Frances Quinn, author of 'The Lost Passenger' - Historical Fiction author discusses advice from ABBA, what other markets want, and the privilege of an editor

Writer's Routine

Dan Simpson

Arts, Hobbies, Books, Leisure

4.9 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 3 July 2025

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Frances Quinn is a journalist, copywriter and bestselling author. Her new novel, 'The Lost Passenger', tells the story of Elinor Coombes, who boards the Titanic trapped in an unhappy marriage to a controlling husband. When it starts to go down, she sees an opportunity to escape for a new life.

Frances began writing after winning a place on the Curtis Brown Creative Novel Writing Course, which led through a meandering path toward publication in 2021. Her debut was 'The Smallest Man'. She followed that up with 'That Bonesetter Woman', which both sold well, yet didn't manage to secure international rights. You can hear what Frances did to learn about foreign markets, in order to get her newest novel sold overseas.

As a journalist and copywriter, Frances has written for 'Good Housekeeping', 'Woman's Weekly', and 'Ideal Home', also producing words for Waitrose and Easyjet. We discuss how this has influenced the novels she writes, and why she's forever thankful to her editor.

We discuss genre, research, and how Frances learns about her character while having decided exactly what they're up to.

You can hear why she's a moany writer, why she likes to exercise early, and why she still keeps office hours.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome along to a brand new episode of writers' routine. This week we're chatting to
0:13.6	Francis Quinn. Her new novel is The Lost Passenger. It's her third in a writing career that has
0:20.3	seen her put words in unexpected places.
0:23.5	You can hear why she leans on advice from one of the greatest bands of all time to keep her writing.
0:29.2	A lesson from Abba. So when Benny Anderson wrote his first song, not for Abba, but in his early
0:36.3	solo career, and it did quite well. And he thought, well, if I can write one, I can write two. And if I can write two, I can probably write three or four. And I remind myself of that, you know, when you think, I've been in this place before, I've thought a book was never going to work, and I have made it work. So that is a big thing.
0:55.1	I think we all do that. You think, yeah, I've done it once and I, you know, my husband's always
1:00.2	saying to me, I say, oh God, this one's never going to work. And he says, you have said that before.
1:05.1	You said exactly that before. And that does help. That definitely helps. You have to remind
1:09.5	yourself of that. Also, Francis is open about wanting success and what she's trying to write to make that happen.
1:16.5	If you want to be reasonably big and make a living from writing, you need to not only sell in this country, you need to sell in other countries.
1:26.8	You need to sell in translation. And ideally you want to sell in other countries, you need to sell in translation,
1:28.2	and ideally want to sell in America. And I didn't get even a sniff of an American deal or a
1:34.7	translation deal for the first two books. And I thought, well, why is that? Because people seem to
1:39.0	like them. So the first one, you know, the background is the English Civil War. Well, lots of people in
1:43.9	Britain don't know about the English Civil War, let alone anywhere else. So that was never going to fly
1:48.1	abroad. And then the second one, I don't really know. I mean, it was Georgian England. That
1:54.1	sometimes sells, sometimes doesn't. But what I was told is it is probably too niche. So then I
2:00.6	thought, well, okay, if you want an
2:02.6	American deal, if you want foreign deals, you need to think about what those markets want.
2:06.8	You can find out what she did next in this week's writer's routine with Francis Quinn.
2:16.8	Yes, welcome along to the show. My name is Dan Simpson. Thank you for being there. This is
	...

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