Please join us for a Q&A with Catherine Lloyd, the author of several novels including the BookBrowse Book Club selection, Chelsea Girls. Catherine will be here to take your questions from July 20 through July 22. Please stop by!
Please help me welcome Catherine Lloyd, also known as Kate Pearce, to our Community Forum.
Catherine is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author. Her novel, Chelsea Girls, about Mary Quant and the worldwide fashion revolution she sparked in the 1960s and 1970s, was a recent BookBrowse Book Club selection.
Born in England in the middle of a large family of girls, Catherine quickly found that her imagination was far more interesting than real life. After acquiring a degree in history and barely escaping from the British Civil Service alive, she moved to California and then to Hawaii with her kids and her husband and set about reinventing herself as a romance writer. You can find her on Facebook and Twitter.
Please use this space to ask Catherine questions about her work. As a reminder, to reply to an existing comment, click the grey Reply on the right side under the comment. To ask a new question, click the blue Reply button a little lower down.
Catherine: Thank you so much for agreeing to chat with us. Before we jump into the Q&A, is there anything you’d like to share about yourself?
Good morning from sunny England! After 25 years of living in California and Hawaii I recently moved back to the UK and now live in Bath, Somerset–a place a lot of you might know from its association with Jane Austen and its thermal hot springs first enjoyed by the Romans.
I currently live with my husband, 2 small and very yappy Pomeranians and various grown up kids who return like homing pigeons between house buying and university. I write during the day and take the weekends off and I’m enjoying rediscovering my homeland. 
Happy to answer any questions you have and thanks so much for inviting me.
p.s. as I’m in the UK my replies might turn up in the middle of your night.
Hi & welcome again! I guess I’ll get the ball rolling.
I was amazed when I looked at your website to see you’ve published over 90 books across multiple genres since your first novel, Eden’s Pleasure, was published in 2005 (please correct me if I have anything wrong). What made you decide to sit down and write that first book? What was the journey like to get it published?
Hi!
I think I’d always wanted to write a book and when we moved over to the USA I didn’t have a work visa so when my kids were in school I realized that for the first time in my life I actually had time to write. I told my husband I’d give myself 5 years to get a book published and if that didn’t happen I’d go back to school and do my phd. Luckily for me I just made it in year 5 and my first book, which was an ebook (I didn’t really know what that was back in 2005!) was published and I never looked back!
Back in the old days we had to do everything by mail, print out submission packages, send them off and hope that someone got back to us. I was lucky enough to join Romance Writers of America who were also very helpful back then and helped me understand the business and make lots of writing friends.
Digital publishers in 2005 just sold the files for people to read on their laptops, which was something new and exciting. When e-readers came along things got a bit easier. I ended up being published traditionally via the UK and in the US and in 2010 I also started self publishing so I’ve always been quite busy.
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Wow, I’d never thought about the submission process back then. Did you work with an agent at all?
Which was your first traditionally published novel?
Your first books were fairly spicy! What made you decide to branch out into other genres?
You’ve published two cozy mystery series and now Chelsea Girls under the name Catherine Lloyd. What went into the decision to market these under a penname? What went into the creation of your penname (i.e., is there a story behind that particular name?).
Chelsea Girls is a bit out of the norm for you, as it’s historical fiction (not a mystery, not a romance). What led you to tackle Mary Quant’s fashion career? Was it a more challenging book to write, since it’s based on real-life people?
I did have an agent, who was British and I parted ways with her because she didn’t really have the reach I needed into the US market. I then had a US agent for about 10 years. I left her because I had established such good relationships with my publishers and I was happily self-publishing and I felt I knew enough to do the negotiating on my own.
My first traditionally published novel was through Virgin Books, Cheek Line which was aimed at the American market in 2007. It’s called Where Have All The Cowboys Gone? It’s a very high steam cowboy romance. It hit USAT bestseller list in 2014 after a strange series of events.
I think I get bored I just always like to try new things and also, to be honest, as I got older the spiciness decreased along with me. :). I tend to write more than one book at once, which actually helps my productivity, and so it seemed obvious to me to attempt new subgenres as they came along. My first love is historical romance to write and to read along with an abiding love of cowboys. I’m also a big cozy mystery reader so it seemed obvious to try writing that as well.
Mystery readers don’t tend to read romance so my publisher thought it would be better if I used a different pen name for those and, as they are historical cozy mysteries it seemed sensible to put the historical fiction under the same name.
I chose Catherine because that’s my real name, and I’ll remember it, and Lloyd, which, like Pearce, is a surname from my family tree.
My editor at Kensington Publishing has been asking me to write historical fiction for years and I always said it would be too much work. But we both love fashion and when he asked if I’d be interested in writing about Mary Quant I couldn’t say no. I came up with a detailed proposal and a timeline to write the book (about a year) and they offered me a contract based on that.
I have to admit that even though I’ve written about 100 books it was still daunting. I have a degree in history so I at least knew how to go about doing the research which ended up being a great deal of fun. I got to see original Mary Quant designs at the Victoria and Albert museum collections library and that really helped her ideas come to life.
I also had to decide how to shape the story. As she only died recently i didn’t want to write it in Mary’s point of view because there are hundreds of people still alive who knew her far better than I ever will. I wanted to look at the impact she had on ordinary women all over the globe because that to me is the extraordinary thing about her. I was also interested in how women’s lives were changing at that period and how the freedom of Mary’s clothes influenced them. I created composite characters whose lives changed because of their association with Mary drawing from the real people I read about.
It was hard work and the research was extensive. Trying to get the balance between too much info and not enough while jumping along a fairly extensive timeline and creating rounded characters was a challenge but I always enjoy that.
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I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to read the comments from our discussion, but people really loved the book. It seems to have struck a chord with many of them. Thanks for the info above; some of our folks did wonder why you didn’t write from Mary’s POV, and that explains it. I hope they’ll see your response. Your decision makes total sense.
Did you have a favorite character among your Chelsea girls? Which did you find the most challenging to write? Did any of them end up hijacking their story and turning out much different than they started?
You mention you’ve got several books going at once. How do you balance that? Do you have a set way you juggle them, or do you just write which one you’re feeling at any particular point?
Where do you get your ideas from? Given your extensive output, do you find it challenging to keep the stories fresh?
This reminds me of Mary Quant !
Innovative, not afraid to break ground and take a risk. But with a book! Great for you 