Two Months of Italian Sunshine

It’s two months today since A Taste of Italian Sunshine was released and it’s been the best start of any of my books. I can’t quite believe it!

Whether there’s something magic about having six books available or (more likely) my publisher has tamed the beast, I mean trained the Amazon algorithm, Italian Sunshine is in the UK Kindle Top 500 already, despite still being priced above 99p. And it’s been added to Prime Reading today too! I’m also thrilled that 63% of the over 400 ratings on Amazon UK are five stars!

In the meantime, three of my other books have been reduced to 99p in the UK and Italy Ever After had another little moment in the chart sunshine, nearly cracking the top 1000. I’m pleased to see people continuing to discover my Venice books too that didn’t quite storm the charts as some of my other books.

Although the writing part is what brings me joy in this business and I make a point of not checking the charts (I only know that Italian Sunshine started charting because my husband and a good friend checked and told me) because I know that ‘what goes up must come down’ and I don’t need that emotional rollercoaster, it’s motivating to see my books starting to find some traction in a tough market.

Mostly, I’m thrilled that people are meeting Tiziano and having a laugh with him. Writing Jenn grabbed me by the heartstrings and writing Tiziano was just a joy (even the sad bits). To celebrate these two conquering the world (not quite LOL, but I’m taking the win), I thought I’d share the song that started it all.

I had loosely pitched a book about prosecco to my editor and that was kind of all I had and as I was fleshing out the plan and developing the characters, this song came out and Tiziano was born. I took a lot of inspiration from this singer at the beginning, but he grew into his own character pretty quickly.

The song title translates roughly as ‘Country Boy’ in Veneto dialect and you’ll see it’s not romanticised at all! From there, I decided to lean into Jenn being a city slicker and make use of that romance trope for a bit of tension and humour.

I love how the music video has to have captions in standard Italian for people who don’t understand the dialect!