Karen Swan is a favorite with binge reading listeners. Her appearance on the show at Christmas time last year was one of the most listened to episodes of 2022.

So it's great to have her back on our Encore program. That's the one where people who've already been on the show, come back to talk about their latest book and for Karen it's her latest holiday special, The Christmas Postcards.

In case you're asking yourself why a show that ran in December, 2021 is in the 2022 best of lineup, it's because we have to take the stats from December 1 of each year, December 1st, 2021 to December 1st, 2022, to give us time to produce a show by January one.

Next week, we'll start posting the top 15 for 2022 and we're dividing it over two weeks, so there's not too much to listen to in one show each week. You're getting excerpts from a great range of genres from romance to thriller, women’s fiction to historicals. So don't miss it. That's just the way it all came together. I didn't do any tweaking

Books Giveaway - Enter the Draw

Giveaway with 40 romances that make for great holiday reading, including my three holiday novellas pack.

Enter the giveaway by clicking here 👉 https://www.booksweeps.com/giveaway/december22-win-a-bundle-of-sweet-mild-romance/

Plus a new E reader to be won, in total, $450 in value. Links for how you enter that plus anything else that you might want to find out and link to, in the show notes for this episode on the joys of binge reading.com.

Enter the giveaway by clicking here 👉 https://www.booksweeps.com/giveaway/december22-win-a-bundle-of-sweet-mild-romance/

And don't forget if you enjoy the show, leave us a review so others will hear about us too.

Links to things mentioned in the episode:

Links to things mentioned in this episode

Nicole Kidman film: Before I Go To Sleep, from a novel by S. J. Watson.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1726592/

S. J. Watson novel of same name: https://www.sjwatson-books.com/

The Hard Way: Chris Bonington – Documentary on climbing the south face of Annapurna.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASs95G49OjIhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASs95G49OjI.

Chris Bonington: https://www.bonington.com/

Where to find Karen Swan online

Website: https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/karen-swan/6006

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1112862.Karen_Swan

Instagram: @Swannywrites

But now here's our show.

Introducing international author Karen Swan

Karen Swan international best selling author - books for Christmas and summer..

Jenny Wheeler: Karen, you were last with us in December, 2021, talking about your very successful international career and last year's Christmas book. You've made a real, terrific story of doing two books a year, one for summer, and one for Christmas.

Could you just recap for us, before we get into The Christmas Postcards, tell us how that pattern got established.

Karen Swan: It all really happened because of me majorly messing up, it wasn't ever anything on my horizon at all, but Christmas at Tiffany's, which was my third book, had just come out and done amazingly well all over the world. This book was a bestseller. It was so unexpected to me.

It was amazing experience and it meant that there was quite a lot of pressure to follow up strongly.

At that point it was taking me a year to write a book. Christmas at Tiffany's had come out in November. I was handing my book into them for the following year in January.

And as I handed it in in January, my editor starts reading it and she said, ‘We have a problem.’

And I was like, ‘oh no,’ no writer wants to hear that. There's a problem with the manuscript, especially when you've just had a really big hit. And it wasn't even the main thrust of the story that was the issue.

Going head to head with Nicole Kidman

It was that in writing my book, which became known as The Perfect Present, I was writing about a woman originally with am...