Today – 4th March 2024 – the RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institution) is celebrating two hundred years. I prepared a blog post for my publisher, Boldwood Books, briefly outlining how the RNLI was formed and giving some key links to their website. You can read the my blog post here but do check out some of the links in it to the RNLI’s website where there are some fascinating posts, videos and podcasts.
The Starfish Café series shines a light on the amazing work undertaken by the RNLI and it has been a privilege to spend time at Scarborough Lifeboat Station to research the operations of the lifeboat station and the work of the crew.
I’ve interviewed several volunteers, observed a training session and posed with my books…
I’ve met their mascot Stormy Stan (who features in the series)…
I’ve made a financial donation and dropped off signed copies of the series to raise funds in a raffle…
And I’ve purchased lots of merchandise from the RNLI shop…
And a few other nautical items which fit so perfectly with the series. Any excuse!…
It was a beautiful day in Scarborough (aka Whitsborough Bay) today and hubby took a few pics for me while on his walk with our dog, Ella. The harbour and lifeboat station were looking mighty fine in the sun…
I love The Starfish Café series. It’s probably my favourite series I’ve completed so far. Thankfully readers have loved it too and the combined series so far has sold over 168,500 copies with book 1 – Snowflakes Over The Starfish Café – selling nearly 93,000 copies alone.
That particular book has been in The Works and was also shortlisted for the Romantic Novel of the Year in 2022 (Christmas/Festive Holiday category) which was such an honour. And it was translated into Serbian last year (although I think that version might be out this winter as I haven’t received my paperback of the translated version yet).
Onto my news about the series, if you haven’t already read the three books in The Starfish Café series, you might be interested to know that they’ll be released as a box set later this month. This is an eBook box set only and comes with some additional bonus content.
And, finally, I’m offering a signed copy of book 3 in the series – Summer Nights at The Starfish Café – and a fabulous bundle of goodies, many of which I bought from the RNLI’s shop, helping support their incredible work. You need to be signed up to my newsletter to have a chance to win. You can do so here. A newsletter will be issued in the next few days with a form to enter the competition so existing subscribers can also take part. The T&Cs for the competition can be found here.
I’ll finish with a thank you to all the amazing crew at the RNLI, the lifeguards, and the volunteers who help run the shops, fundraise, and raise awareness. What they all do is amazing but the lifeboat crew in particular are heroes in my eyes. These are volunteers who put their own lives at risk to help those in difficulties. That’s just phenomenal and must take incredible courage but, as Sir William Hillary said, “With courage, nothing is impossible”. And the lifeboat crew couldn’t do what they do without the amazing support of a team back at base planning and supporting each launch.
Congratulations on 200 years, RNLI, and here’s to the next 100.
Yesterday, I received my PLR statement and I wanted to say a huge THANK YOU to all the lovely readers who have borrowed my books, ebooks and audiobooks from UK libraries between July 2022 and June 2023.
My top 5 borrows during that time were all paperbacks: 1. A Wedding at Hedgehog Hollow 2. Spring Tides at The Starfish Cafe 3. Chasing Dreams at Hedgehog Hollow 4. Healing Hearts at Bumblebee Barn 5. Christmas Miracles at Hedgehog Hollow
Want to know more about PLR? Here’s an explanation…
PLR stands for Public Lending Rights which is a payment to those who contribute to a book (and therefore can include illustrators, photographers, editors and audiobook narrators) for books being borrowed from UK libraries. (We also get paid for borrows from libraries in Ireland but that scheme runs separately). It’s not automatic. Authors need to register the ISBNs for each eligible title and I have a publication day checklist to remind me that I need to do this each time a new book comes out as, if you don’t get registered by a deadline each year, your book isn’t eligible for PLR that year.
Although the PLR payment is for library borrows, we don’t actually get paid for every single borrow. Each year, a sample of libraries around the country is announced and the number of times an author’s books are borrowed across the libraries in that sample is seen as representative of overall borrowings and a small payment (13.69 pence year – included the figure because you could Google it and find it in seconds for yourself if you were curious) is made for each borrow in the sample.
There is a flaw to the sample system as it very much relies on a distribution of books countrywide. When I was first published, my local library group – North Yorkshire Libraries – kindly bought six copies of my debut book and I donated six each of the subsequent two titles. Unfortunately, North Yorkshire didn’t appear in the sample for several years so, although those eighteen books were borrowed a lot, I never received any payment for them. In a similar way, imagine an author writes books set in Cornwall and their books are really, really popular in Cornwall with stacks of borrows there but not as widely distributed around the country, their PLR payment would not be reflective of true borrows if Cornwall wasn’t included in the sample. Mind you, this could work the other way as, if Cornwall was included, their borrows would be skewed more favourably.
For me, after years of not receiving any PLR payments despite having titles in libraries, it was very exciting to get my first statement after joining Boldwood due to my books being available throughout the UK.
There isn’t a bottomless pool of money from which payments can be made so the amount an author can receive is capped. The payment big name authors receive therefore won’t be reflective of the number of borrows on their titles. My earnings are lovely but I’m several years off hitting the cap … if ever!
Libraries are such an amazing resource for those on limited budgets, those who need large print books, and a variety of other circumstances and it’s wonderful that a scheme like this exists because it does mean that the author receives some income from many months of hard work.
Are there similar schemes around the world?
Yes, but they only work within each country for authors based in that country. Unfortunately, this means that UK-based authors don’t receive any payment for books borrowed in libraries outside of the UK&I. (If there are any authors reading this who know differently, please let me know but this is what all my research has concluded!)
I am aware that my books are accessible in libraries around the world, both digitally and physically, because readers excitedly tell me they’ve borrowed them. Does this mean I receive no payment whatsoever when someone borrows a book/ebook/audiobook overseas? Not far from it…
The library overseas will have bought the initial copy/copies so I’d have had a small royalty payment on that (which is pence) but that’s it. No further payment. No PLR. No other scheme. Therefore my books could be borrowed thousands of times worldwide and I won’t see another penny for it. Eek! As followers of my blog know, I’m always honest about the highs and lows of being an author so I’ll admit that this is a low and I do struggle with the idea that, beyond that initial one-off royalty payment, there’s no income.
Being an author is such a funny profession because books – which give so much pleasure, excitement, comfort etc. etc. – wouldn’t exist without the author yet we are stung left right and centre when it comes to earning an income from our work. Let’s move away from overseas libraries and talk about buying books to further illustrate this. The author only receives a small fraction of what the reader pays for a book in any format after the distributor (e.g. Amazon, supermarket or bookshop) and publisher and agent (if the author has one – I don’t) take their cut, but we know this is how it works. I would not for one moment begrudge any of the payment Boldwood receive from my books as what they have done for me in building my profile, finding me readers and enabling me to live my dream as a full-time author is priceless. Indie authors cut out the publisher and agent payments so earn a great proportion of the price but they still have big expenses to harbour which the publisher would normally cover – such as an editor and cover designer – and they need to invest a lot of time and money into advertising/marketing to get noticed (which the publisher should also provide for their authors).
For some reason, despite a cost of living crisis where everything has gone up in price, ebooks haven’t. I am personally of the view that ebooks should be cheaper than printed copies because there aren’t the same production and distribution costs involved in the production of an ebook as there are for a print copy BUT I have never been comfortable with the 99p ebook. Or the £1.99 ebook. I’m not even comfortable with a £2.99 ebook as it is still less than the cost of a decent coffee in Costa / Starbucks / Other-Coffee-Shops-Are-Available but lasts for hours rather than minutes and is still available once consumed. And it took months to create. I cringe when I see posts on social media from readers asking for the best places to find 99p or free ebooks and the huge number of responses of how to ‘beat the system’ and never pay for books at all. Seriously? Do these readers actually hate authors? Do they want authors to stop writing because they can’t afford to continue?
Being an author – and perhaps being a musician – are the only careers I can think of where some consumers are completely unwilling to pay for the product they claim to love and where there is an expectation that the product should be available for free. Would they expect a plumber to fix the blockage in their drain for free? Would they think it was acceptable to walk out of the supermarket with the monthly shop without paying? Then please pay the author for their work!
I’m chuckling to myself now as this was meant to be a thank you post and an explanation of PLR but I’ve gone off on a little tangent so I’ll leave it there and close with a virtual thank you hug to those who contributed to my most recent PLR payment. And, as I had a little rant about low priced books and those who don’t pay for books at all, I’d also like to extend that big hug to those who obtain their books in a way in which the author gets paid – for buying a new copy of the book in whatever format or through paying for subscription services like Prime Reading, Kindle Unlimited and Audible. If you want your favourite authors to keep writing, please keep doing these things as it’s a sad reality that no income means no more books.
I left the end of my last blog post on a cliffhanger and promised I’d come back and explain more, so here we go but you might like to make a cuppa first as it’s a long one!…
2023 was the most incredible year for my books. At the end of March, I hit a milestone of 1,000,000 copies of my titles sold. I’ve just had my November statement through and this has now passed 1,250,000. One of my titles – Finding Love at Hedgehog Hollow – passed 100,000 sales meaning I joined the Boldwood 100,000 Club.
During 2023, contracts were signed for seven of my titles to be translated into five different languages. Two titles went into The Works and I was invited to feature in Yorkshire Life magazine.
I worked on five books, although it was part of the process for two of those titles so really four complete books and, on top of that, I ran two one-month courses, spoke at four festivals, designed and ran a half-day workshop at one of the festivals, presented a session at the RNA’s conference, prepared a presentation and spoke at a local RNLI event and attended the RNA’s Leicester chapter as a guest.
I feel tired looking at that list so it’s perhaps not surprising that I approached the end of 2023 feeling exhausted and burnt out although, looking back, it had been coming on throughout the year.
When writing for a publisher, you work to production schedule deadlines. When writing four books a year, those deadlines are tight. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE a deadline. I’m (usually) really good at working towards them. Readers have seen books go up for pre-order which I haven’t even started writing yet and have asked how I cope with the pressure, but I don’t really see it as pressure as deadlines have always been part of my life. From my years of studying where I had homework to be in by a certain date through to my previous day job in HR where I’d have a deadline for submitting a report, designing a training course, recruiting for a position and so on. So, really, a deadline for me isn’t daunting.
However, there is a big deadline-related challenge which comes with writing so many books a year and that’s that it isn’t possible to just focus on one book at a time. I’m usually working on four books simultaneously. While undertaking various activities around the promotion of book 1, I’m editing book 2, writing the first draft of book 3 and thinking about the storyline, setting and characters for book 4. That’s a lot of worlds trying to inhabit space in my mind at one time. And that’s before we throw in menopause brain! Argh!!!!
Running the first RNA Learning course in March around my writing deadlines was tricky, but I’d designed and run it already the year before so I wasn’t starting from scratch. The September one was different. I’d proposed the structure maybe 18 months previously but, when I started designing it, I quickly realised it was way bigger than I’d anticipated. It was very naïve of me not to have realised that earlier – after all, it was all about writing a series which is a HUGE topic (so huge I had to capitalise it!) so it shouldn’t have been a surprise that designing it and pre-recording the training sessions took me twice as long as anticipated. All the while, I still had writing deadlines.
I love training, I was delighted with the course and I know the participants got a lot from it so it was successful, but I finished the month with my head in my spin, feeling like I wanted to sleep for a week. Except I couldn’t because I was on a deadline!
Around the same time, we had some challenges at home. My daughter didn’t get the GCSE grades she’d been predicted or expected which was devastating for her, especially when it meant she couldn’t take any of the A Levels she’d planned to take, so there was a battle on our hands to get her into college. Thankfully she’s there now and very happy with a couple of subject changes, but this took it out of me emotionally.
My edits throughout 2023 were hard. Every single book needed quite major work and it wasn’t because I had bad ideas/weak characters or anything like that. It was because, at the point of submitting them, I hadn’t had enough time to step back and give them a polish so there were a few abandoned plot threads, some emotional scenes which lacked emotion, missing descriptions of settings and lots of typos. I even had to submit a couple of first drafts in the early hours of the morning after my submission deadline which weren’t quite finished – emailed over with chapters missing, an explanation of what would be included, and a huge apology.
I hated it.
While my editor is one of the loveliest people in the world and completely understood the time pressure and that this is not how I like to work, I wasn’t happy with myself. I’ve always worked with the ethic: If you’re going to do something, do it well. Submitting inferior work makes me feel like a failure and it was really pulling me down and sucking all the enjoyment from something I love.
This substandard work had a knock-on effect. Because of it, the first edits were huge and intense but the second edits – which should be just smoothing out and polishing – were also big. Instead of experiencing joy at creating a new story, I felt like I had dragged it kicking and screaming into the world.
In all cases, I was really happy with the finished book – I absolutely could not release something I didn’t love and believe in – but I wasn’t happy about the painful process of getting there. I knew something needed to change, but what? When you lurch from one deadline to the next, how do you step back and take stock?
Christmas at the Cat Café came out in mid-September and that was really my breaking point. I wrote a blog post at the time about some of the early negative reviews from reviewers hating cats, loving cats but not that many, and not understanding the concept of a cat café. Although frustrating because, let’s face it, the clues were there about there being a lot of cats in this story, I could roll my eyes and laugh at these reviews.
What I couldn’t laugh at were all the negative comments about the main character having fibromyalgia – a chronic pain condition – which affected all aspects of her life.
These reviews typically fell into two categories. The first was from those who didn’t want to read about a main character who was ill, ranging from the type that was empathy expressed but I read for escapism through to the more direct “a whiny self-pitying whinge about fibromyalgia” (direct quote from a 1-star review). I found these reviews very upsetting as one of the issues that those with fibro can face is a lack of empathy and understanding from those around them because what they have is an invisible illness so they “don’t look ill”. The idea that readers wanted it to remain an invisible illness and not read about it in a novel broke my heart for those who have fibromyalgia or similar conditions. One reader even called it a “misery memoir”. Wow!
The second category of review was where the book was accused of being more like “a self help manual for fibromyalgia combined with a lecture / text book on it” (2-star review). I’ve got another long quote here from a 1-star review which pretty much sums up what kept coming at me: “…seems to be just self indulgence of telling as many people as possible about Fibromyalgia. Oh my goodness it was constant. The story would progress a tiny bit and then whoa, back to pages upon pages of self indulgent waffle about fibromyalgia. I’m absolutely baffled at the positive reviews this book has been given, unless you really do want to wollow [sic] in pages upon pages of the innermost feelings of someone going through a fibromyalgia attack this book really has got very little else to it. I do understand that fibromyalgia is a widely misunderstood condition but I really don’t think writing a book like this is the way to educate the nation”.
Ouch! So that’s me told! I do feel that the second reviewer completely missed the point – that this IS a story where the main character has fibromyalgia and the whole plot is meant to be about how she adjusts her life and her dreams based on that because life with fibro is about adjustments. So of course fibromyalgia is going to feature heavily. If I only mentioned fibromyalgia a few times, I wouldn’t have been authentic to the character. If I made out that every day was fine and she occasionally had slightly tired days, I might as well not have used a character with fibro. And if I didn’t explain what fibro was, how could I tell the story when so many people aren’t familiar with this condition? Explaining things is not new to novel-writing. There’s usually a topic which I need to explain in every book I’ve written. Some are lighter like chocolate-making in Christmas Wishes at the Chocolate Shop, but it’s still educating.
At this point, you might be thinking I’m travelling down the negative review path here and how hurtful they can be, but that’s not the point of sharing this. Before I join the dots, I just want to clarify something. I love Tabby’s story in Christmas at the Cat Café and, despite all the negative comments about cats, cat cafés, and having a main character with a chronic pain condition, I stand by this story. I’m glad I wrote it and I’m really glad I had a main character with fibromyalgia. It might have attracted a lot of hate but, my goodness, it has attracted some love too. Apart from a couple of readers with chronic illness who had a pop at me – “As a sufferer of an invisble [sic] illness, in my case M.E. I was surprised to see the main character Tabby suffers with fibro … but when I read a book, I want to escape into a different world. I don’t need reminding how much pain I’m in daily or the exhaustion I feel” (2-star review) – I’ve had stacks of positive comments and direct messages from readers with fibro (or similar) thanking me for making them feel seen, for a book which gave them a few ideas about coping with their own fibro and/or hope, or for helping them understand what a loved one is dealing with. It has a great overall star rating on Amazon of 4.5 and 90% positive reviews/ratings (at the time of writing this) so it compares equally to all my other books. The main difference is that it has gathered more 1 and 2-star actual reviews rather than just ratings as those who hated it seemed to really, really hate it and wanted to rant about why, so I’ve felt the prod of the negative reviews more.
Joining the dots, all of this ties in to what I was saying earlier about quality of work. The text book comments kept recurring, even in some of the positive reviews. If you see a comment made a couple of times, you can disregard it, but if it recurs that often, you should really start questioning whether there’s something in it. So that’s what I did and I kept coming back to the time pressure I found myself under and the lack of time to step back to perfect and polish the story. I can say that, hand on heart, I would NOT have removed any of the information about fibromyalgia. It is part of Tabby’s story and therefore part of Christmas at the Cat Café. It was the story I wanted to tell. But, what I might have done was smooth it out a little. Perhaps if I’d been able to do a third edit or another read-through, I might have spread out some of the more concentrated detail about fibromyalgia. Perhaps I’d have been able to remove some repetition. I say perhaps because it could be the case that these reviewers just didn’t like learning about fibro full stop and no matter how little detail there was, they’d still have been unhappy about it – invisible illness remaining invisible and all that.
Anyway, there I was in autumn 2023 feeling exhausted, emotionally drained, bruised from a glut of negative reviews, and worried that I might have put a book out there that wasn’t quite perfect. Okay, so perfection is impossible so let’s say a fear that it perhaps wasn’t 100% my best work even though I’d believed at the time that it was. What if A Breath of Fresh Air wasn’t my best work either? What if I’d peaked and everything was downhill from here?
Guess who knocked on my door? Yes, Mr Imposter Syndrome was back and laughing at me. He took great delight in pointing out that, after a run of charting in the Top 100 on publication day, The Start of Something Wonderful and Christmas at the Cat Café hadn’t followed suit. He rubbed his hands in glee as he suggested that my brand new Escape to the Lakes series could well bomb. Who do you think you are, creating yet another setting? All your readers will ever want is Hedgehog Hollow. They don’t care about any of the other worlds you’ve created.
I’d sit at my desk, trying to write A New Dawn at Owl’s Lodge and, after only managing a few sentences in the space of thirty minutes, I’d be onto Amazon checking chart positions and reviews and panicking that the bubble had burst. I’d gaze longingly at the UK Kindle Top 10 with IS whispering in my ear: Never gonna happen! And don’t even let it cross your mind that you could ever have what it takes to reach the #1 position because you don’t. Far from it! Mwah ha ha ha!
I did submit the manuscript (in the early hours of the day after deadline) and it was in the worst state yet with a whopping eight chapters unwritten. I knew what was going to happen in those chapters but I couldn’t seem to get the words out despite hours and hours at my desk. I wouldn’t say it was writer’s block as I wasn’t blocked – I was just downright knackered!
I knew I couldn’t keep going on like this and the only way I could break the cycle of exhaustion – deadline – imposter syndrome – exhaustion – deadline… was to do something different. In my former role as a management trainer, I used to talk about control the controllables which is concept where you look at what’s going on around you and work out what is in your control and what isn’t and to stop investing energy/ worry/ fear on the parts that are not within your control.
I can’t directly control how many books I sell or the chart positions they reach. I can’t directly control whether people love or hate my books and whether they share negative reviews. But I do have control over the work I put out there and how I feel about it and the only way for me to make sure I never submitted a weak first draft and never doubted the quality of the final product was to give myself more time. So I proposed to my editor that I didn’t rush the edits on A New Dawn at Owl’s Lodge by trying to hit a pre-Christmas deadline. I asked if I could submit them in mid-January instead. Doing this meant the release date needed to be put back from April to May and it also meant that I wasn’t going to have time to release four books in 2024 … but that was exactly what I needed. Some time to step back, to breathe, to refocus and to find the joy in writing once more because it had gone.
But this created another problem in my head…
There are many things that a reader can say which are so flattering and one of these is that they can’t wait for the next book and this is often presented with good humour as: Hurry up and write the next one! / I can’t wait until [name of month of next release] – please write faster! How amazing is that? They’ve loved the book so much that they are clamouring for the next one. Wow! The thing is, when you’re already drained and fast approaching burnout, the brain can switch from seeing these lovely comments in the way they’re meant – as a huge compliment – and start seeing them as further pressure. My readers will go off me if I don’t write faster! / I’m letting them down if I ‘only’ release three books a year / They’ll find other authors who can feed their reading needs quicker and never return to me. And if I lose readers, I lose income and I might have to return to a day job… but I’m too long out of HR and would never manage to get another job! Imagine all that going on in your head and, deep down, you know it’s ridiculous and irrational but you can’t stop it? Argh!!!
So, back to A New Dawn at Owl’s Lodge, although the submission date for my edits had shifted by a month, the reality was it had only gained me a couple of weeks because Christmas was in there and I was going away for a week over New Year. I therefore needed to do some work on it in December. But I couldn’t seem to do it – hours sat at my desk without hours’ worth of work to show for it – so I decided to stop fighting it. I watched a stack of Christmas films, decorated the trees, wrapped gifts, labelled the storage crates in the garage, got my accounts up to date and progressed through a whole pile of admin tasks.
I thought I’d miss writing. Any time I’ve had several days away from writing in the past, I’ve felt like part of me was missing and have itched to get back to it. Normally, if I wasn’t putting fingers to keyboard, I’d be thinking about scenes, creating dialogue, working through plot points. But last December, there was nothing. I felt no pull to my manuscript. I wasn’t even thinking about it. And that was a bit scary, especially when this thought kept popping into my head: If I never write again, I don’t actually care. I knew then that I’d hit a very dark place.
I thought I’d do some edits while we were away for a week after Christmas. The awful weather should have made that possible because we spent so much time in the holiday cottage, but I just didn’t feel like it. Every day I didn’t edit was a worry because that already-changed deadline was getting closer. And closer.
I got back from our break not feeling particularly refreshed and panicking that I hadn’t left enough time to deal with the enormous editing job which included not only writing those missing chapters but also creating a new beginning to start the story earlier. So I controlled the controllable and asked my editor for one more week. Even with that extra extension, I was still struggling. I’d fallen out of love with the story. I had no idea what I was doing.
I do usually fall out of love and/or lose the thread with my books a couple of times during the course of writing the first draft and the way I overcome this is always to go back to the start, read through my work, and edit as I go. This gets me back in the story, reminds me of some seeds I’d planned which I’d forgotten about, and reassures me that it’s actually pretty good. As I returned to my manuscript last month, I really didn’t have the time to do this but I had to because, if I’d continued fumbling through it, it’d have been a mess.
Thankfully returning to the start worked like it had done in the past. My mojo returned but not quickly enough. I submitted at 1.14am the morning after my edits were due in, there was still one chapter missing, and I didn’t have time for a final read-through. Cue another panic that it would still be a mess. Thankfully, when the second edits came back to me, my editor was delighted with them. In fact, my lovely editor Nia said, “You have done a fantastic job… It was truly a joy to read this manuscript, and if the word count had been shorter I would barely have needed to touch a thing”. Phew!
Those edits have now been completed and I’m in a comfortable situation where I don’t need to immediately dive into the next book (Escape to the Lakes book 3). I will do this week/early next week to avoid the familiar Argh! I’ve only got three weeks to write this book! but I am loving the pressure being off.
I wrote a blog post for Boldwood at the start of this year to coincide with the release of A Breath of Fresh Air which is predominantly set across New Year and January. I’ve tweaked it a bit and pasted it below as it outlines my plan for 2024 where I have five goals to stop me ending this year burned out and feeling completely disorganised…
Be kinder to myself
I struggle with imposter syndrome and am constantly pushing myself to achieve new goals as though to prove I am worth it. I know my IS comes from years of being bullied in the workplace and repeatedly overlooked for promotions/bonuses because I didn’t do workplace politics and schmooze with the right people. I therefore repeatedly needed to work longer and push harder to prove that I was good at my job and I can’t seem to get out of that mindset. I need to stop berating myself for what I haven’t achieved and celebrate what I have while reminding myself that originally I only ever wanted to see if I could write one book (I’ve written 23) and, after that, my goal was to earn enough that I could leave my day job. Big tick there. Anything over and above that is a bonus and deserves lots of happy dancing (which might also help me lose weight and get fit – double bonus!)
Be realistic with what I can do
I’m such a people pleaser and will often agree to do things when I know time is too tight, whether that’s running a training course, reviewing a book or giving a talk. Sometimes I regretfully need to say ‘no’. I’ve started putting this into practice already and it’s making me feel so much calmer. I’m much more realistic with how many books I have time to read and review. At the end of last year, I turned down an opportunity to be on the judging panel for a short story competition run through one of my library contacts. It sounded amazing and I’d have loved to be involved but the reality was that I needed to read all the entries while working on my edits and it wasn’t possible to do both.
Find the joy in writing again
As explained, I crammed too much into 2023 so I’m releasing three books instead of four, I haven’t got any festivals or talks lined up and I haven’t committed to running any training courses. (Actually, that’s a slight fib as, after writing this section of my blog post originally for Boldwood, I’ve confirmed I’ll run a workshop at August’s RNA conference but designing and running that is nothing compared to a one-month course!) This should give me some breathing space to find the joy again. I love what I do and I need to find my creative sparkle again.
Get a work/life balance
I’ve been saying this for ages but I’ve never managed to do anything about it. This is the year where I get a grip. I have some ideas to help me structure my day better such as not looking at social media until I’ve written 1,000 words, aiming for 2,000 words a day, and writing these within a ‘normal’ working day, giving myself evenings and weekends off so that I can recharge my batteries and be with my husband and daughter. I’d like to read more. I’d like to do more crafting. I’d like to sleep better too, and not going straight from ‘work’ to bed might help!
Invest in me
I’m a trainer and a qualified coach so I’m all about personal development, but I often fail to develop myself. I’ve signed up to Sophie Hannah’s ‘Dream Author’ programme. I saw Sophie speak at the RNA’s Conference in the summer and she was so inspirational so I’m very excited about working with her. I think doing this 14-month programme is going to massively help me achieve the other four goals.
Although these five goals might all seem to be about me, they are all going to have a massive impact on my friends and family because I will be happier and have more time to be with them. Win:win all round!
Although it’s still early days, I am feeling a lot more positive with these goals in mind. The drop to three books this year has to be the biggie and that has already brought back some of the joy.
I haven’t been able to test the word count idea yet as I’ve been editing rather than writing but I have been taking most evenings off although I confess I have worked the last two weekends to finish my edits. That’s really a kick-back to them not being in a good enough state earlier on and I hope that submissions going forwards will be stronger at first draft and not require quite so much effort in the editing stages.
Now that I’m feeling more positive about my writing and less under pressure, I can look more objectively at Christmas at the Cat Café and my fears around that. Yes, perhaps I might have found one or two points to spread out the fibromyalgia details … but, then again, I might not have. Those reviewers might have raised the same comment if there was very little information in there. And, if I’d put less, those who’d found it helpful might not have done. We can’t write a book second-guessing what readers might or might not want. We have to write the story that burns inside us and I did exactly that. I told the story I wanted to tell in the way I wanted to tell it and I need to stop doubting myself.
I’ve never been good at self-care but I’ve realised how important it is to feel confident with my stories, to ignore the negative comments and to hush my imposter syndrome. I know there are readers who are disappointed that I’m not releasing a fourth book this year but I hope they will ultimately understand that three books from a happy, relaxed author who believes in themself is far better than four books from an exhausted burnt-out author who then drops and doesn’t write any the following year.
And if you’re still with me at the end of this tome, thank you for reading and thank you for your support. If you’re an author who, like me, hasn’t been looking after yourself, what can you control about your writing journey and what are the uncontrolables you can let go of? How can you restructure what you do to find the joy once more? For me, the joy is why I write. I love the buzz I get when a character develops and a plot comes together and I get a thrill from submitting my manuscript, knowing I’ve created a special story. I’m excited about having that back as I start writing Lakes 3 very soon now that I’ve stepped back and slowed down.
Before I go, I just want to give an enormous shout out to my husband who is always there with lots of hugs and encouragement, my bestie Sharon Booth (check out her amazing books here) who is always a tonic when things get tough, and my fabulous Facebook group, Redland’s Readers, who are so warm and lovely and great for picking me up. I cannot thank my incredible editor, Nia Beynon, enough or the wonderful Boldwood Books for being so understanding. They’ve been incredibly flexible and have never put any pressure on me – all the pressure I’ve had has very much been self-imposed! I even told Nia that I felt I might be able to return to four books for 2025 as I’m likely to get ahead now, but she suggested we play it by ear and make sure I’m happy with the pace before we even think about upping it next year. What a star!
Happy New Year! Considering it’ll be February a week today, I’m a bit late in saying that but this is actually my first blog post of the year so better late than never!
I had a new book out a fortnight ago and I’d have normally penned a publication day post but I was so deep in my editing cave (translation: so far behind on my deadline) that I didn’t have the time to write one.
Anyway, wishing you all the best and hope January has treated you well so far – especially as it seems to have been roughly 78 days long already! I’ve had a bit of a mixed month so this is another long blog post looking at the positives and the challenges. Make a cuppa, grab what’s left of the festive chocolates/biscuits, and put your feet up…
THE POSITIVES
Yesterday (24th January) was the two-week anniversary from when A Breath of Fresh Airwas released and, although I don’t know any sales figures (we get them a few months in arrears), several amazing things have happened to make this – my 22nd novel – my most successful release so far.
Apple Books UK Chart Position – On publication day, A Breath of Fresh Air stormed the Apple chart, topping the Fiction & Literature category chart and hitting the #5 position in the overall chart. To my knowledge, I haven’t had a higher publication day position on Apple Books so thank you very much to anyone listening on Apple Books
Kindle UK Top 100 – A Breath of Fresh Air reached #75 on publication day. I was so delighted with this as my last two releases hadn’t done this which panicked me a bit as that broke a long run of Top 100 chartings. So it was a relief to be back in the Top 100. I anticipated a dip from there as publication day is usually the peak but, a few days later, it reached #39 and #1 in several categories. Woo hoo!
Just over a fortnight on, it is still in the Kindle UK Top 100. The charts do move around across the day and it has been kicked out a few times but has always been in the Top 100 at some point every day. At the time of writing this blog post, it’s at #92 and it was in the 80s earlier today.
Bookstat eBook Chart – The positive early sales earned A Breath of Fresh Air a place in the top 10 at #7. I love this chart because most of the book charts are compiled from paperback sales so my books (and those of other digital lead or digital first publishers) don’t appear in them. This chart is based on eBook sales, audiobooks and online paperback sales. I’ve featured in it several times but my last Top 10 charting was in July 2022 when Chasing Dreams at Hedgehog Hollow was released so it was great to be back in there.
Audible UK Top 40 – A couple of days after publication, the audiobook hit #34 and has stayed in the Top 200 for most of the past two weeks which is lovely.
But the real biggie – and the reason I’m posting this today – is the speed at which reviews/ratings have been coming in on Amazon…
Reviews/Ratings Milestones – Within three days of release, A Breath of Fresh Air had already passed 100 reviews (achieved 121). Up until that point, the fastest book for gathering reviews had been the third Hedgehog Hollow book – Family Secrets at Hedgehog Hollow. I hadn’t actually kept track of how quickly that book hit 100 but it reached 300 on its one-week anniversary. ABOFA hit 313 reviews at five days.
I was really interested to see whether reviews for ABOFA would tail off, leaving HH3 as the speediest to 1,000 (1,002 attained on the three-week anniversary) but that hasn’t been the case. Yesterday, on ABOFA’s two-week anniversary, it hit 975 and, today, it has reached 1,045 so well ahead of those hedgehogs!
It’s so flattering knowing that readers are devouring the book so soon after release date and that they’re sharing quickly how much they’ve loved it. Well, most of them are. I’ll come back to the negative comments later.
It took me years before my debut book reached 100 reviews/ratings and I never dreamed back then that my books would become so popular that one would gather 1,000 in just over a fortnight. Wow!
Blog Tour – The two week blog tour for A Breath of Fresh Air has now ended. As always, a huge thank you to Rachel Gilbey of Rachel’s Random Resources for organising the tour and for the amazing bloggers/reviewers who took part and shared their thoughts.
Some of those involved have been supporting me for a long time and I’m so very grateful for that, others have discovered me more recently and there were some reading one of my books for the first time on this tour… who thankfully loved it. Phew!
Bloggers/reviewers are not paid beyond being gifted a copy of the eBook. They therefore do this because they love reading and are passionate about sharing the books they’ve loved with others. Thank you to everyone who took part as you are absolute superstars and I’m so grateful for everything you do. I’ve shared the comments from the blog tour throughout this post.
Thanks also to the lovely reviewers not on the blog tour who still read/listened to A Breath of Fresh Air close to publication and shared lovely thoughts, including Fiona Jenkins. Really appreciate it.
My favourite reviews are the ones where they share that there’s a part of the story which has particularly spoken to them, whether that’s because it resonated personally with them or simply that they loved that specific element. Spoiler-free, of course! I love reading about how the reviewer feels about the book – connections to characters who feel like friends and/or being transported to the setting. Reviews like this make me so happy and give me a warm and fuzzy feeling as I can tell the reader has really connected with the book.
THE CHALLENGES
I’m sticking with the publication of A Breath of Fresh Air for the start of this section. This is the second book in what is intended to be a long series – hoping for 12-15 books as long as readers are still loving the stories and my characters still have engaging tales they want me to tell.
Because it’s a series, there are some things that readers can expect:
A familiar setting which will grow as the series progresses and I introduce more parts of Willowdale Hall and the village of Willowdale
A cast of characters who will also grow because each book will focus on the story of a different character and, in doing so, we get to know their friends and family
Questions raised/storylines touched upon which carry across future books – a bit like threads pulling the whole series together
It is possible to write a series where the books work completely as standalones throughout and can be read in any order, but they’re not the norm and they’re not the type of series I write. Most series build in the way I’ve described above and that’s why readers love them – that feeling of getting more familiar with the setting and the characters and seeing all those threads connecting across the different books.
A Breath of Fresh Air is Rosie’s story. She lives and works in the grounds of Willowdale Hall and, when something happens to her boss causing his estranged son, Oliver, to return to Willowdale Hall, Rosie’s future is thrown into disarray. During the story, various secrets are uncovered and there are some discoveries made but not resolved. I appreciate I’m about to be quite cryptic but I don’t want to give any spoilers here for anyone who hasn’t read the book yet, but there is a point towards the end where the main characters accept that they aren’t going to find the answer to a particular question, which is disappointing for them but something they need to accept. One of the characters wishes that they could solve the mystery. This is an actual conversation about this which happens in the book. This is me clearly telling the reader that it’s not going to be wrapped up in this book but that it’s not the end of it – it will be resolved at some point in the future. After all, why plant something that will never be revealed? That would be mean.
In the original draft of the book, I did attempt to include the resolution but it was too rushed. I didn’t have the word count available to give it the justice it deserved and readers wouldn’t have been happy with it for that reason. I’ve always worked with the If you’re going to do something, do it well ethosand, for me, wrapping up something so significant in a chapter or two wasn’t living by that ethos. It wasn’t delivering a quality product. So I didn’t wrap it up and my characters have the conversation I’ve mentioned.
It’s very common with series to have connections to the next book at the end. This might be a pre-order link, a blurb, a teaser or even a first chapter. I don’t have first chapters in mine because they aren’t written far enough in advance to include them, but I saw an opportunity for a teaser for what was coming up in book 3 which I ran by my editor. She loved it so it became the epilogue.
The word ‘epilogue’ comes from the Greek word epilogos which means ‘concluding word’ and is therefore only ever found at the end of a novel. In my genre, it can often be used to finalise the down-the-line happy ever after which happens after the happy ending in the book e.g. couple get together at the end of the book and the epilogue shows their wedding day or they get married and the epilogue shows them welcoming their first child. Or the heroine sets up a business and we see a year on how well it’s doing. I could keep going through examples but I’m sure you get the picture because you’ll be very familiar with this.
Another purpose of an epilogue is to set up the possibility of a sequel, hinting to what is to come and often including a twist or cliffhanger to entice the reader into instantly craving for the next instalment.
You already know why I’m telling you all this, don’t you? Yes, the abuse has started again about using cliffhangers. I had it after New Arrivals at Hedgehog Hollowin 2021 where there was a little teaser cliffhanger and I had it big-time after Family Secrets at Hedgehog Hollow later that year where there was a whopper of a one. In both cases, the story being told had been told. I left NOTHING hanging with respect to the story in each book, but I added in a teaser chapter at the end about what lay ahead in the next book. The reactions at the time ranged from humorous comments of ‘Nooooo! You can’t do that!’ – just like we shout at the TV when our favourite TV series ends on a cliffhanger – through to 1-star rants. I was accused of all sorts from completely ruining the book to being devious to being a terrible writer and it did hurt. A lot. Especially when my only ‘crime’ was to use a common literary device. Is enticing a reader with the next book really that bad a thing?
I didn’t have cliffhangers in the rest of the Hedgehog Hollow series, but mainly because the storyline didn’t warrant them. If it had, I’d have still done it because I am always authentic to the story I’m telling.
As publication day for A Breath of Fresh Air approached, I started to get nervous about the epilogue. I’d already had some awful negative comments about it in early reviews to the point where I’d asked my publisher if we could add a sentence underneath the epilogue heading to say it contained a cliffhanger and not to read it if cliffhangers induced anger (although I’d have worded it more diplomatically than that!) My publisher said no. As with the Hedgehog Hollow books, there were far more excited responses about the teaser and I had, as already explained, made it clear earlier in the book that the issue was unresolved so readers were surely going to realise it would be a continued thread into book 3.
So publication day came out and it wasn’t long before the 1-star negative reviews came in about the epilogue. There were accusations of it ending abruptly or not being finished at all and one reviewer claiming this has never happened in other books. I find that hard to believe that as there are plenty of cliffhangers out there in books.
It didn’t end with the reviews. There were comments on the socials and I’ve even had direct messages from readers telling me how disappointed they were. Ouch! I picked up one of these messages over the weekend. I’d found out that morning that my lovely auntie had passed away and I clicked into the DM thinking it would be a nice comment to give me some comfort on a sad day. Exactly the opposite. So that was fun. I don’t think those who DM me have any malicious intentions and I suspect it’s often just blurting out a reaction but I do sometimes wish social media had that filter (most of us) apply face to face, thinking about how the words could hurt before blurting them out.
Although I couldn’t add a warning in the book itself, I did as much as I could to warn people to step away from the epilogue if they hated cliffhangers. I mentioned it in my publication day video, I posted it all over the socials, and I even made a warning sign! That said, I do appreciate not everyone follows me on social media and that those who do won’t see all posts so I was never going to be able to warn everyone. Although there is a school of thought that says why should I give a warning. Teasers are commonplace in books.
The funny thing about all of this is that, in The Start of Something Wonderful, I have an issue unresolved, just like in this one – who or what the green man was. While I had some readers mention that they were intrigued about this in reviews, nobody docked stars for it being unanswered, nobody left me negative reviews and nobody DM’d me to tell me how disappointed they were. The only difference between The Start of Something Wonderful and A Breath of Fresh Air is that I didn’t put a teaser at the end of book one to suggest that we’d find out who the green man was in book 2. I put a teaser at the end of book 2 telling readers that a character had found the answer (without revealing what they’d actually discovered) and lots of readers get upset with me because I didn’t tell them what the character had found out. So I go back to point 3 from earlier in what a reader can expect from a series: threads which continue as the series develops. This is one of those, as was the green man.
I’ve never hidden the fact that I write in series so I don’t understand why anyone would think I’d just leave it like that and never return to it. ALL my books are part of a series and even the few that are more standalone are part of a world I’ve created (e.g. Whitsborough Bay or more specifically Castle Street) and have character cameos and connections with other books, so absolutely nothing I’ve written so far is purely standalone. That said, ALL my books do tell complete stories. When we get to the end (or certainly the end before any epilogue), the story or part of story being told in that book has been told.
My acknowledgements at the end of the A Breath of Fresh Air make it clear that there is a book 3 coming out as a Christmas release, although I do appreciate these aren’t available on the audio recordings.
In my early reviews, one of the 1-star comments accused me of adopting a ‘tacky tactic’ to get readers to buy the next book in the series. I’m bewildered by the suggestion that authors shouldn’t want to entice readers to buy more books. Does an author write a series because they hope that readers will go on to buy future books? Of course they do. Authors have many reasons why they write but the ultimate one is that this is a career (hopefully). They want to sell the books and make an income so they can pay their mortgage/rent, their bills and hopefully have some nice things like holidays and new clothes. We’re no different from plumbers, bank managers, nurses, teachers, engineers or any other person out there works. We need an income to live off and we do that by selling books and by finding readers who will buy our next book, and our next, and our next… And just to be clear on this, a series writer is no different from an author who writes standalones. The latter is also hoping the reader will love the book they’ve just read and go on to read the next one… and the next… even though it isn’t connected.
I think the negative reactions have hit me harder this month because, well, it’s January and as I said at the start, it does seem to go on forever, doesn’t it? I’ve had a bereavement (RIP Auntie Mary xx) and I’ve also been struggling with my writing mojo although that’s something that’s been building for a while. The last few months of last year were a huge battle for me and I’ve had to think long and hard about how this year would look as an author because I couldn’t do another year like last. I hit December drained and burnt out and, for a while there, could happily have never written another word so I knew something had to change.
And on that cliffhanger, I’m going to sign off this post as it’s way longer than I originally intended. I’ll be back within the next week or so with more about the battle and the changes needed but if you love my books, don’t panic, I’m still writing! And please don’t lynch me for leaving this blog post on a cliffhanger!
Thank you to all the amazingly supportive readers out there. You know who you are. An author pours their heart into what they do and the kindness and enthusiasm that so many of you show is such a gift.
As we approach the end of the year, it’s often a time to look back and reflect on the highs of the previous twelve months – and perhaps also the lows – but I’m not going to do that this year. Instead, I’m going to look back over a handful of things I’d planned to blog about but time wasn’t my friend and I never quite managed to cover them.
LEEDS BEAR HUNT
First up is my bear hunt. I’m not sure when it started but there have been art trails all over the country which are a really great way of drawing in visitors and raising money for charity. The ‘Leeds We’re Going on a Bear Hunt 2023’ art trail featured giant bears at various locations in and around Leeds City Centre, inspired by Michael Rosen’s beloved children’s book We’re Going on a Bear Hunt. The charity the bears hunt was fundraising for was Leeds Hospitals Charity, a charity which supports various teaching hospitals around the city including Leeds Children’s Hospital.
My daughter and I had planned a trip to Leeds in July to celebrate the end of her GCSE exams. Timed during the couple of weeks before school term finished, we’d booked tickets for Strictly Ballroom The Musical starring Kevin Clifton, and were staying for two nights, planning to do some shopping and have a cinema trip too. On arrival, we spotted a bear. I had no idea there was a bear hunt going on so it couldn’t have been more perfect for me, being a huge bear fan.
There were 35 giant bear sculptured and nearly 50 bear cubs and hunting for them kept us occupied for quite a bit of the time away which was just as well because we didn’t get to visit the cinema. My daughter was sixteen and we wanted to see a fifteen film and the rather unpleasant person serving wouldn’t let us in without ID. I get that cinemas have policy but logic would have said a student out in the day during term time, clearly with her mum, was likely to have just finished GCSEs or A Levels and therefore be at least 15, but there you go. He’d already ordered me to move away from the desk and stand in a certain place (despite no signage saying to stay there) so I suspect he was a little bit power hungry!
Anyway, we didn’t get to any of the outlying bears and we struggled to find some of them but I hope you enjoy the pictures I’ve included. I have over 300 so I had to be selective! I also spotted a fabulous teddy bear in John Lewis which was nothing to do with the trail but I had to include him.
CASTLE HOWARD AT CHRISTMAS
The next event I missed was going to Castle Howard in early November to see their Christmas installation. This is the fourth time I’ve visited. Previous themes have been Masquerade, Narnia and Into the Woods. This year’s was Christmas in Neverland.
I went with my bestie, fellow author Sharon Booth. The creativity and planning that goes into these installations is quite astonishing. There was a note in the visitor guide saying that they’d ‘prioritised sustainable materials’ and ‘recycled and reused where possible’. I’m fully in support of that but it did mean that, as a regular visitor, I recognised certain aspects. Not saying that’s a bad thing; just that it therefore wasn’t quite as fresh for me.
Although extremely impressive, this was probably my least favourite of the four Christmas installations I’ve visited. Sharon and I went to the Masquerade one together (I took the hubby and daughter to the other two) and she preferred that one. I don’t know whether it was more impressive or whether there’s an enormous ‘wow!’ element of seeing a Christmas installation for the first time when there are no expectations and being blown away by how amazing it is.
The bedrooms which you visit first were as impressive as ever but the Antique Passage didn’t have much in it which was a shame (the Narnia version was very impressive) and the Long Gallery with the deck of the Jolly Roger! was more sparse than previous installations although there was a fabulous shadow film playing which I loved.
I think Narnia remains my favourite, then Masquerade, then last year’s Into the Woods, with this one being in last place. Again, I emphasise it was still extremely impressive and I take nothing away from the imagination, time and effort that has gone into it. I’m sure other visitors will have loved it the most. Just like reading a book, everyone has different tastes.
I look forward to seeing what theme they have next year. The current installation is still on until 7th January so you might still be able to get tickets and see it.
OCTOBER IN THE LAKES
We were meant to be going to Florida for a fortnight in November and, for reasons I won’t bore you with, we had to cancel it and push it back to next year. Although not quite the same, we managed to book a Monday-Friday in our favourite holiday cottage in Keswick.
I’ve never been away for a Monday-Friday and it was surprisingly disorientating, being away for longer than a weekend but not quite a week, and not having a weekend as part of it. I’m not sure I’d do it again.
There were lots of knitted poppies in the grounds of a St John’s Church in Keswick ready for the approaching Remembrance Day. The weather wasn’t kind to us and it rained at some point every day. As you can see, the photos are pretty dull!
This sign made me laugh outside one of the pubs:
We didn’t want to go up on the fells as there’s no point when you don’t get the reward of a stunning view due to the rain or low cloud, but we did go on a low-level walk in Borrowdale. This is an area south of Derwent Water which we’ve never explored before. The walk was lovely but we decided to go off-plan and see if we could bag the smallest Wainwright – Castle Crag – instead of just passing round the bottom of it. Bad decision. We weren’t sure which footpath to take and came off the route too early, arrived at a dead end and had to retrace our steps. It took us an hour to get to the bottom of Castle Crag and, at that point, we discovered that the footpath up looked like shale. There was no way we could do that with an excitable sprocker spaniel who bounces all over so we had to skip it.
By the time we’d added nearly 90 minutes getting back on track, I was a bit fed up. I don’t cope well with being lost and having to do more than expected. I was also really hungry as it was way past lunchtime and we had no food with us. The route thankfully took us near a village and we strayed off the path in search of food. It was cold but the rain had let up and we parked ourselves at some tables outside a café and chose our lunch. I went in to order. It was 2.55pm and I heard the woman serving tell the customer in front that they stopped taking orders at 3pm so I was just in time. I have my order and she said there was a half hour wait on food as they were stacked up. Fair enough. I said I’d go ahead thinking we could have our drinks in the meantime. She gave me a stony look and said, ‘And it’s a half hour wait on drinks.’ Wow! Talk about not being welcome. She didn’t even know what drinks I wanted. For all she knew, it could have been a couple of soft drinks out the fridge which take no preparation on her part as we would happily have had them straight from the bottle. Feeling very unwanted, I told her we’d leave it. I do completely understand how frustrating it will be when someone orders food five minutes before the kitchen closes. Having had a shop, I hated it when customers came in two minutes before closing time and took ages browsing but at least the café would have had money coming in rather than my scenario where the customer 99 times out of 100 left without buying anything! Oh well!
There was no way I could finish the circular route without food so we walked to the main road and caught the bus back to the car park and returned to the holiday cottage.
One thing I did manage to do between downpours was take some photos of The Start of Something Wonderfulby Derwent Water. The colours might not be the brightest in the background but it was nice to have the book in its setting.
CHRISTMAS MARKETS
I visited York Christmas markets with my good friend and former work colleague, Carol. She lives near Newcastle and York is a central point for us both to get too by train so we meet up a few times a year. We usually do this on a Friday but diary commitments meant we had to do a Saturday and never again! The market is just too busy for me (too short to feel comfortable in moving hoards!) and The Shambles was the same.
I returned to York shortly after to meet with fellow Boldwood author, Samantha Tonge, which was lovely. We’ve been Facebook friends for several years but had never met in person. We had lunch together and a good old catch-up.
I’d gone in early to meet another friend but she was unable to make it so I had some time to kill. It was a gorgeous day so I went for a wander, including a visit to Clifford’s Tower using my English Heritage membership. My goodness, it was breezy up the top. My eyes were streaming! But look at that gorgeous blue sky!
I absolutely loved the polar bear outside The Ivy. Isn’t he amazing?
After that, hubby and I went to Leeds Christmas markets. He’d read an article promising 150 stalls but there probably weren’t even a third as many as that. They were spread out at different points around the city centre in clusters of a few huts at a time and what a disappointment. The only decent part was the fairground where there were a lot of food huts together and a lovely atmosphere because of all the lights of the rides but, other than that, it was a complete let down. I’d been really looking forward to it because I do love a Christmas market. Next year, we’ll maybe try Manchester or even Birmingham were they do put on a huge market.
I did manage to grab a few pics of me out and about in Leeds.
CRAFTING
Finally, I’ve done a fair bit of crafting this year at the workshops in a village near us in Ebberston Studios. I’m not naturally talented at crafting so I’m focusing on one type of craft at the moment – needlefelting – and hope that practice will improve my abilities before I move onto something else. I’ve also tried wet felting – same materials but a completely different concept. Jury’s still out on wet felting as there are so many stages to the process and I can’t remember the order of them all, but I haven’t given up on it yet. I made a wet felting heart earlier in the year but I still haven’t finished it. It needed to spend several hours fully drying out before we stuffed it so that last part had to be done post-workshop and it’s still waiting to be stuffed. I might try to do that over Christmas. This is the equipment needed, the fluffy pic is the start of the process and the heart in the middle is the end product which I did inspired by the cover on Healing Hearts at Bumblebee Barn with a sunrise, lavender and bee.
It was back to needlefelting after that with an owl. I’m super proud of the barn owl I created.
Next was a mixed project with some wet felting and a small amount of needlefelting. I’m not going to reveal what I did as it’s connected to my next book release, A Breath of Fresh Air, so I’ll post about it around publication day. Having said that, subscribers to my newsletter have seen it and we might even have posted on Twitter (refuse to call it X!) at the time.
After that, I had a couple of workshops in quick succession with a Christmas theme. The first was to make tomte (Sweden) / tonttu (Finland) / nisse (Norway and Denmark) or gonks as we tend to know them in the UK. I use tonttu because we were in Finnish Lapland just before Christmas 2019 when I completely fell in love with them and purchased several. My tonttu collection has grown a fair bit since then although hubby always calls the ones not purchased in Lapland ‘imposters’. So I made my own little imposter and I’m delighted with him.
I want to do a slight tweak to his hat, putting a couple of stitches in about halfway down to create a kink in it – perhaps another job for over Christmas.
My final workshop of the year was to make Christmas decorations. It’s the only one Emma at Ebberston runs where it’s a bit of a free-for-all to make what you wanted but we were told that, if we went for smaller decorations, we should be able to manage three so that was my goal.
I started with the cutest penguin hanging decoration followed by a bear’s head wearing a party hat. There was time to do one more but nothing complicated so I decided to do a snowman as the shape was very simple, as was the colouring. I was going to make him into a hanging decoration too but Emma had some wooden plinths and little Christmas trees we could buy so I made him a standing decoration on a plinth instead.
I’m really pleased with how they all turned out. I wish I could say I’d made the knitted hat on the snowman and the scarves on him and the penguin but they were pre-made for purchase. Everything else is by me, though. Check out the snow! I was worried at first that I wouldn’t make it when it started coming down but, thankfully, the main roads were clear.
I’ve got some needlefelting kits and various spare materials and hope to do some crafting at home next year. I’m not intending to create anything to sell – it’s just for my own pleasure and to give me a break from writing.
That’s it! All caught up on the many posts I planned to write but didn’t get around to doing.
This is my final post before Christmas (or at least I think it is!) so I’ll finish by thanking you for all your support for my writing this year. It’s been another amazing year and none of the things that have happened this year like achieving one million sales could have happened without you. I’m so very grateful for how you’ve embraced the worlds I’ve created.
Wishing you a peaceful, relaxing, joyous Christmas and hugs to those for whom this festive period is going to be difficult.
Did you know that you can stream my audiobooks on Spotify? They can be accessed via the free version of Spotify or via a Spotify subscription. The latter is a much better way of listening as the free service means that the story will be frequently interrupted by adverts. And I mean properly interrupted. Because Spotify is predominantly a music streaming service, it works on the principle of tracks i.e. singles on an album by a music artist. For audiobooks to be available via this service, they need to be carved up into tracks. Boldwood use a company to do this and they split the audiobooks into 3-minute tracks. The tracks won’t split a word but they will split a sentence so, when an advert kicks in, the narration might be mid-sentence. So, for books, a subscription is definitely a better reading experience.
I was sent a lovely email from Spotify at the end of November capturing my year – ‘Spotify Wrapped’. Everyone with tracks on Spotify was sent their personal breakdown and it was quite amusing to have my work referred to as ‘music’. Felt like a pop star!
The email had a link to a presentation where I could look back over my stats from across 2023 and it was really interesting to watch. It finished with some graphics giving key facts. I found a couple of bits of background information supporting the graphics really interesting.
I had 1,924 listeners streaming my ‘music’ 374,220 times. Woo hoo! Listening time was 18,615 hours which is apparently roughly the amount of time it would take for a person to walk from Berlin to Beijing nine times!
Coming Home to Seashell Cottage has been the most popular audiobook with 466 listeners. 1,605 people were first-time listeners in 2023 and I had a listener increase of 77%, so my Spotify presence is growing nicely.
As you can see from the graphic, my audiobooks have been listened to in 93 countries which blows my mind. The top streams came from:
UK
Germany
USA
Netherlands
Australia
The fastest growing listenership for my audiobooks comes from a random mix of countries:
Ukraine
Estonia
Portugal
Finland
Kenya
On Wednesday 25th October 2023, between 6-7pm, I had sixteen people listening to my audiobooks at the same time. I love the thought of all those people listening at the same time and that there were probably people reading my books at that time too.
Thank you to everyone who has listened to my books on Spotify or supported my writing in any way.
Hi everyone and welcome to December! I’d have said a warm welcome to December but, my goodness, how much has that temperature dropped? On Tuesday evening, we had snow in Scarborough. It wasn’t particularly thick but it stayed. Yesterday morning, it came down again. The fields looked beautiful but some of the side roads in the villages around here were impassable and the road to Whitby was apparently cut off, as is often the case. Hope everyone was able to stay safe and warm.
I’m stopping by today with two separate pieces of news and a reminder…
FREE BOOK
The first piece of news is that the first book in The Starfish Café series – Snowflakes Over The Starfish Café is the FREE BOOK OF THE WEEK on Apple Books UK & Ireland.
This offer runs for a week and will end on Sunday 3rd December 2023, right at the end of the day. It went straight to #1 in the Apple Books FREE chart. Always lovely to have a number 1, even if it’s not quite the same having it in the free as the paid chart!
Running alongside this offer, book two in the series – Spring Tides at The Starfish Café – is being offered on Apple UK&I for only 99p. Yesterday I was very excited to see it rise as high as #14 in the overall paid chart and #3 in the fiction & literature category.
The final book in the series – Summer Nights at The Starfish Café – is full price (£2.99) but that’s still nothing considering the months of work that go into writing a book and bringing it to market. So, for less than £4, you can treat yourself to the entire series. Go on, you know it makes sense! Book 3 made it to #128 in the overall chart at the start of the promotion which I was very excited about, hoping it would join book 2 in the Top 100 but it hasn’t scaled those heights since then.
Thank you to everyone who has taken advantage of this offer and helped those books storm the charts. So very grateful.
You can access the Free Book of the Week offer here.
GUIDE DOGS AUCTION
Author Jennifer Page and founder member of the gorgeous Facebook group, The Friendly Book Community, Sarah Kingsnorth have pulled together a fabulous auction in aid of Guide Dogs. This is a cause close to their hearts as Jen is currently training the most adorable guide dog Labrador puppy called Pete and Sarah has a gorgeous guide dog Labrador called Ozzie.
They’re hoping to raise £1,000 and it’s looking good as the auction only went live yesterday (1st December) and, at the time of writing this blog post, the total bidding has already reached £428. You can access the auction here.
The auction is running until 14th December to allow time for posting of items before Christmas so why not check out the huge number of amazing lots to treat yourself or a loved one for Christmas, bearing in mind that we cannot guarantee arrival for Christmas as we’re reliant on the post which is slower at that time of year, and on winning bidders responding quickly with postal details.
I’ve submitted two lots. As the auction is raising funds for Guide Dogs, I decided to put forward two of my books which heavily feature dogs. Snowflakes Over The Starfish Café starts with a lost shih tzu on the beach below the café who is a very important part of the series. Healing Hearts at Bumblebee Barnis set on a farm where Farmer Barney is assisted by his gorgeous brother and sister Border Collie team, Bear and Harley.
Please note that he links of the books in the above paragraph will take you to the Amazon page for each book to find out more about it rather than the auction itself. If you’d like to find my books on the Guide Dogs auction, you can find the lot for Snowflakes here and Bumblebee Barn here.
THE VIRTUAL EVENT
I’ve mentioned this one before so this is more of a reminder. I’m taking part in a virtual event organised by Northumberland Libraries on Monday 18th December at 2-3pm. It’s FREE but you must have a ticket to participate.
There are three authors on the panel – Kiley Dunbar, Sue Moorcroft, and me – who’ll be talking about Christmas books and our most recent Christmassy releases. You can secure your ticket here.
I think that’s it for now. I have a very busy day today trying to catch up with a mountain of admin and tidying which always falls by the wayside when I’m on a deadline. Tomorrow we’re putting up the Christmas tree which is always my favourite moment in the run-up to Christmas.
Hi everyone, just stopping by very quickly to let you know about some offers on my eBooks on Kindle UK at the moment. I don’t share all offers on my website but this one is too big not to quickly write a post about it.
Unless you’ve been hidden under a rock ignoring your emails and social media, you can’t have failed to spot the gazillion Black Friday/Cyber Monday offers floating around this month with the pinnacle of them being this weekend.
Amazon have selected SIX of my titles to feature in a selection of 25 titles on offer TODAY ONLY (Saturday 25th November) on Kindle UK. These are:
It was rather lovely seeing them all on my mailer this morning. You can see them on the offer below along with some of the other books included in the 25 titles. The full listing can be found here.
On top of this, TWO further titles are available for 99p at the moment:
And the first book in my Escape to the Lakes series, The Start of Something Wonderful, is only £1.39 so you can pick up NINE of my titles for less than a tenner. HUGE BARGAIN!!!!
ALL of my books are FREE if you have a Kindle Unlimited subscription and The Start of Something Wonderful, Christmas at the Cat Café and Snowflakes Over The Starfish Café are also in Prime Reading so FREE if you subscribe to that programme.
I was also ever so chuffed this morning to see Christmas at the Cat Café passing a 1,000 reviews/ratings milestone on Amazon UK and am so grateful to everyone who has left a kind review or positive rating.
Happy bargain hunting and happy reading! Do let me know if you take advantage of any of these offers on my books or if you find any other major Black Friday/Cyber Monday bargains. I’m deep in my writing cave at the moment with a deadline on Monday so am having to show lots of restraint in ignoring all the tantalising emails!
I’ve said before that I read my reviews and this is very much an individual author’s choice. Lots of authors don’t read reviews, mainly because the negative ones can really hurt, but I do read mine. I don’t do this religiously but, every so often, I check out my most recent reviews. Most of them make me smile, some of them make me laugh, some are so lovely that they bring tears to my eyes and there are others which bring tears to my eyes because they’re so hurtful. But this weekend I spotted a review which generated a different reaction and I felt compelled to write a blog post about it.
So what is this review? It’s a review which declares that there is something factually incorrect in the book. The reviewer may decide that this inaccuracy warrants a scathing one- or two-star review as it has supposedly ruined their enjoyment of the book, or the reviewer might have still loved the book but chooses to deduct one or two stars from their rating because of this inaccuracy.
And that’s their choice. If they’re correct in their declaration of the inaccuracy. But what if they’re the one in the wrong?
In The Start of Something Wonderful, my main character Autumn stays with her penpal Rosie in the stunning Lake District. Rosie lives in a cottage in the grounds of Willowdale Hall and manages the riding stables so we get some small insights into the equestrian world.
I know nothing about horses. My bestie Sharon – who was obsessed with pony books when she was younger and still adores horses – thinks it’s hilarious that I have a main character who manages a riding stables when I don’t like horses myself. Actually, that’s not strictly true. I think they’re beautiful animals … but they scare me. I went on a pony trekking weekend once when I was in my mid-twenties and it was terrifying. I never mastered how to ride and spent the whole weekend terrified of falling off. At the end of one of the rides, they encouraged us to canter across a field and I honestly thought I was going to die!
Why am I telling you this? It’s because my lack of knowledge (and my fear) of horses meant I did huge amounts of research into them. I bought a gorgeous book all about different horse breeds and another about learning to ride, both of which I studied in depth. I read all sorts of articles, I did loads of research about the layout of stables, the best feed and bedding, the amount of exercise needed, and so on. Basically, I took the same approach with all my books – research like mad to ensure accuracy and authenticity. With the horses, one of the things I was really conscious about getting correct was the language so I did extra research on that.
Then yesterday morning, I spotted this 4-star review:
“The story of the main players is great and they all have such depth. I’m looking forward to reading more by this author. One small niggle – if you’re writing about a riding stables get the spelling right for the indoor arena the horses work in, it’s menage, not manege, mentioned 3 times.”I’m delighted that this reader has enjoyed my book and very grateful for a positive review, but I can’t help thinking that the reduction of the one star is because of the niggle. The thing about the niggle is that the reviewer is actually wrong. And I understand why because I also thought that horses were exercised in a menage. But they aren’t. They’re exercised in a manège (even note the use of the accent!) I know this for sure because I checked the hell out of it. I found an article on the Horse and Hound website entitled ‘8 horsey terms you’ve probably been getting wrong for years’ and, guess what? Saying menage instead of the correct term manège is one of them! You can find the article here.
The author, Carol Phillips, explains that it’s a French term (the accent is a big clue to that!) but the incorrect frequently-used term, menage, means ‘household’. We’re probably most familiar with this term in the phrase ‘menage a trois’ which literally translates as ‘three-person household’. But a manège is where horses are exercised. If you Google ‘manège meaning’, various dictionary definitions come up and all confirm that this – not a menage – is where horses are exercised.
This particular reviewer is keen to go on and read the next book in the series – A Breath of Fresh Air (out in January 2024). This is Rosie’s story so we have more action in the stables and more mention of the manège. Because that’s correct. Will I get another even lower star review for not checking my facts in my second book when that’s exactly what I did do?
This got me thinking about other author friends and how many times they’ve had reviews pointing out an error which was actually not an error. I remember Sharon (Booth) being really frustrated with a review for her fabulous A Christmas Carol inspired Christmas story, Saving Mr Scrooge. There’s a company in this book which makes chocolates. The collective term for sweets or chocolate is confectionery with an ‘e’ in it. However – and very confusingly – the place where confections are kept or made is called a confectionary with an ‘a’ in it.
Like all good authors, Sharon had carefully done her research and the two terms were used interchangeably in her story in the correct context – confectionary when she was talking about the factory and confectionery when she was talking about the finished products. However, just like The Start of Something Wonderful did for me, this generated a 4-star review which was positive about the elements of the book the reviewer really enjoyed but finished with this: “I was less keen on the way the word confectionery was incorrectly spelled several times. It’s easy enough to use a spell-checker.”
How frustrating is that when, like me with my manège, Sharon was correct with her mix of confectionery and confectionary?
I turned to my fellow Boldwood authors curious to know whether any of them had experienced similar accusations of inaccuracies and I discovered several tales which I feel fall into three categories…
Category 1 – Where you’re accused of being factually wrong but they’re wrong instead
This is the category my manège review falls into, as does Sharon’s confectionary/ confectionery one.
Kim Nash shared that she had a review for Sunshine and Second Chances where the reader claimed that she was incorrect about the geography of the Algarve. Kim says, ‘I’ve been to this particular part of the Algarve about ten times so I KNOW it’s right’.
Sandy Barker shared that a reader criticised one of her books because nobody in America eats Christmas cake. Sandy is half-American so does know what she’s talking about. Another claimed there was no way that anybody could visit as many countries in two weeks as she stated in another of her books. Sandy says, ‘I was a tour manager for a European tour company. We went to WAY more places in two weeks.’
Lynda Stacey writing as L. H. Stacey added, ‘On The Fake Date, someone once told me that the courtroom scene was totally improbably and that the questions that the solicitor asked were ridiculous. Well… I have [a friend who] works in the courts and knows the protocols and [another who] is a solicitor who works these type of cases. Both of them hand fed me the information and I couldn’t have done more research if I’d tried… not unless I’d taken the bar myself.’
Category 2 – When a reviewer makes a huge assumption about your levels of knowledge … incorrectly
Samantha Tonge told me that she had a comment in a review for Game of Scones which said that she clearly knew nothing about making scones. Samantha has baked for years and I can attest to this as she regularly posts her delicious-looking creations on Facebook making me drool and wish she lived a bit closer to me!
Siobhan Daiko has a 2-star review for her recent release, The Girl from Portofino, which states, “Not for a moment did I believe the main characters were Italian.” Siobhan’s step-family are Italian and she says, ‘[I’ve] been living here [in Italy] full-time for eleven years and have visited almost every year since I was ten. I write about real Italians, not the stereotypical versions you find in some books.’ I’d say that makes her pretty qualified to write about realistic Italians!
These comments made me think about some of the reviews I’ve had along these lines. I can’t remember which book it was left for and I have too many reviews to scroll through to find it, but I had a review for one of my Hedgehog Hollow commenting on me having a couple of difficult mother/daughter relationships in my books and suggesting that I must have a difficult relationship with my own mum to repeatedly write about this. Well, it’s the same mum but six books so of course the relationship is going to keep cropping up. And as for my own relationship with my mum, it’s excellent and I have something known as an imagination – kind of important tool for a writer!
I have another scathing review (again, can’t put my paws on it just now) where it’s commented that I clearly have no knowledge of mental health issues or counselling. Erm, I beg to differ. I’m a trained and qualified coach and career development counsellor and I have studied counselling in different contexts with the intention of completing a degree in it. I completed an introductory course and got a place on the degree programme but had to defer due to pregnancy and then couldn’t afford it so didn’t continue down that path. But I have a lot of knowledge. And – bit of a theme here – I do lots of research too.
Category 3 – Where the reviewer has speed-read the book and presents an omission which wasn’t actually an omission
Keri Beevis shared a 4-star review for The Boat House which is pretty long and full of praise for the story and Keri’s writing, but the reviewer then shares her niggle about the book: “The only issue I had with the book was the inconstancy [sic] in some small details. In one scene Emily left the house without her shoes, and in the next, she put her shoes back on…” Keri explains, that there’s a ‘line where it says the character grabbed her boots and threw them in the car when leaving the house’ which clearly the reader has missed.
This is so frustrating as it’s the kind of detail that, as an author, you would only need to mention once but, if a reader is speeding through a book, they can so easily miss.
This brought to mind a 1-star review I have for Making Wishes at Bay View. SPOILER ALERT!!!In the story, the main male character has a baby with his ex. She intentionally sabotages their birth control to get pregnant as she doesn’t want to work and plans to take advantage of the benefits available to a single mum. At no point are any judgements passed on this by the characters but, if there were, that would be fine because this is a book about fictional people and if they wanted to make a judgement because that fit in with their personalities, they’d make a judgement. But in this case they absolutely don’t. Anyway, my 1-star review states, “A very disappointing read. The single mum on benefits bashing wasn’t great!” Where was there any single mum on benefits bashing? Certainly not in this story, but clearly something hit a nerve and this reader read something that wasn’t even there.
In Snowflakes Over The Starfish Café, main character Hollie has experienced several bereavements and I read a review which was extremely complimentary about the book but there was a large chunk of it where the readers said she was disappointed that Hollie hadn’t sought any professional help to deal with her grief. This bewildered me because she did! There wasn’t a scene about it because the story is set some time on from the bereavements, but there is a section where Hollie is reflecting on her home and discussions she’d had with her counsellor on the merits of staying there with memories or moving to a smaller property to start afresh. It’s not even a throwaway line – it’s a big paragraph. But this reader had presumably skimmed past it.
And just to share a review which doesn’t really fit into any of those categories but does fit with this subject, Michelle Salter shared this 4-star review for the fourth book – A Killing at Smuggler’s Cove – in this 1920’s set crime series: ‘This was my first book in this series and I was just a bit confused as the time period didn’t “click” in my mind. When something was described as happening in 1918, I thought “a long time ago” – however, it was only 5 years ago in the book. (My fault, I suppose.)’ Erm, yes. So why leave a review sharing this?
What can we do about this?
I don’t enjoy any sort of criticism in reviews – who would? – but I am very open to constructive points on which I can take action. But when something is already correct and a reader believes it isn’t, what can we do?
Absolutely nothing!
Authors are advised never to engage with the critics and I understand why as that can look like confrontation. I don’t do confrontation – far too scary and not me at all – so we have to suck it up. Which is hard when it’s unfair criticism but c’est la vie! Can’t please all of the people all of the time.
Well, I say there’s nothing we can do but there is something. I can write a little blog post like this with a plea that, if you do spot something in a book which you believe is wrong, please, please, please can you check that it’s not you who is actually wrong about it before you leave a negative review/deduct stars from a review because of the thing you believe is wrong? Even if you are absolutely convinced that you are right, a quick chat to Google will confirm it. You see, part of the job is to do research so we will have checked our facts. Most of the time. Sometimes we can be caught out too, believing something is correct and therefore not even thinking to check it. Like menage! I almost didn’t check it because I was so sure it was menage.
And if it turns out that you’re right and the author’s wrong, has it really spoilt your enjoyment of the whole book? Take a deep breath. Is it essential to be angry about that one thing and have a go at the author today? If it really is, then fire away but maybe take another deep breath and have a nice hot chocolate or something equally lovely first. Because is one small error in a book of 100k words really that much of a crime?
If you’re an author, have you ever had a reader flag up something as an error in a review which wasn’t actually an error? If you’re a reader and you spot something you believe is an error, how would you handle it? Would love to know your thoughts.
Stopping by briefly today to let you know about two book related auctions going on at the moment.
East Yorkshire Food Bank
Although I live in North Yorkshire, I’m in the Beverley Chapter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association (RNA) which is in East Yorkshire. Several members of the chapter and a host of other authors and people with literary connections are participating in a bookish auction to raise valuable funds for the East Yorkshire Food Bank. It’s organised by one of our members, author Jeevani Charika/Rhoda Baxter and the Food Bank Manager. You can find out more about the work of the food bank here.
This year, I’ve donated two lots – a signed copy of Christmas at the Cat Café and a one-hour Zoom which might suit either a reader or an aspiring writer. The book is a UK-only lot but the Zoom can be bid on internationally.
You can find the full auction here and can specifically bid for a signed copy of Christmas at the Cat Café on lot 14 here or the Zoom chat on lot 13 here. But you need to be quick as the auction of promises ends on Friday 20th October at 6pm.
Children in Read
The annual Children in Read auction in aid of the BBC’s Children in Need campaign is also up and running, organised by the amazing Paddy Heron. You can find the full auction here which has a whopping 633 lots on it at the time of writing this blog post. There are so many wonderful offerings across the genres to suit readers, collectors and writers so do take a look.
I’ve donated two lots here too – pretty much the same as those donated to the East Yorkshire Food Bank auction except the Christmas at the Cat Café lot is a small bundle which includes a cat bookmark and cat coaster as well as the signed book.
You can bid on the Christmas at the Cat Café bundle on lot 563 here and the Zoom chat on lot 564 here. As with the East Yorkshire Food Bank auction, the Zoom is available internationally but the bundle is UK only.
£12,709 has been raised in bids so far across this auction with plenty of time still to run as Children in Need day is Friday 17th November.
Happy browsing and bidding! And please do spread the word. Great opportunity for some early Christmas shopping!
Jessica Redland Author 