‘The writing is joyful, more or less. It’s painful, but it’s also joyful. The marketing of it is much harder.’
Dr Lucy Ryan’s book Revolting Women touched a nerve worldwide: many women can relate all too well to the perfect storm of challenges facing midlife women at work, and everyone has an opinion on it.
Which took a bit of getting used to. In this week’s conversation, part of my series talking to this year’s Business Book Awards winners, Lucy talks frankly about the learning curve when a doctoral research project becomes an award-winning, conversation-sparking business book, and how she learned to love (or at least manage) the work of promoting it.
From being squeezed down to seconds in her first radio interview to talking sex, drugs and rock and roll with Mariella Frostrup, her experience and hard-won lessons are pure gold to anyone setting out to write – and promote – a business book that makes an impact.
(And if you’re thinking I set this whole podcast up for the sole purpose of being able to talk at regular intervals to Lucy Ryan… you’re not wrong.)
Lucy’s site: https://www.lucyryan.co.uk/
Mindspring site: https://mindspring.uk.com/
Lucy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drlucyryan/
Alison on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-alison-jones/
The 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge GIFT EDITION: https://pi-q.learnworlds.com/course/proposal-challenge-gift-24
The Extraordinary Business Book Club on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1447064765612358/
Alison Jones: I’m here today, again, with Dr Lucy Ryan, who is a leadership coach, consultant and passionate advocate for women’s professional development. Her doctoral research project explored the phenomenon of midlife for professional women, a long-standing data gap, and she works with companies internationally to unlock the potential of this key talent pool.
And she is the author of Revolting Women: Why midlife women are walking out and what to do about it, which was, brilliantly, named Diversity, Inclusion and Equity Book of the Year at the Business Book Awards 2024.
So first of all, welcome back, Lucy.
Lucy Ryan: Thank you.
Alison Jones: And secondly, congratulations.
Lucy Ryan: Thank you. Thank you on both counts.
Alison Jones: Are you still grinning?
Lucy Ryan: It’s lovely to be back. And yes, it was really thrilling. I was really excited.
Alison Jones: It’s just terrific. I’m so pleased. And you know, obviously it was a great night for Practical Inspiration generally, but yes, it’s just wonderful. And your sister had come over from Australia. Would you like to explain about how your sister actually got an award before you did?
Lucy Ryan: Oh, I couldn’t believe it. So there is a family joke, you know, it has a background to this. There’s a family joke. My sister lives in Western Australia, and she comes back to England for events, family events, big events. But every time she comes back, like for a wedding, like my daughter’s wedding last year, they always do this thing of who’s travelled the furthest and give them a clap.
Now, my sister wins it every time.
Alison Jones: Every time.
Lucy Ryan: You know, we could have all been working for a year on this wedding, but everyone stands up and claps my sister. So there we go.
I get to the Business Book Awards, my sister has arrived from Western Australia that morning. She didn’t actually come for the awards, she came for my mum’s birthday but it was beautiful timing. So she arrived, well, literally that afternoon. And of course, the first thing they say, Alison, as you know, was ‘who’s traveled the furthest?’ And I sat there and I kind of, I put my head in my hands at all these poor authors who had traveled from Canada and America and Japan.
And Sarah was always going to scoop it because she got in from Western Australia this morning and got this huge award, this doorstep of an award.
Alison Jones: I’m not sure that’s going to go in her hand luggage.
Lucy Ryan: No, no, she bought a suitcase to take it back, another one to take it back in.
Alison Jones: That’s hilarious. It was so funny and there’s a wonderful picture of her standing there with the award and you in the background with a face like a lemon.
Lucy Ryan: I know, I know.
Alison Jones: But then you got your award so there’s a happy ending.
Lucy Ryan: Yes, so thank goodness, happy days, otherwise, you know, it might not have been quite so funny.
Alison Jones: Yes, it could have been a terrible family thing.
Now, Lucy, this is not your first rodeo. In fact, it’s your third time on the Extraordinary Business Book Club.
Lucy Ryan: Sorry about that.
Alison Jones: Yes, we were joking off screen like we would run out of things to say. That is never going to happen. But if you do want the sort of the background to a bit more kind of introductory stuff to Revolting Women, then go to episode 379 because we talk about it all there.
So I’m just going to ask you to very, very quickly introduce the book and then if people want more information that’s where they can go. What’s it about and why did you write it?
Lucy Ryan: Okay, I wrote it because I did a PhD, started it ten years ago, and after five years of doing a PhD, I was studying the experience of midlife women. And one of the startling things that came out of the study was the amount of women who were exiting, or thinking of exiting, or considering exiting. And I couldn’t believe this was just happening without anyone batting an eyelid.
I couldn’t find any, well barely, three academic papers. No books written about it. And yet here was this phenomenon going on, whilst at the same time I was reading about HR from HR talent, leadership books, all saying we have a talent shortage. So there’s this experience, wisdom, brilliance exiting silently and we’ve got a talent shortage.
But when I finished the PhD, I really had had enough of it all and put it away for two years. And wrote a different book, wrote a leadership book. And, it just wouldn’t let me go. And a bit like I’m here for the third time, I did your Business Book Challenge three times to try and work this out.
So really, you do haunt my life, Alison, I’ve got to say in a very nice way, in a very nice way.
Alison Jones: Not sure how I feel about that.
Lucy Ryan: There, it’s there, it’s live now. And to work out how I could turn a weighty 100,000 words into a kind of zingy 50,000 word book.
And essentially it explores the three reasons why women exit: gendered ageism, midlife collision, and the revolt.
Alison Jones: Brilliant. Thank you. You kept that very succinct and that’s wonderful. And actually such a great story. How you, yes, do go and listen to episode 379 because there’s a lot of very funny stuff in there.
But let’s focus today on the sort of the ongoing life of the book, if you like. So there’s a sort of moment, isn’t there, when you you kind of exhale and you go, Oh, I’ve written the book. It’s done. I can get on with my life.
And of course, what happens at that point is the book sort of starts to have a life of its own. So just, yes, what’s it been like over the past year?
Lucy Ryan: It’s been, it’s been extraordinary. It’s been, you know, more than I could have hoped for in terms of the media life it has had. You’re absolutely right. You finish it, you put it to one side and then you suddenly realise that actually that was the easy bit. And the marketing of it, for me, is way harder.
The writing is joyful, more or less. You know, I know it’s painful, but it’s also joyful. The marketing of it is much harder. I did take on a PR agency, the ones who work with you, and I took them on for three months. The Book Publicist. The first thing of course that happened was this double page spread in The Sunday Times and what was so…
Alison Jones: Christina Patterson’s review, wasn’t it?
Lucy Ryan: That’s right.
And what was so they’d said, The Book Publicist, it might be in The Sunday Times. So we got The Sunday Times, we looked through the whole book section and Steve said, I’m really sorry babe, it’s not there. And I went, Oh, well, never mind, you know, it was a long shot. But he was looking down the columns for a tiny paragraph, and then we found this kind of, Whoa, it’s there. And that gave it a life of, you know, every broadsheet, so many podcasts, so many radio shows and Sky News as well. So it had this momentum and life and I had to learn so much. It was such an amazing thing to learn. I wasn’t experienced in any of this. I wasn’t experienced in doing radio. I certainly wasn’t experienced in TV.
I wasn’t experienced at podcasts. I wasn’t experienced at doing writing short… you know, could we have 200 words in, in the next half hour? So it was an incredible learning for me. And my very first radio interview was a Dublin station And this guy went you know, we’ve got Lucy Ryan here and I’m so sorry we’ve run out of time. Lucy, 15 seconds, summarize your book for us.
And so I got so much cannier and I wrote out, and still advise anyone to do the same, I wrote out this kind of two pages in front of me of all the trickiest, 10 trickiest questions, or the 10 most interesting or trickiest questions they might ask, how I’d summarise it in 15 seconds, how I’d summarise it in three minutes, bullet points that I wanted to get across, and those kind of two pages sat in front of me for everything.
Alison Jones: That’s so interesting. I’m guessing you didn’t read off them, but it’s just that…
Lucy Ryan: …no…
Alison Jones: ….safety blanket of having done the work and…
Lucy Ryan: …yes, it was just, it was to look at it beforehand. It was to go, okay, remember those three things and, you know, sometimes I, after his 15-second one, I did another one for Somerset Radio and he talked to me for 50 minutes. And then it was like, oh, well, what do I say then? What do…
…I’ve
Alison Jones: done it all in the first 15 seconds.
Lucy Ryan: It was exactly that. It’s like, oh, okay. I’ve got to write down then, you know, kind of the three stories that are really good. And so, very quickly, I had to do some really beautiful learning of how do you talk about a subject quickly, at length and yes, so I learned huge amounts.
Alison Jones: It’s a sort of foundational change in your identity, isn’t it? You become, from being a researcher, you become somebody who is writing a book, and then you become somebody who has written a book, and then you become somebody who’s promoting a book, and they’re all aspects of one thing, but they all draw on very different elements of you, don’t they?
Lucy Ryan: Without a doubt, without a doubt. And I’ve just, I live in Cheltenham and you came with me to the Cheltenham Literature Festival.
Alison Jones: Oh, was so much fun.
Lucy Ryan: Where I was kind of doing that, where I was speaking.
Alison Jones: In our Revolting Women T-shirts.
Lucy Ryan: Yes, I know, I know, it was so, just so beautiful. But what strikes me every time I go is how unnatural it is for a writer to speak.
Alison Jones: Yes.
Lucy Ryan: And some are good at it and some are terrible at it. And they meander and they mumble, and you’re there wishing they would just look, look up and speak. Or have thought about what the audience might want. So I think it’s a fundamentally different skill. And I was so lucky that as a trainer, I had some of those skills for doing it, but I can speak very slowly and I can hesitate a lot because I’m thinking as I speak and I’m really aware of it and my voice is very low, so I was having to kind of train myself to speed up a bit, don’t hesitate so much, give light and shade to my voice.
Alison Jones: So interesting. Did you watch yourself back? Did you coach yourself?
Lucy Ryan: A few times. Yes. yes. I don’t like watching myself back. I don’t think many people do, but I heard the first one or two radio interviews and thought I’m so low and I’m so hesitant. I can hear myself as I speak to you now. When I start talking about it, I start hesitating more. So I really had to concentrate on keeping momentum in my voice and keeping it going.
So I really coached myself. I took everything that I do for clients to myself.
Alison Jones: It’s so interesting because it isn’t just speaking. You can be a very good speaker. You can get up on stage and give a presentation. But this is a different thing. Because, as you say, you’re responding in the moment. The scale is different. It’s about getting a tiny segment of time and getting a key point across and responding to, because I’m guessing that not every interviewer is as helpful as the first…
Lucy Ryan: No,
Alison Jones: …one. No.
Lucy Ryan: No, and some people were, I was interviewed by Mariela Frostrup, and she went so off key, and was talking about sex, and it was like sex, drugs, and rock and roll. And I was just lucky that that was about my fifth outing,
Alison Jones: …would have been quite…
Lucy Ryan: I was learning then that my comfort blanket had to just be that, and then to just let it go and laugh and go with it.
Alison Jones: And I think…
Lucy Ryan: …and not worry too much.
Alison Jones: Yes, but I think it’s an interesting point, isn’t it, that the book has been yours for so long. And it’s, of course, it’s always your book. But as soon as a reader reads it, it’s theirs too. And it speaks to their current preoccupations and the bees in their particular bonnet.
And often when you’ve got a conversation going, you’ve tapped into something that is really important for the person who’s speaking. And you have to kind of navigate around that as well. You’re kind of co-creating what the book is, aren’t you?
Lucy Ryan: And that there are so many aspects of what I’m talking about. And invariably, I was interviewed by middle aged women. I was interviewed by a few men, but invariably middle aged women. And so they came at it with their own take. So either, they had been chucked out of an organisation and were full of rage and anger and wanted to talk about that, or they were steeped in grief or had experienced grief which is still for me the chapter that’s least talked about that I think is so profound. Or they really wanted to talk about menopause which was always and still is very tricky because people have very binary points of view about it and I’m very grey.
I’m very, whatever’s right for you, you need to be in a position of knowledge and then what’s ever right for you is good. But that doesn’t sit comfortably.
So, yes, I never quite knew, you know, as a book, it’s quite provocative and I never quite knew where someone was going to kind of attack it, if you like.
No one was negative but there were points of view that took me by surprise.
Alison Jones: And how do you feel about it now?
Lucy Ryan: About the book, or the experience?
Alison Jones: Well, the book particularly, when you look at the book now, what does it speak to you?
Lucy Ryan: Deeply proud of it. You know, I’m deeply proud of it. I still absolutely love the way it looks. Which is, you know, all due thanks to you and your team. But I’m really proud of it. I think that it sparked a conversation. And I think any book that can spark a conversation does something really interesting.
And I can’t quite believe I had the courage to do that, by the way. I was very happy to write a PhD, be very private about it, put it in a drawer and never write about it again.
I had never seen myself as any form of advocate. I’m not a very good kind of banging the drum kind of person but yet wrote quite a provocative book.
And so I am, I’m really proud of it. I wouldn’t change any of it.
Alison Jones: Oh, that’s really, really good to hear. But that’s so interesting that you think you’re not, or you had that image of yourself as not a provocative person because it is, it really stands, it’s not one of those books that apologizes for itself. You are angry in this book and it really comes across, and I think that’s what resonates with people.
Lucy Ryan: And still, I’m surprised by the way, when people go I was enraged by your book. I was so angry by it. I was like, oh okay. But then you also get people who went, loved it, skim read it in half an hour. And I want to go, what do you mean you read it?
Alison Jones: Go back and read it properly.
Lucy Ryan: Go back and read it properly. I put a lot of work into that.
Alison Jones: Tell Tell me about the writing, because as you say, you know, writing a PhD is quite an esoteric thing. Nobody’s sort of, you know, banging on your door wanting to have a difficult conversation. It’s quite private. It’s like you and your supervisor, and four people in the world.
Lucy Ryan: yes.
Alison Jones: How, what was the experience of writing?
I mean, I guess you didn’t know it was going to have this sort of immense impact, you know, as you were writing it, although we hoped it would. Yes, tell us just about what writing is for you, how you went about it, what you get out of it.
Lucy Ryan: I don’t know if we’ve spoken about this before, but forgive me if we have, but it was a very healing event for me writing this book in a surprising way, in that while I was writing my book, my husband was very ill and I needed to occupy my mind. I took almost six months off work. I worked a bit, but mainly he needed a lot of care. He had bleeding bones and he’s terrific now. But he was very, very ill and he was in a lot of pain and it was a very tricky time.
And writing the book was shutting myself away for about two hours almost every day when he was asleep or watching something or calm. And so it was a really healing book. It was my sanity, this book.
And I’m not surprised, as I look back on it, that I kind of wrote it in that kind of six months. Because once I started, I was like, right, okay, next chapter, next chapter, next chapter with an amazing editor, Alison Gray, who kind of went with it with me and was just so kind at going in a rather random way, because I could only tackle it in ways that I could manage. So if I’d had a really, really tricky day or Steve was in a really bad state, I had to go with something easy.
Alison Jones: Yes.
Lucy Ryan: I’d skip to another bit and then I’d come back to something difficult. So it was a very different book for me to write because it was done in this intense period of time in my life and I absolutely loved it because I shut the door and it was a total sanity. Forgive me if I’ve told you that before, I’m not sure, but…
Alison Jones: No, I don’t think you’ve expressed it like that before but it’s funny I’ve talked to a couple of authors recently who are going through quite difficult times in their lives and you know on both occasions I’ve said well, you know, let us know what we need to do with the schedule. Do we want to just this out of the schedule?
And they’ve both said, oh no, absolutely not. This is my sanctuary. This is the only thing I have that that allows to sort of be myself and lose myself. And yes, nobody talks about that, do they? But it is, it’s really interesting.
Lucy Ryan: No, I mean, I experience great flow when I’m writing and I miss it. I really, I haven’t worked out what form of writing to do next or what to do next, but I miss that intense flow. I love it when I’m either studying or writing and completely absorbed in something, which is how I feel about it.
Alison Jones: and I am going to ask you for your best tip. And I know that you’ve given this twice before, but I’m sure that you still have something new to teach people, maybe from the perspective of somebody kind of coming out of the maelstrom of marketing.
Lucy Ryan: From the marketing point of view, it’s… from the writing point of view, for me, it’s all about decide your audience.
Alison Jones: Yes. Sorry, I’m laughing because I know how hard that was.
Lucy Ryan: Yes, yes, really, really hard.
From the marketing point of view, it would literally be to have a double page spread. And really work out if you’ve only got 15 seconds, what must you land? Three minutes, what must you land? 30 minutes, what stories can you tell?
Alison Jones: Yes, I love that.
Lucy Ryan: Realize that people only want to really hear stories.
They either want their three bullet points that they can preface the session with. That’s the other thing, you know, they can go, and we’ve got Lucy Ryan coming up and she’s going to talk about XYZ, bang. So I’ve done their hard work for them. I’ve done their heavy lifting. So I think I became quite a nice interviewee because I gave them their hook to sell me.
Alison Jones: That’s brilliant. And course, much better you give it to them than they mess it up.
Lucy Ryan: Oh my God, yes, yes, yes, yes. Because, and I learned that again, you learn it, you know, when, because I heard my here’s Lucy Ryan, she’s here to talk about the menopause.
Alison Jones: No, she’s really not.
Lucy Ryan: Yes, yes, yes. So then you go, well, actually not. And then it starts it all on a kind of a negative.
Alison Jones: You’ve made them wrong and they, yes, nobody enjoys that.
Lucy Ryan: I think if you can make it easy for the person who’s asking you to do it, you know, and even for keynotes, write the intro for them.
All of it I learned to make it easy on the person introducing me because otherwise they do it themselves.
Alison Jones: Yes, and nobody wants that. And this really, we do a similar thing in book marketing. We think, you know, we need a story for every screen. Is the way that I’ve heard it put. So you need your tweet and you need your Instagram post and your LinkedIn post and you need the description for the book and you need the long form description.
And, you know, there’s different use cases for the different marketing copy. And one of things that a proposal does really well, for example, is do that.
Lucy Ryan: Amazing. Yes, yes.
Alison Jones: Key marketing bites and so on. Yes. Perfect. Brilliant tip, thank you.
And Lucy, recommend us a book.
Lucy Ryan: Oh, yes. Can I sneak in two?
Alison Jones: Go on then.
Lucy Ryan: I’ll do one if you like.
Alison Jones: No, you can do two and people often do.
Lucy Ryan: Unusual, it’s quite fun, and it’s John Ronson, The Psychopath Test.
Alison Jones: If you’re looking on video, it’s such a striking cover that.
Lucy Ryan: Oh, and it’s such a great book.
Alison Jones: So I haven’t read that yet. It’s one of those on my radar, but tell us why we should read it.
Lucy Ryan: Well, it’s all about understanding the nature of psychopaths, and it’s written by John Ronson, who’s a journalist, and so it’s written in a, it’s a funny, accessible, interesting way. And because they feel that, you know, up to about 20 percent, at least, of CEOs are psychopaths.
It’s sometimes quite a good reminder of what you might be dealing with. And a client was talking about it this morning, which is why I got it out of my library to go, yes, I know, you know, I know what you mean. And so I’ve thought about that.
And the other one is Patsy Rodenburg’s Presence book.
Alison Jones: Yes. yes, this one I I do know.
Lucy Ryan: I love Patsy Rodenburg I just think she’s a beautiful speaker, beautiful writer, and the book on presence is really useful and good.
Alison Jones: Useful and good. That’s what we want from our business books. Love it. Thank you.
And Lucy, if people want to find out more about Revolting Women, more about you, where should they go?
Lucy Ryan: Okay, so to find the book, they can find it obviously at Practical Inspiration Publishing, or they can find it easily at Amazon.
Alison Jones: Yes, or wherever people sell books.
Lucy Ryan: Or wherever people sell books both the bookshop and Waterstones, et cetera.
They can find me either at lucyryan.co.uk. So hello@lucyryan.co.uk or at my corporate site, which is MindSpring.
That’s lucy@mindspring.uk.com.
Alison Jones: Brilliant. Thank you. Real joy.
Oh, and LinkedIn, obviously. Yes, I’ll put those links up on the show notes at extraordinarybusinessbooks.com along with the transcript of this conversation.
What a pleasure to talk to you. And if you’re feeling the itch to write something again, then I think you should probably do that and then we can have a fourth Extraordinary Business Books conversation.
Lucy Ryan: Yes, but then you’ll really panic that we’ll run out of things to say.
Alison Jones: I don’t see that ever happening. Thank you so much for your time today, Lucy. Just joy as ever.
Lucy Ryan: Thank you for asking me.
