The Little Bookshop of Love Stories – cover reveal!

Posted by Jaimie in writing February 28, 2020

📚❤️📚 It’s cover reveal day! 📚❤️📚
I’m so excited to share the cover of Book 6 with HQ – The Little Bookshop of Love Stories – which comes out on May 8th!
Books and romance – what could be better, right?
❤️ Pre-order here ~ https://amzn.to/2I2rxNN

This is quite a different cover for me so I’d love to know what you think!

I got to lose myself in some gorgeous classic books while writing this, and I loved telling the story of unlucky Hallie and adorably clumsy Dimitri!

Here’s the blurb ~
Today is the Mondayest Monday ever. Hallie Winstone has been fired – and it wasn’t even her fault!

Having lost her job and humiliated herself in front of a whole restaurant full of diners, this is absolutely, one hundred percent, the worst day of her life. That is until she receives an email announcing that she is the lucky winner of the Once Upon a Page Bookshop!

Owning a bookshop has always been Hallie’s dream, and when she starts to find secret love letters on the first pages of every book, she knows she’s stumbled across something special.

And things get even better when she meets gorgeous, bookish Dimitri and between them, they post a few of the hidden messages online and begin reuniting people who thought they were lost forever.

But maybe it’s time for Hallie to find her own happy-ever-after too?

Snowflakes at the Little Christmas Tree Farm – publication day!

Posted by Jaimie in writing October 9, 2019

It’s publication day! 🎄🎄🎄 My fifth book with HQ Digital is out now! If you like gorgeous grumpy men, Christmas trees, pumpkins, hot chocolate, adorable little dogs, and lots of tree puns, grab it now! ❄️
Leah wakes up the morning after a few too many glasses of Prosecco – and realises she’s accidentally bought a Christmas tree farm in Scotland! 🎄🎄🎄

Amazon UK: https://amzn.to/2OrjzlF

Amazon.com: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07PP465LH

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Blurb:

All she wants for Christmas…

Leah Griffiths has woken up after a few too many glasses of Prosecco with a hangover – and discovers she’s accidentally bought a little Christmas tree farm in Scotland!

At first she’s horrified, but perhaps it’s the perfect way to forget all about her cheating ex.

And when she meets grumpy (but ridiculously gorgeous) pumpkin farmer Noel underneath the mistletoe, Leah begins to believe that at Christmas time, anything can happen…

The Little Vintage Carousel by the Sea – Publication Day!

Posted by Jaimie in writing April 3, 2019

It’s publication day for my fourth book with HQ Digital! If you like carousels, gorgeous seaside villages, charming tall men, or uplifting summer love stories, grab it now! I know you aren’t supposed to have favourites but this is easily my favourite of all my published books, and I hope everyone will enjoy reading Ness and Nathan’s story as much as I enjoyed writing it!

Amazon UK: https://amzn.to/2CLmjUr

Amazon US: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B07J17VQ1J

What if one moment could change your life forever?

Ness has almost resigned herself to being single forever, when she catches sight of the most gorgeous man she’s ever seen on the train to work.

But just as she plucks up the courage to speak to him – he steps off the train and disappears into the crowds, without realising he’s accidentally dropped his phone!

It’s her ‘glass slipper’ moment, she’s sure of it, she just needs to track him down – all the way to the gorgeous seaside village of Pearlholme, where she finds him restoring a vintage carousel by the sea…

Maybe it’s finally time to follow her heart?

It’s publication day!

Posted by Jaimie in writing October 5, 2018

It’s publication day! My third book with HQ Digital is out today! If you like Christmas, It’s a Wonderful Life, coffee, mince pies, or uplifting festive love stories, grab it now!

Amazon UK: https://amzn.to/2NqUAef

Amazon US: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B07D4679MT

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One night will change their lives forever…

Georgia Bailey is closing up her little charity shop in Oakbarrow when she gets a mysterious late night call from a stranger, threatening to jump off the town’s bridge.

Something about the man’s voice is faintly familiar but all she can do is stay on the line and after talking for hours, losing sense of time passing, coax him back from the edge.

The next morning, Georgia walks to work, buys a festive latte from Leo (who she’s had a crush on for months!) at the local coffee shop, and is shocked when she suddenly recognizes the voice from last night…

A heartwarming festive love story that reminds us that even in the darkest of times, hope is always just around the corner!

It’s a Wonderful Night – cover reveal!

Posted by Jaimie in writing June 29, 2018

I’m so so so excited to share the cover of my Christmas book! Even though it’s the middle of summer!

It’s a Wonderful Night is my third book with HQ Digital, it’s out on October 5th and can be pre-ordered now! https://amzn.to/2yU7Cig

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It’s a Wonderful Life has always been a big influence on Georgia Bailey’s life, and never more so than when she answers the phone one night to a man about to jump off a bridge. As they talk, she recognises his voice, but he clearly hasn’t recognised hers. It’s her chance to step into the shoes of guardian angel Clarence and anonymously make Leo’s life just a little more wonderful again…

Out October 5th 2018! Pre-order here! https://amzn.to/2yU7Cig

Finally, an update!

Posted by Jaimie in Cover Reveal, writing April 20, 2017

Hello! Yes, I know it’s been a long time since I updated this blog but I haven’t had much in the way of writing news to share – until now!
I’m very happy to announce that I’ve signed with the publisher HQ Digital, and my very first book with them will be released on June 7th! It’s a romantic comedy called The Chateau of Happily Ever Afters, and here’s a little more about it:

Where dreams come true…?
Wendy Clayton stopped believing in fairy tales a long time ago. Instead, she has a ‘nice’ life. Nice job. Nice flat. Absolutely no men. Until her life is turned upside-down when her elderly neighbour, Eulalie, passes away and leaves her the Château of Happily Ever Afters!

But there’s a catch: she must share the sprawling French castle with Eulalie’s long-lost nephew, Julian. And no matter how gorgeous he is, or how easily she finds herself falling head over heels, Wendy needs to find a way to get rid of him…

Because surely happily ever afters don’t happen in real life?

Escape to beautiful France this summer with this uplifting romantic comedy. Perfect for fans of Kat French, Caroline Roberts and Holly Martin.

How’s that for exciting?! The hardest part has been having to keep this news to myself for months!
And even better, The Chateau of Happily Ever Afters is available to pre-order now for the teeny little price of 99p!
Have a look on Amazon UK, Amazon US, and all other eBook retailers!

An October Update!

Posted by Jaimie in writing October 1, 2014

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Hello! It’s been such a long time with no update, I thought it was time I posted something! It’s autumn, it’s my favourite season, and it’s the perfect time to step back and assess how the year is going.

> Writing/publishing.
You may have noticed that I haven’t had a new book out for a while now, and although that wasn’t the original plan for this year, it’s how things have ended up. I am still writing – writing quite a lot, actually! I’ve completed two novels this year, one of which I think is the best thing I’ve ever written, and one of which I think is probably the second best thing I’ve ever written. I’ve also completed three novellas, and have made a couple of starts on new novels.

When it comes to publishing, I came very close to being traditionally published this year, unfortunately it fell through at the last minute, but it did make me realise that it’s still my dream. It’s why I’m going to take the novel mentioned above – the one I think is the best thing I’ve ever written – and attempt to go the traditional publishing route. Once I’ve had a bit of space from it and edited it to within an inch of it’s life, I’m going to send it out to agents. Yes, I know how hard it is to be noticed in the slush piles, I know it’s a long process, but I feel this book deserves a chance. It was one of those rare (really, really rare!) stories that quite literally wrote itself – you know the kind where you sit down at the laptop and look up two hours later to discover you’ve written six thousand words and the characters have done things that were completely unplanned by you? This book was the easiest thing I’ve ever written, but also the longest, and the one written in the shortest amount of time – from idea to finished 127k word draft in under two months. I spent every spare second writing it and loved every moment. That doesn’t happen very often, and I think when it does, it means you’ve got something special.

So, yes, all the writing has meant that actually releasing any books has fallen by the wayside. The sequel to Not Pretty Enough was supposed to be out this summer but I haven’t had time to work on editing it, and I’d also planned to release a Christmas novella, but upon re-reading it, I’ve decided that it’s just not good enough. I intend to re-write it during the festive season this year, along with another festive novella, and hopefully have it up to scratch by next year.

So that’s about it from me! Happy autumn/winter season, everyone! (Let’s ignore the fact it’s been winter in the UK since July!) How is your year going? Tell me in the comments! Have you met any goals or got any still to meet?

My Writing Process Blog Tour!

Posted by Jaimie in Uncategorized, writing February 24, 2014

Today I’ve been invited to participate in My Writing Process blog tour, thanks to the lovely Jennifer Joyce for inviting me! Jennifer is the author of A Beginners Guide To Salad, which I’ve just started reading and think it’s fab so far! You can find her on jenniferjoycewrites.co.uk.

The idea of this is that you answer four questions about your writing process, and then nominate three authors to follow you on the tour, so without further ado…

1) What am I working on?
I’m not allowed to mention what I’m actually working on right at this second, but I hope to have some exciting news to share very soon! I’ll have to talk about another WIP that I can’t wait to carry on with instead – it’s a new YA, untitled as of yet (my ideal title would be protected by copyright so I have to think of something else that fits!) and it’s really different for me. It’s dark and gritty, probably a bit controversial, exploring human nature at it’s darkest. I haven’t planned it out at all, I was so excited about the idea that I wanted to start writing it straight away. It’s a different approach as I usually start with at least some kind of plan, but I’m hoping the different approach and the different style will complement each other!

2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?
It’s probably a bit weirder than most! People have started to expect quirky from me, you know, vampire pumpkins or zombies at the North Pole, so I’m getting a bit of a reputation as the quirky, weirdo writer. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not!

3) Why do I write what I do?
Because I love it! That’s the answer you’ll probably find from most participants on this blog tour! I write chick-lit and YA because that’s what I love, it’s what I read, it’s what I get excited about, and I love both genres equally, so I write in both.

4) How does my writing process work?
I’m not a huge planner, but I’m not a pantser either. Generally I start by writing an extra-long blurb, the kind of thing you’d see on the back of a book, but more in-depth and with spoilers. After that I jot or type pages of notes, just the flashes of inspiration or ideas that pop up when I’m thinking about the book, and more often that not when I’m washing my hair and have no access to a pen and paper or laptop! I write down everything, every little idea for each book, because I know how often I think of something brilliant only to forget it moments later! The next step is a vague chapter-by-chapter outline – this is mostly to make sure I have enough material to write an entire book out of the idea, and an attempt to keep track of the storyline and how it gets from beginning to end. It’s nothing more than a list of scenes really – who’s in them, why, what they’re doing, what they want, etc. Each chapter has maybe one or two sentences about what will be happening in it, because I like to keep things vague so the characters can still take over if they want to. Things do change a lot from this outline when the actual writing starts, characters take the lead, sometimes they go places or do things that aren’t planned, and that’s okay because it’s only a shitty first draft. That’s how I think of the first draft – for me, the purpose of it is to write the story, to get the words down on paper, to go off on tangents if need be, to tell the story and not worry about something not working or not fitting in. It’s going with the flow and writing random ideas as they come to you. If it doesn’t work later then it will be edited out or drastically altered in the second draft. In first draft mode, I don’t go back or edit anything, I just write until the end, then put it away for as long as possible – ideally a few months but it can’t always be done. After time has passed, I re-read it and re-work it into a second draft, then edit, edit, edit it through two or three more drafts until it’s ready for a professional editor.

And that’s it from me!
I’m nominating three wonderful authors to post next week, and they are:

tilly Tilly Tennant
Tilly Tennant was born in Dorset, the oldest of four children, but now lives in Staffordshire with a family of her own. After years of dismal and disastrous jobs, including paper plate stacking, shop girl, newspaper promotions and waitressing (she never could carry a bowl of soup without spilling a bit), she decided to indulge her passion for the written word by embarking on a degree in English and creative writing, graduating in 2009 with first class honours. She wrote her first novel in 2007 during her first summer break at university and has not stopped writing since. She also works as a freelance fiction editor, and considers herself very lucky that this enables her to read many wonderful books before the rest of the world gets them.

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Dan Thompson Dan Thompson Author Pic 2
Dan lives in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire (England) with his young daughter and his shabby dog, Skye.

He is the Author of the charity poetry book Life is all but a vast array of Colours and phobia Novella The Caseworker’s Memoirs. His first full length novel, A YA Fantasy entitled The Black Petal will be available soon. Also in 2014, a dark new adult novel entitled Here Lies Love will be released.

A lover of YA and fantasy fiction, you can often find him writing on his blog, writing book reviews and connecting online with other writer-type people and interviewing authors. Dan grew up reading Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five series, secretly coming up with his own inventive adventures, and R.L Stine’s The Goosebump series, before turning to the works of Philip Pullman, Eoin Colfer and Marcus Sedgwick and slipping away into alternate realities. He also loves a good Historical Thriller too.

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Jack Croxall Photo Jack Croxall
Born in High Wycombe, Jack Croxall now lives in rural Nottinghamshire with his chocolate Labrador, Archie. He has a degree in Environmental Science from the University of Nottingham and currently toils away as a science writer in between working on his books. He tweets via @JackCroxall and blogs at http://www.jackcroxall.co.uk

My first experience with Amazon KDP Select and free promo days…

Posted by Jaimie in Amazon KDP, Creepy Christmas, Kismetology, NaNoWriMo, Self-publishing, writing November 26, 2012

Having recently enrolled a book – Creepy Christmas – in Amazon’s KDP Select program for the first time and ran my first free promotion for a few days last week, I thought I would write a bit about my experience.

I think the promo went very well. Much better than I expected anyway! My numbers were not huge, nothing compared to what some better-known authors would pull in on a free promo day of their own, but as I had never done KDP Select before, I wasn’t really sure what to expect. (I’m sure most of you already know this, but in case anyone doesn’t – when you sign up to Select, your book has to be available exclusively on Amazon for a period of three months, and in that three month period they allow you to offer your book for free for up to five days.)

I don’t think I went into the promo best prepared. For a start, I used my free promo days in conjunction with the book’s release day, which meant that the book had no reviews (it does have a couple now – thank you, lovely people!) I was advised against doing it, and friends suggested I wait until people had bought it and left reviews, and then run the free promo. Obviously good reviews help buyers decide whether to download the book or not, and also increase your chances of getting picked up by the free Kindle book promotional websites (who mention your free book to thousands of their followers) and almost all of which require your book to have a high rating before they will consider promoting you.
I didn’t want to wait, mainly because I felt it would be unfair to expect my friends, family, and other readers to buy the book only for it to be free a couple of weeks later. It’s only 77p anyway, so not a huge amount of money, but it just felt wrong to ask people to buy it, knowing it would soon be free.

Another thing I’ve heard about Select is that it is much better suited to authors who have a series of books out – you use the promo days to give away the first book in a series, hoping that customers will come back and buy the other books from that series.
I can safely say that not only is Creepy Christmas not part of a series, but I don’t have any other books out in the same genre. In fact, I only have one other book out, and it is most definitely not children’s fiction!

So, overall, I could have gone into it better prepared. I should have given myself more time to submit my book details to the freebie promo sites – I gave them about a week’s notice, when I should have pulled my socks up and done it two or three weeks earlier.

I didn’t know how many downloads I expected, but it was definitely far less than I got! My final download numbers after a four day free promo looked like this:

Amazon US: 2565 downloads.
Amazon UK: 315 downloads.
12 from Amazon Germany, 1 from France, and 7 from Japan.

Chart wise, in the UK I reached #242 overall in the free chart, and #28 in children’s books.
In the US it was #142 overall and #2 in children’s books > Christmas.

It also led to my first borrows from the Kindle Owners Lending Library, both here and in the US – which I admit that I got ridiculously excited about!

The free days kicked off on a Thursday and were scheduled to run for three days. By the end of Saturday, the downloads were still coming in, and I was so close to getting 2000 in the US that I decided to add another day to the promo, so it ended up being free on Sunday as well. I also conveniently forgot to mention this to anyone! The downloads still came in though, and I was very glad that I did extend it, as the number was well over 2000 by the time I got up on Sunday morning!

It’s now been a week since my free promo ended, and sales have been slow and steady this week. I have sold a few copies every day, and had an equal number of borrows in the US (less borrows here, but the lending library is still very new to the UK!)

I worked hard to promote it, but I could have done better. I should have been more organised and not ran around like a headless chicken on release day.
Promotion wise, I got mentioned on a couple of the free ebook sites – none of the big ones, but I’m sure the ones I did get a mention on led to some downloads in the US if nowhere else! I also posted links on a couple of Kindle forums that allow authors to promote their free books, and I mentioned the hell out of it on Twitter (Sorry, lovely followers! I do try not to use Twitter for advertising purposes, honest!)

I was also really lucky to have some amazing support on Twitter and Facebook, with friends, family, and even people I’d never met before sharing or retweeting the links.
I want to say a HUGE thank you to everyone who helped. I know you all must’ve been sick of hearing about Creepy Christmas by the end of the promo, but I really appreciate the support so much!

In other news: I am coming to the end of NaNoWriMo – one half-novel is now turned into a full novel, and I’ve made a start on the next half-finished manuscript. 46,000 words written so far this month – almost there!

On Friday I was on the lovely Trashionista website talking about Kismetology here: http://www.trashionista.com/2012/11/author-interview-jaimie-admans.html

And speaking of Kismetology, it’s currently on special offer and reduced to 99p / $1.60 for a limited time only!
Amazon UK || Amazon US

Creepy Christmas is out now! And it’s free!

Posted by Jaimie in Creepy Christmas, Self-publishing, writing November 15, 2012

It’s release day! My second novel – Creepy Christmas – is out today! It’s available to download from Amazon, and for the first three days only – it’s free! Yay!

Of course, the point of the post is to tell you where to buy the book…
You can read a sample or buy the book on Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com.
Amazon: FR, DE, ES, IT.

You do not need a Kindle to read it. Amazon do a lovely little free Kindle app, which you can download to your computer, phone or tablet-thingy, and read any Kindle book you wish on it.

The book is a fun, festive, family read. It’s aimed at children/middle-grade readers over the age of 8, but of course can be enjoyed by anyone! It won’t cost you a thing to download if you get it in the next three days, and you might just like it! Please pass the link on to anyone else who might be interested too!

PS: You can add Creepy Christmas to your books on Goodreads: Here!

PPS: There’s still a chance to win a copy of Kismetology on the lovely I Heart Books!