The Third Year of My Christmas Number One

My debut novel turned three on 10 September and it’s currently having its little yearly resurgence at Christmastime. This time we might actually make it to 1,000 ratings on Amazon which would be a huge milestone for this little book that took me on a long journey in many different ways.

Although it wasn’t the first book I’d written (I think it was somewhere around the ninth novel I’d finished and the fourth I’d queried with a view to publication), it’s an origin story for my publishing career, if not quite my writing career. Looking back, I can understand more clearly what happened back then and see how I ended up here.

I have always been a reader of high emotion romance (think the Mills and Boon Modern/Harlequin Presents line or similar). When I started writing, I must admit I didn’t know much about the British cosy romance market where my books have ended up. I cut my teeth querying Mills and Boon/Harlequin, where each scene is packed with high-stakes emotion and the book is tightly plotted around the two main characters, with as much on-page interaction between them as possible.

For those of you who’ve read My Christmas Number One, you’ll know it’s a romance more along these lines than a Christmas story with warm secondary characters and a cosy, wintery setting. Looking back, I can see this as missing the mark in some ways. Reader expectations of certain subgenres matter and a Hallmark-type Christmas story this ain’t.

The book came out in a really tough year for Christmas books, dominated by big names and perhaps there’s a certain awkwardness to having a debut novel that’s a Christmas book with these specific expectations and the cosy element that keeps readers returning to authors they know and love. It didn’t sell badly, but certainly didn’t have a huge impact the year it came out and if it weren’t for the subsequent success of Italy Ever After I don’t know where my confidence would be right now. Certainly, I’ve heard this year from many of my regular readers that they hadn’t heard of MCN1, didn’t know it was my debut novel and hadn’t read it yet.

But as a story, regardless of the cosy Christmas expectations and initially lacklustre sales figures, I’m incredibly proud of it and lots of readers have loved the variation on the genre, the fact that the book is a little different, that the Christmas in the book is partly sad, partly tropical, very musical and at times a little angsty – and full of sexual tension (as well as romantic tension of course).

In fact, if you’d asked me what I thought the cover of this book would look like when I’d just finished writing it, I would have pictured something like Blame it on the Tequila by Fiona Cole or Idol by Kristen Callihan. I know it’s not very Christmassy (see point above LOL).

This is where looking back starts to get a bit trippy. I imagine what would have happened if an American publisher had picked it up (or nobody had picked it up) and I don’t know what kind of books I’d be writing now if MCN1 hadn’t found the home it did with Boldwood.

There’s a lot I love about the subgenre I’ve found myself in: romance with a travel element. I still try to keep the focus on the romance in my books although it varies a little from book to book depending on the setting and the hook. I love the travel element almost as much as the romance element.

But I sometimes wonder what kind of writer I would have turned out to be if MCN1 had been published with a hot guy on the cover…

Ultimately, I’m incredibly grateful to have found a publisher for my debut back at the beginning of 2020 and for the journey of the books that have followed and the opportunity to keep publishing them. To a degree, I don’t mind how the books get marketed or where they end up on the virtual ‘shelves’ because I get to write them and I love creating my characters and watching them fall in love. I also like that my editor doesn’t let me get away with too many ‘pounding hearts’ and challenges me to get that emotional reaction out of the reader with tension rather than (melo)drama (although I love reading melodrama).

I have developed an appreciation for non-physical chemistry by following the path I have. You might notice in MCN1 there is a bit of physical chemistry, probably more than in my later books (I don’t think the characters’ breasts get described in any of my other books actually, but Cara’s in MCN1 do!). It could easily have been a rather spicy book if it had ended up on a different ‘shelf’ (I had been querying open-door books with Harlequin). Market-wise, that’s a question that I wonder about sometimes given today’s trends, but ultimately while I love reading physical attraction, I now love just as much the emotional chemistry: banter, jokes, the interaction of fears, admiration and affection. But I hope that despite the absence of skin on the covers of my Leonie Mack books (and super-described spice on the page) die-hard romance readers will still love them.

I wrote my Lilo Moore books partly to set free the romance beast in me dying to get all that high-octane attraction onto the page but they showed me I still value the emotional connection more.

Ultimately, it’s my journey and My Christmas Number One was the beginning of it and I’m still so proud of that book – and happy that readers are continuing to discover it, three years later!