Your guide to writing a bestseller — by hit podcaster Elizabeth Day

It is a tough time for debut novelists: publishers are cautious despite record profits, while agents and editors are overwhelmed and overworked. There are no 2024 debuts in the Sunday Times top ten bestsellers. Big advances are still offered, but Day thinks that can be a poisoned chalice. “The really difficult thing can be having a big advance, as you’re seen as a big failure if you don’t earn out.”

The three hosts and Day are all friends, bouncing ideas around. It was Day who put the trio together. Andrew is her agent, so when Day emailed her to say, “There’s something I want to talk to you about,” Andrew panicked. “I thought, ‘She’s going to fire me.’” Lovegrove — who runs her own imprint, Dialogue Books, at Little, Brown — met Day in 2017 at a dinner where they bonded over a shared love of Beyoncé’s Lemonade. Collins is another of Andrew’s authors, and had sent Day a proof of her bestselling 2019 novel The Confessions of Frannie Langton. “We got to know each other on the page first and had crushes on each other,” Day recalls.

The group wants the podcast to be accessible, and its references run the gamut from Peaky Blinders to the reality show Love Is Blind and the film Cool Runnings. Day says one of her favourite exchanges is when Lovegrove admits that she has never read a Jane Austen novel and that she hates “English love” because it is so repressed. “I was somewhere the other day and we were getting confused whether it was Jane Austen or the other one, the book,” Lovegrove says. She means Jane Eyre. Andrew recoils in mock horror.

“A lot of times I’ve attended masterclasses and it’s all very highbrow,” Collins says. “There’s a place for highbrow, but let’s not all pretend that we read only Middlemarch and don’t obsess over Love Is Blind. You can find narrative in so many places.”

Each of the three has different ambitions for the podcast. Andrew, 39, wants to crack open the “esoteric, slightly closed-off world” of publishing. Lovegrove, 42, emphasises that they aren’t promising to reveal the secret formula for a bestseller — “If we all knew how to do that, that’s all we’d be doing all day” — but says she wants to explain “what agents and publishers are looking for, what is character and what is plot”. Collins, 51, hopes to provide companionship. “Writing is such a lonely process,” she says. “What you get is a feeling that someone else has been in those trenches. We’ll metaphorically hold your hand. When you’re writing a novel, you need ways to trick yourself into thinking that it is not the worst experience you’ve ever had.”

So how should one write a book? Lovegrove has a basic prescription for novels, “narrative, story, plot, character, genre”, and adds that the key feeling is a compulsion to write. Andrew agrees. “The worst kind of author is a glory chaser — someone who asks, ‘How do you write a bestseller?’ There are easier ways to make money. I don’t do this because I want to be rich — though I love money. I’m an agent. I do this because books saved my life when I was growing up and touched me in a way nothing else did. So I look for consummate writers who say, ‘I wish I could do something else, but I have to do this.’”

The flipside is how should an unpublished writer know when to stop flogging a dead manuscript? “When you stop learning … when you’re receiving feedback and not incorporating it,” Andrew says. “The difference between people on the bookshelf and people not on the bookshelf is perseverance and change.” Collins nods. “What gets authors on the shelf is also a willingness to be edited.”

They are dismissive of trends. “By the time you have finished the book, the trend will have changed,” Collins says. “You should be writing the book that is in you — that’s when you get the electricity. It means instead of following the trend, you might be setting it.”

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She is hyper-aware of potential pitfalls. One of the big challenges, she feels, is that writers think their novels are exercises in creativity, but then they have to put the book “through a conveyor belt of commercialism”. Additionally, Collins feels there is a false assumption that novels by female authors are autobiographical. “It’s a way of devaluing the work by assuming it’s just someone’s journal entries parcelled together and packaged up as a novel,” she says. “The way I do it as a female author is to own it. Yes, we are mining our own experiences — and it’s about time because the entire history of English literature has been fabricated to muffle, devalue, demean and shut out our experiences.”

Where it becomes uncomfortable sometimes, though, is in the marketing. “You’re asked to sell yourself in tandem with the book, to open up your personal life and have some kind of tale of suffering,” Collins says. “I don’t think men are asked to do this.”

Day wishes the podcast had existed when she wrote her early novels, especially her second, Home Fires, which she considers a disappointment. It sold 2,000 copies in the UK, according to Nielsen.

“With every novel you write, it’s like being an England fan — a triumph of hope over reality,” she says. “You convince yourself that you are building an amazing cathedral and you end up with a serviceable garden shed. I now feel fondly about [Home Fires], but the writing is probably overdone and florid.”

Day sees podcasting and books as complementary. “They feed into each other in the most wonderful ways,” she says. “It all helps me become a better communicator with a sharper understanding of people. Lots of readers are turning to audiobooks, but I don’t think that’s to the exclusion of reading from the page. I tend to have multiple books or podcasts on the go: a novel I’m reading in hard copy; a podcast I listen to for my news or culture fix; and a non-fiction audiobook that I save for long journeys. I enjoy the different textures of each experience.”

When I ask Day if expanding her podcast empire makes her the new Gary Lineker, she laughs. But she is seeking to challenge the former footballer’s supremacy in podcasts as her company, Daylight Productions, takes on Lineker’s Goalhanger empire, which makes The Rest Is Politics, The Rest Is History and The Rest Is Entertainment, among other podcasts.

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“I love Gary, and what he has done with The Rest Is… is fantastic,” she says diplomatically. “But the top of the [UK] podcast charts is dominated by white men. I wanted to attack the idea that these are our only experts because there are many different people from different backgrounds who have not been given the platform they deserve.”

For Day, 45, who has written about the pain of unsuccessful fertility treatment, it is also about making podcasts targeted at women that are not about parenting: “Because I am not a mother, I am passionate about women being able to show up in spaces where they are not defined by their family role.”

Lovegrove and Andrew both say how pleased they are to be celebrated as experts. “As three black women in the publishing industry, we rarely get asked about craft,” Lovegrove says. “If anyone wants me to do a panel, it’s about race and diversity, but I spend all day editing and running a business, and I rarely get asked to talk about that.” Andrew adds: “This isn’t some kind of artificial diversity exercise. Elizabeth hasn’t picked us because we’re black, she has picked us because she admires our expertise.”

Day had been a journalist for The Observer before she quit suddenly with no job to go to. So what made her pivot? “It was instinctive,” she says. “It started around 35, 36, when my first marriage [to the journalist Kamal Ahmed] started imploding. That threw my other relationships into stark relief and one of those was my work relationship. It was, ‘I don’t feel seen in my work either.’”

She took control of her career, a gamble that has certainly paid off. “Having come out of the other side of 12 years of unsuccessful fertility treatment and having made peace with the fact that I won’t have my own biological child, I am even more motivated to ensure that what I put into the world has meaning and purpose,” she says. “We are really bad in this country at allowing women to be polymaths. In my forties, I am really enjoying leaning into the opportunities that interest me. I know what the coherence is and I don’t need to explain it to other people who are, like, ‘Hang on, you were a journalist and you must for ever stay there.’”

As an early podcast adopter, does she think we are reaching saturation point for the medium? She shakes her head. “We are 20 years into podcasting. Look at where cinema was 20 years in. We are at the beginning, and it is not just going to be more and more podcasts, it is the evolution of the form.”

How to Write a Book is available from July 22