This week, I'm delighted to welcome Jane Cable to my blog. Jane is a fellow member of the Cariad Chapter of the Romantic Novelists' Association, and during the time I have been a member, she has helped me enormously. I have always said that authors are the most supportive group of people, and Jane is one of the best. Not only that, she writes the most wonderful books too. Welcome, Jane!

When did you publish your first book, and what started you writing?

I have always written, one way or another, but I didn’t seem capable of completing anything novel-length until I was in my forties. Then it took me a few more years to produce something I felt might be worth publishing. In 2011 my mother persuaded me to enter the Alan Titchmarsh Show’s People’s Novelist competition and The Cheesemaker’s House reached the last four. However because it was a rather ghostly romance I struggled to find a publisher, and in the end I self-published it in 2013 through Matador.

Tell us about that book.

Because I’ve just had a new cover produced for The Cheesemaker’s House to bring it up to date I’ve rewritten the blurb as well, so here it is:

When Alice discovers her husband has been cheating there are just three things she wants; their gorgeous second home in Yorkshire, their spaniel William, and a quiet life.

But no sooner than she arrives in Great Fencote, strange things begin to happen. A skinny-dipping swimmer disappears without trace, only to pop up behind the counter of a local coffee shop. Someone seems to be crying at night, but Alice can’t work out who. And equally unsettling is the incredibly sexy builder she employs to turn her barn into a holiday let.

Old houses hide old secrets, but is The Cheesemaker’s House ready to share the tragedy in its past? And can Alice, café owner Owen, and builder Richard, find a way to lay its ghosts to rest for once and for all?

What is your fondest memory of publishing your first book?

Being on holiday when it came out and discovering there were these wonderful people called book bloggers who were reviewing it and loving it. I guess because of its competition success, it had been chosen as a book of the month on Netgalley. I had absolutely no idea how important that was either. I was green as grass.

Tell us about your latest book

My latest book is The Collaborator's Daughter, my third Croatian novel written as Eva Glyn. I've always wanted to write a romance featuring characters in their sixties, so this is Fran's story. Having fled from Dubrovnik in 1944 in her mother's arms, Fran had always been told that her father died a hero. But when she is finally free of the caring duties that have filled her adult life she discovers he was executed as a Nazi collaborator, so she returns to the city of her birth to find out the truth. But the past is rarely what it seems - and neither is the future.

What advice would you give to new writers?

Write the very best book you can. It won’t be your first draft, or even your second (from memory I wrote about thirteen or fourteen until I was happy with The Cheesemaker’s House).

Getting a publishing contract is tough, but so is self-publishing if you do it properly. It’s no good just sticking a book on Amazon and hoping people will find it – you need to learn about book marketing too. But self-publishing gives you an instant back list; it was my second novel, now called The Missing Pieces of Us, that won me a deal with One More Chapter, an imprint of Harper Collins, where I now write as Eva Glyn.

Links for The Cheesemaker’s House:

apple.co/3laPr0h  
amzn.to/3l68jxq  

Link for The Collaborator's Daughter:

https://mybook.to/CollaboratorsDaughter

About Jane

Jane Cable writes romance with a twist and its roots firmly in the past, more often than not inspired by a tiny slice of history and a beautiful British setting.

After independently publishing, Jane was signed by Sapere Books. Her first two novels for them were contemporary romances looking back to World War 2; Another You inspired by a tragic D-Day exercise at Studland Bay in Dorset and Endless Skies by the brave Polish bomber crews who flew from a Lincolnshire airbase.

Jane lives in Cornwall and her current series, Cornish Echoes, are dual timeline adventure romances set in the great houses of the Poldark era and today.