How to get published: Lady Carnarvon talks to Harriet Evans about her journey from publisher to author.

Lady Carnarvon welcomes Harriet Evans, a former publisher turned writer, to Highclere Castle. Harriet discusses her journey from working at Penguin Books to becoming a successful author. They delve into her latest book, 'The Treasures,' part of the Seven Stones Trilogy, which is rich in historical and geographical details. Harriet shares her writing process, her love for creating vivid settings, and the influence of her literary family. The conversation also touches on overcoming insecurities, the importance of good editors, and the challenges of choosing book titles and covers. Lady Carnarvon and Harriet bond over their shared appreciation for history, places, and the personal treasures that inspire their works.

00:45 Harriet's Early Writing Journey

02:02 Family Influence and Writing Motivation

02:46 Challenges and Growth as a Writer

04:10 The Importance of Place in Writing

07:11 Career Beginnings and Publishing Insights

10:23 Research and Writing Process

15:20 Historical Inspirations and Personal Stories

18:42 Reflecting on Youth and Memories

19:19 The Significance of Letters and Treasures

21:53 Writing and Publishing Journey

23:07 Challenges and Triumphs in Writing

24:32 Navigating the Publishing Industry

30:06 The Importance of Covers and Titles

32:05 The Value of Books and Reading

32:54 Highclere Castle Garden Party

You can hear more episodes of Lady Carnarvon's Official Podcasts at https://www.ladycarnarvon.com/podcast/

New episodes are published on the first day of every month. 

Transcript

 

Welcome to my podcast and I'm thrilled to be sitting here at Highclere with Harriet Evans. Now she was a publisher turned writer. Her books above all to me are imbued with a sense of place, a subtitle to all I write, and just the cover of the latest one.

The Treasures means you want to step into the book, step into the world of seven stone farms, step into the family, step into where they live, and explore with her what happens. So I hope when you go into any bookshop over this summer, you're going to be drawn to this book.

So welcome Harriet, and thank you so much for joining me here today. Thank you for that lovely introduction. I'm so happy to be here.

And I just was looking at how many books you'd written and on Google, which must be correct or not, it says you started writing in 2005, is that right?

I think that's when the first one was published, but I started a few years before that. I think about. Two or three years before that. And I wrote in Secrets because I was working at Penguin Books at the time as an editor and I didn't want anyone to know I wanted to write a book. , I'm very talkative and seemingly confident, but like a lot of writers, as you all know, that's quite a mask for a deep need to panic and be light, but also to hold back and observe and.

Actually, one of the things I love so much about writing now is it gives me control of a situation. I love creating my own world. I love it so much. And so I was doing it in the mornings I was waking up at. This is so unbelievable to me 'cause I really loved sleeping in. Um, I was waking up at five 30 in the morning and writing for an hour and a half before I went to work.

And I think I thought if I don't do this now, I won't ever do it. And I think I'd always wanted to write. My mother worked in publishing until she retired. She edited Jill Cooper and Joanna. Wow. And Sophie Kinsella. And my darling late dad was an editor and a writer, and he was the paperback publisher for David Niven.

So I sat on David Niven's Knee as a baby, and he worked with people like John Le Carey and Delia Smith, and lots of people like that. So I grew up in a house full of books. But, and I think it was easy for me to see that and think I could give that a go, but it's very important to remember, for me to remind myself I wasn't interested in being a writer.

I just, I wasn't interested in anything my parents did. I just always liked writing. I liked writing down what I wanted to. So the, I think when I started writing, I was so afraid. And I look back now and I think, yes, I can see why you felt there was lots at stake because. I only want to do things if I do them well, and that's always stopped me from doing lots of things.

You know, I never went traveling, as I get older and I care less, I think, oh, I'll go to the summer solstice at stone end and stay up on my tour. I'll get my ear pierced for the second time. You know, what I'm much brave about? Those are sort of small, pathetic things, but now I'm much braver in the books I write and , the scope of what I'm trying to do, and I just enjoy it much more.

I, I'm always find how you first conceive of a book and begin to make that world of, of make believe, but it's based on reality quite often and the characters are, or the places are, and what makes each of us take. That first step and is, is extraordinary and I, I think you're right inside it, there's these immense doubts that always assail me whenever I sit down and I think, oh my God.

Can I do it? Can I write the next paragraph? Then you get into it and you think you silly sausage basically, or I think I'm a silly sausage but that's where it does begin. How extraordinary is that and did you in go into Penguin Random House because you wanted to be in the publishing and book world, that drew you in there to start with?

Was that always going to be where you began your career? 

I wanted to work either as a location scout for films, so it's very funny to be here today because I love my favorite films. With things like Howard's End, films are bound to places, places, and lots of my books are about houses, whether they're tiny like holiday shacks on the coast, endorse it, or huge crumbling stately homes, you know?

But there's always a house, and I think that gives me some control. I always draw a floor plan. I always have it really clearly pictured in my mind, and. I always wanted to, be able to have control over the different houses I was writing about.

We've had one of our favorite location scouts for Downton here today. We're spending the morning there, and that again is always looking at houses the film brings the three dimensionality of the house into your sitting room, and you are trying to do that with your floor plans in your head onto the page in terms of the black and white writing. Whereas of course, I have my floor plans here. Yeah. And my books tend to be all around high clear, but I've got plenty of floors, plenty of rooms, and plenty of characters.

So I, I'm quite happy stuck here. I've contemplated it several times. Yeah. About. But actually this is what I know and love and that's where I am based. Whereas you've explored further and wider through all your 

books. I have, I always felt places very, very, very keenly as a little girl.

We used to go on holiday to North. Did you see 

any ghosts in your places too? 

I don't. I did. I was very afraid of lots of things, so I didn't want to know that there might be some there because my imagination was. Massively overactive. That's such a, I was thinking about this that the other day I was terrified that I'd be right.

You know, I was always really afraid of lots of things and like you were saying about how you think, oh, I'm overcome with doubt. I think those are quite important things and the longer I've been doing it, and as you say, it's been, I've been writing for 20, 25 years. I, I've realized those are really important.

You should have the doubt, you should be able to hold it and you should have that moment of calling yourself a silly sausage. And I think that thing of not quite of knowing that the book isn't quite working, that it's not quite right and not panicking, just holding firm in your space is really, really important.

And when I give talks at schools and especially to young women. That idea of like, it's okay to go wrong. Going wrong is part of the journey of going right. And I think the floor plan and the interest in houses and places is all tied into that, that you are trying to give yourself a little bit of control.

I always felt very, very, very deeply about the place we went on holiday when I was younger and when we didn't go anymore. I was heartbroken. When my grandparents' house was sold, I was heartbroken. I felt sort of locations and situations very. Strongly, and I think that's partly why I wanted to do all those things.

I didn't originally think about going into publishing. It wasn't my game plan. I had no game plan. I was hopeless. I worked for about six months at, and this was my first job after university and the Lady magazine and it was really awful. It was a very stressful environment and I was. The production assistant, and it was very, very old fashioned.

Everything was done by cutting, like setting the printing out the pages and then cutting them out and gluing them onto squared paper. This is how long ago it was. There was a dummy copy. I. Of the addition for when the queen mother died, kept in a safe, and I had the keys for that safe and I was 22 and I hopeless.

I was very Bridget Jonesy, just absolutely hopeless. Always like falling over, always turning up late for things, always being confused. And I found the stress of being a production assistant quite extreme, but it was such an interesting experience. So I think I thought I'd be a glamorous magazine editor.

Or a locations get, and neither of those. And I think I just always knew in the back of my mind, I'd always be writing. I've just always written things down. And I think part of growing up as a writer is being confident in your head. Not that it makes it onto the page, but being confident in yourself to think, yes, I'm, I'm gonna try that.

That's, that might be a terrible idea, but I'm gonna try it. 

This house makes me try things. Yeah. And everyone who works here end up, ends up being much more. Okay. You know, it's a group of women in the estate office and so today we were discussing whether we needed a crane to get , a water tank up onto the roof or not, and how we do that.

And I just think years ago that would really worry me now. We are all completely calm about getting a crane in and how much and getting different costs and what the water tank is and how to do it. So it's amazing what you can do if you can try, which you've never dreamt. You'd be having to do. And here we have to problem solve.

And in a sense, when you're writing a book, you have to problem solve your way through drawing out the characters rounding and sent them off through another part of the garden. I suppose I think about wiggly wagley garden walks when I write 'cause that's what I walk through here. But it's again, winding someone your reader's way.

Through a garden, through an archway into a beautiful rose and ending up in the stingy nettles before helping them out again. 

I think that's completely it, and I think the water tank is a really interesting metaphor. For what sometimes you are forced to say to yourself, I'm going to have to take out a lot of the bricks and the structural integrity of this book to get this new water tank in because this doesn't work.

I do vast amounts of work to the books. 

I spoke to Robert Harris, who's obviously hugely successful and, many films made of his books noticeably conclave was clearly made at just the right time. But and he spends one year doing all his research and then one year writing.

I mean, it's incredibly disciplined and very organized. So depending when you catch him, he may or not be able to come. But do you have a similar process? Do you do a lot of research behind your books or you do, you start writing?

That's so interesting about Robert Harris.

I didn't know that. 'cause one of the things, I love about his books is they feel that they flow. You don't feel, I dunno if you've read Precipice, but you don't feel you're being bashed over the head with historical facts about the First World War. But it's so in its time and that's presumably 'cause he knows so much about it.

He's done all the research, he's just able to write it quite five. I. I don't often know where the story's going to go. I do loads of work afterwards. So I will start off by doing all the research I think I need to do, and in the case of the Treasures It, part one is about Alice and it's in New York in 1965, upstate New York, the Hudson Valley, beautiful part of the world.

Part two is about Tom, an English boy, who is brought down from Scotland to live in notting Hill in London in the fifties, and then part three is them together in the summer of 1968 in New York, which was a, as I'm sure you know, a very seismic summer when everything happened.

Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy were both short the Vietnam War, like everything, every time you think. What year did that happen? That was 1968, so I did. Tons of research on what it was like to be a young person in the sixties. I know that sounds obvious, It's become a cliche. The sixties. Yeah. I don't actually know what it was like, and I asked lots of people. I listened to loads of music. I went to the Hudson Valley. I went to Washington Irvings house on the banks of the Hudson. I put myself in it. I read loads of Joan Didion. I read.

Every single book from that period. I read lots of myths about the Hudson Valley, which is a beautiful, it's a bit like Tuscany. It's gorgeous. Then I did loads of research on Notting Hill in the fifties. I grew up in West London. I lived in Bayswater for a few years, but still, what a period of change it was how insanely poor bits of Notting Hill were still.

Yeah. And we have a caravan up in Scotland on the west coast of Scotland Oh beautiful part of the world. And we go there every year and I've always wanted to write about that. So I had all that already. And then part three was New York in the sixties, which was. Hilarious and extraordinary to write about, but then other bits started coming through and that's what's really interesting 'cause I don't dunno till I'm writing it.

What, there's a bit of the story I'm missing what you were talking about earlier with the festival you were having in September. I kept thinking there's the house at the center of the book and it's the first of a trilogy, the Seven Stones Trilogy, the Treasures is part one and Seven Stones. So do you know 

there's a, there's a 

farmhouse 

by here.

That's why I was supposed to take it by, called Seven Stones Farm. No way. Yeah. Yeah. No way. So it is just at the back of Heley. It used to be part of Heley. It's not, it's seven stones. Do you, why is 

it called Seven Stones? Because 

it's, , stones and Stan, it was a very old Anglo-Saxon part of the world, and that's part of where the, um, unborn river came down.

It was the sheep wash, and then presumably there were seven large boulders. Seven stones house marking through the way. 

This is in the middle of a stone circle. I know. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. 

Yes. So that, that's why I was sort of thinking it. I wanted to, I'm glad your, your face is falling apart. Sorry, I wish you good radio 

face, but it's called the mouth open face, so it's Wilshire.

But actually I went to Avery Loads. I go to Stonehenge. I'm really, I'm entering my old lady who lives in Bath, who goes to the solstice phase, and I'm very, very into it because that idea of sort of. I don't understand so much about it, and I really, really love that feeling all over the west country.

There are these stones and this landscape that we don't know what they were doing with it.

I've done quite a lot of research on it. Yeah. 'cause we managed for Brons and we've got neolithic remains. Yes. So part of my historical research, I often touch on it. Yeah.

Because everyone has this you call, I've down in times so I can let it touch and come back again. Yes. But I have done quite a lot to bring it together. And there's an endless ax. Charter from 749, which marks the boundary and the words that are used Stan is Stone. Yes, I studied Anglo-Saxon. Yeah. And it's fascinating charter.

And it mentions, , the sheep wash and the seven stones and going on with rat that, so I just, when I was reading, I think, oh my god. Mm. How bizarre. Mm. 

And that's really amazing. It's also amazing that I've imagined it really clearly, and it's the. Touchstone for the three books, but I've also totally made it up.

So I kept thinking, I'm just gonna make this up and it could be wrong. And people like neolithic age experts and experts in Anglo-Saxon, and this may well be you later, you can correct me when you've read all three of the books, right? And say, that wouldn't happen. But I kept thinking, I'm just gonna put this, and then things kept happening to confirm it.

, I dunno if you know this, but thomas Hardee's house is in the middle of a stone circle. Yeah. The one endorse it. They've just started excavating it and they didn't realize, but it actually was, and I was.

Going through, I realized that quite a lot of the stories set in the past and for me, when my first books came out, my first novel going home was published in 2005 and it was referred to as Chiclet and it was packaged in a quite young chitty way. And I didn't mind and it sold lots of copies and I was very lucky.

But I always found it funny 'cause I think quite often, books by women about women's lives get called Chicklet. And books by men, they don't get called chi lit. And I've always thought it's really funny how you have a character. And for me, I want to know with a heroin or a hero where have they come from?

What are their parents like? What happened in the past to bring them to this? Situation where we are sitting right now, and the more I started writing about Tom and Alice, the hero and heron of the book, this is their great love story. Part one, how they meet. It's so coincidental that they're brought together, it's really meant to be.

But I started doing more and more research about the RAF and the Second World War and the air bases around stone engine soul. We plane and I found this estate agent listing, which always slightly makes me cry. That was near RAFT. And it was for a house that was being put on the market by this couple who'd lived there for , 50 years.

And when it was on the market, a very old man knocked on the door and he said you are not getting rid of that door, are you? They have this huge wooden gate. And they knew that the house had been used by people in World War ii 'cause it was right next to the, to the air base. But actually it turned out it was the place where all the.

Spitfire pilots and the WAFs and everyone, American servicemen, loads of people who are drivers, they would come to this house. There are photos of it with all the hairs on the back of my neck go up just talking about it. This old stone mantle piece with disused, old bottles of champagne, and that's where they'd go for one last night of partying.

And then they'd go off and fight and some of them would die. And this man said, I knew I'm gonna start crying. I knew once I opened that gate and shut it. I was safe there for one more night and he said, if you ever get rid of that gate, please, will you tell me? She said, we'll never get rid of that gate, and that gate's still there

and I remember reading this and thinking. Oh my God. Like just, that's so powerful. And they were so young. People forget when you see old people being celebrated. Everyone in the anniversary of D-Day this year, they all said, we need to remember the people who lost their lives.

You know, my colleagues, my friends. They were all so young, and this idea that underpins the book for me is this idea that they were all really young and they all gathered at Seven Stones. So Seven Stones was that place. And again, I'm quite vague about the geography. I was like, let's just hope there's a RAF base nearby.

But you can sort of get away with stuff if you do it with enough. Brio, I suppose is the word. And if you are kind to yourself and give yourself that confidence, then you can write about things like stone circles, and houses like that.

Some people today are putting in stone circles, which I find a bit silly and not my thing at all, because they came from a different place, different reason, and they weren't random.

They weren't plunked there for decoration. They came from the earth, but here , as well as seven stones. Eight planes crashed here in World War ii, so I've done a memorial to those young men. At the foot of the garden and after this, I'll show you what I did on Instagram. That'd be lovely. So that is really why I'm doing it.

Then I've got another one to remember what happened to D-Day as well coming out. 



So it is that youth. Mm-hmm. Because you took us back into the youth of 1965. Mm-hmm. Before coming forwards, which was really interesting for me. 'cause I forget that my parents were once young.

Yeah. Yeah. So it is, seeing those dates were very interesting 'cause I. Was a child. I'm a bit older than you, but was, didn't know that at all. Yeah. Yeah. And I can just remember the smell of my mother's coat she was allowed to wear. Then going out for supper at the priest and the dancing and asking what she had for supper.

Yeah. Or things like that. Those moments, which other ones you need to remember and bring forward. And I also. Enjoyed the way you brought letters for 'cause in my historical books. Letters are so important to me. And I don't know where we're going to go with letters in the future. So you had your letters and your lists of treasures.

Mm. Curiously enough. Miranda Hearts book is about treasures and the treasures that she's found to help her through things. So it was. Really powerful how I thought I'd just been talking to Miranda about treasures and here I was looking at a book which began with treasures. Yeah. So it's fascinating and I thought we'd have a treasure hunt here, by the way.

And I might lose you in a cupboard and see if I can find you. 

I had a little shelf when I was small of. Those, they're called Whimsies. There's a company that used to make them of these little China animals, and I was, I dunno where the shelf came from, but it's built specially for them. And I loved it.

And I used to arrange 'em. If we went on holiday, I'd buy a little clay owl from the local shop, and my. Wonderful, wonderful mother-in-law who died last month, who was a very, very wonderful woman who the book is dedicated to, who was 93 and grew up in Long Island and had this very long and interesting and incredible life.

She was a great one for collecting things and a great one for good stories, and she gave my daughters lots of different treasures. So we have lots of, she just had nice knickknacks around the house, so we have little brass elephants that she had. You know when her father set up Fort Hood in Texas in the.

Late thirties, she was given that on the way there. So those things of, they're like talismans, you know, you carry them around. I have this very big gold ring, which a family friend of ours who doesn't have daughters gave me. It's very heavy and I really like wearing it. 'cause I feel it's sort of something that I'm carrying around.

It keeps me safe. I know that sounds crazy. Yeah. Um, and I can sort of bang it on things and that thing of what are the treasures that we all carry around with us? I lose things all the time and I wanted it to feel that her, at the beginning of the book, and this isn't a spoiler, Alice's father dies very, very suddenly, and that's a chapter one and everything is gone.

In an instant, and I think for her, this idea of home and this idea of family and safety and love is bound up in these little treasures which he bought for her and and used to give her and. The more I knocked on the door of that idea. 'cause sometimes you get a plot idea or you get you, you are chasing after hairs and you go down that and you're like, no, that's not gonna work.

I also write murder mysteries. I wrote one last year and I've got, I'm very happy that I'm gonna be doing a couple more. And it's really funny trying to work out what you can get away with. 'cause you can get away with a lot more in murder mysteries. But with. Fiction that's about lives and about experience.

You have to be quite careful. You don't strain credulity too much, because, well, you need people to enter the 

world. Yeah. So, so you wrote your first book in, in secrecy whilst you were working, and then how did you get that published? Did you go to penguins and say, will you publish this? Or how did you make that?

Step. 

So what happened is I turned the computer on one day and I was starting to think, what shall I do about it? I'd written about 30,000 words. 40,000 words, which is sort of. A third, a quarter of a a, a decent sized novel. And I had a laptop at home, which you just didn't then, but I'd had glandular fever, I think, had I, yes, I think I had.

And they'd given me a laptop to have at home, which is very unusual. You didn't have that then? And I turned the computer on one day and the whole thing had gone. Ah, yes. Something had got into the hard drive and it had corrupted, and people always ask and had you backed it up? I'm like, of course I hadn't backed it up 'cause this would be a terrible story.

And it was the most important moment of my career and it is a sort of, I remind myself of it quite often because I like to think I'm insecure and anxious and worried and dah. And I remember really clearly thinking, Nope, that's not how this ends. I mean, obviously I was. I did for about a week.

Think you're not good enough, you're stupid. This is fate. You're an idiot. You should, why did you try? It was really, 'cause I was doing it in secret to try and, yeah. But after about a week, 10 days, I do really clearly remember thinking, no, you need to do something about this. And I bought a computer on buy now pay a year later I was a secretary at a publishing company.

I was not earning a great deal of money. So I, I had a year to make back that money and I'm. Good in exam situations, I'm not good at coursework. So I was good with the pressure, yeah. And I sent it to an agent under pseudonym and said, I work in publishing this is, I rewrote it. And it was much better.

Yeah. For being rewritten. Everything that was a bit wooly or self-indulgent, gotin. And that's why I'm okay with doing lots of work now. So you sent it to an agent? Yeah. And I said. I work in publishing. I know you. It's called Dex and YZ and my two favorite books that I capture, the Castle and the Pursuit of Love.

I dunno if it's anything like those, but I wanted to write about a girl and her family. I really hope you enjoy it and I sent it off. And to anyone who wants to write, who's trying to work out how to approach an agent, I always say the same thing, which is I think he was interested. I think it was easy for me, easier for me because I worked in publishing.

Yes. And I knew how to get his email address and things like that, but that's quite freely available now. I think I knew to keep it very short and to be really focused about the kind of flavor of what I was giving him. So did 

you send him all the 30,000 words again, or you sent a treatment? 

I sent him the first sort of, what I think I'd sent him, what I've written.

I'm quite, I'm really bad at Synopsis and I'm really bad at character breakdowns and all of that. I write it and then I rewrite it. And he took you on and he took me on and he, I said, call me. This is my number. And he answered the phone and he said, he's not my agent anymore. He's a lovely man and we are still friends.

He said, um. Who's this? And I said, it's Harry Evans. And he said, Harry. And I was like, but I was paranoid, you know, I worked at Penguin and we published Yeah, Lisa Jeweler, Marion Keys and Adele Parton and these massive, and I was a junior editor and I didn't want them to think I wasn't serious about my job 'cause I was really serious about my job.

So you, did you keep on at Penguin after the 

first, after you've written the first book? 

I, funnily enough, I got offered a job. That summer, so I had to decide what to do about the novel. I had to decide what to do about the job and I moved Jobs to Hoder headline to another publishing company. It was a much better job and more paid ho who published my first two books.

That's where my dad worked for many happy years, so Oh, nice. Amazing. So I was at headline and they, my then boss, who was a wonderful woman called Jane Morpeth said, we'd like to meet you and I said I need to tell you something. I've written a novel. Um, Mark Lucas is my agent and I would like to ask for, and I was about to say, an extra week's holiday.

She said, do you want to work four days a week? Yeah, fine. I was like oh. And it always goes to show, ask for more. Like I was about to say, please, and so then I got a deal about six months later, I'd written most of it with Harper Collins, who were my first publishers, and I was with them for a while.

Then I went back to headline, actually coincidentally, and I've just signed, and this is my first. But with them, with Viking Penguins. So I'm with them now, which is really, really exciting. So I've been writing for 20, 25 years and it's, it's a business I, and I've learned, and we were talking about this before we started recording, you know, you have to take yourself seriously.

The business of what you are showing to readers and people who want to get to know you. You have to take it seriously, but at the same time, you have to hold really close the things you love. Doing about it and being self-employed in a writer who's on their own all day is a very, very weird way to spend your day.

It 

is, and as well, I always say to everybody. You have to get a good editor. Yeah. Because you have to be edited. And my first book was such a lesson inconvenience and it was good. I learned a huge amount from that. Mm-hmm. And he is the first two with ERs and then I seemed, then I was with a wonderful man called Ed Victor, who I just adored.

And he got me the at home gig with penguin, which is a joy. Yes. Ed was the 

lovely man. He was friends with my 

dad, actually. I loved, it's a great man. He was just such a character and driving Bentleys in houses in Florida, so I knew he was successful. So only because he represented successful people. So you sort of got the 

feeling he believed in it.

The first time I had lunch with him and he knew. He knew my dad. My dad had had a car accident when I was a very small baby. He was in a coma for a very long time, was in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

Ed was really good to him and really kind and wonderful. And he had lunch with me when I was a very junior, unimportant editor and it was quite a big deal. 'cause Ed was Ed Victor. Yes. He'd flown every single brick of her. Barn he liked in Sussex, brick by brick out to the east coast, Florida. Oh, it was at Florida.

Okay. Um, so these stories about him were legion in publishing and it finally, the word came, ed, we'll have lunch with you. And I was living in Sel rise on a main road where someone was a couple months later shot dead while I was in my front room below a, a heroin addict on a quite cra in a quite crazy flat that had a steel door.

And I met Ed for lunch and he said. I've just had a dear friend, um, who's fallen and landed on some marble stairs and injured her back. So I'm saying to everyone, I don't, I know when you get a new staircase, don't make it marble write down that pile of wisdom, take it back to Ken Rice. And I was like, I love you so much for.

Being you. You know? That was a deal maker. That was a, and he was a kind man. He was a kind 

man. He was. And he was there to help people. Yes. And that was so appreciated. 'cause I was. I am still very much a sort of junior struggling author in many ways, and a funny one too 'cause it's a part-time job. But it feels to me like it absorbs much of my soul and my thought process.

But on the other hand, I have other things to do as well, Harriet, which is I think what everybody does. So you are quite right. So I take away from this, the discipline that you need to have as an author and the confidence you have to follow what you're doing. And then the compromises you make. When you are speaking to an editor, and then the arguments I have, I hope you have them too, over the cover and the title.

Oh my goodness. So I never knew that was so 

tricky. This one I was very lucky with because this is. A beautiful, beautiful cover. And it's , William Morris Willow Print. Very recognizable to lots of people Yes. Who are listening, I'm sure. And this was literally the first cover they showed me.

Yes. And I looked at it and said, yep. That's the cover. Yeah. And because I was an editor for so many years, I take covers really seriously. , And like you,. I know my readers and I know what people like, and I think often that can get lost. I think there's a lot of wanting to look like other books

I always think of a. Book buyer in Gatwick, WH Smith travel on their way, on their precious summer holiday for that summer, and she will have time to read one book before her kids get in the way too much. And if she's looking at my book, it needs to be a really good book because she won't have much time to read And what the cover says and what it does needs to say, this will be good.

It's not gonna be. Too wordy and too super, super complicated. But I am super sure this is a good book. And I take that really seriously. And that's what's so hard about covers, making them look beautiful and appealing at the same time. Not too literally. It's a nightmare. It was the hardest part of my job.

The second, when I was an editor, editor, the second hardest bit was titles. 

Oh my goodness. Yeah. It's just crazy. And every single one ends up being a compromise. Mm. Um, at home, at Highclere was the only title. Well, and Christmas at Highclere. In fact, three cover coffee table books. Mm-hmm. Seasons at Highclere, at home, at Highclere and Christmas at Highclere.

Were. Were fairly obvious, but the, the books I've written about the people here have just been protracted with whoever. It's, I've tried three publishers now for them and every single time. Oh my goodness. But it is a fascinating world and I think reading libraries, the thoughts and Dreams, which we pass on through the pages of a book.

And the knowledge that we gain from reading a book is just incomparable. And we are at a time when it's ever hard to persuade people to read a book, which is more than six lines on a page because of Instagram or other things like that. So , I find that interesting. And we've got this book Reader's Prize now, which just to encourage people to read and put some money behind it.

So that's really nice. But I find. Books are a treasure, so I'm very happy that it's Harriet Evans in this book, the Treasures, because there's more than one there, clearly more than one book on the Treasure series, which is great. Yeah.

Harriet, every. Summer now, for the last two or three years I've been having a Highclere Castle Garden Party, which is such fun, I thought. I'm afraid the royal family have one, so we might have one as well.

Anyway, if you could bring anyone you wanted to the Summer Garden party, who would you bring? Who would be your guest? 

Celia Ery. 

Oh wow. 

My, my life's goal is to try and be friends with Celia Emery. I dunno why. I just, I really love that one. 

And perhaps she 

might act as one of your characters, 

one of your books if it were made into a film.

She, Eva, pleasure. There you go. Fish bash posh. I think she'd have fun. I'm sure she'd have fun. Yeah. 

Harriet, thank you so much for sitting with me this afternoon. The sun is nearly shining here at cle.

But it's a glorious cover to your book with this really pretty sandit apple, probably hyper sunshine, all the William Morris cover. But thank you so much for coming here today. Thank you for having me. It's been wonderful.