165: Lisa Roe- Author of Welcome to the Neighborhood

This week’s interview is with Lisa Roe (Welcome to the Neighborhood, Sourcebooks, April 2022). Describing herself as too anxious to be a pantser, Lisa describes how, for her, embracing a story structure frees her creativity, her rule of thumb for when to put a novel in the drawer and start over, and how her publisher used focus groups to not only choose her book’s title but also its final cover design. A sucker for stickers to reward herself, Lisa shares exactly how much time each phase of her publishing journey took and how she enhanced her publisher’s efforts to court influential bookstagrammers in the months leading up to her book’s release. Lisa Roe graduated from the S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University and spent many years as an advertising creative director and copywriter in New York City until she accepted the tougher job of stay-at-home mom and turned to writing fiction — mostly to entertain her kids, but then to tell her own stories. A classic first born, reluctant empty nester, Dr. Doolittle wannabe, and the author of WELCOME TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD, Lisa lives in New Jersey with her husband and three incorrigible dogs. To learn more about Lisa, click here.