December 29, 2021 | Issue #74 |
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Five Facts From Our Friend, Sarah MacLean!
The one thing you’ve learned you can’t live without during the pandemic:
Good TV. Peaky Blinders, Ted Lasso, Happy Endings, Schitt's Creek, The Witcher, Bridgerton and more have gotten me through the last 22 months. We're really living in a golden age of television, and the all-consuming shows I've found throughout the pandemic have made me so happy.
Your perfect day:
Sleeping through all the alarms, hanging out in bed with a romance novel, meeting a friend for a gossipy lunch, taking a long walk through New York City, tacos and margaritas with more friends, tumbling into bed with another romance novel.
Your favorite independent bookstore:
Can I have two? My local indie, WORD, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, is a tiny bookstore that gives me so much joy. It's got a glorious cookbook section that I can't resist, and a small but mighty romance section! You can get any of my books, signed, from WORD here. Also, please don't miss Old Town Books in Alexandria, VA, a store that has supported romance (and romance podcasts like mine, Fated Mates!) from the start, and made sure readers throughout the DC area are full up on kissing books.
The last book you raved about:
Only one?! I literally just raved about Tessa Bailey's It Happened One Summer to my sister—it's a delicious contemporary romance that will appeal to Schitt's Creek lovers with an Alexis Rose style heroine who lands in the Pacific Northwest and falls head over heels for a local fisherman. Tessa's writing is clever, funny, sexy and so modern—talk about someone who absolutely understands the assignment.
Your next book in ten words or less:
A powerful duke, a tempting thief, and only one bed. HEARTBREAKER, Hell's Belles Book 2, August 2022
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Bookseller of the Week
Bookshop.org
Find all the books by every F&F guest, past and present, in the F&F Bookshop.org Shop! Portions of all sales placed in our shop help fund F&F! Proceeds from every sale made on Bookshop goes straight into the pockets of indie booksellers nationwide. Since its inception, Bookshop.org has raised more than $18 million for indie bookstores! Find recent books by tonight’s guest, Sarah MacLean and by the Fab Four on our Friends & Fiction 2021 Guests list!
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Latest News From "The Fab Four"
KRISTY WOODSON HARVEY is so grateful to all who spent their holidays with Christmas in Peachtree Bluff—and wanted to let you know that, if you didn’t get a chance to read it yet, it’s on sale for $5.99 on all e-reader platforms! She also wanted to thank everyone for your wonderful reviews this year. Thanks to you, Under the Southern Sky—along with Kristin’s The Forest of Vanishing Stars—was one of the 19 Highest-Rated Books on BookBub this year. Wow!
PATTI CALLAHAN is so grateful for this holiday season and all the time with family. She had a blast celebrating the 200th episode of The Joys of Binge Reading podcast by talking about Once Upon a Wardrobe. And she loved talking to Desoto Magazine about the question we often talk about: Where do stories come from? Meanwhile, she’s ready for the new year with new goals and an absolutely amazing Winter F & F schedule! She wishes all of you a beautiful new year!
What Patti is Reading: The Last Season by Jenny Judson and Danielle Mahfood.
MARY KAY ANDREWS is dismantling Christmas in order to have a clean slate to start 2022–(and also because Mr. MKA thinks that dried-out tree is a fire hazard.) She’s loved seeing all the reader response to her secret Christmas book, THE SANTA SUIT, and is still grateful and gobsmacked to realize y’all were responsible for giving her TWO New York Times bestsellers in 2021! In the meantime, she’s gearing up for copy edits for THE HOMEWRECKERS, which will be out May 3.
KRISTIN HARMEL is so grateful that The Forest of Vanishing Stars, along with Kristy’s Under the Southern Sky, made the list of BookBub’s Highest Rated Books for 2021! Thanks to all of you who took the time to read it and help spread the word. She hopes that all of you had a wonderful Christmas, that your friends and loved ones are healthy, and that you ring in the New Year with happiness and health this weekend. She’ll be raising a glass to the hope of a better year all around the world.
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The F&F 2022 Reading Challenge
Join the Fun in Our Reading Challenge!
Join us in the new year for a fun 12-month reading challenge. We will challenge each other all year long to read books in a different category every month. This will help all of us broaden our horizons and read books we may not have chosen for ourselves. This is a fun way to join with the rest of the F&F community and share a fun reading experience.
And the F&F Reading Journal makes the perfect companion piece to this challenge, helping you keep track of all the books you read all year long. Grab your reading journal HERE.
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Listen to the F&F Podcast!
Coming soon! Out this Friday, December 31st—The Beaufort Special! Ron Block interviews attendees live from the June 2021 F&F event in Beaufort, NC and follows it with an interview with Managing Director Meg Walker all about F&F, the founders, her role, and what the future holds.
Out Now! WB_S1E30—Rockin’ Around the Podcast Tree! Ron gathers with the Fab Four and F&F’s Managing Director Meg Walker to talk holiday faves, memories, and traditions. LISTEN NOW!
Out Now! WB_S1E29—A special surprise bonus episode of the F&F podcast featuring Mary Kay Andrews reading her original 1997 Callahan Garrity short story Fatal Fruitcake, only available online as a digital e-book download. LISTEN NOW!
Out Now! WB_S1E28—Tune in for the second installment in Ron’s interview with country music artists Kim Richey & Gretchen Peters about storytelling through songwriting. LISTEN NOW!
Out Now! WB_S1E27—Ron talks to comedian and Real Housewives impersonator Amy Philllips and her co-author, celebrity chef Stuart O'Keeffe, about their parody cookbook Cook It, Spill It, Throw It. LISTEN NOW!
Listen, download, subscribe, rate, review & share wherever you get your podcasts!
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News from the F&F Official Book Club
We have a lot of fun events coming up! Take a look at our book club schedule coming up through the early part of 2022 and be sure to save the dates! All events begin at 7pm Eastern unless otherwise noted.
Grab these books quickly and start reading now! We hope everyone is having a great holiday season so far!
If you missed our Dec 20th Christmas in Peachtree Bluff book club discussion with Kristy Woodson Harvey, catch it HERE.
If you missed our Dec 6th book club discussion with Mary Kay Andrews about The Santa Suit, catch it HERE!
If you missed our Happy Hour with Ron Block on Friday Dec 3rd, you can watch it HERE.
Not a member of the Friends & Fiction Book Club? Join us! We would love to have you!
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F&F is Now on LoCo+!
Come join Friends & Fiction on LoCo+, a brand-new streaming platform that launched just a few days ago. The platform specializes in locally produced content and will eventually include channels from all over the country, but this is your chance to get in on the ground floor with us; we're part of the platform's rollout, and we'd love for you to be there, too. Eventually, it will be a paid subscription (like Netflix or Hulu), but if you sign up now, you can get the first month free--and you can see past and current episodes of Friends & Fiction as well as lots of other great, independently produced content, including the "Good News Lady" show from our friend (and former F&F guest) Daryn Kagan. Sign up for your free trial here and check it out: https://golocoplus.com/.
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F&F is on YouTube!
Subscribe Today!
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Did you miss last week’s Christmas Spectacular episode with F&F’s 12 Authors of Christmas? You can watch the whole thing on our YouTube channel HERE. We air our show live on YouTube every Wednesday night at 7pm ET. And every episode since our show’s inception can be found there too. So if you ever miss one, or Facebook is being difficult, check us out on YouTube. Subscribe today so you never miss an episode and get alerted every time we post new content. We also have book trailers and highlight clips on our channel too! Watch the December 15th show HERE.
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Friends & Fiction Merchandise
SHOP THE F&F MERCH STORE!
NEW! Stay on track with the exclusive Friends & Fiction Reading Journal, featuring 52 book entries (one for every week of the year), a lending library, reading list, and books you put down. With a cloth cover, gold foil embossing, a satin ribbon page marker, elastic band, heavyweight paper, and a back pocket to store notes, this is the perfect gift for the book lover in your life—or for yourself! ORDER READING JOURNALS HERE.
Cozy cotton with a flattering v-neck and our signature Friends & Fiction logo, these comfy t-shirts are the perfect way to show your Friends & Fiction pride! ORDER T-SHIRTS HERE.
Friends & Fiction wine sippies are available and shipping now from Oxford Exchange!
But that’s not all! We also have F&F 20oz travel tumblers for on-the-go coffee of drinks!
We can’t wait to see you model your merch!
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CONNECT WITH THE FRIENDS & FICTION HOST AUTHORS! |
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