My Dearest Miss Fairfax

                                                   My Dearest Miss Fairfax

by Jeanette Watts

 

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GENRE: Austenesque/Historical Fiction

 

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BLURB:

 

How much would you gamble for true love? Jane Fairfax dreaded her future as a governess. But genteel solitude seemed her fate. Then handsome, charming, rich Frank Churchill asked to marry her – IF his rich aunt agreed. If their secret engagement was discovered, Jane would be ruined. Frank seemed worth the risk; but the stakes got higher when the aunt refused her consent!

 

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EXCERPT

Mr Churchill caught the end of one of the long ribbons from her bonnet, which were flying madly in the strong breeze. He toyed with it for a long while, then looked up into her eyes. “Do you believe in love at first sight?” he asked.

 

“No, I don’t suppose I do,” Jane answered. Her heart started beating harder. That was a lie. Maybe her breath was catching in her throat because she was lying: she fell in love with him the moment she saw him, rescuing the poor store clerk. Or maybe it was because he was standing so close to her, just on the other end of her bonnet ribbon. She felt her cheeks growing warm, and tried to talk herself out of blushing. He was not standing any closer to her than when they danced together, or sat on the same bench at the pianoforte. Why should it fluster her that he was wrapping the end of her bonnet ribbon around his fingers like that?

 

“Neither did I.” He tied a knot into the very end of the ribbon, then caught the other flying ribbon, and did the same to its end. “I thought love requires mutual respect and understanding, and complementary temperaments that can only be discovered with a judicious application of time and conversation.”

 

Jane hid her trembling hands inside her muff. She wished there was a way to hide the fact that she was trembling all over. “I understood you from the first moment I saw you,” she admitted, her voice little more than a whisper.

 

A Word With the Author

 1.Did you always want to be an author?

 

Sort of… I was always a storyteller, which is at least similar, if not exactly the same thing. 

 

When I was in fourth grade I used to make up stories that I told my best friend as we’d walk to school. She was the one that used to make me write things down. So this is really all her fault, in a way. 

 

When I was old enough to babysit, instead of reading the kids I was taking care of a bedtime story from a book, I would act out stories using their stuffed animals. Once when I moved away, one of my girlfriends took over babysitting the same kids – she ended up letting me know she was going to strangle me. She was not a natural-born storyteller who made up stories using the kids’ stuffed animals!

2.Tell us about the publication of your first book.

It was an adventure! 

 

It has been a few years since that first book baby. Ebooks came out as I was in the process of trying to find an agent, because you were NOT going to find a publisher for historical fiction without an agent. I sent out a lot of query letters, I heard back from agents, “Hey! I really loved your book, but would you change this and this and this? If you do that, I’ll represent you.” So I would spend five months rewriting the book to that agent’s specifications, and then that agent says, “Ew! I don’t like your book anymore….” I did that over and over again for five years. 

 

Meanwhile, Kindle comes out, and I have people telling me, “Just go publish it on Kindle!” For a year, I told them, “No, no, I want to publish the traditional route. Self-publishing has such a bad reputation, and to be honest, I’ve seen a lot of self-published books that make me say, “Yes, I understand why self-published books have a bad reputation. My writing is better than that. My characters deserve better than to be ignored because I self-published.

 

But after one more crazy agent had me waste my time making changes they didn’t actually want, I finally listened to the advice. I should have listened much sooner! When there was almost no content on Kindle, I might have been a best seller simply because there was so little out there to read on a Kindle!

 

Once I was on Kindle, then I needed to start trying to find my readers. But how to do that? I got invited to be in the author’s pavilion at the Ashville Viking Festival, where I could hand out cards for getting an ebook. The vast majority of the people I talked to said to me, “No thanks, I want a REAL book in my hands!” 

 

Fortunately, I was sharing the authors tent with a writer who told me about CreateSpace. It was not a vanity publisher that was going to require several thousand dollars from me: it was a print on demand publisher, people could order a copy, it was printed and sent to them, I could order a bunch of copies to bring to book festivals when I needed books to put into people’s hands.

 

And that’s how my first book came to be! It was a slow process. It got easier after that.

 

3.Besides yourself, who is your favorite author in the genre you write in?

 

Margaret Mitchell. I know that Gone With the Wind is a controversial book right now, but I will stand by her. Is it racist because the enslaved peoples around her all talked with a dialect? People to this day talk with dialects. Her black characters were not characterized as stupid people. Scarlett O’Hara feared and respected Mammy. As much as a narcissist flawed protagonist was capable of respecting anybody.

 

The reason I like Margaret Mitchell so much is that she was a reporter first, and she did her homework. Thoroughly. So much historical fiction makes me cringe. Just because the telephone was invented in 1876, housewives were not calling each other on the phone in 1877 to gossip. (Yes, I’ve seen that. In a book published the traditional way with a large publisher. It’s kinda disgraceful.) I’m a history buff who mostly reads biographies and histories, and there’s nothing in GWTW that makes me slap my head and groan and call the writer a moron who doesn’t do her damn homework.

4.What's the best part of being an author? The worst?

 

There are two best parts:

 

1)     Readers. I love going to book festivals to promote my novels, and talking to people. I have had the most amazing conversations with people who watch for me every year, and with people who have never read my books before. I have had conversations with people about my books, who have later stopped back at my booth to bring me other books they know I would be interested in!

2)     Once I have written the stories, the characters stop banging at the inside of my brain, trying to get out. It’s a relief.

 

The worst part of being an author is navigating the publishing industry. The traditional publishers don’t care if a book is well written. They just want books that will make them money. Circumnavigating that system by self-publishing, I have to do all the things that a publisher would do to get a book into the hands of readers. I have to find out what the rules are, and continually adapt to the constantly changing rules. There is an entire industry built around figuring out what Amazon does. Amazon does not TELL authors how the algorithm works. Authors have to pay thousands of dollars and spend hundreds of hours researching to find out what they need to be doing in order to get Amazon to introduce their books to the people who would be interested in reading them.

 
5.What are you working on now?

 

My newest novel, “My Dearest Miss Fairfax,” was released on March 14^th. So I have been spending all of my time working on the publicity that goes into a book release. Sadly, for every hour spent writing a novel, an author needs to spend at least two hours marketing. I wish there was a better system.

 

Once “Miss Fairfax” is really underway, I am working on re-releasing my previous romantic comedy, “Jane Austen Lied to Me.” There is a strong trend in book covers for romantic comedies lately, that I need to embrace. And I hopefully have found the composer for the stage musical version of the book! 

 

Once THAT is underway, I have a half-finished series of historical dance manuals I started during the pandemic that needs to be finished. I am a dance instructor and dance historian, and these books will help museums all over the country in teaching the period-appropriate dances to do for a house built in 1803, for example, or a historic battlefield from 1776 or 1863, or a town who holds an annual celebration to commemorate their founding in 1890.

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AUTHOR Bio and Links:

 

Jeanette Watts has written three Jane Austen-inpsired novels, two other works of historical fiction, stage melodramas, television commercials, and humorous essays for Kindle Vella.

 

When she is not writing, she is either dancing, sewing, or walking around in costume at a Renaissance festival talking in a funny accent and offering to find new ladies’ maids for everyone she finds in fashionably-ripped jeans.

 

Contact Links

Website: www.JeanetteWatts.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JeanetteWattsAuthor

Twitter: @JAMLW_writer

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6967936.Jeanette_Watts

https://www.goodreads.com/author/dashboard

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/jeanette2420/_saved/

Instagram: jeanetteamlwatts

 

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GIVEAWAY INFORMATION 

 

Jeanette Watts will be awarding a crazy quilt tea cosy to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

 

 

 

a Rafflecopter giveaway