for a publisher, but did you consider indy publishing?
Lisa: Yeah, definitely, I did. The conflict I had with my agent was that when we were getting to the bottom of our list of publishers with Finding Claire Fletcher, I would have been happy to self-publish it, but that doesn't benefit her in any way. So that was kind of the problem.
That was a problem for me. Actually, what happened was after Aberration came out, it was kind of like, "What do we do next because this publisher is no longer taking books?" And then I wrote Hold Still, and I went to my agent and I said I'd like to look for a publisher, but if we don't get any serious interest in nine months, then I want this back to self-publish it. And she just wasn't willing to do that. We were kind of at an impasse there.
At that point, I didn't sign with her for that book because I wanted the option to self-publish and she just wasn't willing to allow that. I ended up self-publishing that book, the third book.
By then I had a pretty decent following. I think it was out for two months and I had sold 5,000 copies. I was at that time some unknown paralegal writing in her spare time. That was a huge amount for me. I think it still is. And, that had been out for a month and Thomas and Mercer approached me and said that she had read it and loved it and they'd like to pick it up.
Matty: Thomas and Mercer is the Amazon imprint for mystery and crime, is that right?
Lisa: Yes. That was kind of a no brainer with their marketing reach. I had a full-time job, so my survival was not dependent at all on my writing income. Any royalties I got after I paid the taxes, I would use that money to buy ads. It was like putting it back into the pot and trying to get more readers.
Matty: What were you putting your money into and what year was that?
Lisa: That would've been 2013, 2014. So, it wasn't a lot. I mean, my first royalty check was $3.16.
Matty: What were you spending the money on at that time?
Lisa: Oh, mostly Kindle Book Review and a Digital Book Today. Kindle Nation Daily, if I could get that much money up. I did look at BookBub when that became big, but I never put up that, at that time. Any little ad that I could find on a site where readers came to look for books, I would try to put the money there and just try to get the book out there where readers might see it.
Matty: I think it's interesting that even though you had a publisher, when needing to invest money yourself and the advertising, I think it's starting to be an accepted thing that having a publisher doesn't absolve you of responsibility to do marketing activities. But I don't know if it's always so clear that it also doesn't absolve you of investing marketing dollars.
Lisa: No, it doesn't. That was my choice to do that. I heard a lot of writers at that time who were also with smaller presses complain that they're not spending enough money to market my book.
And I thought, well, because they're small, they don't have a big author, say like James Patterson, who's bringing in a ton of revenue, where they can afford to take some of that money and put it behind their unknown authors to try and drum up sales.
These are small presses that their whole list is mid-list or unknown. They just don't have the money necessarily to invest in advertising. So that was a choice that I made to do that, because I didn't need that money to survive at that time. I just had this idea that I would just keep reinvesting it into the books.
Thomas and Mercer had picked up Hold Still. And it's Amazon, so their marketing reach, that was a no brainer. I wasn't going to get that kind of reach on my own. I signed with them and it was a dream working with their editing team. I mean, they were wonderful. They're very author centric. They care very much about your vision for the book and what you want to do creatively. That was really cool.
That editor kept saying to me the whole six or seven months—they picked up the book in May, and I think it came out in November—she kept saying to me, you should really think about writing a sequel because this might make a good series . And I wasn't understanding what she was trying to tell me, which is that you really need to jump on this quickly because if the book comes out and it doesn't do well or it only does moderately well, then the editorial board is not going to want to pick up a sequel because it's just not going to make sense financially.
I was working full time and I had a family and, I was like, well, I can't just sit down and write a sequel. These things take time. I think it was a year to write the sequel. And by that time my editor had left and pretty much everyone on the staff from top to bottom had changed. I was in touch with whoever their president was at the time. Contractually I was obligated to pitch them whatever I wrote next. I said, here, I wrote the sequel, would you look at it? And he assigned some new editor to it.
Ultimately, they said exactly what I thought they would say, which was that the book is good but your sales on Hold Still weren't good enough to warrant us investing in a sequel. So I self-published that. And I was happy with it and it did as well as I thought it would do, which was nice.
Then my daughter had medical problems and life just kind of got in the way and I was kind of directionless cause I said I'm not going to write a third book in a series that nobody wants to read. I just didn't know what to write next.
My agent was still in contact with the woman who was running my first publisher. There was still one person working at the publisher overseeing the existing contracts that they had out there, and she had mentioned that she might want to give it another try with the company, and would I write a sequel to Finding Claire Fletcher?
At first I said, no, cause that was never something that I considered. But I was getting messages from readers all the time asking for it. And I had some ideas for a sequel, and I thought, I know that this publisher is not in any hurry cause she's trying to get the company back on its feet, so I could take my time to write it.
And I did. And then, I think it was June of 2016, she wrote to myself and my agent and said that it just wasn't possible for her to keep the doors open.
Matty: Just orient me timeline-wise—who is she associated with?
Lisa: Sapphire Star Publishing. They opened in 2012 they published my first two books. And in 2013 they said they would have to close, but they were honoring my contracts. She was giving me the rights back and I thought to myself, I'm not going to crap around with this. People are reading these books, so I don't want there to be a big lag between them having them and me getting them back out on the market. And I talked to my agent and I said, do you think you could place these elsewhere? We had a long discussion, but basically she said no.
Matty: Did she give any detail behind the no?
Lisa: One of the things was that no publisher in their right mind would touch a book that had already been published by another publisher.
which I have not found to be necessarily true, not just in my own experience, but in speaking with other writers. By that time, I had sold 40,000 copies of Finding Claire Fletcher. And, I said, everything I'm reading is saying, 40,000 copies for someone that nobody knows with a small press, that's a lot of copies. She said, if a big publisher really wanted the book, they would approach us and try to work something out or that they would buy out the smaller publisher or something like that. And I didn't really think that that was true. I didn't agree with her. I mean, certainly I'm not an agent, but I didn't agree with that.
And then there was still a matter of the sequel. I was almost done by that time and I was like, if you're not going to place this book anywhere else, now I've got this sequel that's three-fourths written and what am I going to do with it?
So we decided that we would part ways and I took my rights to my first two books, Finding Claire Fletcher and Aberration, and I self-published them. It was the fall of 2016 cause my daughter had skull surgery that year. And it was after watching her go through all of that, I said to myself, I really need to be worthy of this warrior that somehow came out of me. This is my dream. I really want to try to push this a little further.
In the meantime, I had written a sequel to Finding Claire Fletcher. I had sent it to four or five of my beta readers. And, a few of them said I really don't think you should self-publish this. I think you should try to look for a publisher because their feeling was that a publisher would publish it. And I said, it's a sequel to a book that's now been published by a publisher and by me, it's got this checkered past. I don't know if that's going to be a hard sell. But I thought what have I got to lose? The worst thing that they're going to say is no, and I'm doing pretty well self-publishing, so that'd be fine.
There were only two publishers that I really wanted to work with. Which would be Thomas and Mercer again and Bookouture. They actually opened in 2012 as well, but by that time they had sold millions of books and every time I opened Amazon to look for something to read, it was one of their titles or two or three or four or five of their titles would be right at the top of the bestseller list or the Recommended For You list. And I had read a bunch of their authors' books, and I really loved Angie Marsons' Kim Stone series. I was like, Oh, I would love to work with them. I love their books. They're always, topping out these lists, and that would be a lot of fun, to try and get something going with them.
I sent Finding Claire Fletcher and the sequel, Losing Leah Holloway, to Thomas and Mercer. By now they have a new president, Grace Doyle, and I approached her and I just said, "Hey, you guys published me couple of years ago." I explained to her the situation and she was just awesome.
She was so gracious and very welcoming. She said, "No problem. I'll take a look at this and see who I think the best fit is." She assigned an editor to read them to see if they wanted to acquire them. Then I didn't hear from them for a couple of months, which is the way of the business.
At the same time, I submitted them to Bookouture and the Bookouture editor got back to me first and she said that they weren't strong enough. But she really liked my writing and she thought I was really talented. She said to me, "What else have you got?"
She asked for my second book, which was self-published. She read that and she didn't think that was really what they were looking for. She's kind of like, "What else? What else is there?" So I sent her every half-finished book that I had and she still was kind of like, "These aren't really a good fit, but, but I still want to work with you."
Then I just started writing proposals for ideas that I had. I sent a proposal for what is now Vanishing Girls, the first book in the Josie Quinn series, to her, and she came back and said, "I really love this."
Because what she had said to me initially when we were going back and forth trying to decide what I could give them that was what they were looking for, she said they wanted to do a rogue detective, someone who doesn't necessarily follow the rules, but he's got a strong sense of justice and he gets the job done and he hasn't always colored within the lines.
I said I'd love to do that. I want to write it as a woman. And she thought that was a great idea. Then I sat down and wrote the proposal for Vanishing Girls. I sent it to her, and she really liked it and she said, "If you can write this quickly and give me a proposal for two more books in the series, then we'll talk."
Matty: What did the proposal look like that you sent her? How detailed was it? How long was it?
Lisa: It was 10 pages, single spaced. And, it was basically the whole book from beginning to end, almost chapter by chapter, but a lot of it was still pretty undeveloped. If I were to do that now, it would be like 30 pages, but then it was about 10 pages long.
I sat down to write that, this time I was like, not going to let this opportunity slip away like I did with the sequel for Hold Still, where the editor was like, "Listen, you really need to write a sequel," and I was like, do-de-do-de-do. So I'm furiously writing it. In the meantime, Thomas and Mercer comes back and they say, "Oh my God, we love these books. They're very strong. We want to publish them."
I had tens of thousands of medical bills at the time, my daughter's surgery, so I just was like, I can't turn this down. We need this now, so I have to go with them. We did that contract and I made sure that in the contract, should I finish Vanishing Girls within the next three to six months, I would be able to still pitch that to Bookouture.
I signed with them and we got down to editing and then, I finished Vanishing Girls, which back then was called, Found Alive. I sent it to the editor at Bookouture with my proposals for two more books. She was excited about it and they offered me a three-book contract for that. So that's the start of the Josie Quinn series.
Matty: One thing that stands out to me is it doesn't sound at any point as if you were thwarted in your plans by a contractual limitation.
Lisa: No, I was really careful about that. When I got the contract for Hold Still, I believe there was a clause in there that I couldn't publish anything or authorize another party to publish anything for six months before the book came out, which was fine because I had no irons in the fire. Then on the back end, it was 18 months from the book being published, I couldn't publish or have somebody else publish anything. And with digital publishing, 18 months is a lifetime. With Hold Still, I negotiated that down. I don't remember exactly what it was, maybe six months to a year.
But then when I got the contracts for Finding Claire Fletcher and Losing Leah Holloway, they had already shortened their terms and then I just asked that they be shortened even more. I think it was three months and three months, that's what I wanted. and I had a literary attorney look over everything before I signed it and she went over it and told me what to ask for and why and that sort of thing. And then I just took that information and I went to the publisher and said, this is what I'd like to do.
Matty: At this point, you did not have an agent, is that correct?
Lisa: No.
Matty: If you had still had the agent would the agent have been doing some of that legal review for you, or would you have still gotten an independent legal review of the contract before you signed it?
Lisa: She would have been doing all that. But I worked for lawyers and I'm a little bit of a control freak, which is another reason I don't have an agent. I probably would have insisted on a third-party review anyway, just because, having worked in the legal field, I really feel the need to cover those bases.
But my understanding is that it's the agent's job to take care of all of that. And they're looking at contracts every day, so they know what to look for, what needs to be negotiated, and what are red flags. And it's my understanding that that's what they're getting paid to do.
Matty: It sounds like when you got a lawyer, you got a lawyer who specialized in the literary field. How did you go about finding that person?
Lisa: Just Google. Actually, I recognized her name because she had also been an agent for a time. I had seen her name during my agent search many times. By the time I was looking for an attorney, that's what she was doing, so it was very easy for me.
Matty: It seems like there are a lot of lawyers in the mystery and crime writing community, you could probably track one of them down for some specific advice.
Lisa: Yeah. The other thing that I can say, though, having worked for a lawyer, is that you really have to get someone that specializes, at least in contracts, if nothing else. Because lawyers really do specialize and the field that they know, they know it really, really, really well, but the stuff that they don't know, it's going to be somebody like me, the paralegal, researching it. So, if you do have an attorney review a contract, you want to try and get someone with experience in the industry or someone that works with contracts a lot.
Matty: You don't want to just go to your neighbor who's a corporate lawyer.
Lisa: No, I would not. Or you know, a family lawyer or a personal injury lawyer. Lawyers are there a lot like doctors, you wouldn't ask a heart surgeon to repair an orthopedic injury. I mean, they could probably do it, but--
Matty: —you might not be 100% satisfied with it. Especially if it was the orthopedic doctor doing heart surgery, that probably wouldn't be good.
So, continue with the saga of Josie Quinn because it gets even more exciting.
Lisa: Oh, yeah. So, the book was called Found Alive when I turned it in, and they thought that was too gory. They changed it to Vanishing Girls, which was fine. My feeling with Bookouture was, as a reader, every time I bring up Amazon, there's like five of their books topping the charts. I thought, I'm going to let them do their thing. I'm not going to try and interfere and be this diva author who thinks she knows everything about everything. I was like, if that's what you think is going to sell, that's fine with me.
Then a wanted to change the name. Josie's name was Vanessa Sloan in the first draft, and they thought that was too posh. You know, I think they were right. I sent them a list of first names and last names that I could live with, and they chose Josie Quinn. Now I'm eight books in and I can't imagine her being called anything else.
So I had finished Vanishing Girls. We were editing that. And then I had the three-book contract, and I'm thinking, especially based on my experience thus far in the business, that this is it, this is going to be a nice little trilogy and it's going to tank and I'm going to be back out there looking.
While I've got this chance to definitely get three books in, let me make this a complete arc, cause I certainly never expected that the series would continue beyond three books. So the first three books were a pretty complete arc in the story, in the subplots, and in Josie's personal life.
Then Vanishing Girls came out in January of 2018 and it had the best cover, my favorite cover of all time. And then after two weeks, they came to me and said, "Listen, it's not really selling the way we thought it would sell and we want to change the cover." And I thought, "Oh no, I love that cover so much."
But again, I'm looking at this publisher and I'm seeing that everything pretty much that they do is successful. I said, okay, I'm going to trust you with this. Do what you think is the best thing. And they changed the cover. It's kind of blue now. It's got the creepy old house. And overnight the sales doubled.
Then it just started to pick up speed. and by the time the second book came out in April and that book hit the USA Today bestseller list. I was just astounded. I don't understand what's going on here. Then they were really excited. And the third book came out in July, and that spent nine weeks on the USA Today bestseller list.
It was funny because on the ninth week, I sent an email to my editor saying, "Oh my God, it's not me. It's, I can't believe it." And she's like, "Let's see if we can make 10," and then it fell off.
But by that time now the series is doing really well, beyond my wildest expectations. and they said, let's do another three books. And I said, absolutely. Now I have to think of more stuff because I did that complete arc.
Matty: This is arc number two.
Lisa: Yes. So, we're just moving forward. I'm just writing away and, I think all of the books hit USA Today bestseller list. And, I think all but one of them reached the Wall Street Journal bestseller lists in fiction eBooks. Then at some point the publisher came to me and they wanted to do a longer contract.
That was for six books. And it's like a no brainer to me. I mean, the readers are going crazy for the series. They love it. I get to write this awesome character. My editor, I would die without her. She's the best editor. I don't know that I could write a book without her now.
As long as I get to keep Josie, let's do this, and now I'm at 12 books. And book seven was coming out this past December 2nd <2019>, and right before Thanksgiving the first six books across the series sold 1 million copies.
Then right after that, my publisher offered me another contract for eight more books.
Matty: What's the grand total? Cause I've been having trouble with the math.
Lisa: I know, everybody does. It's 20 books. And you can't turn it down. I talked to other writers that are pretty successful and they're still having trouble selling new stuff. And I thought, if somebody is going to let me write books then I'm there, let's do it. And I love my publisher. There's nowhere I'd rather be.
Matty: And fortunately, you're writing full time now. You're not going to juggle a full-time job anymore, which would be truly horrific.
Lisa: Oh, it would be horrific. And it was getting really, really stressful. It was around this time last year, I started having really debilitating headaches and cognitive problems. I went to the neurologist and he said, "I think you're having mini strokes." And he asked me about my life, and I said, I work full time as a paralegal. I'm writing these books and I have family. And he said, "Well, you need to stop doing something." He was like, "Pick something and stop it."
Then after that I was having horrible stomach issues. Couldn't eat anything. I was sick all the time. I was throwing up all the time. I went to the GI doctor and they did an endoscopy. And she kept saying to me, “I've never seen that much inflammation in one person. It's just all up and down your upper GI tract.” And of course, there's nothing wrong. They did the biopsies and everything, everything's fine. And she says, "Well, it must be stress. What's going on in your life?" And I tell her. And she says the same thing to me. "Well, listen, you got to pick something and stop it. You're going to give yourself stomach cancer." And I was just like, "Oh, yeah, okay." And I kept going to work.
And then, I was in the ER for chest pains and, there was something abnormal in the EKG. And so we go to the cardiologist. He does all these tests. I'm fine. And then he says to me, "You know, this has got to be stress." And, he leaves the room and my husband is like, "Listen, just quit your job. Now we've had mini strokes and GI inflammation, and now we're at the cardiologist. It's time to make a change."
Matty: Yeah, that's a pretty clear message.
Lisa: Yeah. So we decided we were going to choose writing.
Matty: Thank heavens. It would have been more stressful if you had chosen the job.
Lisa: Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah. I just couldn't do all of it at the pace that I was going for much longer.
Matty: Something you had said earlier, I thought it was interesting about the letting Bookouture do what they do best, which was the marketing side of it, and the fact that they both changed the title and changed the cover of the book. I think it's very interesting because it's gotten so that “girls” in the title of a book is telegraphing something about the book.
After Gone Girls, there was a rash of books with “girls” in the title, and it's sort of a signal for readers that it's going to be a certain kind of book, that they have a certain expectation. And I think the same is true of the cover.
I remember scrolling through Facebook and I went past a book cover that I thought was Vanishing Girls and I went back to see what was going on with Vanishing Girls, and it was a different book. Because there is this trend of greenery or the woods and then the creepy house and a certain kind of font.
And I think what's really interesting about that is that as an author, each author's baby is unique and you want something totally unique to wrap your baby in. But from a marketing point of view, I think that those sorts of conventions are conveying a very important message to readers and readers are glancing at books on a shelf or they're glancing at thumbnails on Amazon and those kinds of signals that this is that kind of book are really valuable. A lot of times an author can't bring that perspective to their own book. It takes somebody else knowledgeable about it who can bring that perspective.
Lisa: It's true. Even I was kind of resistant because I really loved the cover that they initially did, and I thought it was really different and unique and creepy. And the funny thing is that a friend of mine, she also writes in this genre, she said to me, “Oh yeah, you'll either get the creepy house or the woman in the red jacket running away.”
And I was like, Hmm. That's true. I do see those all the time, and I think you're right, as authors, we're just a little too indulgent. We just want everything to be super-duper special and unique and original. And, sometimes the hard truth is just that, that doesn't necessarily draw readers.
There are certain things that draw certain readers to them that catch their eye. And so, maybe your book looks like 10 other books, but if it’s drawing readers to it, if they're reading the description and maybe clicking to buy it, then I don't see anything wrong with that because ultimately we want people to read our stories.
Matty: The other thing I thought was interesting is some of the timelines that we're describing are very fast, and at least in the indy community, and even a lot of times in the traditional community, there's the sense of the elongated timeframes that are involved in traditional publishing. And yet you have a couple of examples where your publisher was able to really turn on a dime, in a couple of weeks, have a whole new cover, a whole new approach for it. That's sort of heartening to hear that.
I think that the traditional publishing is learning some important lessons from indy just as indy learned some important lessons from traditional publishing. And I think that need to turn quickly in those circumstances is an important lesson.
Lisa: I think it is too. And the longer that I was with Bookouture, and I'd seen them change titles, even like they would put a book up for preorder, and if it wasn't performing to where they wanted it to, they would even change the title before it was released.
I realized, you look around traditional publishing, they get this book ready and they kind of just slap a cover on it and push it out into the world. And however it does is how it does. Of course, now with digital publishing, it is possible to quickly rebrand a book or do a new cover or new title, but it's not really that possible in traditional publishing. I understand that. But I really think this idea that if something's not working, let's try something else is really valuable, especially to writers.
After I saw that, I looked at my backlist and the I only two books I really had control over were Aberration and Cold-Blooded and Aberration had really never done that well, and nobody could ever remember the name of it. Or spell it. I said, I'm going to rebrand it. I'll give it a new cover and a new title, something that's easy for people to remember.
And it went from selling like 60 copies a month to selling 400 copies a month almost immediately. I think there's really a lot of value in rebranding, and I really like being with a publisher that is aggressive about, something's not working, let's figure out what it is and try to change it.
Matty: That's great. Lisa, I appreciate so much you being willing to share the backstory of your journey through publishing. Just a ton of lessons that we can learn from that. So let people know where they can find you and your books online.
Lisa: Okay. The easiest place would probably be just to go to my website, which is www.lisaregan.com and you can follow purchase links from there to anywhere you would like to purchase books.
Matty: Great. Thank you so much, Lisa. It's been great.
Lisa: Thank you.
Links
www.lisaregan.com
https://www.facebook.com/LisaReganCrimeAuthor/
https://twitter.com/Lisalregan
https://www.instagram.com/lisareganauthor/
https://www.facebook.com/LisaReganCrimeAuthor/
https://twitter.com/Lisalregan
https://www.instagram.com/lisareganauthor/
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