I haven’t had a ‘real’ job since.

(I also haven’t had money since, and I suspect these two events may be connected. But that’s another story for another day…)

I’ve written quite a lot about what made me finally quit the 9-5 here, so I won’t repeat myself, other than to say that even though I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do (or, you know, how I was going to pay my mortgage…), leaving work that day still felt a lot like how I’d imagine it must feel finally walking out of jail after being wrongly accused of something.

No, seriously.

Ever since then, though, I’ve had weekly nightmares about having to go back: not just to that job in particular (I sometimes also have nightmares about returning to the call centre I worked weekends in as a student…), but to ANY job at all, really. I’m honestly not exaggerating when I say I’d do almost ANYTHING to avoid it.

So, here are some of the things I’ve done in my bid to make a living in a way that doesn’t make me feel like my soul is dying…

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I mean… is it just me who’s currently being bombarded with this kind of thing every time I log in here?

Because, don’t get me wrong: I’m happy for all of those people and Ima let them finish. No, seriously: good for them. I don’t blame them in the slightest for wanting to shout about their success, because you better believe that if I had 200 paid subscribers, I would be shouting about it. I would never shut up about it. I would literally change my name to Amber ‘200 Paid Subscribers’ Eve. Yes I would. Try me.

But, lately it seems all the algorithm ever shows me is these un-relatable success stories, and, I’m not going to lie, they always leave me feeling just a little bit deflated. A little bit less than. A little bit, ‘WTF, how are all these people signing up to Substack and having overnight success with it, while I’ve been here for YEARS and no one’s ever heard of me?’

No, seriously: HOW?

So, if you’re in that position too, and your Notes section is making you feel like you’re the only person in the world who isn’t killing it on Substack, then allow me to de-influence you by saying that I’m not either.

I’m not even remotely ‘killing it’ on here.

Actually, I’m a Substack failure.

I joined this platform in October 2022, and I’ve been steadily losing subscribers ever since. Sure, there’s been the odd spike in subscriptions, and I even hit the ‘Rising In’ and ‘Bestseller in Fiction’ lists a couple of times (go me!), but despite what that might suggest, I have never been a Substack ‘bestseller’ (Which means someone who has more than 100 paid subscribers), and my stats for the last year look like this:

I’m like… the opposite of ‘aspirational’. I am un-aspirational. An anti-influencer. Wait: is that a thing? Should I make that my thing?!

Anyway.

Before this all starts to sound horribly self-pitying, (because, believe it or not, that’s not what this post is supposed to be about…), let me just say that absolutely none of this is remotely surprising to me, and I’m not here for pity. Because, last week I sat down and had a good look at my newsletter. I scrolled through the archive, doing my best to try to view it through the eyes of someone who’d never seen it before, and I did a deep dive into the analytics in a bid to figure out which posts worked, and which ones didn’t.

(Spoiler alert: it was most of them. Most of them didn’t work. D’oh!)

My conclusion from all of this?

Yeah, I probably wouldn’t subscribe to my newsletter either, tbh.

So, instead of feeling sorry for myself, and wondering why other people are signing up and immediately shooting to Substack stardom, while I languish here un-noticed, here’s everything I’ve learned from failing on Substack…

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To quickly re-cap for the benefit of those of you who have actual offline lives, and are therefore blissfully unaware of all of this: there are witch hunts. Yes, like in the olden days, except this time the witch hunts revolve around people accusing authors of having used AI to write their books (often without a single shred of evidence), and then cancelling them for it.

This state of affairs has been ongoing for a while now, but it took a more worrying turn earlier this month when publishers and agents started hunting witches too, and withdrawing deals from authors they suspect might be guilty of using AI. Cue lots of authors publishing earnest anti-AI declarations on their newsletters and social media, along with detailed info on how they intend to defend themselves against accusations of AI when the witch hunters come for them — which, let’s make no mistake, they will. Sooner or later, they’re going to come for us all, because witch hunting is a hobby for these people, and they’re not going to give it up without a fight.

(And, OK, also because AI is repulsive, and a genuine issue facing the industry. That doesn’t excuse the witch hunts, obviously, but it does have to be acknowledged…)

I like to think I’ve already made my anti-AI stance clear: I don’t use it, don’t like it, and if I have to read one more piece of text with the phrase, “not this, but that,” or “And honestly?” in it, I will probably scream, like Veruca Salt when she doesn’t get her own way on something.

I’ve never, though, explained exactly how I’m planing to PROVE I don’t use AI in my writing (other than through my cunning use of typos, I mean…), so here, for the avoidance of all doubt, is how I will do it:

I won’t.

No, I’m being serious: I have absolutely no intention of contorting myself into increasingly ridiculous shapes in order to prove to a bunch of armchair detectives that I’m a real person who writes her books herself.

Because I refuse to willingly take part in a witch hunt.

Because I firmly believe the burden of proof should be on the accuser, not on the accused.

And, finally, because there is literally no way to prove a negative, is there?

I mean, let’s see…

OK. I mean, I could show you my notes, I guess? Here you go:

This is an actual page from the notebook I used while drafting the book I’ve just handed over to my publisher. OR IS IT? Because, I mean, I could’ve scrawled that note to myself at any point, couldn’t I? It’s not dated: and, even if it was, unless you’re going to somehow forensically test it to scientifically date when it was written, it would count for nothing.

A lot of my notes are like this. Most of them are legible only to me; some not even. As well as that “OMFG, what’s the poiiinntttt”, here’s some other stuff you’ll find in this particular notebook:

• character names that changed by the final version and therefore do not appear in the published book.

• random scenes and dialogue I did not end up using in the manuscript.

• plot points I completely changed, and which, again, bear no relation to the finished draft.

• a random note I scrawled to my husband when he was on a video call but I needed to tell him I was going out somewhere.

• quite a lot of very private stream-of-consciousness journal-type stuff that I use to try to clear my head and figure stuff out, but which I would literally rather die1 than show anyone.

Like, I’m sorry, folks, but you’re not getting to see my notes. And, even if you DID see them, they would prove absolutely nothing, because not only do a lot of them make no sense at all, if you were determined to think I’d used AI to write my book, I suppose you’d just say I could’ve written those notes after the fact, wouldn’t you?

But… drafts! Authors should surely be able to show their readers evidence of all the drafts they created in the process of writing their books!

Um, no. Not necessarily.

I’ve said this before, but I don’t really write ‘drafts’. I write everything in a single document, changing and removing things as I go. I do often have a second document I use as a kind of dumping ground for stuff I’ve taken out but still want to keep for future books or whatever, but I don’t create an entirely new ‘draft’ every time I change something. I could show you the document history, which details every time something changed:

This is from the Reedsy editor, which I use to draft, and it’s the document history for Highland Getaway. But all it proves is that I made changes to the document at various times. That doesn’t prove I didn’t use AI to make those changes, though, does it? I mean, I DIDN’T, and I hope I’m making that clear enough. But, again, if you were determined to accuse me of it, the document history doesn’t prove anything, because you’d just say that all of those changes could be me pasting text in from ChatGPT. (Especially given that I seem to have made them ALL at exactly 19:21, which… HOW?2) I don’t expect people who write produce AI books just type in a prompt and have it spit out an entire, 90,000 word book, which they then publish without making a single change to it, after all. (DO THEY?) Surely they must change things and tweak things? And surely doing that would ALSO create a document history that would look something like the one above. Surely?

“But you can include your process on socials!” says the person in the screenshot above. Aha! Yes! So I can! Except… whoops, no, actually, I can’t. I spent all of last year, for instance, unable to say anything AT ALL about my book, because the publisher wanted to wait until the official announcement. I’m currently in exactly the same position with book number 2: I literally can’t tell you anything about it, much less ‘talk at length’ about it. (Which is why I have my hand over half of the page in the photo of my notebook — there was some stuff there that would give too much of the plot away…) This is actually quite frustrating for me, because I am by nature an over-sharer, but it’s very common in traditional publishing, and a very good reason why not all authors will be ‘sharing their process’ on their socials. Hell, some authors don’t even HAVE ‘socials’. Or they have pen names and want to remain anonymous. Or they just don’t WANT to have to ‘share their process’ on freaking Instagram, which is absolutely their right, and who are you to tell them that, actually, they must post stuff on Instagram, even if they don’t want to, or you’ll tell on them?

So what else can I do to prove that I write my own books? All that’s really left, I suppose, is for me to actually video myself writing… but, not only would that be the weirdest thing ever, the fact is that videos can be faked. Unless the screen is clearly visible (which it can’t be, because, again, I’m not allowed to share the book publicly until the publisher says so, plus I don’t want to share my WIP until I’m completely done with it…), I could be writing anything. My grocery list. Taylor Swift lyrics. The words “All work and no play makes Amber a dull girl” over and over again.

More importantly, though, why on God’s green earth would you think you have the right to WATCH me working? To read my private notes? To casually demand that I publicly perform ‘being an author’ in the exact way you deem appropriate, or you’ll destroy my entire career based on a ‘hunch’? Can you see how creepy and weird that is? How completely intolerable that level of scrutiny would be to… well, to anyone, really, let alone authors, who, as a group tend to be on the introverted/private side?

And yet, incredible though it seems, this is the situation we seem to be facing. Just this week I’ve seen numerous Instagram posts from fellow authors saying “yes, you can see my notes! Yes, you can read my drafts! Look, here is a photo of me working!” And while I understand why they’re all doing this, I’m afraid I won’t be joining them, because I honestly believe that no matter how much ‘evidence’ you attempt to provide, it will never, ever be enough for the witch hunters. There will always be another hoop they’ll want you to jump through, and then another one after that. And, I don’t know about you, but I’m done jumping through hoops to appease people on the Internet.

So I will swear on the Bible3 that I didn’t use AI. I will sign any number of legal documents declaring this. If you’re my agent or publisher, I will answer any questions you have, and have as many discussions as you need to convince you. I will cross my heart and hope to die.

But I will not give you access to my private notes, which are almost like a diary. I will not turn every writing session into some weird public performance, which is recorded and broadcast for the internet to pick apart. I will absolutely not be giving up my beloved em dashes and Oxford commas (although I think most of those got edited out of my last book: boo!), because if you think only AI writes like that, then you clearly haven’t read enough books. I said what I said.

Ultimately, instead of asking myself how I’m going to prove I didn’t use AI, I’m going to ask YOU4 to prove I did.

I’ll wait…

If you’d like to read a non-AI Scottish romcom, Highland Getaway is out now. I wrote every single word myself, and deleted quite a lot too. You can find it anywhere that sells books, or by clicking on the image below…

I knew this was coming, obviously: not because my book cover is AI (it absolutely isn’t) or because my publisher paid to advertise the book on Amazon (totally standard marketing for books, really weird comment to make about it…), but because we’re firmly in the era of the AI witch hunt, and it increasingly feels like being accused of using AI, either to write or market your book, is some kind of weird rite of passage as an author. I’d say the only surprise here is that it took so long for it to happen, but I suspect that’s only because it took so long for anyone to even notice me/my books, so … yes.

For the record, I’m as anti-AI as anyone. AI, after all, basically ‘killed’ my blog, which, in turn, destroyed the livelihood I’d been making from it for over a decade at that point. AI steals artists’ work and turns it into strange, ‘uncanny valley’ images, or meaningless blocks of text in which people have ‘quiet’ realisations that something is ‘not this, but that’ all the time. I despise it. A little bit of me dies inside every time someone I follow on Instagram posts a photo with a clearly AI-written caption. I don’t understand how any writer or artist can be OK with it, and it’s genuinely strange to me that I even have to say this, because who would want their industry to be taken over by robots?

Who, though?

You know what I hate even more than I hate generative AI, though?

Witch hunts.

I cannot stand witch hunts… which is unfortunate for me, really, because the internet loves a good witch hunt — maybe even more than anything else. I sometimes wonder if some of the people I see on Threads really even care about the issues they claim to be so passionate about, or if they just get off on subjecting other people to purity tests, because that’s often what it feels like.

And it’s not just random people on Threads, either. This week, The Atlantic took it upon themselves to publish an article accusing Daggermouth author H.M. Wolfe of using AI to write her book. The author of that article admits there’s no real evidence of this, and H.M. Wolfe and her publisher have both denied it, but that doesn’t matter, because as the person who accused me of using AI on my book cover earlier this month proved, people are now so sensitive to the very idea of AI, that it feels entirely reasonable to them to ‘shoot on sight’ and ask questions later: if even then.

In this case, the person did apologize, and we ended up having a perfectly reasonable conversation, which I appreciated. But he did still ‘shoot on sight’, and that’s a problem for authors like me, who now find themselves scared to post anything in case they’re accused of something they can’t possibly defend themselves against — because how can we?

Well, here’s one suggestion, courtesy of Threads:

And, I mean… sure, I could show you my notebooks, filled with my indecipherable handwriting (and which I’m sure you’d say I could easily have pulled together after the fact). But most of my ‘planning’ is done in my head (in fact, most of it’s done in the shower, and trust me, you don’t want to see that…), and takes the form of a couple of very rough outlines (which, again, I suppose would be easy enough to fake). I don’t write ‘drafts’ as such: all of my rewrites are done in the same document, and while the Reedsy editor I use does create a writing timeline, which tracks which changes have been made and when, that still won’t prove that I made those changes myself, and didn’t just copy and paste them from ChatGPT, will it?

Which leaves me… where? I know some artists and illustrators have started to literally film themselves working, or screen record their output, but honestly, the idea of having to set up a camera to film every writing section is genuinely wild to me. I shouldn’t have to feel like I’m on trial every time I sit down to write. I shouldn’t have to turn every writing session into some strange kind of public performance, or be forced to make my private notes, containing all of my inner thoughts and personal experiences, available to any member of the public who decides I need to prove I wrote my book myself. If I thought I was going to have to do all of those things I would give up right now: not because I have something to hide, but because when you’re as awkward and introverted as I am, it’s hard enough showing up on social media every day, without having to essentially livestream your entire life just to prove you aren’t a filthy AI user.

But, incredible though it may seem, this genuinely seems to be where we’re headed. Because if the witch hunts don’t stop, the writing will. If people keep on braying for blood, like the person yelling ‘start the witch hunts’ on Threads, AI will be all you’re left with, because I can’t imagine there will be many creatives out there willing to subject themselves to the level of scrutiny and invasion of privacy that will apparently be required to ‘prove it’s their work’. We’ll just stop doing the work.

Sure, AI is a growing problem: you don’t need to convince me of that. But this… this isn’t the solution, folks. As someone much cleverer than me pointed out in response to that thread, no actual ‘witches’ were killed in the witch hunts: it was just ordinary people. The people doing the so-called ‘hunting’ were the bad guys … and yet here I am, scared to use an em dash (my most beloved form of punctuation!) in this post in case someone accuses me of having written it with AI.

Is this really the future of publishing?

This week marks the one month anniversary (no, it’s not a thing…) of Highland Getaway being out in the world, which means my most frequently asked question right now is the one in the title… which, just in case you were wondering, is NOT a great question to ask an author, all things considered.

Reasons not to ask authors how their book sales are going:

1. Imagine how awkward it’ll be if the book totally flopped and you’ve basically just forced the author into either admitting it < record scratch> or straight-up lying about it to save face? Awwwwkkkkwarrrd.

2. Most non-publishing people assume books are only successful if they can buy them in the airport, or watch the movie version on Netflix, which makes them a tough crowd, really. Like, sorry my book’s not in Tesco, Frank…

3. A lot of the time we genuinely don’t know the answer, but you, as a non-publishing person, will find it hard to believe that, so you will react as if we’re trying to trick you in some way, and then we’re back to point one, with the ‘awkward’.

(Other questions not to ask authors include, “Does this mean you’re rich now?” and “Why don’t you just get it made into a movie?” You’re welcome…)

Of all of these, number 3 is my life right now. The fact is, I genuinely have no idea how many books I’ve sold so far. I mean, I’m assuming I could probably find out if I asked my publisher, but I haven’t done that, because … honestly, I don’t know why not. I think maybe it just feels easier not knowing an exact number at this point? Because if I don’t know the exact number, then I can’t be disappointed by it? Or something?

I’m not sure. What I do know, however, is that it’s definitely not lack of interest that’s stopping me asking about the sales figures, because instead of doing that, what I’ve chosen to do this month is restlessly hover over the book’s Amazon dashboard, tracking the book’s ranking, which now has a direct correlation to my mood at any given time. When the book hit the giddy heights of number 69 in Contemporary Romance, for instance, I felt quietly pleased with myself, and only slightly disappointed that it didn’t get to 67, so I could tell my eight-year-old I was at SIX SEVEN. But when it dropped out of the top 100 again a week later, I was so devastated I briefly considered giving up writing altogether, and going to work down the mine.

But then it came back, and went to 75! And then dropped again! What a rollercoaster ride, seriously.

From all of this, my overall impression is that the book isn’t a bestseller, but… possibly isn’t a complete flop, either? But, while none of my self-published books ever made it this high in the Amazon rankings (Well, not in the UK: I was quite big in France and Germany at one point, apparently…), I’m also finding it very hard not to compare myself to other authors whose books are in the top 10, so I don’t think it’s time to break out the bubbly just yet.

(Yes, there is an actual bottle of bubbly. Just like the one I saved for when I signed my book deal, there’s currently another bottle chilling in the fridge for … something. I don’t know what it is yet, but I’ll know it when it happens...)

(I was going to open it on the evening of release day, but we had an early start the next morning, then my parents had kindly bought us all a bottle to share the day after that, so I got to keep mine mine. Possibly forever, at this rate…)

There are, however, some other reasons to celebrate this month, albeit not with champagne, because let’s not get too crazy over here:

1. I handed in the manuscript for book two just a couple of days before Highland Getaway came out. I’m still waiting on my edit letter for that, so there’s still a long way to go with it, obviously, but at least the first hurdle has been crossed!
   

2. I’ve started drafting what I’m hoping will be book 3 (as in, my 3rd traditionally published book, which will be my 11th overall…). I’m only a couple of (very rough) chapters in at the moment, but I’ll be sending it to my agent soon to see what she thinks of it, so if you could please keep everything crossed for Potential Book 3, that would be fab.
   

3. We’re going on holiday next week! Which means my favourite two weeks of the entire year is about to begin and I will soon be adopting my ‘holiday personality’, which I like to think is secretly the ‘real’ me, but which I only get to inhabit for a couple of weeks every year when there’s sunshine and no stress. I can’t wait…

Finally, if you’ve bought, read, or reviewed Highland Getaway this month, a huge thank you: you honestly have no idea how much it means to me! And if you’re taking the book on a ‘getaway’ of your own this summer, could you do me a huge favour and send me a photo (or tag me on Instagram)?

While I’m happy that we made the right choice in starting the book much later, though, today I thought it might be fun to take a look back at that original starting point, which sheds some light on Rosie’s shopping addiction, as well as letting us see exactly what happened when she received that invitation to The Chrysalis (plus a bonus appearance by Bex and Daniel).

So, here you go! The original (very long!) first chapter of the book that became Highland Getaway…

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It’s been a week today since Highland Getaway came out, and I still haven’t calmed down. Seriously, I have no chill at all about this. The morning after release day I literally got a health alert from my Apple Watch saying my heart rate was higher than usual, and I was like, “No kidding, watch? Have you ever published a book? Get back to me when you have…”

That morning I headed to Edinburgh to sign copies at various bookstores around the city, which was an absolute blast — especially when I got to see readers actually buying the book right in front of me — and, since then I’m glad to report that my heart-rate has returned to normal, with only a few random spikes every time someone tags me in a review. (They’ve all been lovely so far, but you just never know, do you?)

Anyway, now that the book is out in the world, and I know quite a few of you have already read it (Thank you!), I thought it was time for a little ‘behind the scenes’ of the book, and how it came to exist. Note: this post contains mild spoilers for Highland Getaway, so if you haven’t read it yet, but are planning to, you might want to skip this one…

• The book was originally going to be self published, as a kind of sister title to Cool Girl Summer, and the entire concept was based around the fact that I really, really wanted to use a particular title (which I’m not going to share, just in case I ever do get the chance to use it one day…). So I basically came up with an idea to to fit the Super Special title (Note: don’t do that…), then the publisher decided to go with a completely different title anyway, so… yes. On the plus side, I still have that title to use someday!

• Also to fit the title, the book was initially supposed to come out at Christmas time: a fact that now seems absolutely wild to me, because I only came up with the idea in November 2024, and … what was I thinking? No, seriously, what? Needless to say, I didn’t manage to finish it in time, but that ended up working in my favor, because if I HAD published it at the time I’d planned to, when I got that email from my future editor the following February, I wouldn’t have had a handy, just-completed manuscript to send them. So, for once, things not going to plan actually turned out to be a good thing.

• Because of the planned release date, the events in the book originally took place in the depths of winter, with the launch party at the end of the book being a New Year’s Eve Party. The winter setting was quite important to the plot, but because the book was slated for release in June, I was asked to change the season to spring/early summer, as the publisher felt people probably wouldn’t be into reading Christmas books on the beach. Even after multiple edits I was still finding rogue references to snow, or it being pitch dark at times when the sun wouldn’t even have started to set during a Scottish summer…

• ‘Rosie Winters’? Yes, that would be yet another reference to the season/title that got changed…
  

• I know I’ve told you this before, but the inspiration for The Chrysalis hotel was Dunrobin Castle in Sutherland; in my opinion, the most beautiful castle in Scotland. The real castle isn’t a hotel, but I’m sure it gets its fair share of influencers anyway.

  

• I changed the names of almost all of the influencers (except Bex, who was always going to be Bex…) so many times (mostly because I kept coming up with names that were too similar, then worrying people wouldn’t be able to tell them all apart) that I’d honestly have a hard time telling you what they’re all called now without checking.
  

• Bramble, the pony Rosie rides on the beach, is a nod to Patricia Leitch’s ‘Jinny’ books, which were favourites of mine as a child, and which also featured a black Highland pony called Bramble.
  

• None of the influencers are based on real people, but some of the things they get up to (lying about their ages, faking photos etc) are very much a part of the influencer culture I was a part of years ago, albeit as a blogger rather than an Instagrammer / You Tuber. As ‘influencing’ was such a big part of my life for so many years, it made sense to me to set a book in that world, which still fascinates me, even though it’s no longer how I earn a living. (You’ll also find influencer characters in A Scottish Cozy Mystery, and my next release for Black & White has a main character who’s a former blogger…)

• The opening chapter in the published book was actually Chapter 3 in the first draft. My editor suggested plunging Rosie right into the action from the start, which I think was the right decision — I’m planning to share the original chapter one, though, which shows Rosie receiving the invitation and buying the ‘magical’ red sweater (originally a grey sweatshirt) with paid subscribers soon, though, so if you haven’t upgraded your subscription yet, now’s your chance!

  Subscribe now

  
  

• Finally, Stevie the dog has been getting a lot of love from readers, and I’m pleased to say that the real ‘Stevie’ is just as great: she’s my brother and sister-in-law’s Belgian Shepherd, Pandora, and she’s a Very Good Girl who has never once been mistaken for a Black Shuck:

Until next week!

Here are some things people have been saying about it:

“current and thought-provoking. The twists and turns kept me hooked until the very end”

“a great example of how to write a perfect romantic story in the Highlands of Scotland”

“wonderfully funny and heartwarming… I didn’t want it to end”

“heartwarming, funny, and chaotically good. I read it all in one evening!”

“funny and poignant with plot twists galore”

“lighthearted, funny, and full of charm”

“exactly what romance novels should be about”

“a swoon-worthy slow burn”

And that was just my mum.

Kidding! I’m kidding! Those are all quote from real people (not that my mum isn’t a real person, you understand, but… nevermind…) who were kind enough to read the advance copies and leave me a review.

And now it’s your turn!

The book is available in paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats, from anywhere that sells books. (If your local bookseller doesn’t have it, just ask them to order it for you!) You can buy it online here, and, if you enjoy it and have a couple of spare minutes to write me a review (it doesn’t have to be anything in-depth: literally just a couple of lines will do!), I’d be eternally grateful!

As for me, having waited for over a year for this day to come, I’ve so far spent most of it like this:

Actual launch day photo of me and Max on the school run this morning. Look, I know it looks glamorous, but someone has to do it, OK? And doesn’t June in Scotland look glorious? I’m both an author and a travel influencer!

Today might be fairly ordinary, however, but tomorrow I’m off to Edinburgh to visit some bookstores and sign some books for them (so if you’re in the area, and you’d like a signed copy, keep an eye on my Instagram to find out where to get them…), then at the weekend my parents have booked a celebratory meal at our favourite restaurant. So it should be a fun few days, that I only wish my younger self could’ve known about, because it would’ve blown her tiny mind, for sure.

For now, though, a huge thank you to everyone who’s helped make my childhood dream a reality, and particularly to those of you who’ve bought the book: I really hope you love it as much as I do!

headdesk

(Also, people keep asking me if I’m excited, and I can’t say ‘no, I’m absolutely terrified, Sandra, because what if everyone hates it?” so I just say ‘yes, of course!’…)

It would be fair to say that I’ve never been very good at marketing. In fact, once a book is written, it’s basically dead to me (sorry, books…), and all I can think about is the next one, and to hell with everything else. So, with all of my previous books, I’ve mostly just waited until the book’s out, then done a few social media posts, which I’ve quickly given up on when none of them took off.

This is probably at least one of the reasons why none of my books have ever become bestsellers, now I come to think of it. But the fact is, I’m a writer, not a marketer — which is why it’s always seemed particularly cruel to me that, a lot of the time, a book's success depends solely on how well it’s marketed, rather than how well it’s written.

Highland Getaway, of course, is no different. Yes, it’s traditionally published rather than self-published, like my previous books, but when I signed my contract, I was under no illusions. I knew perfectly well that my publisher would be unlikely to pull out all the stops with marketing, and this, it seems, is true. My publisher dealt with the cover, the ARC copies, and getting the book into actual stores, but the rest of the marketing efforts will come down to yours truly… which is a bit scary really, because I feel a bit like I’ve come this far, and am about to fall at the last hurdle because of the whole Not a Marketer thing.

Or not!

Because there are two ways to look at this, obviously. I can either think, “oh shit, there’s only two weeks to go, and I have no idea how to do book marketing properly”… or, I can take these next two weeks, and basically just throw everything I have at them, in the hope that something works.

Naturally, I’m going for option two.

(I mean, I’m also going to do a bit of option one, too, because the fact is, I don’t have any idea how to do book marketing, and I am vaguely panicking about it. But I’m going to do my best to promote the book while panicking, because that would appear to be my only option, as well as being how I do most things in life...)

I know the first week’s sales are crucial in both the book’s success and in helping persuade my publisher to buy more books from me in future, so my current focus is on getting as many pre-orders as I can: not just so I can hopefully have a decent launch week, but also because, realistically I know there’s only so long I can keep on cranking out promotional content before I either die of The Cringe or just run out of steam and give up. So the plan is to go hard for the next two weeks and then… um, go home? Probably?

In my case, all of my marketing is being done online, because … well, because I’m anxious and socially awkward, and I don’t know any other way to do it. I know some authors swear by organising book tours and other in-person events, but not only do I have no idea where to even start with things like that, I have no budget for them (and by that I mean literally no budget: as in, I have no spare cash at all…), and I feel like in-person stuff would be counter-productive for me anyway, because I’m so painfully awkward I’d most likely persuade people NOT to buy the book. Yes.

With that said, I have had some success with Instagram lately, and have been slowly growing my follower numbers there, so that’s going to be my main focus for the next couple of weeks, and I’m going to be creating most of my content for there, with the aim of then cross-posting it to my other platforms. (In an ideal world I’d make different content for each, because they’re all subtly different, but alas this is not an ideal world, and there’s only one of me, so cross-posting it is…)

I’ve had most success on Instagram with Carousel Posts like the one below, which has had over 17,000 views, and brought me a few hundred new followers:

These are really time-consuming to create, though, and so far the ones that have done best for me have been ones that aren’t specifically promoting my book… which is nice, of course, but not particularly helpful right now, because I’m glad you liked my Instagram post, but would you guys please just buy my books already?!

Sheesh.

So, while I’m aiming to continue creating as many of these as I can, in terms of promoting Highland Getaway, I’m mostly going to be concentrating on Instagram Trial Reels — which, for the uninitiated are Reels Instagram shows only to non-followers. I like these because they basically allow you to be as cringe as you want, and to repeat yourself over and over, without having to worry about annoying your existing followers, and this makes them particularly useful for marketing, because they allow you to test different hooks and formats, and (hopefully) figure out what works and what doesn’t.

From what I’ve read (on Threads, naturally, which is NOT part of my marketing strategy on account of people being completely unhinged over there…), the current wisdom states that you should post exactly 9 Trial Reels per day — NINE — to get the most of this system. This, needless to say, is completely unrealistic for most of us, so I’m aiming to just do as many as I can each day without losing the quality (She says as if her Trial Reels are ‘quality’…), and then cross-posting them to:

• TikTok

• Facebook

• YouTube Shorts

And then just crossing my fingers and hoping at least one of those works, basically. (Although, I mean, even if each video ‘only’ gets 200 views — which is what happens to most of them — that’s still 200 extra people who now know about my book, right?)

Some other things I’m doing…

• Facebook advertising

This is actually where we’ve had most success with my other books, and we’ve set aside a small amount of money to run some Facebook ads for Highland Getaway. Although this has worked well for us at times in the past, though, it’s incredibly inconsistent, and we’ve never had much luck with promoting pre-orders (I’m not sure if that’s been an issue with the ads themselves, or if it’s just that people prefer to wait until a book’s out before buying it…) so most of those ads will run once the book has released, with just a few going out over the next two weeks.

• Email marketing…

… via this very newsletter. Don’t worry, though, though, nothing’s going to change, and I’m not going to suddenly start spamming you with multiple salesy emails every week. I know everyone says a mailing list is the most powerful thing in an author’s toolkit, but I lose subscribers every time I send outa newsletter, so I figure mine’s probably doing more harm than good at this point. If you’re reading this, though, please consider yourselves marketed to!

Once the book’s actually out, meanwhile, I have a few other things planned which I may or may not be able to pull off, but for now, that’s pretty much it — although if anyone has any other suggestions I haven’t thought of (and which don’t involve me having to speak in front of an audience), I’d love to hear them.

Two weeks to go, folks!

This newsletter only exists due to the generosity of its subscribers. To support my work and allow me to continue avoiding the fictional Victorian workhouse that haunts my nightmares, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription below:

“But what’s in it for me, Amber?” I hear you ask.

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• Monthly ‘Behind the Scenes’ posts, in which you get to be the first to know about upcoming releases and what I’m currently working on.

• Occasional ‘bonus’ posts which are generally a little more personal/the kind of thing I don’t want to be available to everyone on the internet.

• COMING SOON: Bonus chapters and deleted scenes from my books.

• The warm, fuzzy feeling that comes from knowing you did your good deed for the day, and helped keep a roof over my family’s heads for another month.

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SPOILER: It takes a long time. A verrryyyy long time. And so does reading this newsletter, actually, so I’m going to cut the waffly introduction for once, and just get straight to it. So, here’s my indie-to-trad publishing timeline, right from the very start…

November 2024

I came up with the idea for the book while making myself a Pot Noodle one lunchtime, and immediately went back to my desk and bashed out a 6-page outline for it. This went back and forth between me and my husband (who normally works on the initial plot ideas with me) a couple of times, but I don’t think I looked at it again after November 13th, when I sent Terry version 2 of the outline, which seems to have been the final one, and which looks roughly the same as the original to me, so God knows what I thought I was doing there.

(This was quite unusual for me because I can spend weeks on end working on my outlines1, but this one seemed to come out almost fully formed, and didn’t change much until my future editor got her hands on it. I wish they were all like that…)

I started drafting as soon as I had the outline sorted, but we had the Christmas holidays to contend with (and just December in general, which regular readers will know is my Bad Month, when I get barely anything done), so although I’d confidently predicted I’d have it finished by Christmas (oh my sweet summer child…), it actually took me until…

February 10th, 2025

… or thereabouts, when I finished the first draft, and immediately started work on the self-edits, because my self-publishing empire (lol) at the time relied on a fairly rapid release schedule, and at this point Terry and I were already starting to plan the book that was to become The Love Curse.

I didn’t track how much time I spent drafting, but I’d say it was somewhere between 6-8 weeks; this was definitely one of the quickest drafts I’ve written and, despite the lack of a detailed outline, it came to me quite easily, with the main issue being all of the school holidays and other events which slowed down my progress. (Don’t worry, I’d get my comeuppance with the next book, which was to take approximately forever…)

February 17th

It was the half-term break, and we had a houseful of kids. I briefly escaped to the bathroom to check my email, and that’s where I was when I read that first message from Clem Flanagan — an editor at Black & White Publishing— asking if I’d be interested in a chat.

I genuinely thought this must be either some kind of joke, or one of those vanity publishers at first, because this kind of thing just doesn’t happen to me. A quick Google, however, revealed that Black & White was a real publisher, and Clem was a real person, so I emailed her back, then waited for someone to pop out of wherever they’d been hiding and tell me it was all some elaborate kind of practical joke.

February 19th

My first video call with Clem, during which it transpired that not only was this NOT a joke, Clem was particularly interested in acquiring Scottish books by Scottish authors. I swear to God I almost fell off my chair at the serendipity of this happening just as I’d finished drafting a book set in the Highlands. I mean, what are the chances, right?

I sent Clem the unedited manuscript, then continued with my self-edits, at which point I realised I’d somehow managed to write the worst book in the entire history of books. The literal worst. The draft was riddled with typos and other errors, and because I’d sent it while I was in the middle of editing, there were things that happened at the end that were now completely inexplicable given the changes I’d already made to the start.

I’d completely blown it, in other words.

I sent Clem an updated version of the manuscript, but confidently assumed I’d never hear from her again.

March 2025

The waiting game. I was absolutely convinced at this stage that Clem wouldn’t want the book, and figured I should probably just forget about it altogether because it clearly sucked. Also, the book was originally set in winter, and now we were heading into spring… which isn’t exactly a great time to release Christmas books. So I decided to shelf the book, along with any thoughts of getting a traditional book deal, and started work on The Love Curse instead.

By this stage, my previous release had been out for three months, and had not done well. We would later re-release it under a different name, and it would go on to become my biggest seller, but in March of 2025 I didn’t know that, and I was so down about everything I genuinely considered quitting writing altogether, and just going to work down the mine, or whatever it is that people with ‘real’ jobs do these days.

It wasn’t a fun month, really.

BUT!

March 31st

Plot twist! Clem got in touch to say that not only had she liked the book, the rest of her team had liked it too, and she wanted to take it to an acquisitions meeting (which is where the editorial team pitch the book to the sales/marketing people and try to convince them to make an offer on it) the following week.

I still thought the book sucked, so I told everyone who knew about it that I wasn’t going to get too excited about this, although I was secretly a little bit excited.

April 3rd

The acquisitions meeting. Clem had told me I’d be unlikely to hear anything right away, and we had family visiting from England, plus a wedding in the Highlands to prepare for, so I tried to put it to the back of my mind and pretend nothing was happening, while also checking my email approximately every 5 seconds. I even went back to the bathroom to see if whatever magic had brought me the first email would somehow bring me another, but apparently publishing doesn’t work that way, so no.

April 7th

While in the middle of hosting a dinner for 15 family members, I reflexively (and completely without hope) checked my email, and found this email from Clem:

Panic ensued.

I had somehow found myself in a position where I’d been offered a book deal, but I had no agent, and absolutely no clue what I was doing. Oh, and I also had a houseful of guests, so there wasn’t much I could do about it until …

April 8th

Terry got up the next morning and immediately set to work emailing a list of literary agents, which he’d pulled together from a hasty Google search. He emailed about half a dozen, saying I’d had an offer and now needed representation — to my amazement, almost all of them replied and asked to see the manuscript.

(If you’re wondering why Terry did this instead of me, it’s because the one thing I knew — or thought I knew — about literary agents was that they were notorious for not replying unless you sent them a very specific kind of query letter, along with a single unicorn’s hair and a promise to give them your firstborn child. And while I was faffing around trying to pull all of this together2, Terry just got on with things and started sending emails…)

(I mean, it was also because I’m so painfully awkward and lacking in confidence I assumed that even with a deal already on the table, no literary agency would want to sign me, so there was that, too…)

Of all the responses we had, though, our favourite was Kate Nash , who called us as soon as she got Terry’s email. Kate promised to read the book ASAP and set up a video call for the next day.

April 9th

Video call with Kate, who did a great job of explaining how everything worked and what would happen next. She hadn’t, however, finished reading the manuscript yet, and we were leaving for the Highlands the next day (Which was appropriate, really, given the book is set there…), so Kate promised to finish reading it, and get back in touch.

April 13th

The day after my cousin’s wedding, we were wandering around Brodie Castle when I received an offer of representation from Kate.

April 14th

We were in Aberdeen, en route to our next stop in the Cairngorms, when we got an email from one of the other agents we’d contacted, saying she’d also loved the book and wanted to have a chat about it.

This was both awkward and amazing, because I’d never in my wildest dreams imagined having one agent interested in me, let alone two.

Much discussion ensued.

April 16th

I signed with Kate, while staying at a gorgeous lodge at Glen Clova. I was officially an agented author! But I still hadn’t signed the book deal… which was a surprise to me, because I’d naively assumed that once Kate had checked the contract, I’d just … you know, sign it… and that would be that.

But no!

There were a few things in the contract we wanted to query, so we left Kate to get on with that, and I went back to drafting The Love Curse, still feeling a bit shellshocked by everything that had happened.

May 14th

We finally agreed the terms of the deal with Black & White, after a lot of back and forth between Kate and the publisher. My instinct was to immediately rush to Instagram/ the newsletter to tell the world, but was asked to hold off at least until the contract was signed.

May - June

For a long time, nothing seemed to happen. Of course, behind the scenes quite a lot was happening, and Kate was having lots of discussions with the publisher, but I, who’d naively expected to just sign the contract and start telling everyone about it, found this apparent lack of progress quite difficult, and kept convincing myself the deal wasn’t actually going to go ahead. This timescale, I was to learn, was all very normal for traditional publishing, though; unlike self-publishing, things tend to move super-slowly, and that definitely took a lot of getting used to, especially for someone as impatient as I am.

June 16th

While we were waiting for the contract to be finalised, Terry and I headed into Edinburgh to finally meet Clem at the Black & White offices for a chat about the book, and what would happen next. After this, Clem sent over my edit letter with suggested changes, and we also started discussing the title, which I already knew from the discussions Kate had been having was going to have to change.

I was a little bit worried about starting a structural edit without having actually signed a contract, but Kate assured me this was all completely normal, so I got to work, aware that the summer holidays were coming up, and that once they started, my time wouldn’t be my own.

I’d always assumed traditional publishing would allow me the luxury of much more time than I was used to for each stage of the process, but we had two holidays arranged for July and August, and not a lot of childcare over the summer, so I ended up having to somehow complete the edits (Which involved changing the season the book was set in, and completely rewriting the first few chapters, as well as adding at least one extra…) in the couple of weeks I had before the holiday.

June 24th

Gave Clem some details for the cover briefing. This part was also quite strange for me as I’m pretty obsessive about my covers, and am used to being heavily involved — to the point of control freakery, really — in the design process. That’s not how trad publishing works, though, so while I had some input in terms of telling Clem what the characters should look like and which castle was the inspiration for the setting (this one), that was the extent of my involvement and I was simultaneously excited to see what my book would look like with a professional cover (we’ve only ever had a tiny budget for covers, and have done most of them ourselves) and terrified in case I hated it.

June 30th

Sent the completed structural edit to Clem, just 14 days after receiving the edit letter. Really wanted a lie down afterwards, but Max’s school broke up for summer at around the same time, so NO.

July 2nd

The night before we left for our summer holiday. I’d just got out of the shower and decided to quickly check my email before bed, only to find a message from Kate saying the contract had finally arrived, and would be ready to sign within the next few days. Exciting!

July 7th

I’d just climbed into our rental car in Lanzarote when the contract finally arrived, ready to be signed. But I wanted to do it somewhere other than in the back of a Cupra, so I waited until that night, and signed it at a cute cocktail bar with my parents, Terry and Max.

Afterwards, I messaged a few of my friends, but still wasn’t allowed to announce the news publicly — a fact that genuinely almost killed me. (Cause of Death: signing a book deal but not being allowed to tell anyone…)

July 17th

The last day of our holiday, and I got a notification saying the publisher had also signed the contract. It was finally official… but not really official official as far as I was concerned, because I still couldn’t tell anyone.

July 19th

I got back from holiday to find the line edit of the book had arrived, and now I had to go through it and make changes as required. Unfortunately for me, I had very little time to do this, as we were off to the south of England for my brother-in-law’s annual summer party at the end of the month, so I had to do it while unpacking, repacking, and juggling childcare. Once again, I have to laugh at Past Me for thinking the trad publishing route would give me more time for everything — with this book I felt like I did everything from writing it to editing it in a panicked rush…

July 28th

Sent off the line-edit and headed to Kent.

August 15th

The first portion of my advance was paid — five months after receiving the offer and one month after signing the contract. This is one of the things I think a lot of new authors don’t realise; even if the advance looks like a decent amount on paper, it’s then split into chunks and paid in installments, often with long gaps between them, which makes it really hard/impossible to rely on as your sole income.

September 4th

The copyedit came back; there wasn’t much for me to do here, fortunately, but by this stage I’d read the book so many times that I didn’t want to even think about it, let alone do any more work on it…

September 10th

I sent back the copyedits, along with a couple of pitches for book two, which Terry and I had been discussing for the last few weeks, mostly during long walks on the moor near our house. We’d whittled it down to two different options and I put together a short, one-page synopsis for each of them, which I sent to Clem, along with a note telling her which one was my favourite.

September 23rd

Clem got back to me saying she’d discussed both pitches with the team, and they were happy for me to go ahead and start writing the one I’d identified as my favourite. Yay! But meanwhile…

October 20th

The first draft of the cover arrived, while we were on a half-term trip to Edinburgh with Max. (Side note: why does every important milestone with this book seem to happen during a school holiday?!) We spent the train journey home discussing it (to the fascination of the woman in the seat next to Terry, who blatantly stared at the cover over his shoulder the entire way home. Really hope she sees it in a bookshop one day and thinks, ‘oh, it’s the book from the train!), then had a video call with Kate the next day, to discuss it with her.

Also sometime in October…

I can’t remember exactly when this was, but at some point the final proofread came back, and I almost cried when I realised I’d have to read the book in its entirety YET AGAIN. By this stage I’d read it so many times I honestly think I could recite it off by heart. I was seriously tempted just to hit ‘accept all’ on the changes, but I forced myself to go through it line by line, and it’s a good job I did, because although it had been through multiple edits at this point, I STILL found some glaring errors. GAH.

November 13th

The cover was finalised. It was all starting to feel very real … except for the fact that I STILL wasn’t allowed to announce the fact that I had a book deal, let alone say anything about the book itself.

The ‘secrecy’ aspect of all of this was probably the hardest part of the whole process for me (other than that two-week structural edit,. obvs…). As a former blogger/Instagram addict I’m used to over-sharing everything, and doing it almost immediately, so keeping a secret as big as this one was genuinely hard for me, and although everyone who knows me in ‘real life’ knew about the book, the fact that I couldn’t share the news with my actual readers was weird and frustrating. Imagine having your childhood dream come true and not being able to tell people about it, though!

November 17th

I sent in the final bits for the proofs — acknowledgements, dedication etc. My work on Highland Getaway was officially done, but it still didn’t feel quite real on account of the continued secrecy surrounding it. I just wanted to be able to tell everyone about it, but every time I sent out a newsletter I felt a bit like Taylor Swift, all ‘not a lot going on at the moment’…

November 25th

Started drafting book 2 of my contract. I optimistically announced to the internet that I intended to have this finished by the end of January.

I am so funny.

January 29th 2026

Video call with Clem, Kate, plus the publicist and marketing exec assigned to the book. It was during this call that I found out when the book would be published — July 4th — and we agreed a date for the announcement. I was finally going to be able to talk about it, and there was a good chance that once I got started, I might never stop…

February 6th

Almost one year to the day I first heard from Clem, I finally got to tell everyone my news:

Having been waiting for this moment for essentially my entire life, when it was time to publish the post, I briefly panicked, and didn’t want to do it, which is just the most me thing ever. I did it anyway, though… and that brings us more or less up to date, with me now counting down to…

June 4th, 2026…

… when Highland Getaway will finally be out in the world!

(You can pre-order it here, if you haven’t already!)

I’ll be honest: it still doesn’t feel quite real yet, and I’m not sure it will until the day I see it in a bookshop. So roll on June 4th… and, in the meantime, it’s back to plotting the next book!

Thanks for reading,

This newsletter only exists due to the generosity of its subscribers. To support my work and allow me to continue avoiding the fictional Victorian workhouse that haunts my nightmares, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription below:

“But what’s in it for me, Amber?” I hear you ask.

Good question. As a paid subscriber, you’ll get access to my super-secret bonus content, including…

• Monthly ‘Behind the Scenes’ posts, in which you get to be the first to know about upcoming releases and what I’m currently working on.

• Occasional ‘bonus’ posts which are generally a little more personal/the kind of thing I don’t want to be available to everyone on the internet.

• COMING SOON: Bonus chapters and deleted scenes from my books.

• The warm, fuzzy feeling that comes from knowing you did your good deed for the day, and helped keep a roof over my family’s heads for another month.

  Subscribe now

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Of all the comments I’ve had since announcing my book deal a few weeks ago, there’s one that’s cropped up more often than any other — except maybe, ‘wow’ and ‘how the hell the hell did you manage that, then?’ It’s this:

“You’ll be a real author at last!”

Which…

Yeah.

OK, I’m being facetious. It’s important to note here that none of the people who’ve said this (or some variation of it) to me have intended to cause any offense with it, and none has been taken. So this post isn’t about me venting, or complaining about any of the very nice people who’ve wished me well, and who I’m very grateful for. It’s more of an observation on a bias I’ve always secretly known existed, but which I’ve always done my best to ignore; namely that people in general think traditional publishing is superior to self-publishing, and that it’s only those who are traditionally published who have the right to consider themselves to be ‘real’ authors.

Now, I had always known this distinction existed, and yet I still managed to be taken aback by it when people started congratulating me on becoming ‘real’ at last. It was strange, and a bit humbling, I suppose, to know that all of these…

… were presumed to be ‘pretend’ books, that didn’t really count, and that it was only now, after over twenty years of being paid by people to write, that I was deemed to have finally ‘made it’.

It was strange to me, I suppose, because I’ve always considered myself to be a writer. I suspect this might be slightly unusual, because it seems to be the norm for writers to question that status; barely a week goes by without the Substack algorithm showing me at least one newsletter by someone worrying about whether or not they’re ‘allowed’ to refer to themselves as a ‘writer’, but, I have to admit, this isn’t something I’ve ever particularly related to. My first job out of university was in local journalism, and, since then, I have always made a living from writing, in some form or another. That’s why I’ve always considered myself ‘a writer’, and it’s probably also why I’ve never been ashamed to admit that I would like to be paid for the writing I do — it has literally never occurred to me that I shouldn’t be, or that writing is something I should only ever consider as a ‘hobby’. I write, therefore I am a writer; it’s as simple as that.

Not for everyone, though. Because, while I have never had any issue describing myself as a writer (or as an author, once I started writing books), announcing my book deal made it very obvious to me that not everyone in my life has thought of me that way. No, for a lot of people, it’s only now that I’ve ‘finally’ earned the right to call myself an ‘author’; and only because I’ll now be traditionally published, meaning that at least one person in the industry has verified my credentials, and deemed me worthy of the title.

Before that, though, I guess I was … what? A pretend author, I suppose? Writing pretend books? I mean… I guess?

And, in the same way that I’ve been pretending to write these books, and pretending to sell them, it turns out a lot of the people who know me have been diligently pretending to take that seriously, and I guess it’s that, more than anything, that’s got me feeling a bit weird about all of this, because, well, it IS weird to find out that everyone’s just been humoring you these last few years, isn’t it?

I’m kind of mortified, actually.

And, look, I get it. I do. Because while I have never hesitated to call myself a ‘writer’, it’s also true that a large part of the impostor syndrome I’ve always felt as an author has come from the fact that, until now, I was self-published, and so there was literally nothing stopping me from just cranking out any old rubbish, was there? Self-publishing wasn’t like working for a newspaper, or being paid to write an article for a client; no, there were literally no checks or balances on the quality of the work I produced, and no one to reliably tell me whether it was good or not… which made it all too easy to think that it probably wasn’t.

“It’s such an amazing achievement, writing an entire book,” people would say (And, note, this in itself is very different from someone saying, “I loved your book’ or “you’re a great writer, Amber’…), but I would always just brush those comments aside, because it seemed to me that pretty much anyone could write ‘a book’ — it was writing a good book that was the difficult part, and I could not allow myself to believe that I had done that. Anyone who said I had was obviously just being kind, or trying to flatter me, and the fact did not escape me that most of the people who praised me for being able to write ‘an entire book!’ hadn’t actually read the book(s) in question, and were basically just praising me for my typing ability.

(Strangely enough, I have never thought this about any of the other indie authors I know, or come across online. No, to me, they are all ‘real’ authors, writing ‘real’ books; it was just me who wasn’t one. Wild, huh?)

So, while I hadn’t ever considered pursuing a traditional book deal, I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel somewhat validated when I was offered one. This is why I offer no criticism of the people who’ve congratulated me for finally becoming a ‘real’ author: I know perfectly well they’re only saying something I had been secretly thinking about myself. And still am, actually. Because, the fact is, signing a book deal hasn’t actually made me feel any more ‘real’ than I did before. I am still haunted by the idea that my book isn’t actually any good, and that I’ve just somehow tricked people into thinking it is. I am terrified that it won’t sell, and I’ll be exposed as the giant fraud I am. “We thought Amber was a real author now,” people will grumble. “But she’s still just as fake as she’s ever been!”

Will this ever change, I wonder? Will I ever get to feel like a ‘real’ author, as well as actually being one?

And, hey, while I’m on the subject, have you pre-ordered my first ‘real’ book yet? Because I’m thinking that would probably help:

Thanks for reading!

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First up! ARCs of Highland Getaway are now available on Netgalley, so if you’d like to be one of the first to read my debut traditionally published novel, and are willing to write a review in exchange for it, please head over there to sign up!

Second up: book number 10!

Which, in traditional publishing terms, is book number 2, it being the second book which will be published as part of my contract with Black & White…

… but which, in real terms, is the very first book I’ve written under contract with a publisher, all of the previous ones (including Highland Getaway) being written with the intention of self-publishing them.

Are you following all of this?

Writing a book under contract is, it turns out, very different from writing a book for yourself … which is, I think, why this book is proving to be so much harder to write than anything I’ve done before. It’s making me feel like an absolute rookie, actually: it’s like all of those other books just don’t exist any more, and this is my very first rodeo — which, of course, is bringing up a whole lot of impostor syndrome-y thoughts and other acts of relentless over-thinking.

I know! Who would’ve thought that getting a book deal would make me anxious? Me! The most laid-back, relaxed person you ever … oh. Right. Yeah.

And it’s not that I didn’t care about the quality of my self-published books, obviously. I don’t know … I think it’s just that, when I was writing as in indie, it felt like there was much less pressure, somehow. My deadlines were all self-imposed. If I didn’t have the book ready by the pre-order date, nothing much would happen. And if I got to the end of the first draft, and decided I hated it, there was really nothing stopping me just binning it and starting again with something else.

I never actually did any of these things, you understand. Even when my deadlines are self-imposed, I am far too uptight to allow myself to miss them. But the fact remains, I could have done them, if I’d really wanted to.

Now, though, things are different; and although the deadline for this next book is still reassuringly far away (One of the reasons I was so keen to take this deal was the fact that being trad published will — hopefully — give me more time to work on each book), it’s not so far away that I’m going to be able to just endlessly re-write it… or, indeed, bin it and come up with something different.

It’s not just that that’s making it difficult, though. It’s also the awareness that someone else is going to have to read this book and approve it before it can be published that’s freaking me out a little. I feel like my writing is much more self-conscious than it usually is; as if someone’s always looking over my shoulder (they’re not), so I’m constantly thinking, “God, I wonder what they’ll think of this? What if they hate it, though? I bet they’ll hate it…” And then I have to stop myself re-writing it 15 times to address some completely imaginary criticism that may or may not even be made.

It seems wild to say it now, but, with my other books, I didn’t really think about them like that. I just kind of dove in and started telling the story. Now, though, I’ll be typing away quite happily, and then I’ll be like, “Wait: what’s my character’s misbelief? Does she even have one? Should I give her one?” And then the whole process is delayed while I try to figure out if my book is meeting some ‘rule’ of good fiction writing which I have just that second read about — generally here on Substack, it has to be said.

I should probably add here that all of this pressure I’m feeling to make this book pErFeCt exists purely in my head. I mean, I’m sure my editor would love for the book to be perfect too, obviously, but no one has said the first draft has to be, or that they’ll dump me if it isn’t. All the same, though, that’s what my mind is desperately trying to tell me. That they’ll hate it. That the first book they bought was just a fluke, and I will never be able to pull it off again. And so on, and so forth, down the apparently endless downward spiral of self-doubt and overthinking that has come to characterize this journey.

And always the thought remains: am I really just over-thinking everything, and allowing myself to be paralyzed by the knowledge that bona-fide publishing professionals are going to read this book… or is it actually shit?

That, reader, is the question that has occupied my mind this week as I’ve attempted to juggle promoting book 1 with drafting book 2, and also taking long walks on the moor which are ostensibly for the purpose of thinking about the plot, but which have, in reality been mostly spent listening to Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights on repeat while pretending to be Cathy.

(No, I haven’t seen the movie. I did once write a dissertation on the book, though, so I suspect I’ll have a lot of feelings about it when I do…)

When I signed my publishing contract, my agent warned me that although I obviously have a track record as an indie author, this book (Highland Getaway) would, to all intents and purposes, be treated as a debut novel, and it has very much felt like that. So I guess the crux of the matter is that I feel that I have a lot to prove right now, and a lot riding, not only on the success of book ‘1’, but on my ability to make book ‘2’ even better.

So, absolutely no pressure, then…

Thanks for reading!

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I started writing these monthly looks behind the scenes a while back, but have only published them sporadically since then because I’ve been sitting on the news of my publishing deal for almost a year now, which meant that everything that was happening ‘behind the scenes’ was stuff I wasn’t allowed to tell you about. Which was awkward, really.

But now the news is finally out! Which means I have literally no excuse not to start these back up again, do I?

These posts are for paid subscribers, as a kind of thank you for making it possible for me to continue putting out this newsletter every week, but because I love my free subscribers too, don’t worry, normal service will resume next week. (Please don’t unsubscribe…)

In this look behind the scenes…

• All the things I’m anxious about right now.

• Why I’m not planning a launch party for my book, even though everyone keeps telling me I should have one.

• Two traits I share with the main character of my book.

• Why aren’t authors allowed to be reclusive any more? Why, though?

• Winter sucks. No, really, it does.

• Quite a lot of dull stuff about our garden project. Don’t really know why I included that, tbh.

• Hey, did I mention my book? Did you pre-order it yet?!

Here we go…

Read more

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I always intended to self-publish my books.

I know there’s a pretty common belief that most indie authors secretly want to be traditionally published, and only do it themselves if there’s no other option (i.e. they can’t get a publishing deal), but, in my case —and actually in the case of a lot of the indies I know — I didn’t even try to get a book deal. It genuinely happened by ‘accident’ … which was helpful, actually, because it’s really made my newsletter title make a lot more sense, hasn’t it?

But anyway.

There are lots of reasons why I chose to self-publish my first book (The Accidental Impostor) rather than trying to find a publisher for it, and, I mean, yeah, I guess one of them is that I genuinely thought I wouldn’t have a snowball’s hope in hell of that ever happening. Getting a book deal seemed almost as impossible to me as capturing a unicorn, say, or getting my child to go to sleep before midnight. It also seemed like a long, tortuous kind of process whereby you had to first of all get an agent —which you could do only by querying dozens of agents, and waiting patiently for them all to reject you in turn— and even if, by some miracle, you were to succeed in this and persuade someone to represent you, you then had to start the whole process again, only this time with the agent sending out the queries to publishers, so they, too, could have their chance to crush your tiny dreams by rejecting you.

And, I mean, that’s a lot of rejection, isn’t it? Way more than I, for instance, would be able to deal with. I know a lot of authors use their rejections almost as a badge of honor; we’ve all read the stories about famous books being rejected over and over again, but then triumphing in spite of it all, but, the fact was, I didn’t WANT to have to triumph “in spite of it all”. I just wanted to triumph. Ideally as quickly as possible, because, by the time I was ready to publish Impostor, my blog, which had been my main form of income for over a decade at that point, was on a steady downward slide, and I desperately needed something to replace it.

It’s very important to note here that if you’re desperately in need of income, writing fiction is NOT a quick way to get it. In retrospect, I should’ve done what Jo March did, and just chopped off my hair instead; I would’ve probably got paid more for it. But, alas for me, writing is literally the only thing I know how to do (And, also, I doubt my hair is worth as much as Jo’s was…), and I’d been reading a lot of stuff about indie publishing, and how people were making thousands per month from it, and my head was turned by it all. I remember joining a Facebook group about self-publishing where people were literally claiming to be making tens of thousands per month (with screenshots to prove it), and, I, too, would very much like to make that kind of money, so, why not, I thought, like Bilbo looking at the One Ring? From what I’d read, all I’d have to do would be write numerous books per year, market them round the clock, go viral on TikTok, and then keep on doing that for the rest of my life. Simple enough, right?

It probably says quite a lot about me that all of this genuinely sounded preferable to me than the complicated, rejection-heavy process of trying to get an agent (which could only be done by writing query letters in a very specific format, apparently, and then sending them by the light of the full moon, accompanied by a single phoenix feather, or they just wouldn’t read them), then potentially waiting months, if not years for publishers to reject me, too. For one thing, I am completely incapable of dealing with even the kindest form of rejection. As a teenager I once went to a ‘meet and greet’ with actor Scott Michaelson — Brad from Neighbours — at which I refused to go over to ‘meet and greet’ him, because I was worried he’d think I was stupid for wanting a photo with him, even though that’s why he was there. Be serious, does that sound like someone who’d be able to deal with multiple rejections for something as personal as writing? Exactly. Even one would’ve made me close down my computer forever and proceed directly to the Victorian workhouse, and where would we be then, I ask you? Other than at the workhouse, I mean?

Anyway. I’m not proud to admit it, but I have literally spent my entire life being told I need to ‘grow a thicker skin’, and I still haven’t figured out how the hell I’m supposed to actually do that, so the chances of me being able to do it in the face of multiple rejections seemed vanishingly small, really.

Quite apart from that, though, the fact was that I needed to make money from my books NOW — not to possibly make money from them sometime in the distant future after I’d jumped through all of the various hoops trad publishing seemed to require. I’m not naive enough to have thought self-publishing was going to be some kind of ‘get rich quick’ scheme (I am pretty naive, tbh, but not THAT much…), but I guess I had developed this idea by then that self-publishing was for people who wanted to build a business out of publishing, and trad was for people who just wanted to be able to say they’d written a book, which someone in the industry had confirmed was good enough to be published.

It’s very important to note here that neither of these impressions are completely correct, obviously. I knew, of course, that the most popular trad authors make bank from it (probably way more than most indies), and that there’s a huge percentage of indie authors who make nothing at all. But I also knew that most authors — no matter how they’re published — have ‘real’ jobs to support their writing; that six-figure deals are not the norm, and that, even if you DO get one, they’re split into several parts, and paid over such a long period of time that it’s not much different from a regular wage. I knew, too, that I’d been writing online for 15 years at that point, so I was not exactly new to online marketing or social media… and while I didn’t intend to share my pen name with my existing audience (at least, not at first), the fact that I even HAD an existing audience made me (stupidly) confident that I’d be able to build another one, this time around romance books.

With all of that to persuade me, self-publishing seemed like my best chance, basically. So, with the help of my husband, I published The Accidental Impostor in August 2022 … and nothing happened. Which wasn’t exactly surprising, really: I’d chosen not to share the book with anyone in my ‘real’ life, or with the followers of my blog/social media, so all I really had to work with was a ‘faceless’ Instagram account (I don’t think I was even on TikTok at that point), which generated about 5 views per post, and absolutely no sales.

So we tried advertising on Facebook, and a few sales trickled in; not enough to make much money, but enough to generate some reviews, which I diligently shared on my new Instagram page. About a month after the book came out, though, we went on holiday for a week, and, in the general chaos of trying to do everything at once, while in a strange place, and with a small child constantly demanding my attention, I posted one of the reviews to my main profile by mistake.

And that was it. My secret was out. The post was up for a couple of hours before I realised, and, in that time, the book had sold enough copies that when I logged into my Amazon dashboard that night I almost fainted with surprise.

“Imagine if it sold like this every day?” I said to Terry as we sat on the balcony that night. And, the thing is, that didn’t actually seem impossible back then. The amount we’d sold that day seemed amazing to me, but it was much less than the authors in the Facebook groups I’d joined were making. Now that everyone knew about the book, though, I figured I might as well make the most of it. The genie could not be put back into the bottle, after all, and although I knew that most of my existing audience probably wouldn’t be interested in romance books (most of them having followed me for the fashion and beauty articles I used to write), my hope was that enough of them would be interested to get me some more reviews I could use to market the book — which would be much easier now that I was able to talk about it publicly.

And, there’s no denying, all of that helped. Impostor never sold a huge amount, but I knew the more books I released, the more I could make, so I wrote the next book in the series, then the one after that, and then I wrote two more, still in the same series.

This, it turned out was a mistake.

I’d chosen to write a series because I’d read that this was where the money was; that if you could get readers hooked on the first book, they’d go on to read them all. Which is fine in theory, but what I was forgetting was that this only really works if the first book takes off… which Impostor didn’t. So I found myself in a position whereby I was marketing each successive book to a rapidly dwindling audience (i.e the only people likely to read book 2 are the ones who’ve read book one, and the only ones who’ll read book 3 are the ones who’ve read books one AND two, and so on…), and I basically lost a good couple of years to that series, before the penny dropped and I realised that if I wanted to attract new readers, rather than just continue catering to the existing ones, my time would be better spent on writing a book that didn’t require people to have read three other ones before it would make sense to them.

So I switched to writing stand-alones. Cool Girl Summer came out in May 2024, and, around that time, Terry decided to start advertising the other books as standalones or duets rather than as a series (It’s kind of complicated to explain, but some of those books can be read alone — although they make more sense if you’ve read the rest — while others can really only be read in a certain order. Like I said, it was a mistake…) We’ll probably never know what happened, but somehow those ads worked. Literally overnight, the books started selling, and, before long, we were making enough money from them that if it had continued like that, it would have been genuinely life-changing for us. We still weren’t making nearly as much as some of the authors in the Facebook groups I’d been following, but, for the first time since starting this journey, it really seemed like it could be a possibility, if we could just stay on the path we were on.

Then, just as quickly as it had started, it all stopped.

At some point in 2024, Facebook changed something in the way their advertising system works, and sales plummeted. Again, this happened almost overnight. Facebook giveth, but Facebook also taketh away is the lesson here. The sales didn’t stop completely, because by then I’d started to build a readership and was getting some organic sales, but it was nothing like it had been, and, no matter what we did to try to build it back up again, nothing worked.

We tried for months. Terry created advert after advert, tweaked settings, and even took courses designed to help him better understand Facebook advertising. I wrote another book, which completely flopped, because the title and cover were all wrong1. So I started work on yet another one, having had the idea for it while still drafting the previous book, but by then the writing was on the wall; something was going to have to change.

Most of all, though, I was just done. I’d written 7 books in three years at that point, and had been trying my best to market them all on TikTok and Instagram, both of which took up a lot of time, without yielding much in the way of results. We’d changed covers and titles, re-written blurbs, and spent money we didn’t really have on advertising. By doing this, we’d managed to sell a respectable amount of books, and I had built a small, but loyal, readership, but I felt like I was on a treadmill that I couldn't ever get off. As soon as I started working on a new book, Terry (who does a lot of work on the initial plots with me) would start telling me we needed to come up with ideas for the next one, and I knew that as soon as I started that one, it would be the same again, as the emphasis with indie publishing tends to be on rapid release in order to try to maintain momentum and stay ‘relevant’.

I’m a relatively fast writer (or I was until I started writing the book I’m working on now, anyway… ) and I tend to write very clean first drafts, which don’t require a huge amount of editing, so I was able to keep up with this schedule… but it was exhausting. And, every time I released another book, I was painfully aware of how much better it could have been if I’d had the time to take it through multiple drafts; if I’d had the benefit of an actual editor (which we’d never had the budget for), plus things like professional cover design (we paid an illustrator to draw the characters, but did everything else ourselves, and my early covers were entirely self-made), and marketing that didn’t rely on my ability to make myself seem likable on social media.

More than anything, though, it was impossible not to notice that although I was working constantly and releasing books as fast as I possibly could, we still weren’t making even close to the amount of sales we’d been getting back in the heady days of summer 2024, when I’d briefly started fantasizing about buying a beach house somewhere warm with all of the fabulous money I’d soon be making; and by the time we got to February of last year, it honestly felt like we were out of options, and there was nothing left to try.

There was one thing, though.

Which is why, when I got that email from Clem, my now-editor, asking if I was free for a chat, I once again thought, why not? Why shouldn’t I try something else? I’d given indie publishing a pretty good go, after all… and it hadn’t really worked. By the time I received the offer of a two book deal from Black & White, I was on the point of giving up altogether… and although I knew the offer wasn’t going to change my life financially, it felt a bit like I’d been thrown a lifeline which I couldn’t ignore.

It’s also, however, something of a last chance for me.

Although I haven’t ruled out the possibility of returning to indie publishing if the trad option doesn’t work out for me (All of my existing books are still available on Amazon, and we are continuing to market them, so, who knows, maybe one day one of them will take again, off like they did back in 2024…), the reality is that writing isn’t a hobby for me. It’s how I’ve earned a living ever since I finished university, and it’s literally the only thing I’ve ever been good at. Right now, writing books is a full-time job for me, and I desperately want it to stay that way. I don’t want this to be something I squeeze into the edges of my life, or juggle with another job; which I know wouldn’t work for me, anyway.

If you’ve read this post you’ll know that traditional employment really doesn’t agree with me; I did actually make multiple attempts at writing novels back in the days when I had a ‘real’ job, and it never, ever worked. I have the utmost respect for authors who manage to write on their lunch-break, or type one-handed on their phone while doing something else, but that will never be me, unfortunately. I know from experience that working for other people (even freelance) on something I’m not passionate about basically sucks the soul right out of my body and leaves me with nothing left over for myself.

So I need this to work, basically.

And I’m under no illusions. I know that, although I’ve self-published 8 books at this point, this next release is more or less a debut as far as the publishing world is concerned. I know that most debut authors don’t make a ton of money (And again, I don’t actually need to make a ton… just enough to keep my head above water and allow me to keep doing this), and, just in case I was in any doubt about that, almost as soon as I signed my deal last year, the Substack algorithm kindly started exclusively showing me newsletters about how awful traditional publishing is, how impossible it is for authors to make a living now, and how totally and utterly ridiculous it is for me to hope that I might somehow be one of the ones who does.

But I have to hope that, or I’ll go mad, basically.

So, even though I’ve spent the last seven months reading nothing but negativity about this new route I’m taking, to the point where I’m currently more anxious than I’ve ever been in my life about it, I guess I’m doing it anyway.

Er, please buy my book.

Thanks for reading!

PRE-ORDER NOW!

It’s finally here! The book I dreamed up during a lunchtime chat with my husband in December 2024, drafted over a frantic, fever-dream of a six week spell at the start of 2025, and then didn’t mention again until now is finally available to pre-order!

Highland Getaway follows Rosie Winter, a wannabe fashion influencer who thinks she’s been invited on the trip of a lifetime; an exclusive influencer retreat taking place in a luxury castle in the Scottish highlands. For Rosie, it’s a dream come true — and also something of a lifesaver, given that she’s just broken up with her boyfriend and been kicked out of their flat.

There’s just one problem: the invitation wasn’t actually intended for her. And when the wrong Rosie turns up at The Chrysalis Hotel, it’s a recipe for disaster; especially when Hunter Stuart, the rugged, no-nonsense groundskeeper gets involved…

The location for Highland Getaway was inspired by our trip to beautiful Dunrobin Castle in late 2024, when I looked up at the building towering above us, and thought ‘this would be a great setting for a romance novel’. I mean, look at it!

(Spoiler alert: there may be a brief moment in the book when someone takes a photo of this very scene — minus me and Max, obviously, because that would just be weird.)

As for the rest of the book, as well as being a good, old-fashioned romance, some of the content is vaguely inspired by my own days as an (extremely minor) ‘influencer’, and the many hotel stays I’ve undertaken as part of that, although none quite as eventful as the one Rosie Winter gets to experience, thankfully. (JK, I would love to get to stay in a remote highland castle where strange things happen. Why else do you think I made one up?)

Mostly, though, it’s the story of a woman who has always felt ‘invisible’ — which is something I’m sure quite a few of us have struggled with — and, this being an Amber Eve novel, you can expect some quirky characters, beautiful Scottish settings, and hopefully a few laughs along the way.

The book comes out at the start of June, which is just in time for you to take it on holiday with you, and it will be available in all good bookshops (if yours doesn’t have it in stock, they should be able to order it for you), but if you’d like to be one of the first to get your hands on it, that would make you one of my very favourite people in the whole world, and will also help me convince my publisher that I actually know what I’m doing, so please, I am begging you, if you like romantic comedies, books set in Scotland, or, well, ME, you can pre-order (and make my day) using the link below:

PRE-ORDER HIGHLAND GETAWAY

Oh, and finally, if you’re on Instagram and wouldn’t mind giving my post a ‘like’, comment, or share, that would be very much appreciated, too!

Now onto book two!

Now, champagne is my Very Favourite Thing to drink, but because we are poor, we very rarely get our hands on the Good Stuff and have to make do with either cheap Cava or Prosecco instead, on the rare occasions that ‘fizz’ is deemed appropriate.

Like peasants, basically.

But now, here we were, somehow in possession of The Good Stuff. (Well, I mean, technically Terry was in possession of The Good Stuff, but, fortunately for me, he agreed to share, so…)

“We have to think strategically about this,” I said, once again proving beyond doubt that there’s literally nothing I can’t ruin by over-thinking. “We don’t want to waste The Good Stuff on a random Tuesday in February, do we? We should save it for a special occasion.”

Now, there is, of course, a very strong argument that a random Tuesday in February is exactly the time you should be pouring yourself a glass of the good champagne. Someone wiser (and possibly richer) than me would surely tell you that you never know what life has in store for you, so you should make the most of every opportunity that comes your way; a kind of ‘dance like no one’s watching’ philosophy, which would no doubt include other nuggets of ‘profound’ wisdom like…

• Wear the dress.

• Light the expensive candle.

• Stop saving things for a ‘best’ that might never come.

• Drink the damn champagne, woman.

But I did not drink the damn champagne: possibly because it arrived at a particularly low point for us (We were — and still are — broke, the car needed fixing again, it was winter, and it felt like things would never get better…), and I wanted to believe that the best WAS still to come: that it was, in fact, coming.

Or possibly just because I’m an uptight fun sponge who hasn’t figured out how to unclench for long enough to actually enjoy herself?

Because, let’s face it: that’s a possibility, too.

Either way, we decided to keep the champagne for some mysterious point in the future that we’d deem worthy of it. We didn’t know what this point would be, but we figured we’d recognize it when it arrived, and that would be the moment we’d finally pop the cork on that champagne bottle. We knew it wouldn’t be Christmas, or New Year, or anyone’s birthday; not because those things aren’t special, but because they don’t actually change anything — and what we badly needed was for something to change. But what would that change be?

“We’ll know it when it happens,” I said vaguely, unable to even imagine what it would take for me to consider opening that bottle of champagne. Unable to picture a time when it might feel like things were getting better instead of worse. And then we put the champagne into the fridge, where it stayed for the next 12 months, without so much as the suggestion of ‘something good’ happening that would allow us to open it.

Instead, we had an ongoing list of ‘something bads’. The car finally broke down for good and had to be sold. We got deeper into debt in order to buy a new (old) one. We weren’t earning enough from my books to cover our outgoings, and I decided enough was enough; that the book I was working on at the time would be my last, and that, as soon as it was done, I’d start looking for that ‘real’ job I had tried literally everything to avoid.

(Well, it was either that or finally enter the Victorian workhouse that haunts my nightmares, and I’m pretty sure that’s not actually a ‘thing’ any more, so... )

I felt completely and utterly crushed; like I had failed spectacularly at life, and, no matter how hard I tried, things just kept on getting worse. I expected things to continue like this indefinitely.

I did not expect to ever have a reason to drink that champagne.

BUT.

Back at the start of February 2025 (almost exactly a year ago) I finished writing what, at the time, was my eighth book — a romcom set in the Highlands of Scotland. About two weeks later, and completely out of the blue, I got an email from Clem Flanagan — an editor at Edinburgh-based Black & White Publishing, who are an imprint of Bonnier Books — saying that she was on the lookout for Scottish books written by Scottish authors, and had come across my work online. She wondered if we could have a chat sometime?

At the time, Clem didn’t actually know I had a completed book just waiting to be published. But I did. And it just so happened that it was set in the Scottish Highlands … which was exactly what she was looking for.

The timing of all of this was just so incredibly serendipitous that I still have to pinch myself to make sure it actually happened. The fact was, I shouldn’t even have had a book to show Clem at all at this point. No, had everything gone according to plan, I’d have finished that book long before then, self-published it, and then given up writing altogether, just like I was planning to. The End.

If everything had gone according to plan, in other words, I’m not sure I’d ever have had a reason to crack open that bottle of champagne. Maybe Max’s 18th? Or his wedding? I don’t know.

But, fortunately for me, life doesn’t always go to plan, does it? To cut a very long story slightly shorter, a few weeks after that initial email and video call, I sold that book to Black & White, as part of a two-book deal (the second book being the one I’m working on now):

And, after that, we finally got to drink the ‘good’ champagne. 2

Um, this is not me drinking the good champagne, by the way. This is me drinking an unknown brand of Cava, because I signed my contract while we were on holiday last summer, and we naturally had not brought the champagne with us. But that’s another story for another time.

For now, I’m SO excited to finally be able to share this news with you, which I’ve been keeping to myself for almost an entire year now, and while I know quite a few of you have either guessed or already know the reason I’ve been so cagey lately, I hope you’ll forgive me for all of the incessant talking about it I’m about to subject you to. Apologies in advance for that.

In the meantime, though, I’ll be revealing the title and cover of the book NEXT WEEK (OMG!) , on February 12th, and the initial reveal will happen over on Instagram, so if you’re not following me there already, now would be a good time to start.

(And, also, of course, to open up some champagne, good or otherwise…)

Thanks for reading,

Hi, I’m Amber Eve — author of smalltown romantic comedies, and my long-running blog, Forever Amber. If you’d like to know more about me, start here. If you’d like to hear more from me, meanwhile, hit the button below…

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A few weeks ago I posted a photo of my friend’s puppy on Notes, along with a throwaway comment about how I was hoping little Nellie would be the thing that would finally make me ‘popular’ here on Substack…

(Seriously, though, would you look at that face?!)

I’ll be honest: I didn’t really give that caption much thought. It was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek: an observation that Substack Notes is one of those slightly weird corners of the internet where you can spend hours on end crafting a 3,000 word essay on a topic of huge importance (Or, OK, in my case about things that aren’t particularly important, but which I nevertheless spend a lot of time on…), but it’ll be a random photo of someone else’s dog that ends up going viral.

And this, it proved, was true. That photo of Nellie the Poochon peeping over the back of my couch got far more ‘likes’ than anything I’ve ever written here (Although zero new subscribers, so, you know, take from that what you will…), but, while most people who saw it responded to it in the manner in which the post was intended, after a couple of days I started to get a slow trickle of comments from people who were clearly under the impression that I was being totally serious in my statement that I wanted Nellie to make me a Substack Superstar, and who wanted to gently scold me for it.

There were a few more of these1, all with the same general theme: that I should stick to writing, and not worry my pretty little head about being ‘popular’ because that’s not something I should want for myself. Kind of uncool, really. A bit cringe.

When I started getting those comments, my first instinct was to reply explaining that, OMG, I was just joking, Steve! Like, OF COURSE I don’t ACTUALLY want to be popular! Heaven forbid!

If I’m totally honest, though, I’d have to admit that while I didn’t for a second think my photo of Nellie was the thing that would do it, actually, yeah, I kind of DO want that. I would like my newsletter to be ‘popular’. My books, too. I would like to make the bestseller list. I would LOVE to earn enough from books and newsletters that I didn’t have to take on dull copyediting work, in which a dashing duke is forced to take a wife.

And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.

(With wanting my writing to be popular, I mean. There IS quite a lot wrong with the dashing dukes and their marriages of convenience, actually, but that’s a whole other topic…)

(Also, I AM a bit cringe and uncool, and you know what? There’s nothing wrong with that either…)

A lot of people do think there’s something wrong with wanting to be ‘popular’ though: the comments on my photo of Nellie prove that, as do all of those Substack Notes I keep seeing from people claiming they ‘only want to follow small, unpopular accounts!’, as if the bigger ones are somehow less ‘worthy’. Sometimes the authors of those notes will be very specific about their requirements, saying they only want to subscribe to newsletters with less than 200 subscribers (For some reason it’s always 200…), and anyone with more than that is … just dead to them, I guess?

And, look, I know, OK? I understand that the people who write these notes are really just trying to show their support for what they call the ‘small’ accounts, probably believing that the ‘bigger’ ones don’t need it (Spoiler: they do). But I think what they’re missing with that technique is that if everyone decides to support ‘smaller’ accounts, purely on the basis of their smallness, then those small accounts will soon become the ‘big’ ones, and what are you going to do then? Unfollow them all because they no longer need (or deserve) your support? (Again; they will.) Kick them to the curb for having the audacity to become OMGPOPULAR?

The thing is, I’d hazard a wild guess that most of us — both here on Substack and in the bookish space in general — secretly want to be ‘popular’, in the sense that we want people to read what we write. Are there really writers out there hitting ‘publish’ on a Substack essay and thinking, “Gosh, I hope hardly anyone reads this! I wouldn’t want to be popular!”?

Probably not. Because there wouldn’t be much point in writing things on the internet if you didn’t want anyone to read it, would there? You’d be better off just buying yourself a diary; ideally one of the ones with a lock and key, so you can rest easy in the knowledge that no one will ever read a word you’ve written in it.

If you want to make a living from writing, though, people have to read the things you write … which means you kind of HAVE to be ‘popular’ — or, at least, the things you write do. It’s not enough to just write them ‘for the love of it’, and not care if no one ever reads them. It doesn’t work that way.

Most writing advice, however, completely ignores the inconvenient fact that we all need to make money in order to survive, and assumes that writing should only ever be a nice hobby or labour of love. And so, again and again I’m told not worry about whether or not anyone ever reads my work; to ‘just write’, as if writing is reward enough in itself, and it’s a bit much to expect any more than that. As a blogger, I was repeatedly scolded for focusing on what people described as ‘the numbers’ rather than only caring about the words; I was told constantly that I shouldn’t care how many views my website got each month, even though my livelihood literally depended on this incredibly important statistic. As an author, meanwhile, I’m told it doesn’t matter how many books I sell, and led to believe it’s a bit weird to even think about that, really. Like, why are you even looking at your Kindle dashboard, Amber? Why do you insist on needing something as vulgar as money to survive, when other writers do it just for love?

And this, I think, is one of the biggest challenges for modern writers; we have to be popular without being seen to actually want to be popular. We have to make enough money to live off, while convincing people that we really don’t care about money. We have to write things people will want to read while pretending not to care if no one ever reads them. We are no longer allowed to be ambitious. We are not allowed to want things; least of all success. All we’re supposed to aspire to now is ‘being cosy’, and… something to do with blankets and fluffy socks, I think? Anything more than that is too much, and heaven forbid anyone — especially a woman — be considered too much.

But I do care. If I didn’t, I’d just get myself a journal and write in that, and I would never, ever show anyone what I wrote in it. Instead, though, I have a newsletter, and a blog, and books I very much hope people will one day want to read. I also have a list of very specific goals scribbled in the back of my 2026 planner which I absolutely will not be sharing with anyone, because then you would all know that I secretly want to be one of the ‘popular’ writers, and that would be my cover totally blown.

Oh no, wait: it kind of already is, isn’t it?

Whoops…

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I first read Confessions of a Shopaholic — or The Secret Dream World of a Shopaholic, as it was then known — in my early twenties, not long after finishing a degree in English Literature which had, in retrospect, kind of killed off my love of reading.

I’d just spent four years reading books because I had to, rather than because I wanted to, and analysing them rather than simply enjoying them. Even during the holidays we’d be sent home with reading lists so long they left no time to read just for fun; in fact, I still have flashbacks to the summer I spent essentially bribing myself to read James Joyce’s Ulysses by promising myself a treat at the end of every chapter, only for the lecturer who spoke on it to admit he hadn’t read it either. Yes.

(To be fair, if you’re doing an English Lit degree, I highly recommend reading at least some of Ulysses, because so few people have managed to get through it you can use it to prove basically any point you like. I’m pretty sure I only passed my final exams because of the number of times I was able to say, “and this is shown to great effect in Ulysses,” without fear of contradiction. Top tip for you, there. Follow me for more educational and literary advice…)

Anyway, at some point after finishing my degree, I picked up Shopaholic, and while it would be an exaggeration to say it changed my life, I’m going to say it anyway, because … well, it kind of did?

Not only was that book a complete breath of fresh air after the required reading of Edinburgh University’s literature department, it was also one of the first times I’d come across a fictional heroine I could actually relate to. 1 (Well, with the possible exception of Jinny from Finmory and George from the Famous Five, and both of those characters were far, far ‘pluckier’ than my young self could ever dream of being, so maybe not…) Hard though it was to admit it, I knew I would never be a Lizzie Bennet or a Jo March. I could most definitely be a Becky Bloomwood or a Bridget Jones, though; a fact that was confirmed when I passed Shopaholic on to my mum after reading it, and she returned it with the words, “That was basically a book about you, wasn’t it?”

Like Becky, I was a poorly-paid journalist with a penchant for Gucci handbags, and a lot of credit card debt. Like Bridget, whose diary I read (and then re-read) shortly after, I was constantly falling for men who weren’t good for me, and was convinced the only reason it wasn’t working out was because I was so disgustingly ‘fat’ that no one could possibly ever love me.

(And, look, I know there’s been a lot written about ‘fatphobia’ in Bridget Jones, and Gen Z love to dunk on it for that reason, but all I’ll say is that (in the book, at least - I have only very hazy memories of the movie) I felt the point Helen Fielding was trying to make with all of the weight-talk was that Bridget wasn’t actually ‘fat’ but nevertheless thought she was … because that was exactly how society and the media at the time made women feel. It was certainly how it made me feel, and while I suspect that’s probably a very 90s mindset, which you’ll probably only really understand if you lived through the era of the ‘sidebar of shame’, in which magazines would post photos of celebrities with red circles pointing out their non-existent cellulite, the fact was that I did live through that era and, in Bridget Jones and Becky Bloomwood I found exactly the kind of flawed heroines who seemed to be having the same kind of experience of it I was.)

I’ve written before about how I read (and write) romance because my traumatised little brain is soothed by the guarantee of a happy ever after, but I started reading romantic comedy in particular because I guess I loved the idea that these happy endings could be achieved, not just by the flawless, perfect people who are deemed to be most deserving of them, but also by women who live beyond their means and can be relied upon to make an absolute tit of themselves at the office Christmas party.

I was just such a woman; one of the ones who was more likely to fall over than to fall in love. One of the ones no one ever wrote books about… which is why books like Shopaholic meant so much to me when I first came across them: and why, when I heard that Sophie Kinsella had passed away this week, I felt so incredibly sad about it, even though I didn’t know her.

I did know Becky Bloomwood, though, and all of the other heroines of Sophie’s hilariously warm and witty books; and when I finally came to write books of my own, I knew those were the kind of women I wanted to write about too — despite the knowledge that some people (maybe even quite a lot of people…) would turn their noses up at them … because, let’s face it, romantic comedy is still a genre that’s somewhat looked down upon — considered a far lesser form of literature than almost anything else you could mention.

I knew this, of course, because people had already sneered at me for reading ‘chick lit’; to the extent that, any time someone asked me what I was reading, I’d have to fight the urge to bring up my degree and point out I had read the classics too, but now I just wanted something fun. Like, I read Ulysses, Sandra, would you just let me live?

A lot of people, though, think ‘chick lit’ is superficial and silly; literary ‘fluff’ with silly cartoon people on brightly-coloured covers. But these books are so much more than that. For me, they were first of all an escape route: a welcome break from the ‘real world’, and a return to the days when reading was a pleasure rather than a chore. Now, of course, they’re my livelihood — and I owe that, at least in part, to authors like Sophie Kinsella, who paved the way, and gave people like me something to aspire to.

I think that’s why this week’s sad news made me feel a lot like we romcom writers have lost our leader. Sophie Kinsella was one of the very best of us; and if you were to ask me which I prefer, Ulysses or Confessions of a Shopaholic, I’d simply show you this very low-res photo of me from Halloween 2009, in which I’ve thoughtfully covered up Terry (Who went as Bruno and would probably not thank me for sending that particular photo to all of my subscribers) with my ‘inspiration’ photo:

No one had a clue who I was supposed to be, and I was asked more than once why I hadn’t bothered dressing up, and had just come as myself, but I like to think I nailed it. And I hope Becky Bloomwood’s wonderful creator would have agreed…

Hi, I’m Amber Eve — author of smalltown romantic comedies, and my long-running blog, Forever Amber. If you’d like to know more about me, start here. If you’d like to hear more from me, meanwhile, hit the button below (or ‘smash’ it, as my 7-year-old would say…)

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There was no newsletter last week, because, instead of writing, I’ve mostly been frantically decluttering my house, in a transparent attempt to feel like I’m in control of something in my life, even though I am blatantly not in control of anything in my life right now.

It’s because of Christmas.

Yes, already.

It might only be the whatever-it-is of November, but I’m already finding myself constantly performing the complicated mental gymnastics that comes with questions like:

• If we’re out every single weekend from now until January, when will we put up the Christmas tree?

• If Max has six Christmas events at school, and four of them require Christmas jumpers, but he also has Christmas events every weekend and now also on some weeknights, how many Christmas jumpers do I need to buy him, and how will I afford this?

• When will I wash my hair?

• If we have social events on Sunday, Tuesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday of one week (And the rest of the month is looking much the same…), but I’m an introvert who needs more downtime than that, is it reasonable for me to just declare that I will not be even attempting to work in December? Or, you know, January?

• If we’re seeing the same group of people multiple times, what the hell do I wear to each event to avoid looking like I’m starring in my very own version of Groundhog Day? And what do I feed them that takes account of the fact that I can’t cook? Wine? Can I just give them wine? OK, what if it’s mulled wine? Does that work?

Unfortunately for me, however, the answers to some of these problems continue to prove elusive, which is why I’ve been obsessively decluttering my house. I feel like if I can just clear out every single cluttered drawer and cupboard in order to make way for the influx of STUFF I know will be coming our way in December, I will be able to breathe more easily, and possibly even sleep at night without having recurring nightmares in which it’s the school nativity, and Max and I both turn up in non-Christmas themed pyjamas because my Tetris-like diary for the month has let me down, and everything’s descended into chaos.

And I HATE chaos.

(Note to self: buy Christmas pyjamas…)

(Addendum to note: Maybe buy two pairs, just in case the school springs a surprise ‘PJ Day’ on us without warning again?1)

Which brings me to the plot outline I’ve been working on now for … ooh, approximately MY ENTIRE LIFE? Or that’s what it feels like, anyway.

Given everything I’ve just said about chaos, and control, and my desperate need to turn one into the other, you’d think I’d be an expert plotter by now, wouldn’t you? And I’ve tried; really, I have.

I desperately want to be a plotter. The idea of having a carefully-structured outline that I just have to sit down and add words to (A bit like I used to do as a ghostwriter) appeals to the part of me that craves order; the part whose reaction to stress is to clean her house and reorganise her cupboards. I am a person who likes things neat. I like to have a plan.

But when it comes to writing books, all of that goes out of the window. I just can’t do it, guys. I can’t seem to bring order to this particular brand of chaos. And, as proof of this, having just spent however long its been working on a single plot outline, this week I decided to scrap almost everything I’ve come up with so far and start again, only with a completely different love interest.

From this, I learned two important things:

1. There’s an almost infinite number of ways any particular plot can develop. And if you spend enough time thinking about it, your brain will start to suggest to you that every single one of them is better than the version you originally decided on. For instance, this book I’m currently working on could be either a romcom, a thriller, or a mystery, depending on how I write it. And the fact that I secretly want it to be ALL of these things is … not fun. Not fun at all.

2. I am probably not a ‘plotter’, much as I would like to be.

The thing is, though, I’m not really a ‘pantser’2 either. I mean, I DO need to have at least SOME idea of where the story’s going to go before I can start writing it, but … I think I might be at the point now where I just need to start WRITING the thing and figure out the details as I go.

But I’m probably going to have to clear out at least two more cupboards before I can do that. And I’m also going to have to buy at least one more Christmas jumper, all of Max’s birthday gifts, and perform some more diary-Tetris in order to find time for all of the various things that have been added to our schedule since I started writing this newsletter.

And, once I’ve done all of that, I can start writing the book.

I hope.

Thanks for reading,

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Some authors can write a book pretty much anywhere. On their phone. On the toilet. On the back of a cereal packet. While standing in line at the post office. I could go on.

These authors are straight-up unicorns, as far as I’m concerned. Their very existence is amazing to me, because I … am not like that. No, in order for me to write a book, a very specific set of circumstances has to exist. I need, in no particular order…

Peace & Quiet

I know a lot of people who write in coffee shops, just to get a change of scenery. This is amazing to me, because I can literally only work in my office, surrounded by all of my things, and with a pair of noise-cancelling headphones at hand just in case there’s even the slightest noise outside that might disturb my v important work (I can’t listen to music while I’m writing because I’d probably just start typing the lyrics, but I occasionally play white noise if I have to...). On my desk, I also always have...

Emotional support Stanley and trusty cup of coffee

The coffee cup will get refilled multiple times throughout the day; the Stanley cup is basically just there so I can pretend to myself that I’m going to drink enough water, even though I know perfectly well I won’t. (Seriously, though, I’m an absolute sucker for a Stanley cup. I know it’s a total cliché at this point, but I am nothing if not basic, and I love them so much I have a second one that sits on my bedside table, just so I can pretend I’m going to drink water in the evening, too…)

Sort-of on the subject of hydration...

Lip balm and hand cream

Is it just me, or do you also turn into a dried-up husk of a person every time you sit down in front of your computer? I know that actually drinking the water in that Stanley cup would probably help with this, but why would I do that when I could just buy lots of products to throw at the problem instead? I never go anywhere without my hand cream and lip balm, and I keep a set in my desk drawer at all times, too, so I can reapply them constantly during the day. I switch these up all the time, because I’ve yet to find my Holy Grail in either, but, for anyone who’s particularly interested, my current lip balm is this one by Essence (At night I use a generous slather of Laneige Lip Sleeping Mask), and my hand cream is a L’Occitane one which has the benefit of sinking in quickly, so I can get back to typing. Speaking of which…

Mechanical keyboard

Forget writing on my phone (I genuinely have no idea how people can write an entire book on a phone… I can barely get out a single sentence without multiple mistakes…) — I can’t even write on a keyboard unless it’s exactly the right type of keyboard. If you’ve ever wondered what happened to the Princess in ‘Princess and the Pea’ fame when she grew up, well, now you know…

My preference is for a manual keyboard – or a ‘clicky’ keyboard as I call it – which makes a satisfyingly loud ‘clacky’ noise when you type on it. I suspect this is probably really annoying for my husband, who shares my office (I did ask when I got it, and he claimed it doesn’t bother him…) but I really enjoy typing on it, and anything that helps motivate me to type is worth it, as far as I’m concerned. I have this one, and I feel it’s very appropriate that I write romance books on a pink keyboard with a love heart on it, no?

(The cute puppy isn’t included, unfortunately; Nellie belongs to friends who live in our street, and we were just puppy-sitting her for a few hours. Isn’t she adorable, though? She’s basically a real-life Jellycat pup…)

All the notebooks

I’m fairly old-school when it comes to note-taking and like to write everything by hand (Although not the actual BOOKS, obviously. I do know some authors who do this, and, again, I’m in awe of them because that would hurt my hand. No, seriously…), which is why my desk drawers are overflowing with notebooks. They’re not pretty or well-organised (I love looking at photos of people’s bullet journals, but I’m just not patient or creative enough to make my notebooks look aesthetically pleasing...), and my handwriting is barely legible at this point, but, I don’t know, there’s just something about the act of putting actual pen to paper that I love?

I’ve talked about this before, but I have a little ritual now whereby I treat myself to a new notebook for each new book I start writing (I normally buy personalised ones from Martha Brooke or Papier…), but I also have a few others which I use for various different things, and, like most of the writers I know, I just seem to keep buying more, even when I don’t actually need them. When you’re tired of notebooks, you’re tired of life, right?

Reedsy Editor

Finally, I write all of my books using the Reedsy online editor1, which used to be free, but which is now £5.99 per month, and totally worth it, because while it might not be the most complicated or feature-rich writing program out there, the interface just really works for me: I love the goal-setting feature, and it allows you to back up your work to Word, or export it as an epub, so while I have tried other, more expensive programmes, this is the one I keep coming back to, and which every one of my books so far has been written on... including, I hope, book number 10. Which I am STILL currently busy plotting, and feel like I will be working on for the rest of my life at this point.

I should probably go and get on with that, shouldn’t I?

Until next week,