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.
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.
August and September were a crazy couple of months in our household both writing-wise and personally so I’ve fallen behind on so many things. I’ve been ridiculously late in posting a couple of birthday cards (i.e. on the day of the person’s birthday) and even missed a friend’s birthday completely which is very unlike me as I’m normally completely on the ball with things like that.
One of the writing-related things to fall by the wayside has been the blog tour for Christmas at the Cat Café.I’ve been very slow in thanking bloggers for their posts, haven’t shared everything on Twitter (yes, I know it’s really called X but I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it!) and I’m nearly a week behind with my end of tour thank you post. The tour ended on 30th September. Eek!
Better late than never, here’s a huge THANK YOU to all the bloggers/reviewers who took part in the blog tour for Christmas at the Cat Café and Rachel Gilbey of Rachel’s Random Resources for organising it.
I was really apprehensive about this blog tour because I received some scarily negative early reviews for this book. Thankfully my fears that I’d written a dud have been unfounded and there has been a lot of love for Castle Street, the cat café, my hero Tabby, and all the cats and kittens. Phew!
If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you’ll know that I’m always honest and transparent about the lows of my writing journey as well as the highs, so I’d like to talk about the negative reaction on the early review site.
First thing to put out there is that I don’t like the early review site at all. In my opinion (and it’s an opinion shared by a lot of authors I know), it’s broken. It started off as something really good and positive – an opportunity for bloggers/influencers to get an ARC (Advanced Reader Copy) of books which they could read for free in exchange for sharing their honest opinions with their following. Hopefully they’d pick books which appealed to them, they’d love what they read, and their reviews would be positive. They’d give authors quotes which could be used in the early promotion and they’d help create a buzz ahead of and around release date because they’d amassed a big following. This is not so much the case anymore.
Don’t get me wrong, there are still plenty of genuine site users who do have a strong following on the socials and/or on their own blogs/websites who use the site properly. But there are way too many who completely abuse the system, using it as a way of bagging free books and, scarily, often grabbing books that aren’t within their preferred genre. It’s often obvious from reviews that they’ve not read the blurb because they declare their dislike for things which are spelled out in the blurb as being part of that book. They then give the book a 1 or 2-star review to keep their feedback rating high (they don’t get approved by publishers if it’s low).
There seems to be a culture of skim-reading books to presumably achieve self-set targets on sites such as GoodReads. A case in point of this recently was where a reviewer gave an author friend a 3-star review for her latest release which she had claimed to read in an hour. An hour?! I know there are some very fast readers out there, but that’s ludicrous. Skimming and skipping out chunks is not reading and what on earth is the point in that? You’re not actually getting to know the characters or immersing yourself in the nuances of their unfolding stories.
Anyway, back to the negative reviews for Christmas at the Cat Café, let me explore what they were.
Complaint #1 – There were cats in it
I don’t know about you, but if I saw a book with seven cats pictured on the front cover, with a title that includes the words ‘cat café’, a blurb full of cat puns and frequent mentions of cats, I’d kind of expect to find cats in the book. And if I really didn’t like cats, it probably wouldn’t be a book I’d choose to read.
I’ve been stunned by how many early reviewers have given negative reviews because of the cats. A scary number of these negative reviews include the words: I don’t like cats / I’m not a cat-lover / I’m not a cat-person. For example this 3-star one: I’ve loved all of Jessica’s books and whilst I didn’t hate this one it is probably my least favourite. Not sure why. Maybe it was the cat theme, I’m not a cat fan
It turns out there are a lot of people out there who don’t like cats. That’s fine. But if that’s you, then step away from the cat book about cats! It’s not for you!
Which takes me onto the second complaint…
Complaint #2 – There were too many cats in it
As well as the cat-haters, there were reviewers who could have maybe coped with a few cats but not the volume in my book, as demonstrated in this 2-star review: I’m afraid this one wasn’t for me. I like cats but this was over the top – 15 cats! I mean, seriously! 15!
And in this 3-star one: Finally a cat lady story with an ACTUAL cat lady. And I loved all our feline friends, though with 15 cats, I’ll admit even I was on a cat overdose…
Again, if a book is set in a cat café, what did readers expect? One cat asleep in a corner really isn’t going to make fifty customers very happy! A responsible cat café owner will ensure there is a safe space for their cats to go for some peace and quiet away from customers and won’t expect all the cats to be present each day the café is open. This is why Tabby needs 15 cats (it’s actually 16 but one of them is older and was never going to go into the café).
Clearly the early readers complaining about too many cats didn’t get the concept of cat cafés, which takes me onto complaint number three…
Complaint #3 – Cat cafés
Some readers don’t like the setting of a cat café like in this 1-star review: Sorry but did not like this [the book] at all…The concept of a cat café did not sit right either.
If someone doesn’t like the idea of a cat café, I again cannot understand why they would choose to read a book set in one. Even if somebody mistakenly thinks that ‘cat café’ is just the name of the café and there are no cats in it, the cover and blurb should confirm that’s not the case *sighs*
Complaint #4 – Not enough Christmas
I love writing Christmas books but, as those who’ve read my other ones will know, they don’t always purely focus on Christmas. Christmas at Carly’s Cupcakes is the only one of my six Christmas releases which is purely set in December and carries a focus on Christmas throughout the entire book but even that includes lots of other themes and ends with a Christmas wedding … before Christmas Day!
This particular story starts in October and follows Tabby’s journey of opening up the Castle Street Cat Café in the lead-up to Christmas.
I personally don’t see the need for a Christmas book to be purely about Christmas but, if it’s marketed as a Christmas book (which this is), I would expect there to be plenty of references to Christmas and Christmassy activities.
There are.
Christmas is mentioned throughout – 185 times, in fact – and the whole book is about gearing up ready for Christmas. We have scenes putting up the Christmas decorations, planning Christmas-themed baked treats for the café, going Christmas shopping, and the annual Castle Street Christmas lights switch-on ceremony which is magical. Granted, Christmas Day is only a small part of the story near the end, but Christmas does feature throughout.
However, you can’t please all of the people as shown in this 3-star review: Lacked any significant Christmas magic … really the book could have been set at any time of year.
Ouch!
I personally think there’s a great balance there – 185 mentions of Christmas (and a whole host more where the word ‘Christmas’ doesn’t specifically appear) gives a pretty great flavour of Christmas but, for readers who prefer not to dive into a Christmas book until November/December, there’s enough of this story set before Christmas to dip into it earlier. Best of both worlds!
Complaint #5 – Not enough romance
I’m a British author who writes women’s fiction set in the England. In the UK, women’s fiction falls under the umbrella category of ‘romance’. Illustrated covers like mine can cover a massive range of styles from light-hearted romcom to emotional women’s fiction. I write the latter.
Women’s fiction can be emotional, typically handles some challenging subjects, and is all about the journey that the (usually female) protagonist goes on. All of my books have the big focus on the journey, the setting, the community. There’s a romance in all of my books but it doesn’t necessarily take centre stage because the story is about the protagonist.
In the USA, romance books are separate to women’s fiction. They are purely about the romance and are probably more aligned with what we’d call category romance in the UK e.g. Mills and Boon books which are strongly focused on the couple from the start. This is often where the problem starts as the early review site is used across both sides of the pond and quite often the reviews criticising the romance do come from US-based readers.
There is a romance in Christmas at the Cat Café. It is a love story. But it’s also a lot more than that because that’s what I write.
The romance in this bookis slow-burn but it’s absolutely there and the development of the relationship between the couple progresses across the entire book. But several early reviewers disagreed and here’s some examples of the reviews:
3-star: This is meant to be a romance, and while there are slight romance vibes at the very end of the book, the rest is romance free
3-star: This is also being marketed as a romance when the real hints of the story going that way don’t start until well after the 50% mark. I would have set my expectations differently had I known
2-star: There was nothing to keep me interested. I was reading thinking “where is the romance? I thought this was romance.” I double checked and it is a romance. We don’t see a romance until basically the end. It feels like it is thrown at us
Will just point out that it WAS marketed as women’s fiction, not romance. Will also point out that the romance is there throughout and is slow-burn. I do sometimes wonder if readers are reading the same thing that I wrote because I know it’s there because I put it there!
Complaint #6 – Too much fibromyalgia
This is a story about a chronic pain condition and I’ve been very vocal in identifying this as fibromyalgia. There have been loads of positive reviews from readers with fibro or other chronic pain conditions thanking me for the accuracy of my representation of this and for making them feel visible in literature. There have also been loads of positive reviews from readers who were unfamiliar with this condition and feel they’ve learned a lot, and from those who know someone with the condition and feel they have a better understanding of what their friend/family member is going through as a result of reading Tabby’s story.
But there are plenty who didn’t enjoy this. Here’s just a small selection:
2-star: …feel like I was being taught about fibromyalgia at times
[Yes, you were!]
2-star: I had to drag myself through a lot of it. I found the constant reference to the main characters [sic] fibromyalgia quite draining after a while
3-star: I do think it’s very important that people understand the difficulties experienced by sufferers but felt it took over the story at times
[That was the point. It’s about what it’s like to live with chronic pain!]
3-star: …love Jessica’s books but unfortunately this one didn’t quite hit the mark for me, there was a bit too much about her illness for me and not enough about the cafe and what goes on in one
1-star: Sorry but did not like this at all. I felt the first part of the book was a medical lesson in fibromyalgia which I did not like at all. Really disappointing as I like Jessica Redland
Complaint #7 – I failed them by writing a story they didn’t want to read
That last quote was one of several which effectively told me off for writing a dud! It wasn’t the story they wanted. It wasn’t a repeat of anything I’d written before.
Again, just a small selection…
2-star: I’ve enjoyed a lot of this author’s books but I’m afraid this one wasn’t for me
2-star: I normally love Jessica’s books and was so excited to read this one but…
I do get it. There’s always going to be a book that doesn’t resonate, even with fans, but it still hurts.
Publication day usually brings a combination of excitement, nerves and exhaustion. I’ve done a lot of these now, so the nerves aren’t usually too bad but these negative early reviews made me actually dread publication day for Christmas at the Cat Café. I felt weary and reluctant to check the charts. I opened the blog tour postings with a pre-prepared wince just in case they started with the words, I usually love Jessica’s books, BUT…
But they didn’t, and I couldn’t be more relieved.
The frustrating thing is that I love this book. I believe in this book. I am extremely proud of this book. Yes, this book teaches readers about fibromyalgia, but no more than the Hedgehog Hollow series educates readers about the plight of hedgehogs, no more than Christmas Wishes at the Chocolate Shop teaches about chocolate-making, and no more than All You Need is Love explores Parkinson’s and dementia.
I would argue that ALL books teach something – sometimes major, sometimes minor – and I’m sorry if there are readers out there who would prefer that an invisible illness remains invisible because I don’t regret for a moment that I wrote a book about a character living with this condition.
I actually got really upset on my Facebook Live after publication day when we were talking about how I felt on receiving gorgeous messages from readers who have fibromyalgia about how much it meant to them to see a protagonist with it, presented realistically and sympathetically. This led me onto how much the early negative reviews had upset me – not because they were negative (I can certainly laugh off the comments about not liking cats, not liking this many cats, and even the accusations of no romance or very little Christmas because I know that’s not the case) – but because the comments about not wanting to learn about fibro gave me yet another heart-breaking insight into what it must be like to live with a chronic pain condition. The disinterest of others. The lack of understanding. As if there aren’t enough challenges to face. It all seems so unfair to those fibro warriors out there.
And breathe!
To end on a positive note, it’s nearly three weeks since Christmas at the Cat Café was released and there are 356 reviews/ratings on Amazon, 80% of which are 5-star and 14% of which are 4-star – a very different story to the early review site.
Thanks again to all the amazing bloggers/reviewers on the blog tour and to all those who’ve left lovely reviews or ratings on Amazon, Audible and elsewhere. I’m delighted you’ve loved Tabby’s story. And thank you to all those who’ve sent me messages of gratitude. You’re why I keep writing!
I hope you’ve enjoyed the cat facts and the blog tour quotes I’ve interspersed around my little rant! And I have some good news too. If you haven’t already read Christmas at the Cat Café but you’re a Prime Reading subscriber, it has just gone into the Prime Reading programme today. Woo hoo!
This weekend (19th and 20th August 2023) is International Lighthouse Heritage weekend. According to the Association of Lighthouse Keepers, this weekend aims to “raise the profile of lighthouses, lightvessels and other navigational aids, promoting our maritime heritage.” You can read more about it on their website here.
I love a lighthouse. As well as appreciating their amazing functionality and how many lives they’ve saved over the years, I’m drawn to them because they are so beautiful. The height, the shape and, of course, the setting make them such special buildings.
With books set by the coast, I couldn’t not feature lighthouses. My Whitsborough Bay setting is predominantly inspired by Scarborough where there is a lighthouse. Scarborough Pier Lighthouse is a white one at the end of the main harbour wall. The former harbour master’s lodgings attached to the lighthouse are the headquarters for Scarborough Yacht Club. It was badly damaged during WWI when Scarborough was bombed, and rebuilt in 1931.
It’s a beautiful building but my favourite lighthouses are the ones which are red and white striped. There’s something about them that really draws me in. As Whitsborough Bay is fictional, I couldn’t resist making my harbour lighthouse red and white striped. There’s another red and white striped one a couple of miles down the coast at Starfish Point. It appears on the cover of all three books in The Starfish Café series and the main one appears on two of my other Whitsborough Bay books – Finding Hope at Lighthouse Coveand Coming Home to Seashell Cottage.
My debut book, New Beginnings at Seaside Blooms, includes a couple of key scenes by Whitsborough Bay Lighthouse. This book was originally called Searching for Steven so red and white lighthouses became known in our family as ‘Steven Lighthouses.’ Any time we spot one, no matter how small (or fake), we excitedly cry, ‘Steven Lighthouse!’ which probably sounds very strange to anyone in earshot! Okay, so maybe it’s just me who does the excited cry, but hubby and daughter do point them out.
Searching for Steven was originally out with a publisher who featured a florist shop on the cover. When they ceased trading and I put the book out again as an indie author, my husband needed to design a speedy holding cover which looked a bit homemade but served a purpose and, for me, it absolutely needed a lighthouse on it. This evolved into a lovely lighthouse cover. When Boldwood Books took this book on from my backlist, we returned to a florist shop on the re-named book but that made sense as there was going to be a lighthouse on the next book in the series – Finding Hope at Lighthouse Cove. Lighthouse Cove is a place where the main character in that book goes to think and, in the original version of the book, it didn’t actually have a name. We came up with Lighthouse Cove for the re-issue, hence the logic of the lighthouse on that cover.
Despite having loved lighthouses for as long as I can remember, I haven’t actually visited that many and I’ve only ever been inside one – on the end of Whitby pier (not a striped one but still beautiful). I must rectify that. I’ve walked along the pier to Scarborough’s lighthouse on many occasions but it isn’t open to the public.
On holiday in North Norfolk a couple of years back, I loved seeing Happisburgh Lighthouse, especially as it’s my favourite type. The top left photo on my graphic was taken by the hubby. Isn’t it stunning?
Lighthouses are also very relevant to the storyline in Starry Skies Over The Chocolate Pot Café, but I can’t say why without giving spoilers so you’ll just have to read the book to find out! It’s one of my favourite plot points across all of my books.
It’s a little fantasy of mine to live in a lighthouse, but it’s not something I’ve ever seriously looked into. Quite often they’re in remote locations and I can imagine them being subjected to a lot of scary weather! I found a website gathering together lighthouses for sale in the UK if you fancy looking – Lighthouses for Sale.
If someone did buy a lighthouse as a conversion project (something which happens in Kim Nash’s gorgeous book, Hopeful Hearts at the Cornish Cove), it must take a tremendous amount of vision (and a lot of money) to convert it into a home. And all of those stairs! I think this is something that will remain a fantasy for me.
I’m hoping to write a story about someone who owns a lighthouse in a future book. I have a very clear idea for a story which my editor loves, but finding the time to squeeze it in to our plans is proving to be challenging.
I’ve picked up a lot lighthouse merch since creating Whitsborough Bay and a lighthouse even features on my business card. I have to force myself to be restrained when I see lighthouses now as I’ve run out of space to put them! The various items look great with my books – the excuse I give myself for a sneaky little purchase!
From ornaments to mugs to pictures, I can’t resist a lighthouse. I’m hoping that, one day, Jellycat will bring out a lighthouse in their range. I love Jellycats and a smiley lighthouse would be so precious. If anyone knows anyone at Jellycat…
Hubby and I would love to tour the USA one day and I would absolutely need to plan in seeing lots of lighthouses as part of that. For now, I hope to explore more of the ones in the UK. Although I love the tower style lighthouses the most, I’m still fascinated by the less conventional looking ones like this one in Bamburgh, Northumberland. I think the windows and door look like a face and like to think of it as a happy lighthouse.
Do you love lighthouses? Do you have one near you or have you visited any you particularly love in the UK or abroad? Please do let me know in the comments.
If you have a lighthouse near you, it’s possible there’s a special event on this weekend to celebrate International Lighthouse Heritage weekend. I’m off to make another cuppa in my lighthouse mug. Have a fabulous weekend, everyone.
Christmas at the Cat Café is out in all formats worldwide – print, digital, and audio – on 15th September. Who’s excited for a return to Castle Street?
This gorgeous street full of independent shops and cafés in the fictional North Yorkshire seaside town of Whitsborough Bay was the very first setting I created and I had no idea it was going to evolve and become such a reader favourite.
My debut book was New Beginnings at Seaside Bloomsin which Sarah Peterson returns to her hometown of Whitsborough Bay to take over her Auntie Kay’s florist shop, Seaside Blooms. When I started writing the book, I was only focused on this one shop and hadn’t really thought about the street as a whole. But on the way to the shop on Sarah’s first day, I mentioned Sarah and Auntie Kay picking up takeaway drinks and pastries from a café called The Chocolate Pot and suddenly I could picture what that looked like. The Chocolate Pot appeared several times across the book and I even named the owner/manager – Tara – but I had no plans to write a story about her. New Beginnings at Seaside Blooms was the first book in a trilogy and the thought of writing three books was scary enough – no way did I have any headspace to think beyond that.
I finished the Welcome to Whitsborough Bay series (which ended up being a four-book series) and the next book burning inside me to write was All You Need is Love. Although my career pre-writing was predominantly in HR, I’d taken some time out to pursue a dream of setting up and managing a specialist teddy bear shop. I opened Bear’s Pad in Richmond, North Yorkshire and managed it for nearly two years before moving to Scarborough two hours away (too far to commute). On quiet days in the shop, I worked on Seaside Blooms and also studied my craft. I really wanted to pay homage to that period of my life – when I started writing – by penning a book partially set in a teddy bear shop so Bear With Me was created, located opposite Seaside Blooms.
Later that year, I decided to write and release my first ever Christmas book and I couldn’t imagine setting it anywhere other than Castle Street. When I had Bear’s Pad, I’d loved the approach to Christmas – putting up the tree, getting in all the fabulous festive stock, putting on the festive music and helping customers choose gifts. I wanted to create a business that could do really well at Christmas and a chocolate shop felt like the perfect Christmassy retailer. Charlee’s Chocolates was born in Christmas Wishes at the Chocolate Shop.
I now had three businesses in Castle Street in which stories were set – Seaside Blooms, Bear With Me and Charlee’s Chocolates. I was able to create some lovely cameos as it was logical that the business owners in a small community like this would know each other. I didn’t have any particular plans to extend this retail community beyond Charlee’s Chocolates but I had this vision of a special Christmas lights switch-on attended by the Castle Street traders. I first had a scene showing this in Christmas Wishes at the Chocolate Shop and it felt completely magical.
In one particular scene where Sarah from Seaside Blooms is telling Charlee all about it the approaching event, she mentions that Tara from The Chocolate Pot provides the hot drinks for free. It made sense to choose Tara because I’d already mentioned her and her cafe. I was going to have her providing cakes too but it seemed a big ask for one trader to do all the catering so I decided to mention another business who’d provide the cakes – Carly’s Cupcakes situated next door to The Chocolate Pot. It was meant to be a throwaway comment but the strangest thing happened the minute I mentioned the business. Suddenly I knew who Carly was and the story she had to tell so I wrote her book – Christmas at Carly’s Cupcakes– immediately after Christmas Wishes at the Chocolate Shop. It was one of those rare books that just writes itself.
Because I’d placed Carly’s Cupcakes next to The Chocolate Pot, it felt logical to me that Tara and Carly would be friends. Tara therefore appeared several times in Carly’s story and, even though she’d been mentioned from the very first Castle Street book, I still had no plans to tell her story or any feel for what that story would even be. She was Carly’s friend and another business owner and that was her sole purpose.
Until one day after work, she and Carly had a conversation and Tara – who was really guarded about her past – revealed something unexpected. I really hadn’t seen it coming and it excited me so much that here was no way I couldn’t tell her story. Starry Skies Over The Chocolate Pot Cafépicked up where Christmas at Carly’s Cupcakes left off, but from Tara’s perspective, and her story resulted in the creation of yet another shop on Castle Street (but I won’t mention what to avoid spoilers for anyone who hasn’t read Tara’s story yet).
So now I had a growing community with five businesses in which stories were set, three further businesses in which several scenes had been set – The Wedding Emporium run by Ginny, Bay Books run by father and daughter team Marcus and Lily, and the one in Tara’s story. I’d also mentioned Castle Jewellery and that there were another two cafés on the street although I hadn’t named them. From humble beginnings, the street had naturally evolved into ten named businesses.
I knew I wasn’t finished with Castle Street but the book plans I had meant a natural break from the setting. I’d started a brand new series set in a hedgehog rescue centre – Hedgehog Hollow – and I wanted to revisit a story I’d started but parked a couple of years before set in The Starfish Café a couple of miles south of Whitsborough Bay.
Castle Street was never far from my thoughts. As the fourth book in the Hedgehog Hollow series is called A Wedding at Hedgehog Hollow, I’m sure those readers who haven’t got to that book yet can guess that it does include a wedding. Where better for the wedding party to choose their dresses than The Wedding Emporium? I have further connections to the street in The Starfish Café series, particularly in the final book, Summer Nights at The Starfish Café.
In that book, Hollie spends some time in Charlee’s Chocolates and asks her about an empty unit opposite which appears to be getting a refurb. Charlee tells her it’s going to be a cat café. You have no idea how much it thrilled me to plant that in there! I’d mentioned in previous Facebook Lives that I was going to write a book set in a cat café at some point but the announcement that it was coming out this Christmas hadn’t formally been made on the socials. I loved it when readers started sending me messages saying they were intrigued by this new business and asking if the cat café was coming next!
And so that brings us to the sixth Castle Street business in which the main story is set and how lovely to set it once more at Christmas. Readers often tell me how much they love Castle Street and ask when there’ll be another story set there so I hope there’ll be some very happy readers out there as they return to this special street and wonderfully supportive community.
Except this time, not everyone’s quite as lovely and supportive. New business owner Tabby has more than her fair share of challenges to face while trying to get the Castle Street Cat Café up and running in the approach to Christmas, as you can see from the blurb at the bottom of this post.
What can you expect? Lots of Castle Street Christmassy loveliness, including the gorgeous Christmas lights switch-on ceremony which always feels so alive to me. Some of your favourite characters will make an appearance and you’ll meet several new ones as well as being introduced to a few new shops. Will they be the settings for future Castle Street stories? You never know!
Thank you to everyone who has pre-ordered Christmas at the Cat Café already. It’ll go up for pre-order on Audible a little nearer the time and I’ll announce that on the socials as soon as I spot it. Hope you enjoy Tabby’s special story. I’ve loved all the excited reactions from readers who adore cats but if you’re not a cat lover, I hope you’ll still read this as it’s a lovely story about so much more than cats. And, who knows, you might fall in love with those felines by the end of it!
Big hugs and cat snuggles Jessica xx
It’s the most wonderful time of the year on Castle Street, and there’s a paw-some new business opening….
It had always been Tabby’s dream to work with cats and an inheritance from her beloved nanna has finally made that a reality. Idyllic Castle Street in Whitsborough Bay couldn’t be a better place for pastry chef Tabby to open a cat café with her boyfriend, Leon.
But when Leon leaves her in the lurch, the pressure mounts for Tabby. With Christmas fast approaching, she has to open the café on her own – a daunting prospect, especially when she’s been hiding her health issues from the ones she loves.
Faced with local resistance to the café – and somebody seemingly determined that she won’t succeed – Tabby will need her friends, family and cats more than ever to recover her broken Christmas spirit and pull together for a Christmas miracle.
Will the cat café bring the festive joy to Castle Street as Tabby had hoped or will it be a cat-astrophe? And can the magic of Christmas on Castle Street mend Tabby’s broken heart as well as her business?
Escape with million-copy bestseller Jessica Redland this Christmas for the purr-fect festive treat!
It’s Christmas Eve! We’ve been up to Whitby for a wander around this morning. I predicted quiet, hubby predicted packed and I was right although it was getting busier as we left at about 1pm. Perhaps everyone had been braving the food shopping this morning and had ventured out for a wander this afternoon. Look at that gorgeous blue sky! I’d wrapped up warmly in a blanket scarf and my new coat, affectionately nicknamed ‘the duvet’ because it is quilted and just like wearing a duvet. It’s just from Sainsbury’s but it’s probably the warmest, most gorgeous coat I’ve ever owned. Anyway, it was welcome in the shadows but I was a tad on the warm side in the sun.
How adorable is that whale in the bottom photo? It’s made out of recycled plastic bottles and is for depositing your plastic drinks bottles. He looks very happy.
This is my last post of the year and I’m going to have a little look back over some of the extra special moments across 2022. If you’re a subscriber to my newsletter, you’ll have had some insight into this already with a special Merry Christmas newsletter this morning. If you’re not a subscriber, you can sign up here.
I’m going to do my reflection mainly in photo format.
NEW BOOKS
In 2022, I’ve had four brand new releases outand completed the six-book Hedgehog Hollow series…
THE WORKS
Three of my books have gone into The Works, bringing the total up to eight books going into branches of The Works and online. What an honour! A huge thank you to the staff in all branches of The Works who are always exceptionally friendly and in particular the manager Jamie and the staff at the Scarborough branch who love me going in to sign copies.
It’s always a thrill to see my books when out and about. This year, I’ve spotted them in other branches of The Works, Irton Garden Centre near Scarborough, the Helmsley Bookshop, Beverley Bookshop, Barter Books in Hawes, Good Reads Discount Bookshop in Whitby, Slightly Foxed in Berwick-Upon-Tweed and the Scarborough and York branches of Waterstones (not all shown here).
AWARDS AND MILESTONES
I was thrilled have Snowflakes Over The Starfish Café shortlisted as a finalist in the Romantic Novelists’ Association’s Romantic Novel of the Year Christmas/Festive category. I went down to the Awards ceremony in London in March and, although I didn’t win, it was a fabulous event.
In the summer, I celebrated a sales milestone of 750,000 units sold since joining Boldwood Books – a number I never thought I’d have a hope of reaching.
Also in the summer, Boldwood Books celebrated their third birthday and I hit the third anniversary of my debut release – The Secret to Happiness.
There’ve been some amazing milestones with reviews/ratings, all of my books currently having at least 1,500 reviews/ratings on Amazon alone, including the most recent release. Several of my audiobooks have stormed the Top 20 of the Audible chart but my absolute highlight was this month when Christmas Wishes at the Chocolate Shop made it to #4 in the overall Audible chart.
I didn’t think that could be topped but, this week, I discovered that the Hedgehog Hollow series is in Audible’s Top 20 of the best trending series of 2022 and Christmas Miracles at Hedgehog Hollow is in the Romantic Comedy Top 20 too. Wow! I was not expecting that and the company those hedgehogs are keeping is phenomenal. I can’t get over those big names we’re alongside!
If you want to check out the full listing, you can find it here.
FOREIGN TRANSLATIONS
Two of my books – Finding Love at Hedgehog Hollow and New Arrivals at Hedgehog Hollow – have been translated into Swedish through Lavender Lit. The third one – Family Secrets at Hedgehog Hollow – has also been acquired by them and will be out in spring 2023. I’m hoping they’ll take the final three too but they hadn’t been written at the time the deal was made.
It’s lovely seeing foreign translations and I adore the covers from Lavender Lit. I love the way they have kept the colours and themes of the English versions but put their own spin on them.
I also had an offer from Serbia to take two Hedgehog Hollow books which was really exciting, but I had to decline it because the offer was actually for book one and six and, although each book is a complete story, the characters are consistent and there are themes that build across the series. I didn’t feel right agreeing to a deal where book six wouldn’t make sense read after book one. Hopefully 2023 will bring other offers.
EVENTS
I trained on a one-month workshop in March through RNA Learning which I loved and for which I had incredible feedback and was invited back again for 2023.
Boldwood held their first face-to-face party in May which was a lovely event and I attended the RNA’s summer conference which I really enjoyed.
Stockton Libraries invited me to speak at Norton Library and it was wonderful to have such a big audience. I had been looking forward to speaking at the Richmond Walking & Book Festival too – my very first festival – but my slot clashed with our Queen’s funeral so had to be cancelled. Fingers crossed for next year.
I’ve had lots of get togethers with my bestie, talented author Sharon Booth who I’m thrilled to say has secured a publishing deal with Storm Publishing with a new series out through them starting next year, and with author Eliza J Scott.
Sharon and I both met up with Lizzie Lamb when she was on holiday in the area, I met four of the amazing five admins of The Friendly Book Community on Facebook when they came to Whitsborough Bay (aka Scarborough) for a weekend, and Sharon and I had a few days in York with our writing friend Jackie Ladbury. I do love spending time with book people as there’s never a shortage of things to talk about!
I spoke at a meeting of the Scarborough Soroptimists and spent some time with my friends at Wolds Hedgehog rescue – the real Hedgehog Hollow – with an amazing chance to feed a hoglet. I also went on a needlefelting workshop to make a robin in honour of the Hedgehog Hollow series (if you know, you know).
AND PERSONALLY…
I celebrated turning fifty in May. I don’t feel anywhere near my age, although my creaking knees do!
As a family, we’ve had a few holidays, making up for the pandemic years. We spent Easter in the Lake District which was partly a research trip as I’m, setting a new series in the Lakes next year. We had a week in Hawes in Northumberland in August, deferred from February half term when the hubby and I both came down with Covid. And we had a week in Lanzarote over the October half term break which was our first trip abroad since the start of the pandemic. It was lovely to be away again.
It’s been a busy old year but a lovely one too.
If you’re thinking it all sounds very rosy, there have been some tough moments too. I’ve had Covid twice – although thankfully not too seriously – and the downside of the first time was missing a gig and a holiday. My mum was poorly earlier this year which was a worrying time. I’ve struggled with some deadlines and suffered with conjunctivitis on a couple of occasions, making deadlines even harder. There’ve been other challenges too but I’d rather end the year focusing on all the positives and hope you can too for your 2022 as, even in the darkest years, there’ll always be chinks of light.
Wishing you and yours an amazing Christmas. I hope the final week of the year brings you happiness, hope and positivity. Thank you to all the readers/ listeners/ authors/ bloggers/ friends and family members who have championed my work this year and the amazing Team Boldwood. Your support means the world to me and gives me the motivation to keep doing what I’m doing, especially in those dark moments where I think I lack the talent/am incapable of writing another book.
SPOILER ALERT – This post relates to the real-life inspiration behind one of the key storylines in Christmas Miracles at Hedgehog Hollow so you might not want to read this if you haven’t read that book just yet…
Do you read the acknowledgements at the back of the book? I do. They’re mainly about the author thanking various people who have provided advice, support and encouragement in that particular book’s journey to publication, but they sometimes give details of the real-life inspiration behind elements of the storyline. I find that touching and fascinating so it’s something I always try to include in mine. If you’ve read the acknowledgements at the back of Christmas Miracles at Hedgehog Hollow, you’ll know that the story of Samantha’s baby coming into the world is my own.
I met my husband Mark in 2003 and we married in September 2005. I was 33 and he was 35 at that point and we knew that our ages meant it was probably best not to delay starting a family, especially when we wanted three children, both being one of three ourselves.
Our baby was due on 4th January 2007 but a routine consultation with my midwife in early December 2006 saw me being referred straight to hospital with hypertension (high blood pressure) and suspected pre-eclampsia. I had an overnight stay for monitoring and was released only to be sent straight back as my BP soared even higher. The pre-eclampsia remained mild but the BP was cause for concern and I spent December in hospital on constant monitoring. It was awful. I was worried about what might happen to the baby, especially as I’d had a miscarriage prior to this pregnancy, and being stuck in hospital on your own for weeks is a lot of time to think and to fret.
There was a lot of talk about inducing the baby but I experienced several cancellations due to lack of staff or a full delivery suite. Each day was another opportunity for my baby to grow and gain strength, but also another day to fear something bad. Eventually it was my turn. I was taken to a separate ward, just like Samantha, and given a pessary but the first one didn’t work. Other mums came onto the ward after me and headed off to give birth before. When my editor Nia read the book, she made a comment that it was just like when Rachel in Friends is waiting to give birth and it really was like that. When would it be my turn?
The second pessary worked and, on the afternoon of 19th December, I was whisked off to the delivery suite with my husband, Mark, and labour started. Everything I describe in the book is what happened to me including the very scary moments… Ashleigh arrived into the world at 11.45pm at such speed that she shot across the bed and had to be caught. The heart monitor was tangled in her mass of dark hair. She wasn’t breathing. She was blue.
Mark and I felt so helpless, desperate to hear that first cry, fearful for the worst as our baby was rushed to the side (clip now free) and medical staff rubbed her with towels. We didn’t even know if we had a boy or girl at this point! Thankfully a cry filled the room and our daughter was handed over to us, wrapped in a towel, but it wasn’t over yet. She was unexpectedly tiny at 4lb 11oz. Nobody had picked up on that in the scans I’d had in hospital so it took them – and us – by surprise. She was only a fortnight early and they’d thought she’d be bigger. Although not premature, she needed to spend some time on the Special Care Baby Unit (SCBU) as she might need some additional help feeding. We’d have been discharged later that morning if she’d been 5lb or more.
I had a massive panic about our baby being taken away from us. All sorts of scary possibilities like her being switched, stolen, or falling ill filled my mind and I asked if Mark could go with her. That wasn’t a problem so I sent him off, begging him to make sure she was properly identified as ours. Mark returned assuring me that Ashleigh was fine and, after I’d finished with all the post-birth aspects, I was wheelchaired round to see her. It broke my heart to see our tiny little girl in a crib hooked up to wires with a tube up her nose. I’d wanted to breastfeed but it wasn’t possible. She was too small/tired/weak to latch on so she had to be fed by the tube up her nose which went direct into her stomach.
The days that followed were so difficult. I moved into a small private room along the corridor from the unit so I could be buzzed from the SCBU when Ashleigh woke up. I kept trying to her myself but it didn’t work. Some midwives helped. Some made me feel completely useless and inadequate. I spend a lot of the days that followed in tears, not able to pick up my baby, not able to feed her, not able to do anything I’d expected to do. I knew I was fortunate – there were premature babies in incubators on the ward who had more of a battle ahead of them than mine – but it was still really hard.
Christmas was rapidly approaching and I hadn’t expected to spend December in hospital. I hadn’t put the tree up, hadn’t done my Christmas shopping, wasn’t prepared at all. One of the kinder midwives suggested I take a day off – 23rd December I think it was – to go home for the day and do some Christmas prep and she’d do the tube feeds for me. I was so grateful for that but I didn’t enjoy my day, worried about Ashleigh. Like Samantha, my feet had swollen and only my flip-flops fit. It was winter and cold so my priority was to get into town and buy some bigger footwear. After a huge amount of effort, I managed to get my feet into some lace-up boots two sizes bigger than normal. I was drained and emotional. When I went to the shoe shop till wearing them, the assistant insisted I removed them so she could make sure I’d picked up a pair of the same size. I burst into tears. Thankfully the manager was nearby and she understood my emotional gibberish about just giving birth/swollen feet/exhaustion and she gently led me to a nearby chair and removed my shoes, checked them, then put them back on and laced them as though I was a toddler. I was so grateful for her kindness.
Back at hospital, all I wanted to do was get Ashleigh home for Christmas but nobody ever seemed to be around to give me an answer. There was a midwife who scared me – the ‘Brenda’ character in my story. She’d been extremely unhelpful when I asked her for some support breastfeeding and she was all about the snide comments and sneers. But that evening she was the only person available to ask whether there was any chance Ashleigh would be home for Christmas Day. She laughed at me. Who does that? So I cried again and can honestly say I’ve never felt so alone or vulnerable in my whole life.
We didn’t get our Christmas miracle. I woke up on Christmas morning in my single room and padded along the corridor to the SCBU where I dressed Ashleigh in a reindeer onesie and booties, like Samantha does in the book. They were too big but they were adorable, even if I didn’t feel very Christmassy at all.
I was ‘released’ on Christmas Day to go home for Christmas dinner. My parents had come to stay as we’d anticipated a lovely first Christmas at home with our baby. I don’t remember much about that day other than not being able to enjoy a moment of it, knowing I needed to get back to the hospital.
When we returned to the ward later that day, we finally had some good news. Ashleigh had woken up and demanded a feed so, if that continued during the night, we could take her home on Boxing Day. I was allowed to move into a special room on the SCBU with Ashleigh that night and I prayed it would be our last one. It was. She came home at lunchtime on Boxing Day but the difficulties didn’t end there. I still wanted to feed her myself but, with it being Christmas, there was no support available. The midwife from my local surgery did visit but she terrified me too. Each time I’d seen her before my hospital admission, she’d made comments about how old I was and how fat I was. When she’d first called the hospital to have me admitted, I was in the room with her at the surgery and she described me as ‘enormous’ over the phone, looking me up and down with disgust. I actually wasn’t enormous. Already a size 18 before expecting Ashleigh, I barely gained any weight during pregnancy, my body shape simply changing. She therefore wasn’t the empathetic carer I needed.
The next couple of years were the hardest of my life. I’m convinced I had post-natal depression but I was too afraid to open up to the scary midwife about what I was feeling for fear of judgement from her – old, fat mum can’t cope – so I battled it alone. The whole experience drained and traumatised me so much that I couldn’t face going through any of it again. Ashleigh doesn’t have siblings.
When I wrote Samantha’s story, I hadn’t intended to mirror my own experiences but it made sense to do so. They say write what you know. This was what I knew and I had directly felt every exhausting and heartbreaking moment of it. But, being fiction, I could also change a few things. Samantha was able to take her baby home on Christmas Day, and she got the support she needed to breastfeed Thomas in the end. As for whether baby Thomas gets any siblings, you’ll have to read Christmas Miracles at Hedgehog Hollow to find out.
It was Ashleigh’s sixteenth birthday at the start of the week so I’ve inevitably been reflecting on that difficult time sixteen years ago and it still hurts. I’ve blanked so much of it out but parts of it such as my local midwife calling me ‘enormous’ and the ‘Brenda’ I encountered on SCBU have definitely scarred me for life. If anyone else has experienced anything like this, I sent you hugs because it’s horrible.
To finish on a happy note and a spooky coincidence, when I was expecting Ashleigh my mum was going through a phase of knitting toys to raise funds for charity and she asked which one I’d like her to knit to celebrate Ashleigh’s birth. I was particularly drawn to a town crier so she knit that and my dad printed off Ashleigh’s birth announcement for the town crier carry. What’s the town crier? He’s a hedgehog!
I hadn’t finished writing my first book at this point and Hedgehog Hollow wasn’t even a twinkle in my eye but it was as though I knew! I’d actually forgotten about the town crier being a hedgehog until after I’d finished Christmas Miracles at Hedgehog Hollow. How wonderful that I’d incorporated Ashleigh’s birth story into my final hedgehog book and her birth announcement had been a hedgehog!
Wishing you a fabulous Christmas and hope some Christmas miracles come your way.
Jessica Redland Author 