From Unpublished Author to New York Times Bestselling Author – How it Happened (Part 1)

It's been a rollercoaster – full of ups and downs and I'm sure there are plenty more to come. But yes, I went from a first book selling just 1,500 copies to a New York Times bestseller.

One of my subscribers asked me how my career developed to the point that I became a New York Times bestselling author – especially after I mentioned in last week’s Bijoux List that my very first book published in 2010 sold just 1,500 copies. I sometimes forget that not everyone here has been with me since the very beginning and that you might not have heard this story before.

So, the story of how Natasha Lester became an internationally bestselling author – which is something I still can’t quite believe! – goes a little bit like this.

PS - I’m giving away a couple of books too. Details at the end of the post.

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From Mr Men to Mad Men

In the talks I give at events, I often show one of my earliest manuscripts called Mr Men Go On a Picnic. Yes, I’ve been writing since I was a kid, and when wasn’t writing, I was reading. But, back when I left high school, there weren’t really any universities here in Perth offering creative writing degrees. So I didn’t know how to become a writer.

I asked my dad for advice. He’s an accountant – probably not the person an aspiring writer should ask for career advice! He suggested I do a Bachelor of Commerce – of course he did! But in the absence of any better ideas, I decided to give it a try. The marketing and public relations components of the degree involved writing, so I hoped that at least might interest me.

Once I graduated, I worked in marketing for about 10 years. My first job was at an advertising agency – if you’ve ever seen Mad Men on Netflix, I’m sorry to say that advertising agencies in the nineties hadn’t evolved very far from those portrayed in 1960s. Needless to say, I left there pretty quickly. My last marketing job was with L’Oreal Paris, where I was the marketing manager for Maybelline cosmetics, and then the Garnier skin and body products. My bathroom cabinet was full of more lipstick than any woman could ever wear in an entire lifetime. It was great fun, but it wasn’t what I truly wanted to do.

The Poem That Started it All

An opportunity to change the course of my life presented itself in 2003. My husband had followed me across Australia to Melbourne for my work and when he needed to return to Perth for his career, it seemed only fair that I went with him. That meant quitting my fabulous job and, for the first time in my adult life, I was unemployed. And I paused for a moment – luckily – and thought to myself: what if I finally did something about that writing idea I’ve held onto ever since I left school?

So I went back to university and embarked on a year-long graduate diploma in creative writing. I wanted to find out a couple of things: firstly, did I love writing as much as I thought I would? And secondly, was I actually any good at it?

My tutors were amazing. It was one of my poetry professors who encouraged me to try to get a poem I’d written for an assignment published. I sent it off in the post – they didn’t accept email submissions then! – and about three months later my stamped self-addressed envelope appeared in the mailbox with a letter of acceptance and a cheque for $100.

It was a lot less money than I’d ever been paid in any of my marketing jobs, but it was the best $100 I’d ever earned because it was acknowledgement that my writing was good enough to be published. Those small moments of external validation kept me going through all the long years of writing my first book.

And here’s the poem if you’re interested!

Draft Lucky Number 13

Then I started a master of creative arts and wrote my very first book as my thesis. This wasn’t historical fiction, but more of a literary/contemporary novel. I worked on this between mid-2004 to mid-2007, taking a little bit of time off in the middle to have a baby, which possibly wasn’t the best timing – but is there ever a good time to have a baby?

Once the book was finished, I began sending it out to literary agents who were accepting unsolicited manuscripts at the time. That was about three agents in total. It’s so much easier now to submit manuscripts to agents and publishers – the system is much more open. But back then, getting a literary agent’s postal address – some of the didn’t even have email – was like finding a unicorn.

They all rejected me. But most of them rejected me nicely, sending me personalised letters detailing what they liked about my book and things I could work on. I then submitted the manuscript to publishers and, once again, it was rejected by everyone. Over this time, I had another baby too, so I was pretty busy with my domestic life in between waiting for up to 6 months to hear back from different publishers.

Thankfully my book was longlisted for the Australian/Vogel Literary Award at this time and the amazing judges kindly sent me two pages of detailed feedback. Armed with that, plus the feedback from the agents and publishers who’d rejected the manuscript, I decided to rewrite the book one last time. This was draft lucky number 13. Yes, that’s truly how many drafts I wrote. Most of the work of being a writer is rewriting.

And to be a published author, I firmly believe based on everything I’ve learned over the thirteen years of being published, you need a mix of hard work, talent and luck. The agents and publishers told me I had some talent, writing thirteen drafts is just one example of the kind of hard work you need to put in, but I hadn’t yet had my luck.

The Luck

At last, draft thirteen was ready to be sent off to almost the very last opportunity on my list. This was the Hungerford Award for Fiction, a West Australian prize for an unpublished manuscript. Thank goodness prizes like this exist. They’re the mainstay of aspiring writers, and without it, I might have gone back to marketing and my life would be very different.

I received an email letting me know I was shortlisted for the award, and invited to attend an awards ceremony. I went along feeling very nervous. This was really the last possible moment when this manuscript might turn into the reality of a published novel. If I didn’t win the award, I’d have to put it away in a drawer and write something else or give up.

There are so many moments like these over your career. The thing is, if you love writing, you have to keep going and never give up because you never know when your luck will change.

Luckily, I was the author who won the award that night. Winning came with a publishing contract and thus my first book made its way out into the world five years from the time I began writing it. It sold about 1,500 copies. 1,500 copies for 5 years work. It was a sobering moment, looking at my first royalties statement.

But it was a start, I told myself. Surely my next book would sell more copies.

That was optimistic. Two years and one more baby later, I published another novel, which was similar to that first book – a literary/contemporary novel.

It sold even less than my first book. I was squarely in that bracket with the majority of authors I posted about last week who make only a few thousand dollars from each book.

I hadn’t yet found my calling to write historical fiction …

That would come a couple more years down the track – all because of a failed novel that I wrote and threw in the bin, a book that has never seen the light of day.

It turned out to be the best failure of my life. But I’ll tell you all about that in the next post – as well as the one moment in 2018 that really turned my career around. Stay tuned for that post in a couple of weeks.

Book Giveaway!

To thank you all so much for being here – I can’t believe how big this community has become in just six weeks – I’m giving away two copies of The Three Lives of Alix St Pierre. One is the American hardback and one is the Australian paperback. To be in the running to win, all you have to do is leave a comment on this post. Winner will be chosen by randomiser and competition closes on Feb 23 at midnight AWST. Good luck!

Let me know your thoughts! Is this how you imagined a writer’s journey might begin, and that it’s such a long, slow process?