It was publication day yesterday for The Best is Yet to Come – the third book in my Escape to the Lakes series.

I’d hoped to share a publication day blog post on the day itself – more timely and meaningful – but I was on a writing deadline and submitted my latest manuscript at 11pm on Saturday night, I then had my newsletter to write and various other bits and pieces to share via my publisher and, well, I ran out of time. So here’s a my publication day blog post on the day after publication day with the better late than never mindset firmly in place!

I wrote a piece for the Boldwood Books blog in which I talk about the research I undertook to make this story accurate and authentic, getting up close with the alpacas at The Lingholm Estate by Derwent Water. I’ll include some of the photos later in this post but I won’t duplicate the written content so please do bob over to the Boldwood blog here to read all about the great fun I had with my research for The Best is Yet to Come.

Last month, I arranged to meet up with the team from Alpacaly Ever After – the amazing social enterprise whose alpacas at Lingholm inspired this story – to record my publication day video, take some photos and attempt to recreate the cover of the book.

It had been a really wet week but we were fortunate enough to have a break in the weather the morning we’d arranged to do the filming. It was lovely to have some sun … but it makes it a little challenging for taking photos. The ones looking onto the beach weren’t so bad but we struggled to get some with the lake in the background because of where the sun was, plunging the alpacas and me into silhouette. Even so, I’m pretty chuffed with what we managed. The best pics are by the talented hubby, as always.

My publication video is my absolute favourite of all the videos I’ve ever recorded. You can watch it here. As you can see, Dave completely steals the show while Odin just stands and chills in the lake – Nothing to see here!

Dave reading a copy of The Best is Yet to Come has to be my favourite photo from the day. Isn’t he the most gorgeous, photogenic boy?

I had my yellow bobble hat, my Boldwood mug and a cranberry-coloured hoodie ready to try and recreate the front cover but it was harder to get a close match than it had been for the other covers because of the many components – fence, alpacas, lake, fells and we had to settle for a post on the jetty, a bit of the lake and a view towards the beach rather than the fells. The team also needed to hold onto the alpacas so they didn’t wander off but I hoped I could get creative with it when I got back.

This is what I started with…

And using a bit of wizardry on Canva Pro, I managed to create this with a bit of erasing and some grabbing of alpacas from other photos we’d taken. I’m really not technical at all and have never tried either of these techniques so I was actually really proud of this…

Our Head of Marketing, Claire, had a little play with Photoshop and sent me this spot the difference image which made me laugh. Isn’t it fabulous?

These are my recreations of the previous two books – The Start of Something Wonderful and A Breath of Fresh Air…

Do you know what I've learned from doing these? That I have a lot of red coats/jackets!

Yesterday, the blog tour for The Best is Yet to Come started. As ever, a huge thank you to the amazing bloggers/reviewers who have taken the time to read the story and share their thoughts. I have a lot of regulars join the tours but it’s always interesting seeing a few new names in there … although nerve wracking too in case they don’t like my writing style or have struggled to dip in at book three in a series.

On that note, this book can be read as a standalone but I’m a series purist and personally believe that the best enjoyment comes from starting at the beginning and getting to know the setting, characters and story from the start – especially as characters typically recur and there are some themes or sub plots which carry across several books.

Back to the tour, thank you to Rachel Gilbey of Rachel’s Random Resources for organising it and sharing the posts on the socials as the tour progresses.

Tomorrow night (Thursday 5th September at 5pm GMT), I’m on a Facebook Live in conversation with my editor, Nia Beynon. This is the event link to join us but it will be available to watch afterwards for those who can’t join us live. We’ll be talking about The Best is Yet to Come with a particular focus on the alpacas, I’ll be doing a reading from the book and I’ll take questions from those watching if time permits. If I don’t get to the questions, I’ll come back and type in a response so no question is a wasted one. You can join the event here.

How did I spend yesterday? Usually publication day is spent welded to my chair responding to all the gorgeous messages of congratulations coming in but I was out all day so that’s next on my to do list. I go to a monthly writing meeting but I catch up with my bestie, author Sharon Booth, before that. We have about seven hours together before the meeting starts but I swear it passes in the space of two hours!

When I got back late last night, I eagerly checked the chart positions and was excited to see that The Best is Yet to Come had made it to #100 in Australia so, on day one, the book is officially an international bestseller. It also had a #1 bestseller category flag there which was exciting. It has since dipped out of the Top 100 so the glory didn’t last long … especially as somebody decided to give me a 2-star rating and it’s the ONLY one showing in Australia. Eek! I really, really don’t understand someone racing to read a book on the day it’s out only to give it a negative rating and I can’t help think it’s a personal thing where someone I don’t know has made a conscious decision to take me down a peg or two. Sadly it happens all the time to authors.

But let’s not dwell on the negatives. The Best is Yet to Come did me proud in the Apple Books UK chart with #25 in the overall paid chart and #5 in the fiction & literature category. My goodness, look at that company it was keeping!

Unfortunately, I didn’t quite make it into the UK Kindle Top 100, coming so very close at #105 first thing today. I had a stage where all but one of eight releases in a row got into the Top 100 on publication day but, of the next five (including this one), only one of them has so it’s certainly not something I take for granted. I’m so grateful to every single person who pre-orders or purchases any of my books on publication day, helping push them up the various charts. This includes my lovely Audible listeners - #65 on the overall chart and #6 in the romance category.

If you follow me on Facebook, you might have seen a recent post where I shared that Nia had let me know the latest pre-order figures and I wasn’t far off the second best ever number (for Family Secrets at Hedgehog Hollow) but had a fair bit further to go to the best ever (for A Wedding at Hedgehog Hollow). Yesterday, Nia shared that the latest figures showed The Best is Yet to Come had comfortably moved into second place and needed 61 more pre-orders to nudge into first position. Would I manage to get that many pre-orders in the final couple of days? I’ll find out soon but, much as I love to be positive, I think that’s a few to many to get in such a short space of time so I think those hedgehogs may well be holding onto their crown, although the alpacas will have given them a very good run for their money!

Yesterday wasn’t all about publication day. It was also a special anniversary as my very first Boldwood book – The Secret to Happiness – was released five years ago to the day. It was the fourth book Boldwood issued and has a few unique points. It’s the only book of mine:

To have had a cover change
With a cover directly matching somewhere real (the beach huts in Scarborough’s south bay which are a direct inspiration for Whitsborough Bay’s)
Written from three perspectives (all my others are one or two)
Written in third person instead of first
To have over 5,000 reviews/ratings on Audible* (more than double the next nearest)

* It was part of the very first Audible Plus programme and the number of minutes listened to during that time equated to nearly 135,000 complete listens. That blows my mind!

It was also the first title of mine to be stocked by The Works back in May 2020 and it’s the first book of mine to be made into a Netflix series… Ha ha ha, completely made that last one up. Gosh, I wish!!!

One final piece of news is that Lakes 4 has gone up for pre-order. It doesn't have a title or blurb ... because I haven't written a word of it yet! But I'll start writing it soon and will be bringing it into the world on 1st May 2025 (which happens to be my birthday!) It's only on Kindle at the moment as that's the only place where you can have a pre-order this far in advance but it'll be on all other formats much nearer the time. You can pre-order it for Kindle here. Thank you!

Anyway, I’ve wittered enough for now and I’ll leave you with a gallery of gorgeous alpaca pictures and my beautiful book on location in the Lake District to enjoy.

Hope you can join me at the Live.

Big hugs

Jessica xx