The 30-minute timer trick: The productivity hack behind Natasha Lester’s 12 novels

Nearly nine months pregnant with her second child, Natasha Lester wheeled the pram down to the Nedlands post office. In it was her toddler, Ruby, plus some other precious cargo: the manuscript for a novel Lester had spent the previous few years writing, much of it in the snatches of time during which Ruby was sleeping.

It was February in Perth, aka boiling hot. The queue was long and Ruby was fractious, so Lester unbuckled her, hoping she’d toddle contentedly around the shop. “I was so hot and so tired and so large, I was not paying attention,” Lester says. “I heard the rustling of paper and looked down to see that she’d found the manuscript in the bottom of the pram and was throwing pages around.”

Lester panicked. She was there to enter the manuscript in the Hungerford Award, granted biennially to a West Australian author for an unpublished work. “I couldn’t even bend down to pick any of the pages up, I was that big,” Lester says. “Everyone in the queue must have seen the look on my face and thought, ‘Whoa, mad pregnant woman, let’s help out.’ So they all started helping me gather up the pages.” In the middle of the chaos stood not quite two-year-old Ruby, “looking as innocent as all get out. Like, ‘What, me? What did I do?’ ”

Lester eventually shoved the manuscript into an envelope and posted it off, not at all confident that she’d got the pages back in order. She then went home and prepared for the birth of her second daughter. Lester was lost in the fog of baby Audrey when an email dropped into her inbox telling her that she’d been shortlisted for the award. That might sound exciting, but Lester was downbeat on the way to the awards ceremony. She and her husband had moved back to their home town of Perth from Melbourne a few years prior, stockbroker Russell to set up an investment firm with his brothers, Lester throwing in her career as a marketing manager with L’Oréal to study creative writing at Curtin University. She’d written the novel as part of a master’s, and her supervisor had told her that when she’d won a prize, they’d called to let her know so she could prepare a speech.

Lester had received no such call. What she had received over the years, however, was plenty of unsolicited commentary about how difficult it would be to make a career from writing. She’d been long-listed for The Australian/Vogel Literary Award (also for an unpublished manuscript) but not won. She’d had poems and short stories featured in a couple of literary journals and received some encouraging notes from lecturers and judges, but nobody had yet wanted to publish her book, which she’d just rewritten for the 13th time. If she didn’t win the Hungerford, she reasoned, she’d have to concede they were right. This writing thing was too damn hard.

Reader, Natasha Lester won the 2008 Hungerford Award. The $6000 cash booty was great, but more valuable was the publishing contract with Fremantle Press that came with it. Lester’s winning manuscript would finally become a book.

“Now I can call myself a writer,” she thought.

A dozen books and three nearly-grown children later, Natasha Lester is one of the most successful Australian authors many of us have only vaguely heard of. Her novels, which lift little-known women out of history and fictionalise their stories, have been translated into 21 languages. And while it’s not independently verifiable – the books market is nothing if not opaque – her Australian publisher Rebecca Saunders says the English-language versions alone have sold more than a million copies worldwide.

Her biggest market is the US, where one of her books made the influential Pennie’s Pick rack at Costco in 2018 and the next one spent two weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. But she’s popular in Europe, too, her novels selling in Bulgaria, Albania, Romania, Italy, Germany, Spain, Hungary and Portugal, to name just some of her Euro territories. Scandinavians are particularly partial to Lester – no one can really explain why, but she’s sold more than 300,000 copies of her books in Norway, Denmark and Sweden, similar to her sales here despite our market being significantly larger. Any wonder then, that her combined global advances add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars per book.

Back home, NielsenIQ BookScan ranked her our eighth-highest-selling “historical mythological fiction” author last year, putting her in the top 10 in the company of big international names such as Kristin Hannah and Ken Follett, Australian popular-fiction powerhouse Judy Nunn and Tasmanian literary star Robbie Arnott. Her Australian print sales totalled $540,000 in 2025.

Lester’s books could be broadly classified as popular fiction – you know, the kind sold at airports and Dymocks with the author’s name in big type on the cover – which helps explain why she’s not as broadly celebrated as her sales suggest she should be. Commercial fiction writers tend to need to reach Liane Moriarty levels before the cultural firmament takes notice – unless their predilection is crime, in which case, thanks to our love of “outback noir”, -authors such as Jane Harper and Chris Hammer enjoy profile and sales.

“Popular fiction authors are writing books a lot of people want to read – they actually prop up the publishing industry,” says Cheryl Akle, whose Better Reading runs reviews, interviews and events for a 400,000-plus reading community. Many readers don’t differentiate the way cultural gatekeepers do, Akle says, and are just as likely to pick up a Richard Flanagan, Tim Winton or Anna Funder as a Natasha Lester, Judy Nunn or Jane Harper. “They love reading, they don’t distinguish like that.”

Nor does Lester, 52, who might be writing popular fiction but herself enjoys reading authors such as Maggie O’Farrell, Margaret Atwood, Barbara Kingsolver and A.S. Byatt, together with her childhood favourites, the Brontë sisters and Charles Dickens. That first book she published with Fremantle Press, What Is Left Over, After, was actually in a more literary vein, as was its follow-up. Modest sales, though, were not what she’d given up a career with L’Oréal for. “The whole reason I wanted to become a writer was to make people feel the way I did as a kid who was totally swept away, into another time and place, by books,” Lester says. “But based on the sales figures of my first two books there weren’t that many people reading me, so I  wasn’t achieving that purpose. I wanted to get to more people.”

She started on a novel she thought would have broader appeal, exploring themes around how women are depicted in advertising and the media. But after multiple rewrites it just wasn’t working. The themes were clogging up the storyline and she couldn’t bear looking at it any more. So she decided to bin it, all 85,000 words of it – no small thing, as any writer will tell you. Worried she was losing her love of the craft, she piled all her favourite books onto her desk chair and decided to re-read them, no matter how long it took, in the hope of being re-inspired. Books such as Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, Byatt’s Possession and Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible. “The penny dropped,” she says. “I realised that what I most loved reading was historical fiction. If I liked escaping into that kind of world, why wasn’t I writing that kind of story?”

Starting afresh, Lester decided to write a novel about a woman living in 1920s Manhattan who’d battled the medical establishment to become an obstetrician. That book, A Kiss from Mr Fitzgerald, was published in 2016. It initially sold about 5500 copies but the modest numbers didn’t matter this time. Natasha Lester had found her voice. And in turn, that voice would find an audience; A Kiss has now sold more than 16,500 print copies in Australia.

“I’m glad it took me a couple of books and that failed manuscript to find my path,” Lester says. “It meant I could hone my craft and get to understand the publishing industry a bit more.”

Lester has released eight more historical novels in the decade since, many set in France and around World War II, two popular subject areas that were turbocharged during the COVID-19 pandemic. The titles tell the story. The French Photographer is about a World War II photojournalist who sounds a lot like American model turned war photographer Lee Miller, while The Paris Secret involves a woman pilot, designer Christian Dior and his Resistance-fighter sister, Catherine. The Paris Seamstress is about a dressmaker who flees the French capital as the Germans advance, while The Riviera House and The Mademoiselle Alliance feature women who risk everything during World War II, the former to protect precious art from looting Nazis, the latter running a network of intelligence agents across France.

‘There will definitely be Jane Eyre fanatics who email to tell me I’m a terrible human being who will go to hell.’

Natasha Lester

“France, fashion and forgotten women in history – the three Fs encapsulate what she’s stood for,” says Saunders, who discovered Lester when she returned to Australia from London to become head of fiction at Hachette. She took the manuscript for A Kiss from Mr Fitzgerald to a pub around the corner from the office, which she was pleased to find had sparkling wine on tap. She started imbibing, and reading. “I couldn’t put it down. I could not believe my luck,” she says. “It can take months and months to find a book you believe in.” She gave Lester some blunt advice before taking her on: “To be commercially successful, you need to be able to basically do a book a year. That’s a tough call, not a lot of authors can do it. I publish Michael Robotham and he’s a master at it; he’s up to his 20th novel.”

Lester was up to the challenge. Her 10th historical novel, The Château on Sunset, will be published in Australia next week, in the US and UK in June, then rolled out to other markets in due course. A loose -retelling of Jane Eyre, it is set in West Hollywood’s Château Marmont, a hotel famous in the 1950s and ’60s for the actors, directors, musicians and other celebrities who stayed there, some living for extended periods in the poolside bungalows where directors auditioned starlets for films in ways that would spark #MeToo claims today. “There will definitely be Jane Eyre fanatics who email to tell me I’m a terrible human who will go to hell for what I’ve done, and that Charlotte Brontë will be rolling in her grave,” Lester says with a laugh, noting that Jane Eyre has been her favourite book since age 10. “I’m prepared for them.”

Natasha Lester is already seated when I arrive for lunch at her favourite French restaurant, Bistro Felix, just off Martin Place in Sydney. I get the feeling she’s always punctual, just as I suspect she’s always well groomed. She’s the kind of person the phrase “looks a million dollars” could have been coined for, a petite blonde with a big smile, warm blue eyes and thick honeyed hair that didn’t blow-dry itself. Today she’s wearing silky green pants and a pink strapless top, Tiffany & Co. watch on her wrist and a chunky blue and gold ring on her left hand.

She bought the watch when she made The New York Times bestseller list, not only to recognise a moment that might not come again but also to remind herself, when she’s having a bad day, that she can write – the NYT said so. “Just because you have one book that sells like this doesn’t mean the next one will,” she says. “You never feel like you’ve reached a point where you can relax.” It was a carefully thought-through marker – one of her characters worked at Tiffany & Co. in Manhattan, and she’d made The New York Times – the Times – bestseller list.

As we order lunch (fish and salad, hold the fries), I ask about her childhood in the Perth suburb of Warwick. It was fairly unremarkable, says Lester, the middle child of an -accountant father, Ken Lafferty, and stay-at-home mother, Michele. She and older sister Kareena were mad about reading, borrowing as much as they could from their weekly trips to the library, making up elaborate hospital stories for their dolls, and writing and illustrating their own little books.

Lester loved French, history and literature, but when it came to what to do after school, there were no obvious career paths involving any of them (hats off for ultimately finding a way to combine all three). On the suggestion of her dad, she enrolled in a business degree at Curtin University, choosing the marketing and public relations stream because at least it would involve some writing.

The most unusual thing to emerge from this very suburban childhood came when the kids were in their late 20s, and Kareena decided to become Keeran. Gender transition is much talked about today but was pretty unheard of in the Lester family circles of the early 2000s. It was hard on everyone, most of all Keeran, says Lester, who wrote movingly about the experience in a short story a few years later. “One of the things that doesn’t get talked about a lot is your own personal grief, because obviously the person going through the transition is facing so many more difficulties,” she tells me. “You sort of lose a sister. Obviously you gain a brother as well, but you lose someone, too, which is tricky to talk about.”

Her mother, Michele, remembers the pair as close growing up, and says all three of her children were big readers. “Natasha always loved to write, even as a kid she wrote little poems,” Michele says. “I can’t say I would have picked her to become a famous author but she’s always been very driven. If she set her mind to something, it was going to get done.”

Lester’s first job after university was in an ad agency. It was all very Mad Men – smoking, drinking, bum-pinching. Aggro. So much testosterone-fuelled aggro. “I look back now and go, ‘Oh god, if I only knew then what 20-somethings know today, I’d have realised it was totally inappropriate.’ But I just thought, ‘OK, this is normal, this is the workplace.’ ”

She eventually moved to London, where she ran campaigns for saucy romance novels for Harlequin Books. She met husband Russell during a stint back in Perth, after which the couple moved to Melbourne. In 2001 she became a marketing manager for Maybelline, part of the L’Oréal cosmetics empire. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was big, so it was all Sarah Michelle Gellar magazine spreads and handsome launch budgets. “One time, we got a whole lot of those wrinkly puppies in a studio for an anti-wrinkle cream campaign.” Another time, they hired a house by modernist architect Harry Seidler to launch a glossy new nail polish on its glossy marble benchtops.

‘I knew I’d always wanted to be a writer but I also wanted to find out, did I have the talent to be that?’

Natasha Lester

Her close friend since her early 20s, Erin Corner, doesn’t remember Lester pining for the writing life. “She’s not the sort of person to be unhappy or treading water, she makes the best of every situation,” Corner says. Privately, though, Lester did still want to write. And with the hours her job as Maybelline’s “eyes and nails” marketer demanded, including midnight finishes when the French were coming to town, she was doing very little of it. “I was not happy with the idea of taking 10 years to write a book while working full-time,” she says. “I was ambitious.”

The move back to Perth for Russell’s work was the impetus she needed to roll the dice. In lieu of getting another marketing job, she’d enrol in a creative writing course. “I knew I’d always wanted to be a writer but I also wanted to find out, did I have the talent to be that? And would I enjoy it?” As she went on to discover, the answer to both would be affirmative.

Lester had her three children as her writing career was taking off, which came with challenges. The novel she threw away was written during a difficult time, when Audrey, now 17, was diagnosed with hip dysplasia, a condition in which the hip joint doesn’t sit properly in the socket. Lester is cheerful as she describes going to the supermarket with baby Audrey but it sounds like hell. Audrey had to wear a body cast for the first few years of her life, with a piece of dowel braced between her legs to force the hips back into place. The car seat and pram had to be modified, and popping baby in a shopping trolley was not an option given the angle of Audrey’s little legs.

“With the full body cast, they leave a small hole in the nappy area so the baby can go to the toilet,” Lester explains. “They tell you to cover the hole with the largest size sanitary napkin you can find, then wrap a nappy around it. You have to keep it all clean to avoid infection. So I’d take her to Coles every week to buy 10 packs of maternity napkins – for her, not for me.” She’d pay for the napkins, wheel them back to the car, stow them in the boot, then return to the supermarket to do the rest of the week’s shopping, baby Audrey always in tow. The pair spent a lot of time in hospital, when Lester would try to grab moments to write. No wonder the book wasn’t singing.

Many years later, to her astonishment, Lester discovered that World War II French intelligence leader Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, who Lester’s 2025 novel was based on, also suffered hip dysplasia – as does Lester herself. In The Mademoiselle Alliance, she describes the time Fourcade had to fold herself into a mail bag and stay there for 10 hours to be smuggled from France into Britain. Write what you know, they say – and the reader feels Lester’s keen knowledge of the condition in every excruciating twist of that journey.

It was exhaustion from researching Fourcade’s life that made Lester turn away from World War II for her upcoming book. A lot of her research for The Mademoiselle Alliance involved reading archives in French, in which she is fluent, including the prison diaries of Fourcade’s lover, Leon Faye. “I needed a break from heartbreaking war stories,” she says. “Plus, Marie-Madeleine was such an extraordinary woman, I got to the end of her epic story and thought, ‘I just don’t think I can find another woman whose life had that extraordinary scope.’ ”

The timing was prescient: the market has recently cooled for World War II stories, which her San Diego-based agent Kevan Lyon attributes to a glut of them, and The Mademoiselle Alliance didn’t sell as well in the US as some of Lester’s earlier books. This is the thing with books: if something takes off publishers rush to put out titles just like it, and by the time some come out, readers have moved on. Not that Lester takes any of this into account when she’s writing. “My marketing brain works well for me on the business side but doesn’t come into it on the story side of things.” Call it intuition then, that The Chateau on Sunset looks to Hollywood not France, and the book Lester’s currently writing for 2027, working title Girl of the Year, has Andy Warhol’s It girls as inspiration.

Lester loves an exclamation mark, using them liberally in her Substack newsletter, Bijoux, in which her marketing skills are on full display with special reader offers, chats about zeitgeist topics like the Wuthering Heights film and insights into her writing life. But she knows literary types use them only sparingly, so when an email from her American publisher arrived in late 2019 with lots of exclamation marks in the subject line, she knew something was up.

The email was to inform her that The Paris Orphan, her fourth book in the historical fiction vein (released as The French Photographer in Australia), had made the NYT bestseller list. “She said, ‘This is so exciting for you, you can cross that one off your bucket list,’ ” recounts Lester. She replied saying she’d never imagined any of her books would ever hit The New York Times bestseller list, so that was not on her bucket list – but she would “go and write it down now so I have the satisfaction of crossing it off”.

It was not the first email from her publisher with exclamation marks in the subject line. Her previous book, The Paris Seamstress, had been released in the US in August 2018, her first foray into that market. A few uneventful months later she’d got an email from her publisher, also replete with exclamation marks, informing her that The Paris Seamstress would feature in Pennie’s Pick for December. “I thought, ‘Well, this is exciting but who is Pennie?’ ”

Pennie Clark Ianniciello was the influential books buyer for retail giant Costco, and her -imprimatur meant The Paris Seamstress would grace the Pennie’s Pick stand at the front of Costco’s 500-plus American stores for the crucial Christmas period. What’s more, Lester would feature in the -retailer’s magazine, mailed to more than 15 million members a month.

As often happens when lightning strikes, things rolled on from there. Target picked up The Paris Seamstress on the back of its Costco profile; the following year, The Paris Orphan landed its prized NYT slot. Kevan Lyon says these two books have sold more than 500,000 print, audio and e-book copies in the US. “That lets you know how much of a rocket ship Seamstress was,” she says.

Lester wrote Ianniciello a letter when she retired, “to say thank you and how much of a difference she’d made in my life”. It’s a common -refrain from an author keenly aware that without buyers such as Ianniciello, or literary magazines such as Overland, which published her early pieces, or the various lecturers and judges who encouraged her when she was starting out, she might not be here, making a living from the thing she loves doing more than anything else in the world.

If the minutiae of a life says a lot about the person living it, here are some things I’ve learnt about Natasha Lester. Her desk is an oasis of calm, complete with pink water jug and candle, garden vista beyond. She writes in half-hour blocks then steps away from her desk briefly – for a swim at Cottesloe Beach, just down the road from her home, or a quick cup of coffee – before returning for another half-hour writing block, timer set.

She writes the main storyline before delving into research, so as not to waste time down rabbit holes researching extraneous facts, and doesn’t plot it all out in advance, preferring to let it unfold organically.

She stays off social media for six months of the year, when deep in the researching and writing process, and gets active during the other six months for promotional purposes.

She travels for research – to Paris, Lyon and Marseilles to retrace Marie-Madeleine Fourcade’s footsteps for The Mademoiselle Alliance, to Champagne to find a grove of trees she needed to describe in The French Photographer. “They were bent and gnarled and spooky and had been there for centuries,” says husband Russell. “Where most people would be sipping champagne in Champagne, there we were, tramping through a forest trying to find these trees.”

Her oldest daughter, Ruby, is her first reader. “I go in with my red pen and tell her what’s wrong – if sentences are too long, if I feel out of breath as a reader, if something doesn’t make sense,” says the 20-year-old, a voracious reader herself who is studying fashion and textiles in Sydney. Ruby accompanied her mother on a trip to Chateau Marmont last year to get a sense of the place, including its all-important layout, for Lester’s upcoming book. They loved the antique furniture, the personalised letterhead and the subtle enforcement of its no-photography rule. They were intrigued by a guest who dined alone with his book each night, ordering only a bowl of raspberries and a peppermint tea. He must be famous – if only they could work out who he was.

Lester doesn’t change the content of her books for different markets, although in The Paris Secret, in a nod to her US readers, she made the pilot American rather than British. “It didn’t change the plot line,” she assures. But when a Russian publisher asked her to delete a reference to the Russian soldiers who raped female prisoners as they liberated Ravensbruck concentration camp, she pushed back. “They felt their readers would not be happy to read it,” she says. “I said, ‘Over my dead body will I take that out of the book, it’s the truth.’ ” She assumes it stayed in but “as I can’t read Russian, I can’t be sure”.

These days, she has a no-publication clause for two countries: Russia and Israel. Such are the issues authors with a global readership must think about in 2026. Paradoxically, she’s not published in France. “It’s the hardest market to crack and I haven’t managed it yet,” she says, “but I do hear from a lot of French readers, who just go buy the English version.”

Lester enjoys engaging with readers. When some Americans lamented her use of swear words, she was puzzled: there are no f---s in her books. “Then I realised they were talking about the word ‘damn’.” A former pilot emailed her about The Paris Secret, which features a 1940s female aviator and for which she’d meticulously researched the specs of a Spitfire. “I thought, ‘Uh oh, this is where I find out what I’ve got wrong,’ ” she says. “He went on to say, ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve just read The Paris Secret, it took me right back to my flying days.’ ”

As to why her books focus on 20th-century women doing remarkable things, Lester says it just kind of happened; she didn’t set out to make it her thing. That said, she’s tired of the “messy woman” narrative prevalent in so much contemporary fiction, so perhaps there was some subliminal force willing her to present an alternative. “There are so many strong, capable women in the world – women such as Marie-Madeleine, who can run a resistance network of 3000 men and do it admirably,” Lester says. “We should see women like that in novels, in newspapers. Why are we so caught up in people making a mess of their lives? I don’t want to feel powerless. I don’t want my daughters to feel powerless. And I don’t want my readers to feel powerless.”

Speaking of power, I ask Lester about the tangible flow-ons from her success. She jokes that the family’s beach house at Busselton could be called “the house that Alix built” because her advance for her 2022 release, The Three Lives of Alix St Pierre, contributed substantially to it (the book went on to be judged best historical novel at the 2023 Romantic Novel of the Year awards). It means she gets to plan things like taking each of her kids on a mother-child trip, to a place of their choice, when they finish year 12.

“I took Ruby to Venice, Florence, Seville and Barcelona. In Venice, we stayed right on a canal and could step out the front door and into a gondola. Audrey and I chased the Northern Lights right up into far north Norway, staying in a specially designed Northern Lights cabin. At the end of next year, I’ll take Darcy [who is 16] wherever he wants to go, too. My writing career helps makes those things possible.”

She knows she’s living the writer’s dream – knows too, that it’s been hard won. “I’ll never stop being grateful for those things because it took many years to reach this point, years of tiny advances and books selling just a few thousand copies, years of continuing to write simply because I loved it and keeping faith that one day it might also be financially worth it. And now it is.”

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