Amazing sales, nominations, awards and a sparkly new cover...

Well, it's been a bit of a crazy couple of weeks...

Fairytale of New York has completely surpassed any of my expectations (bearing in mind I thought selling 500 would be brilliant...) - to date, it's sold over 60,000 copies and stayed in the Sunday Times Top 10 Bestsellers for a whole month!

I've also been nominated for an award! I heard a couple of weeks ago that I had made the longlist for the Romantic Novelists' Association's Romantic Novel of the Year Award 2010! You can read more about it here... I'm thrilled to bits to be longlisted - it's more than I ever thought was possible - and means so much to have been recognised by the RNA. I have to wait until Febraury to find out if Fairytale of New York has been shortlisted, but I'm just so chuffed to have made it this far! Keeping everything crossed, though :o)

I was amazed to hear that Fairytale has also just won its first award! The lovely ladies at www.chicklitreviews.com voted the delectable Ed Steinmann from Fairytale of New York as BEST MALE CHARACTER! It's wonderful because Ed was always my favourite character and I wanted other people to love him as much as I did. See all the winners here And here's the award!



Woo-hoo!

And last, but by no means least, here is the thoroughly gorgeous, sparkly new cover for my second book, Welcome to my World, which will be published at the end of 2010...



How lovely is that?!!

Blimey O'Reilly, I'm in the TOP 10!!!

Just when I thought this publishing thing couldn't get any better, it just has!

Fairytale of New York has now been in the Sunday Times Bestseller List for two weeks!! I can't believe it - I'm completely in shock!

Bob and I were trying to work out how many copies I could realistically hope to sell and we reckoned that we probably knew about 500 people between us - but even then it would mean everyone we knew buying a copy of my book and I just didn't think I could expect to be that fortunate. After all, people have been so kind buying my book and I didn't feel I could expect that level of support.

So you can imagine my utter shock when I found out that Fairytale sold just under 6,000 copies in its first week (three days, from Thursday to Saturday), just over 11,000 copies in its second week and, this week, another 12,000 copies... I'm up there with writers I adore, like Cecelia Ahern, and it's completely surreal!!

Everyone at AVON and HarperCollins was over the moon, too, which is great for me because I know how much effort they've all put into promoting my book. I received two enormous bouquets of flowers, making my tiny home look like Kowalski's - I've run out of vases (and flat surfaces) to display them, so some of the flowers have now ended up with my Mum and Dad. People have been so amazingly kind, too. I've had messages, emails and tweets from all over the world - and the nicest thing is the number of people who've said they loved my book. When all's said and done, all I ever wanted for my book is for other people to love the story as much as I did. Several people have read it in a day, saying they couldn't put it down, whilst lots of people love the first chapter of Welcome To My World, which is simply brilliant news.

There's no other way to describe it: it's a dream come true!

So tomorrow, I have an interview with The Independent on Sunday, which should be fun, then it's back to writing for the rest of the week. And quaking in my boots waiting for the next amazing thing to happen. Bring it on!