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Lulu Taylor hit the Sunday Times bestseller lists with a winter-themed escapist story with hidden depths – and found she had a winning formula for holiday reads that are perfect for curling up on the sofa with cup of hot chocolate or a glass of mulled wine.
The latest, A Winter Memory, is an absorbing family drama set on the edge of a Scottish loch in an ancient manor house. It’s a perfect setting for revelations of love, obsession and betrayal.
Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler, and today Lulu talks about the international fascination with snowy mysteries, what keeps Christmas stories high on the best seller lists, and her opportunity to interview Sarah, Duchess of York about her recently published Mills & Boon romance.
This is the 199th episode in The Joys of Binge Reading, so next week we celebrate 200 shows with a very special guest – more of that at the end.
We’ve got three E book copies of Lulu’s Christmas book, A Winter Memory, to give away to three lucky readers. Enter the draw on our website or on the Joys of Binge Reading Facebook page.
Before we get to Lulu, just a reminder that you can support the podcast for the equivalent of a cup of coffee a month and get exclusive bonus content while you do – access to Behind-the-Scenes stories, tips on who is coming up in future episodes so you can read the books beforehand, and insights into our featured authors – like Lulu – in the Getting to Know You quickfire questions…
Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode:
- How Lulu got started writing Judith Krantz style ‘blockbusters’
- Publishing disaster turned to opportunity
- The magic of Christmas stories
- Lockdown dislocation interrupted this year’s output
- The many writers she admires
- Background work as an editor proves useful
Where to find Lulu Taylor:
Website: http://lulutaylor.co.uk/
Facebook: @lulutaylorbooks
Twitter: @MissLuluTaylor
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/2737506.Lulu_Taylor
What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.
But now, here’s Lulu.
Jenny Wheeler: Hello there Lulu and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.
Introducing romance mystery author Lulu Taylor
Lulu Taylor: Hi, Jenny. Thanks so much. It’s lovely to be with you.
Jenny Wheeler: You have created a real niche for yourself with these last eight books, many of which have been London Sunday Times bestsellers. They are winter themed stories. On every one of the covers are these gorgeous snowy settings with ancient houses and wrought iron gates, which immediately sets up a certain kind of story. This has become a bit of a sweet spot for part of your work, hasn’t it? Tell us about it.
Lulu Taylor: It’s quite funny because that happened by accident. My first book in this genre was called The Winter Folly, and it was called that despite the fact that quite a lot of the book is set in the middle of summer. But there was this building, the folly, and the moment it features in the story is in winter, so I thought, The Winter Folly sounds really resonant.
They said, that’s lucky because we’ve decided to publish you in early December. At the time I thought, I guess that’s an alright slot, but generally people said to me, that’s not a great place to be published.
All the big autumn and winter books come out much earlier. No one’s buying books at that time of the year. This is actually a bit disastrous for you. So, I was a little bit apprehensive.
How a disaster turned into a wonderful opportunity
But that turned out to be incredibly lucky. Because they had these winter titles, because the art department at Macmillan came up with that lovely look for them, and because they were published in early December and there was no one else published at that time of year, at the time, they really stood out.
One of the other things was they weren’t Christmas-y. They didn’t have Christmas in the title, and they didn’t have anything Christmas-y on the cover.
That meant that they carried on being appealing all the way through winter – so January, February, and sometimes into March as well. That was lucky for me, and of course immediately with the second book they said, we’ll give it another snowy winter title. That really worked and it went on from there.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s fantastic. And although, as you say, they don’t have anything Christmas-y, I’ve discovered that there is this thing of people buying Christmas books.
There is a little sub-niche where some people love to have Christmas stories. Even without Christmas obviously in the title or on the cover, you probably are also attracting those readers as well.
Lulu Taylor: Definitely. Something else the publishers didn’t think about was that often people are not just buying gifts for other people. They are also buying something for themselves because they’ve got a holiday coming up, a Christmas holiday, and they’ve got a bit of time off and they want to relax.
Christmas a traditional time of story telling
That’s the time when people who love to read stories at Christmas time are looking to get something wintery. Christmas has always traditionally been a time for storytelling – often quite dark, deep mysteries and ghost stories, as well as heartwarming Christmas-y festive stories. It’s a great time of year for that kind of thing.
Jenny Wheeler: The funny thing is, here I am in the Southern hemisphere and we obviously have summer Christmas, but there still is an international resonance about a snowy winter. I feel it and I’ve lived my whole life in New Zealand. It’s a funny little mystique that it’s got, isn’t it?
Lulu Taylor: Definitely. It’s very deep in our cultural consciousness through stories and Christmas carols and Christmas songs and movies. It’s all in there.
I have got a little confession to make to you, and that is that I was born in New Zealand and I grew up there until I was about seven. I was brought up on all the old story books, the British story books. The first thing that really mattered to me when we came to live in England was that it was Christmas in the wintertime instead of in the summertime. Suddenly, it felt like that all made sense. I saw my first robin, saw my first snow, and it was like stepping into one of my own story books.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s remarkable. The book you’ve just published, I think it’s the eighth in this little subgroup, and it’s called A Winter Memory. It begins with a couple, Helen and Hamish, relocating from Southern England up to family in Scotland because they’ve had a bit of a disaster.
Books to curl up in a corner with and enjoy
Hamish has lost his job and at the beginning we’re a bit vague about exactly the detail of how that came about. It starts to unfold as the story develops, but the Scottish setting for it is just lovely. I’ve never visited Scotland, but I loved the old castles and very vivid scenery that you brought to life there.
It really is an escapist read. I saw one of your reviewers said, yours are the sort of books that you like to curl up in a corner with. I think with a hot chocolate or a glass of mulled wine is the way people would like to take it. Curl up in a corner with some hot chocolate or mulled wine.
Lulu Taylor: Yes. I love Scotland. We’ve been there on holiday quite a lot and I’ve always felt as though I’ve got some Scottish in me. My ancestors who went out to New Zealand were from Scotland, so I felt a link with all of that. Going up there, the country, the scenery is so beautiful. I’m really delighted if you think I’ve captured some of that because you can’t stop looking at those skies and those lochs and the mountains and so on. It’s really stunning.
We went up to this house, which is the house I’ve based Ballintyre on, although Ballintyre the house in the story is much bigger and grander, but I got to know the area around that house quite well. I’ve used it in the book, from the fairy ring they walk around at times to the sea loch and the great ferry ploughing past.
Gothic secrets and aspects of the psychological thriller
Jenny Wheeler: There are also aspects of the psychological thriller and a little bit of Gothic secrets as well, so it is an escapist read with a darker depth to it. One of the aspects of this book is the complex psychology that underlies one of the mother-son relationships. Do you do quite a bit of research into that psychological side as well?
Lulu Taylor: Yes. I think every story needs that slightly twisted heart to it because most families have got their hidden pain and their secrets. Nearly all of my books do have families who are finding something out about themselves. In this one, the theme is a kind of inherited pain and how that can affect someone who marries into a family like that, who brings a whole different set of approaches and values, and how they can crash into the strangeness of others and the way they choose to live their lives. That is the message or the central concern at the heart of this one.
Jenny Wheeler: Before these winter books you did do four blockbusters. You’ve written a lot of books, and they were more in the tradition of the Shirley Conran/Judith Krantz sort of stories updated, of course, from their period, with titles like Outrageous Fortune, Midnight Girls. Can you tell us about those earlier books and how you got into writing in the first place?
Lulu Taylor: I loved writing those books. They were so much fun and I raced through them. I wrote them very quickly and I really enjoyed them, because I’d grown up on some of those 80’s blockbusters that you mentioned and adored them. I enjoyed the fairy tale, fantasy aspect of them. Usually, they were girls with lots of money and lots of beauty and hair and lots of clothes, having a lot of fun and some difficult times as well.
A beginning with 80’s style blockbusters
The market for those books didn’t take off in the way the publishers hoped they would. Then something came along which knocked them out of the park, and that was Fifty Shades of Grey. That was published on the same day as Outrageous Fortune and it basically took the genre. Blockbusters were known for being a bit racy and having some sort of sex scenes in them, and Fifty Shades of Grey took that and ran with it and interest in blockbusters disappeared.
It is probably coming back a bit more now, maybe, but for a while it was, no, that’s not working and I thought I’ve got to change direction. I enjoyed doing these books, but I also knew they weren’t the kind of books that were closest to my heart. I relished the idea that now I could start having a slightly more realistic style, inter-generational – old people and young children as well, and more of a Gothic twist to the stories and a historical element too. I’d always loved historical books.
Jenny Wheeler: Getting into writing – was there some moment when you decided, I really want to write fiction, as a kind of epiphany, or is it something you’ve always felt you were going to get to?
Lulu Taylor: I think most writers have started as voracious readers and that’s certainly how I was. Going from loving books from a very early age, I went very naturally to loving writing my own stories. I wrote my first novel, probably about 50,000 words, when I was about thirteen. It was a mashup of my favorite authors. It was historical and Victorian, lots of ripped bodices and shipwrecks, very dramatic.
Working with other top authors as an editor
It was a complete story weirdly enough, and it was set in Russia as well, and England. I thought, gosh, I do love writing, it’s wonderful. But as I grew older, I didn’t have the confidence to think I could write fiction, so I went from studying English Literature at university into publishing. I became a fiction editor, in fact, and I really learned about the book world from that side of it. I worked in publishing for 10 years and commissioned quite a lot of authors who are now quite successful and quite proud of their success.
I was Santa Montefiore’s first editor, and Gill Paul, and also Louise Candlish, I don’t know if you know her work. I loved working on books as much as reading them. Again, I didn’t think I could necessarily write one, which is ridiculous because I was telling other people how to do that all time. Then I became a freelance editor and from that I began doing more writing work, including some ghost writing. I thought, I should have a go at writing that novel, but it was one of the most scary things I’ve done, to try and do it myself.
(Editor note: Gill Paul has been on the Joys of Binge Reading podcast twice:
Fabulous Famous Lives – Wallis Simpson to Diana
Of Love And Betrayal – Jackie Kennedy and Maris Callas)
That’s when I started. I guess the long answer was that answer. The short answer was I always had a writer in me. It took me quite a long time to get the courage to let that writer out.
Jenny Wheeler: The first book you wrote when you were 13, you mentioned that you were influenced by some of your favorite authors at that stage. Who were some of those favorite authors?
Beloved books from childhood
Lulu Taylor: I absolutely loved the historical novels of Jean Plaidy, and all her alter egos, Victoria Holt and so forth. I loved Cynthia Harrod-Eagles and all those big dynasty books. I still really enjoyed all my childhood books like Frances Hodgson Burnett. I loved the Victorians and so my book was set in Victorian times.
I was just beginning to get into Jane Austen and Nancy Mitford and other authors like that. I hadn’t yet read Daphne du Maurier I don’t think, at that age, but I was definitely on my way there. That was what inspired me then.
Jenny Wheeler: Do you still have a hankering to write very much more historical novels yourself?
Lulu Taylor: I would love to write a fully historical novel. The thing that slightly overwhelms me is the amount of research that needs to go into an historical novel. People do know their stuff and you need to get it right. You need to learn everything you can and then sort of forget it, because the other thing you can’t do when you’re writing a historical novel is to show all your knowledge too obviously or it doesn’t read like fiction. It reads like non-fiction.
You’ve got to fold it in to your narrative and into your story so that it’s almost imperceptible and yet completely fills the whole book with the sense that you know your period, you know your place, the characters talk in a way that doesn’t sound like an historical pastiche, but also doesn’t sound like it’s someone down the road talking to you today. It is a very delicate balancing act. I would like to try my hand at that one time. Yes, I would.
What Lulu Taylor’s typical working day looks like
Jenny Wheeler: Give us a little bit of an idea about your typical working day these days. Do you have a set time when you write, like from nine till 12? How do you organize it and have you changed that process over the course of your writing life?
Lulu Taylor: I think the thing that’s changed most over the course of my writing life is getting a sense of belief that I can do it, because even now I still feel very nervous about whether I’ll be able to make a story live.
Some of my stories, I think, are more successful than others but I couldn’t tell you why because I always set out to do the absolute best I can. Sometimes the magic is a little bit more there than it is in other books and you can’t really tell why.
My process is – I’m not as disciplined as some who sit down every day, write their thousand words.
I do a lot of cogitating and I do a lot of research through reading and visiting places and cooking it in my mind and getting lots of visual stimuli so that I have got a real sense in my mind of the world the book is going to inhabit.
Then as my deadline approaches – because I’m a little bit of a deadline fiend, I need that deadline because it helps to add the adrenaline or the spice – as I get closer to that I begin to write very fast, and long, long hours as well.
Carried away with creating stories
I find that a bit of an agonizing part, but I need it because of the intensity. I go into that world with such intensity that I am living it, which can be a bit difficult.
I had some builders here once and I was coming towards the end of my book, A Midwinter Promise. It was very emotional and I was deeply in it and they said, could you come out and look at this thing we’re doing please? I went out with them and they started talking to me and I said, I’m so sorry.
I can hardly see you or hear you because I’m somewhere else right now. I’m sorry, I’m going to have to go back inside and carry on working. They went, okay. That sounds normal. Fine. You come out later when you’re ready.
I do feel it, but at that point I find it very useful to be so deep within it and living it. The strange thing is that that can bleed over, even when the book is a bit finished. One year I got quite upset because I thought I had forgotten to send a Christmas card to somebody. Then I remembered it was my main character from my book. Of course, I couldn’t send her a Christmas card but for a minute I felt real upset. Oh no. I left Ruth off the list. How could I be so stupid?
Jenny Wheeler: You mentioned that you like to go to places to research. How have you been affected by the COVID business in the last 12 months?
Lulu Taylor: That was very hard. It helped that I knew the place I was writing about already very well and that meant I was able to go there in my mind, but I didn’t produce a new book during COVID.
Home schooling with lockdowns disrupted the schedule
A lot of people found it the perfect time to write. I didn’t, because I was used to having hours of the day to work on my own and now everyone was home with me.
My husband is a teacher so he was doing online school all the time. Very busy, very stressed.
My two children, young teenagers, were here also doing the online school and I became their support network of cooking, cleaning, shopping, making sure people were exercising, making sure people weren’t lonely, that sort of thing, and I found I couldn’t do it. I could not write.
I felt very spoiled somehow that I couldn’t do this job when so many people were having such a difficult time.
I felt it was self-indulgent to say, oh, I can’t write a book, it’s too difficult, but there was nothing in my imagination.
I couldn’t find it. I began to panic actually, and it was a horrible, horrible feeling.
When I went to my publishers and said, I can’t do it, they were very sweet and said, miss a year. If anyone can miss a year, this is the year. No one is going into bookshops. That isn’t happening.
People are still reading, but it’s such a strange year. We’ll reissue a book. So they reissued The Snow Rose, with a new cover.
I got a bit more breathing space and as things began to return a bit more to normal, and my children went back to school and my husband went back to work, I found I could get back into my imagination again.
The challenges of the new world order
Jenny Wheeler: It’s funny. Even without that interruption of family life, it does something to your head which is hard to understand. For a lot of writers, the actual physical details of their life aren’t going to change very much. They’re still sitting in a room in front of a computer. But the fact that everything’s so different in the outer world does seem to have an impact.
Lulu Taylor: Yes, I think so. Some found writing to be the only way to get away from it all but I didn’t have that experience. It just shows you how different we all are in the way we approach writing and approach accessing our imagination and our imaginary lives.
Jenny Wheeler: I see on your Twitter feed that you’ve got quite an important book date coming up in a couple of weeks. You’re chatting with the Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson, about her romance, Her Heart For a Compass the Duchess of York about her Mills & Boon novel, which I haven’t read yet, which I obviously must get on. But she is last on my list, she’s my last interviewee so I’m getting to her book last. Luckily I’m a fast reader. I’m looking forward to it. , at a local literary festival. Tell me how that came about and is it something you do every year?
Lulu Taylor: I do support the local literary festival by interviewing authors, which I really enjoy. It’s nice to be interviewed myself today, I must admit, but for a couple of days a year I go along there and have the real pleasure of meeting lots of different types of author and chatting to them about how they write and why they write.
Swapping seats to interview other authors at local festival
This year I’m going to be talking to Lionel Shriver, which is going to be interesting, and some others as well as the Duchess of York about her Mills & Boon novel, which I haven’t read yet, which I obviously must get on.
But she is last on my list, she’s my last interviewee so I’m getting to her book last. Luckily I’m a fast reader. I’m looking forward to it.
Jenny Wheeler: It sounds fun.
Lulu Taylor: I think she’s quite a character.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. You won’t have any trouble getting her talking, I’m sure.
Lulu Taylor: No, but the one thing we’re not having is questions from the audience. It’s a bit sensitive right now, I think.
Jenny Wheeler: Turning from the specific books to your wider career, one question I do like to ask everyone and see what they say is, is there one thing you’ve done in your writing career more than any other that you would attribute your success to. Is there one thing that other beginning authors might be able to take out of your experience?
Lulu Taylor: I think there are two main things. The kind of writing, and that is I think I have moved towards finding my authentic voice and writing the books I want to write. That is key. If you try and be a bit too cynical and think, thrillers are the big thing. I
Finding your creative voice a key to writing success – Lulu Taylor
I’m going to write a thriller because that’s what everyone wants, but really what you want to write is that historical crime novel, then I think you’re always going to fail on some level. You might succeed on just about every other level, but there is going to be something, some little piece of heart that isn’t quite there.
So, once you’ve found your voice, which takes a while to develop, and found the kind of books you want to write, I think that’s really key. The other thing is more about the writing life as a published author. I was lucky with my agent. I found an agent. She is exactly my age and was starting out as an independent agent.
She’d been a sort of baby agent before then and she was looking for people to represent. I approached her because I knew that she was second to none in her protection of her authors. She always fought for her authors and I thought, that’s the kind of person I want to represent me.
She also had a special talent that a lot of agents don’t have, and that is, she has a real editorial eye. She is good at working on story ideas with you and critiquing works in progress and giving good feedback. And she knows the market. That’s her job, so she is able to look forward and look at the realities of the marketplace in a way that I couldn’t do on my own. That was a piece of luck and has been important for me.
Jenny Wheeler: Coming from the publishing industry you would have been in a better place than many beginner writers to see the trends, wouldn’t you?
Understanding the realities of publishing an advantage
Lulu Taylor: Yes. That did work to my advantage in some ways. I had a very realistic idea about how the book market worked. I knew quite a lot about it. When I found my agent, for example, I’d already worked with her on the other side. When I worked with her as an editor, I thought, gosh, she’s a bit annoying. Then when I became an author, I was like, she’s the one definitely, the annoying one.
Publishers only publish what they think they can make a success of so I was delighted when they thought that what I was writing was of interest to them, just as excited as anybody when I got my deal. The first time I got a published copy through the post I could not believe it. I was over the moon.
In another way it slightly went against me because with my critique publisher’s head on, when the publicist said, well, your kind of book doesn’t get much in the way of publicity, I’d be like, yeah, yeah, no one wants to know, I completely understand that. Whereas I should have been going, what? Do your best. I think you should go and publicize my books. I sometimes had to remind myself that I had to be on my own side and not on their side.
Jenny Wheeler: Turning to Lulu as reader, because we are here as The Joys of Binge Reading and we like to give people who are listening a recommendation for other books they might enjoy. You obviously have been a voracious reader right from childhood. Have you been a binge reader as well, and what are you currently reading that you feel like recommending?
Lulu Taylor: I have always got piles of books next to my bed which I am eagerly looking forward to reading, but when I’m doing my own writing I tend to steer clear of reading too many novels because of what I call the leakage. You don’t want to get someone else’s voice into your head.
What Lulu Taylor is reading now
One of the problems with reading a lot of other fiction writers is that you always think, they are so good. They’re much better than I am. It can work as a slight demotivator almost, because you think, what’s the point, I’ll never be as good as X. I try and steer clear. But once I have finished a book and that’s done, then I’m hard at it again.
I love light-hearted comic fiction as a release from some of the darker things that I’d been writing about. I love Sophie Kinsella books. She’s absolutely terrific. Veronica Henry is another lovely feel-good writer. If I’m feeling historical and I want to go back in time, then I will reread my favorite Nancy Mitford books or Elizabeth Jane Howard or Daphne du Maurier.
I’ve just started Olivia Manning. She wrote the Fortunes of War series. I really like Robert Harris. I always enjoy his books. They are a little sort of cooler generally, but always fascinating and he does his research so well. Then in the thrillers, people like Lisa Jewell and Louise Candlish who I always have a little emotional link with. I love her.
I read lots of non-fiction: history books, diaries, biographies, autobiographies, always good for finding snapshots about bright young things or country life, country houses, bringing the past to life. If it’s in a biography or a historical nonfiction, I can see how it can be adapted or used to make the past feel richer in books that I’m writing. I like to make sure I’ve got my detail right.
I always enjoy the real-life spy things by Ben Macintyre. I also binge audio, love listening to audio books.
If you were doing it all over again, what would you change?
Jenny Wheeler: Yes, it’s a great release when your eyes are getting tired, isn’t it?
Lulu Taylor: Yes. When I’m going to be doing the ironing and I can still carry on reading while hard at work. That’s lovely finding a big series. I actually binge listened to Anthony Trollope novels read by Timothy West.
I thought they were terrific, really enjoyed them. He writes women really well, so I enjoyed those hugely.
Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. That’s a tip to look at. Now circling around, because we’re starting to come to the end of our time together, at this stage in your career, if you were doing it all over again, is there anything you would change and if so, what?
Lulu Taylor: That is a very good question. I would say to my younger self, have more confidence in yourself as a writer. You have to learn your craft as you go along. If I could have been a bit more confident.
The other thing I would definitely say to myself is, don’t forget to hide whatever you’ve faced from real life. Hide it really well because as soon as your friends and family start reading your books, they become absolutely convinced that they know who you’re really writing about and quite often they think it’s them.
That has got me into a slightly sticky situation on a couple of occasions so I would definitely say to my younger self, change everything and change it before you write the story.
Treading the careful line between real life and fiction
One of the things I used to do was think, oh, I remember that story X told me. It was brilliant. I’m going to use that. When I rewrite I’ll make sure I change all the details, but I’ll put it down as it was for now. By the time you’ve written it down, it becomes real in your book and you forget how much you’ve borrowed it from someone else’s life or your life or your friendships, and you don’t make those changes. Change now while you can.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s a good bit of advice. Looking ahead into 2022, it has been such a disruptive time, but what have you got on your desk for the next 12 months? Are you happily back into something new at the moment?
Lulu Taylor: I have got another two books with Macmillan to write and I’ve had a great meeting with them recently where they said, why don’t we start to think about something big you might like to write, maybe a series. I’m thinking about that, what I would do, because the kind of book I write is, there’s a historical timeline and a timeline in the present.
Sometimes I’ve said to myself, I have to write two very small novels that fit perfectly together. That’s quite difficult. At some point I think I would quite like to try writing something that perhaps stretched out further into two or three books and get to know my different timelines and my people and my characters. I like seeing my characters at different points in their lives.
Thinking big with story telling
In this most recent book, you see the characters at so many different points. You see them as babies and as grownups and young married people and then older people. I quite enjoy playing with all that perspective, so going further on is quite enticing.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes, that would be. It’s fun to think about that kind of thing, probably also a little bit scary. As you were talking, I was thinking about Lucinda Riley and the Seven Sisters. That was an amazing stretch. Not quite what you’re talking about, but that kind of thing.
Lulu Taylor: Yes, absolutely. I hadn’t really thought of that. It was seven stories that folded into one big story, wasn’t it, and each one told a complete story in itself. That’s really good because with all series you have to be careful that you don’t alienate people who think I haven’t read book one and therefore there’s no point in reading book three.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s right. You can pick up any of those ones and read them as a standalone.
Lulu Taylor: I think that would be key. She has left a great void. She’ll be much missed.
Jenny Wheeler: One of the books I loved from way back, university days, was The Alexandria Quartet where you had four books, each one telling the same set of circumstances from a different viewpoint. I loved that book. In fact, I’ve been thinking about it recently, thinking I don’t know what happened to my copy, I must buy another one. When you move house a few times books seem to mysteriously go missing.
Where you can find author Lulu Taylor online
But yes, exactly that kind of thing, where you are getting the same thing but from different viewpoints and aspects. It’s fascinating.
Lulu Taylor: It is very, very interesting.
Jenny Wheeler: Do you enjoy hearing from your readers and how can they reach out to you?
Lulu Taylor: I always enjoy it, mostly because people don’t bother to get in touch with you too much if they’ve hated it. They tend to get in touch with you if they’ve liked it. It’s so lovely and encouraging and hearing how people have responded to the story is always heartwarming. I love it.
I do have a website but I think that people don’t use websites so much for authors anymore and updating it is a real hassle. Your Instagram pages and your Facebook pages are so immediate and people can message you right away and you can immediately see it. It’s a quick and convenient way of being in touch with people.
Instagram and Twitter and my Facebook page are the places where I interact with people. One of the reasons I like doing the literary festival is getting to chat to people and seeing people face to face. It’s lovely for writers quite often because we’re alone so much.
If you enjoyed Lulu Taylor’s romantic mysteries you may also enjoy….
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. We will have all the links to the social media in the post that goes out with the recording so people can go to the website and find all of those things if they’re looking for them and want to link in. These days you just need to Google your name on Facebook and it will come up, but they will all be there anyway.
Lulu Taylor: Lovely. Thank you.
Jenny Wheeler: Lulu, thank you so much for our time. It’s been great. We have run out of time, so all the best with your writing and have a wonderful Christmas.
Lulu Taylor: Thank you so much. You too.
If you enjoyed listening to Lulu you might also enjoy Jan Moran’s Heart Warming stories linking romance and mystery…
Thanks To Our Technical Support:
The Joys of Binge Reading podcast is put together with wonderful technical help from Dan Cotton at DC Audio Services. Dan is an experienced sound and video engineer who’s ready and available to help you with your next project… Seek him out at dcaudioservices@gmail.com or Phone + 64 – 21979539. He’s fast, takes pride in getting it right, and lovely to work with.
Our voice overs are done by Abe Raffills, and Abe’s another gem. He got 20 years of experience on both sides of the camera/microphone as a cameraman/director and also voice artist and television presenter. Abe’s vocal delivery is both light hearted and warm and he is super easy to work with no matter the job. You’ll find him at abe@pointandshoot.co.nz