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 (24^th January) was the two-week anniversary from when A Breath of Fresh Air was 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 22^nd 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:

1. A familiar setting which will grow as the series progresses and I introduce more parts of Willowdale Hall and the village of Willowdale
2. 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
3. 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 ethos and, 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 Hollow in 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.

Big hugs
Jessica xx