Not long ago, author Lisa Jewell went out with a couple of friends from her North London neighbourhood. They live on the same street, but modern life being what it is, they only properly catch up a few times a year. Still, from the quick “hellos” and chats in passing, Jewell assumed that their lives were bobbing along as normal.
She couldn’t have been more wrong.
“Both of them told me the most shocking, awful stories about what had been happening behind closed doors in their marriages and their families,” says Jewell. “Drama, trauma, unexpected illness.”
And it’s exactly this phenomenon, she continues, that fuels our collective fascination with stories about perfectly manicured houses hiding twisted, dark secrets.
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Jewell would know: She’s sold millions of copies of psychologically complex thrillers about the things that lurk beneath the surface of seemingly normal lives. A “perfect” daughter goes missing in Then She Was Gone, an ordinary middle-aged woman gets entangled with a true crime podcast in None of This is True. In her latest, It Could Have Been Her, a charming cottage on the edge of London’s idyllic Hampstead Heath is the setting for some of her creepiest work – including a clown! – yet.
“That’s the obsession, the idea that you walk past somebody’s house and you haven’t got a clue what’s going on,” she says.
The Globe chatted with Jewell about the reality of being a certain kind of bestselling author, how BookTok transformed her career and why audiobooks made her fall in love with doing housework.
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What’s your relationship to the word “bestseller?”
It’s funny because I think people who are not involved in publishing see the word “bestseller” attached to an author and think it means the same thing across the board. I may as well be J.K. Rowling to them. But there are so many different ways of being a bestseller. I was just in an interview with Lee Child last weekend, so I was doing a bit of research about him. His career is about the same length as mine and the amount of books he’s sold in that time doesn’t compute. It’s insane. But people would imagine that because we’ve both been No. 1 in the U.K. and the U.S., we’re swimming in the same pond, but we’re just not.
I’m quite pragmatic about what being a bestseller means. It means you have sold enough books in a given week to reach a certain point in the charts. The person at No. 1 might have sold 50,000 copies in a week. The person at No. 2 might have sold 8,000 copies in a week. You’re both bestsellers, but you’re also living completely different lives because there’s different scales of it.
COVID-19 lockdowns marked a turning point for British author Lisa Jewell.Clara Molden/Supplied
I’m not asking to see your bank statements, but how would you describe your life as an author? You know, if you’d become a lawyer would you be in a similar position?
Early on in my career, I was a big bestseller in the U.K. My first few books all went into the top 10 and sold very well and I was very high-profile. Then, it became more of a struggle for my publishers to get my books in the top 10, and a few missed. There was a point in the middle of my career where I was about to become a midlist author and obviously my income reflected that. I didn’t panic or freak out about it. I was still making enough money to live a very comfortable life, but I do remember being much more budget-conscious – staying in four-star hotels, buying a lot of second-hand stuff on eBay, not being able to redecorate my children’s bedrooms.
I plateaued along at this point for a few years, and then this thing happened in 2020 during lockdown, both in the U.K. and the U.S., very much influenced by the events of the pandemic. One of them was Then She Was Gone, an older title of mine, going viral on BookTok and suddenly being No. 1 on the New York Times list. I’d never had a New York Times bestseller, let alone a No. 1 bestseller, and it was No. 1 for 10 weeks. That book to this date has sold 2.5 million copies.
That was one book that did one crazy, viral thing but it completely changed the way that people perceived me and my value as an author and a brand. That completely got me out of the midlist doldrums and brought me up again.
And then during lockdown, the only place you could buy books was in supermarkets – and because I’d just been in this big promotion in all the supermarkets before the lockdown hit, there were only about 10 books you could buy. One of them happened to be mine, so it just had this huge run as a bestseller in the U.K. You couldn’t get away from it.
I am now in a position, because of royalty cheques mainly – not just advances, but royalty cheques for books I’ve actually sold – where I could stop writing books now and I could just live on what’s in the bank and what will come from my backlist.
Those two things that you mention – going viral on BookTok and that happy accident of being in the supermarket – are these strange variables you can’t really control. Does that ever play on your mind?
Totally. I often look at what my publishers are doing and they work so hard. Their minds are in overdrive thinking of more and more interesting, creative, high-impact ways that they can sell more books for me. But so much of it is down to serendipity, timing, zeitgeist, luck, fairy dust. I’m doing my bit, which is sitting at my computer writing books that I think people will want to read, and they’re doing their bit, which is making sure they get the right promotions in the right bookshops, get reviewed in the right places and get social media coverage. We’re controlling what we can control, but we also know that it’s the unexpected that turns a successful publication into a phenomenon.
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It does reflect how power has shifted. It used to be the reviewers in a newspaper would tell you ‘These are the good books, you must read these,’ but now it’s 26-year-olds in their bedrooms who have an amazing audience saying, ‘Read Lisa Jewell.’ It’s incredible.
It’s very powerful. I don’t know if they realize how influential they are. They’re called influencers, but I don’t think they realize how they’ve kept the publishing industry alive over the last six, seven years.
And these are young readers. I’ve noticed this at my book events. I’m replacing my readers with younger and younger readers, despite the fact that I’ve been writing for 30 years and I’m as old as their mothers. I don’t think there would be young people at my events in those numbers if it wasn’t for the online influencers.
How important are audiobooks for you?
Massively. I sell more in audio than I sell in print these days – which is very frustrating because in the U.K., we don’t have a bestseller system that charts audiobooks. Another thing that happened during COVID was that audio went up a notch in terms of production values and the quality of the narrators because of all those actors being out of work and sitting at home. We were suddenly able to get hold of much higher-profile actors – and when you’ve got access to all those actors, then the production team starts thinking about ‘Oh, we could do a multivoice narration.’ It’s a much more immersive experience than it used to be.
As a reader, I wouldn’t read books if it wasn’t for audio. I have come apart from the bit of myself who used to be able to sit in a corner with a book and read it instead of doing other things. Now, the only time I can read a print book is on holiday. And no, it doesn’t tap into the work that your brain does when you’re having to look at words on the page and translate them into images and thoughts, but in terms of entertainment, it’s just as good.
And it’s just transformed the way I feel about housework. I now see it as a brilliant opportunity to get some reading done.
This interview has been edited and condensed.