Audio Anyone?

13/10/202013/10/2020 ~ Ada ~ Leave a comment

Hello! Cass and I are so very thrilled to announce that Dreamscape Media is releasing The Particular Charm of Miss Jane Austen in audio book format TODAY, October 13 (physical CDs released Nov 3) and you can find it here!!!

There are a host of reasons why we are excited about this, but number one is that talented actress, comedienne and author, Alison Larkin, is the artist narrating our comedic tale of time travel and friendship. Alison is a multi-award winning Austen narrator—and the only person to narrate all six of Jane Austen’s novels—and we cannot wait for you to hear her read our characters.

The audiobook release is also an opportunity to reach a new audience which is always fun, so please feel free to share the news with any friends you think might enjoy the book but read primarily in audiobook form!

Also, did you miss out on attending the annual Jane Austen festivals, notably the one held in Bath in September? Well, this is the perfect opportunity to participate by living through Rose and Morgan’s adventures!

Happy listening, everyone!

PS: The audio of the sequel, The Unexpected Past of Miss Jane Austen, is available for pre-order and will release on November 17. You can pre-order here!

New Year, New News!!

24/01/202024/01/2020 ~ Cass ~ 9 Comments

Hello!! Happy New Year from Tabby Cow (i.e. Cass and Ada)!

2019 was an incredible year for us, with both The Particular Charm of Miss Jane Austen and it’s sequel, The Unexpected Past of Miss Jane Austen, being published by Canelo Escape. Not without note, we also wrote said sequel in 2019 and got to spend an incredible week IRL together in Bath for the Jane Austen Festival which… oh, have I not mentioned recently – we actually got to be part of the program?

We haven’t actually been in a cave, we’ve been hard at work writing… well, Cass has been writing (her novel, The Cottage in a Cornish Cove, is due out on 11th February, pre-order it here!).
Ada has been deep in thought piecing together her fictional murder plot and avoiding writing by watching a lot of The Mandalorian on Disney +. There’s also the outline for the third book in our Jane Austen time-travel series in my tablet files, and Cass and I are excited to get back to these characters that we’ve grown to love so much.

We’re also about to go on a bear hunt… no, wait! A blog tour! The lovely Rachel at Rachel’s Random Resources has arranged a ten-day tour for us with all the lovely bloggers on the banner below from January 25 through February 3!

Otherwise, we’d just like to say that we so appreciate the support of our loyal fans. Every “like” and “retweet” and “share” warms our hearts and makes us a little bit more guilty that we keep ending our novels with cliff-hangers. You must admit, they are mild cliff-hangers… that’s not as bad, surely?

Thank you!!!

Ada (and Cass)

P.S. In unrelated to writing news, but maybe related to this post news, Ada’s track pad on her laptop is possessed and can no longer be trusted. Okay actually, a little bit of Googling has suggested that her laptop track pad has become overly sensitive with age (#relatable). But what that means is that she has to know where the cursor is at all times, because if it is allowed to hover over anything clickable: a ‘buy now’ button, a different web page, an ad, any link what so ever, then it will actually double tap on its own. Yes, she was going to buy those paper towels on Amazon, but she doesn’t appreciate the track pad deciding on the when. She also cannot seem to log in to the blog as an owner, and therefore she is sending this to Cass to post for her 😉

P.P.S. We had two fab reviews come through this past week for The Unexpected Past of Miss Jane Austen (the second book in the series), and you can read them at the following links. Thanks so much to Anna at Diary of an Eccentric and Meredith at Austenesque Reviews for taking the time to read and review!

Diary of an Eccentric

Austenesque Reviews

GIVEAWAY Winners Announced!

21/10/2019 ~ Cass ~ 4 Comments

We are delighted to announce the three winners of a paperback copy of The Particular Charm of Miss Jane Austen!

There were 31 entries in the draw, and the winners are:

kneyda

Ashley

Carmen

Many congratulations to all 3 of you, and thank you so much to everyone who entered. We really enjoyed reading your responses.

Please can the winners email me on cass {dot} grafton at yahoo {dot} com with your mailing address, and I’ll get your book out to you as soon as possible!

The Countdown Begins with a GIVEAWAY!!

06/10/2019 ~ Cass ~ 78 Comments

As you probably know (because we pretty much haven’t shut up about it over the last month), the long-awaited sequel to the first book in the Austen Adventures series, The Unexpected Past of Miss Jane Austen, is coming out one month today (7th November 2019… It’s already the 7th somewhere in the world, isn’t it?)

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Billed by our publisher, Canelo Escape, as a page-turning story of adventure, friendship and family, the story picks up where the first book in the series, The Particular Charm of Miss Jane Austen, ends, taking the familiar characters on another exciting escapade, this time into the past.

You can read the blurb to The Unexpected Past of Miss Jane Austen here, and you can find it up for pre-order on the ‘Where to Buy‘ page here.

Read below on how to enter a FREE GIVEAWAY for a paperback of the first book in the series!

bookcoverfront The Particular Charm of Miss Jane Austen was released in September, and to celebrate the run-up to the release of the sequel, we’re giving away THREE copies of the paperback edition of the book.

The giveaway is free to enter and is open worldwide! All you have to do to enter is leave a comment telling us your favourite Jane Austen novel or adaptation. That’s it! No more, no less!

Entries close at midnight UK time on Sunday, 20th October 2019, and the names of all entrants will be entered in the draw, with three winners selected by an impartial third party.

Winners will be announced here on the Blog and the news will be shared on social media. If a prize is not claimed within seven days of the winners being announced, a further name will be chosen to receive the book.

So what’s it about? Here’s the blurb of this uplifting, comedic tale of time travel and friendship:

Rose Wallace’s world revolves around all things Austen, and with the annual festival in Bath – and the arrival of dishy archaeologist, Dr Aiden Trevellyan– just around the corner, all is well with the world…

But then a mysterious woman who bears more than a passing resemblance to the great author moves in upstairs, and things take a disastrous turn. Rose’s new neighbour is Jane Austen, whose time travel adventure has been sabotaged by a mischievous dog, trapping her in the twenty-first century.

Rose’s life is instantly changed – new home, new job, new friends – but she’s the only one who seems to have noticed! To right the world around her, she will have to do whatever it takes to help Jane get back home to write Rose’s beloved novels. Because a world without Mr Darcy? It’s not worth living in!

~o0o~

charm-amazon So there it is! A chance to win a free paperback of The Particular Charm of Miss Jane Austen! So what are you waiting for? (please don’t say ‘the sequel’)

Zip on down to the Comments and share with us your favourite Jane Austen novel or adaptation (just the title will do if you don’t have time to say more)!

And if you don’t win the paperback and still fancy reading the book, the eBook is also available with this very pretty cover, and available through the Where to Buy page as well!

Dressing the Part

06/10/201906/10/2019 ~ Ada ~ 6 Comments

BP Soldiers

If you’ve read my previous post, you’ll know Cass and I were set to appear at the Jane Austen Festival’s Pre-Festival Get Together on Friday, September 13 in Bath!

What I haven’t mentioned yet is that my little traveling party (my 16 year old daughter, Abby, and my mother-in-law) decided to take advantage of the opportunity to walk in the famous Grand Regency Promenade during the Festival.

This is a costumed event that is always popular and… if I can just say it – AWESOME.

Cass had walked the Promenade before, but this year she decided to watch and was therefore designated as photographer. As for the rest of us, we needed to start from scratch.

BP Sarah — Beautifully dressed promenaders!!

First thing was to pick fabric.

I was pretty nervous about this part. I’m not great at visualizing a finished product. The last time I picked fabric for something it was an armchair and I regretted it and continue to regret it 18 years later.

I also know that a lot of the wonderful people who dress Regency for this type of event choose beautiful era appropriate fabric and patterns, so I went into the fabric store stressed by the entire idea.

Luckily, when I get like that my family knows well enough to ignore me and get on with the task at hand!

And sure enough, Abby was the one who caught sight of a pretty cream fabric with little flowers that looked right enough. And it happened to have a darker, sister fabric that I thought would compliment my complexion better as well. Sold!

It just so happens that my mother and my mother-in-law both know their way around a needle and thread. So my mother-in-law chose to make her own dress, and my mother got stuck with doing the other two.

They got to work on the measuring, cutting, sewing, and my mom twisted our ears until we made time to try on the dresses during the different stages. In fact, my mother-in-law ended up making not one but TWO dresses. Both very cute.

(Yes, never fear, I am aware I hit the mother AND mother-in-law jackpot. How often does that happen?)

Meanwhile I went hunting on Etsy for bonnets. This is my daughter and I in ours:

The next worry was packing them!

This is the bonnets in their own special box on the airport bus!

And then, after a flight, a few days of all sorts of fun, and a quick iron, we were dressed ready for the Promenade!

Have you ever walked the Grand Regency Promenade through the streets of beautiful Bath? We highly recommend it!

Charmed at the Festival! Our book launches at the Jane Austen Festival in Bath

06/10/201906/10/2019 ~ Ada ~ 3 Comments

The Particular Charm of Miss Jane Austen

The Unexpected Past of Miss Jane Austen

Cass and I were honored to be invited to launch our new release through Canelo Escape, The Particular Charm of Miss Jane Austen, at the Pre-Festival Get Together for the Jane Austen Festival in Bath last month, and it was a fantastic night!

The book is, after all, set during this very Festival in the beautiful city of Bath, so what could be more fitting?

The sell-out event took place at St Swithin’s Church (where Jane Austen’s parents were married), and we arrived to find the lovely Festival volunteers had readied everything. All we had to do was set out our books and publicity material and wait nervously for people to arrive (Cass felt a lot better once she had a glass of wine in her hand)!

We’d had posters made up for both The Particular Charm of Miss Jane Austen and the sequel, The Unexpected Past of Miss Jane Austen (releasing 7th November but already up for pre-order!), along with the blurb – which you can read here for the first book in the Austen Adventures series, and here for the second. This enabled us to have some lovely conversations with people attending the event, and we were delighted with the interest in our stories.

We’d made up some goody bags for the first 30 people to buy signed books, which proved very popular, especially the Californian candy and the Swiss chocolate!

Ada and Cass with Q&A host, Dr Gaby Malcolm

We were honored to have Dr. Gabrielle Malcolm (amongst other things, an Austen scholar and author of the upcoming non-fiction book, There’s Something About Darcy – releasing on 11th November) introducing us and moderating a Q&A, which was a lot of fun.

Afterwards, there was time for more conversation as we signed books and handed out the goody bags, during which we met some lovely people from across the globe.

We were also touched and thrilled to see several friends there, who had all travelled some distance to support us.

A huge thank you to everyone involved. We had a great time!

Ada with Martin, the most photographed man in Bath!

Giveaway Winners Announced!!

19/09/2019 ~ Cass ~ 5 Comments

Hello! We’re back!

It’s been a whirlwind of a week, with us both flying to the UK for the launch event of The Particular Charm of Miss Jane Austen at the Jane Austen Festival in Bath, but now we’re back home and able to announce the winners of our paperback giveaway (from the earlier post, Don’t judge a book by it’s… wait! Go on, then!)

There were three copies up for grabs (signed by both authors), and here are the winners:

rp73fr

Vesper

Jeannie

Please email me on cassandra (dot) grafton (at) gmail (dot) com with the address you’d like your book sent to, and we’ll make sure they wing their way to you directly! 😉

Thank you to everyone who entered into the spirit of the draw and many congratulations to our winners!

More news coming soon about the upcoming sequel to The Particular Charm of Miss Jane Austen (official cover reveal tomorrow from Canelo) and some insights into our adventures in Bath this last weekend!

Don’t judge a book by it’s… wait! Go on, then!

19/08/201919/08/2019 ~ Ada ~ 30 Comments

Hello again everyone!

If you follow Cass or I on any social media platforms you probably already know our biggest news (also mentioned in my last post): the eBook of The Particular Charm of Miss Jane Austen… AND it’s sequel (I don’t think I’m allowed to tell you the title yet) were acquired by Canelo Digital Publishing at the end of last year.

One of the many things we were excited about on entering the traditionally published world was that there would be real artists and professionals creating our covers!

Our first cover will always be near and dear to us, but at the end of the day it didn’t reflect the light hearted nature of our writing and so… drumroll please… HERE is what the professionals came up with:

I love the color and the whimsy of it. I love the animals and the little Royal Crescent at the top. Hopefully it will grab readers that our first cover might have put off.

But wait! There’s more!

We did edit the manuscript before submitting to Canelo, and with the interior updated to reflect this, it seemed the perfect time to brighten up the paperback cover as well.

Of course we couldn’t step on the publisher’s toes as far as making the two too similar, but we found something refined and pretty (just like main character Rose).

So HERE is what we came up with:

This means that if you have a book with this new cover, then you have the new and revised version of our book, which we are immensely proud of.

Whereas if you have this cover:

Congratulations! You have the OG (this is apparently a reference no one is going to get based on asking several peers – basically I just mean ‘the original’) version of The Particular Charm of Miss Jane Austen.

Regardless of the covers, it might be sensible to tell you a little about the inside of the book, for those who haven’t yet read it!

Here we go:

When a time travelling Jane Austen gets stuck in modern-day Bath it’s up to avid Janeite Rose Wallace to save her… because she’s the only one who knows that Jane exists!

Rose Wallace’s world revolves around all things Austen, and with the annual festival in Bath – and the arrival of dishy archaeologist, Dr Aiden Trevellyan – just around the corner, all is well with the world…

~o0o~

GIVEAWAY TIME!!

As we approach the release date for the eBook (12th September – it’s available for pre-order here!), we’ve decided to give away a few copies of the new, revised paperback! What’s more, these will be signed by both authors (not a thing that happens very often with the distance between us!)

All you have to do is leave a comment on this post, letting us know your thoughts on any of the covers (do you have a favourite, anything you love, anything you don’t), and then we’ll enter your name in the draw, which will be made on Sunday, 15th September in Bath!

Draw open internationally! Closing date for entries is 12th September 2019.

Thank you for bearing with us! We hope you enjoy the next few months where we should be posting here more regularly!

It was the best of times…

13/08/201919/08/2019 ~ Ada ~ 9 Comments

It has been quite a while since I’ve been here on our own beloved tabbycow.com (Cass! I think we need to grab the addy tabbyhippo now too! – sorry, private joke that you’d know about if you followed Cass or I on twitter!)

I came to update you all on changes to the cover of our first book together, The Particular Charm of Miss Jane Austen. But lo and behold, when I got here, I saw that we had never officially marked our partnership with Canelo Digital Publishing here on Tabby Cow!!

And THAT was ridiculous! But then, that made me remember WHY we never did so.

It was the best of times…

Cass, being all things brilliant – but in this case Twitter savvy in particular – entered our book in Canelo’s open pitch in the Summer of 2018. There were discussions and contracts and boom! Cass and I had joined the Canelo family.

This was exciting and terrifying, particularly since Canelo wanted not just The Particular Charm, but its sequel which, if you’ve read the first book you know, we’d left a pretty wide open door for.

An open door that we’d not yet walked thru! So, one of the first things Cass and I did after signing with our publisher (after sharing a drink over Facetime together), was book a ticket for me to go to the UK so that Cass and I could outline the sequel and we could officially meet with Canelo and sign on the dotted line.

While Cass and I are quite adept at communicating over the interwebs in all it’s many forms, there is something about being in the same room that is important for us when outlining. We shared an adorable place very near the Royal Crescent. We ate lovely meals and drank Luxe Chocolate Bailey’s Irish Cream and saw friends and ironed out plot points and I fell asleep every twenty minutes. (I’m usually very unaffected by the journey TO the UK. I usually fall into a jet lag coma when I get home).

We also toured all the places our characters would be walking around in the sequel and just generally had a lovely time.

It was the worst of times…

Honestly, most of the work was done (thank goodness) when I started to feel… awful.

I couldn’t eat or sleep or lay down or sit up or walk or be a functioning adult. Joan (a friend and our B&B hostess) very sweetly took care of me (as did Cass, of course) as I spent my last day and a half wondering if anyone would be willing to just knock me over the head until I could get better. Spoiler: no one was willing to do it.

I am so so lucky that my seatmates on the flight home were total arses because I didn’t feel bad one bit that I looked like I was carrying the plague.

I got home, dropped by bags, hugged my kids, and went straight to the ER. I then spent the next two months trying to figure out what sort of antibiotics would finally do the job. Here is me back at the ER on Thanksgiving still trying to figure it out! I wish I looked this good for my family Christmas pictures!

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Anyway… I think that robbed some of our enthusiasm for what we’d just accomplished (outlining the sequel!!! I’m so excited to share with you when we can!!).

I wonder if you’ll be able to gather any hints to the sequel by noting where we went to research 😉 😉 ;).