Interview: Jackie Barbosa Author of SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY @jackiebarbosa #Interview

Jackie Barbosa can’t remember a time when she didn’t want to be an author when she grew up, but there were plenty of times when she wasn’t sure she ever would be. As it turns out, it just took her about twenty years longer to grow up than she expected!

On the road to publication, Jackie took a few detours, including a stint in academia (she holds an MA in Classics from the University of Chicago and was a recipient of a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities) and many years as a technical writer/instructional designer for a data processing company. She still holds her day job, but her true vocation has always been writing fiction and romance in particular.

Jackie is a firm believer that love is the most powerful force in the world, which that makes romance the most powerful genre in the world. Don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise!

 WEBSITE & SOCIAL LINKS:

Website: http://www.jackiebarbosa.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackiebarbosa
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JackieBarbosaAuthor/

But the reality was that very soon, Daniel would take control of the farm. He was, in fact, perfectly capable of managing things himself now, though by legal formality, the farm would not become his until his twenty-first birthday. But whatever the law might have to say about it, Daniel did not need her help any longer, and Laura rather suspected that, should she up and vanish, he would quite handily sort out the household side of things as well. She’d raised a competent son, as she’d intended. She just hadn’t realized what would happen when his competence equaled her own. How…empty it would make her feel.

And then there he had been, a person in desperate need of someone to do the right thing, and that someone seemed to be her.

--From SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY

 

Welcome to The Writer's Life!  Now that your book has been published, we’d love to find out more about the process.  Can we begin by having you take us at the beginning?  When did you come up with the idea to write your book?

Sleeping with the Enemy is the fourth and final book in my Regency-set Lords of Lancashire series. You might think means I’ve had it in the works for a long time, but the truth is that the idea for the story only popped into my head shortly after I’d finished writing the third book, A Matter of Indiscretion, in the summer of 2018.

The first three books in the series are centered on two neighboring families who hail from the Lancashire region of England, the Langstons and the Pearces. The Langston family, from the beginning, consisted of four siblings: three sons and a daughter, with the youngest son and the daughter being twins. I’d written a short story, Taking Liberties, for the oldest Langston son that was published by Harlequin, and stories for each of the twins, but it dawned on me when I was getting A Matter of Indiscretion ready for publication that I hadn’t planned a book for the second Langston son, Geoffrey.

Geoffrey never featured much on the pages of any of the preceding books because, being the second son of an aristocratic family, he was destined for the military and, in this era, that would have meant he was seldom ever in England. But I’d had a hankering for a while to write a book that featured slightly older main characters and had also been toying for years with the notion of having an American heroine and a British hero fall in love during the Revolutionary War. At some point, it dawned on me that I could have a similar setup during the Regency period if I set the story during the War of 1812 and thus, a plot was born!

Who is your publisher and how did you find them or did you self-publish?

Although I’ve been published in the past by Kensington, Harlequin, and Entangled, about half of my books, including Sleeping with the Enemy, have been self-published. I started self-publishing back in what I now think of as the halcyon days of the self-publishing revolution. The first novella in this series, The Lesson Plan, was the first I ever wrote with the intention of self-publishing and was released in 2011. It did very well.

Nowadays, however, I find self-publishing a tougher row to hoe. Visibility is hard to achieve and maintain, particularly with the sheer volume of books being published on a daily basis. As a result, I’m considering making the attempt at shopping my next historical romance series to publishers. We’ll see how that goes. I’m very fortunate to have a fantastic agent, Kevan Lyon, of the Marsal Lyon Literary Agency, and if anyone can help me get my foot back in that door, it’s Kevan.

Is there anything that surprised you about getting your first book published?

My first book, a short story called Carnally Ever After, was published by a small digital press in 2007. It was a short story and available only as an ebook. This was several months before Amazon even began selling the first Kindle, so I think it’s fair to say that books in digital format were very much a niche market at the time. If memory serves, I made the publisher’s bestseller list that first month by selling 60 copies. Things have certainly changed since then!

Do you believe a book cover plays an important role in the selling process?

Everyone judges a book by its cover!

Of course, I don’t necessarily think that all readers have the same taste in covers, so a cover that might draw one reader to a particular book might very well put off another, but covers are doing so much work when it comes to cuing the reader as to its content. A cover that does a good job of this is essential, as far as I’m concerned.

What other books are you working on and when will they be published?

One thing I’ve learned over the course of my start-stop-start career as an author is that I should never announce a book I’m not 100% sure I’m going to finish! At this point in time, I feel pretty safe in saying that I will be finishing a Christmas-themed bonus epilogue to Hot Under the Collar, which is the second book in the Lords of Lancashire series. I’m planning to release that in October, though it could slip into November if I don’t get my act together. Beyond that, I don’t want to make any promises!

What’s one fact about your book that would surprise people?

It might surprise people to learn that the solicitor (who doesn’t appear until the second half of the book) is heavily modeled on John Thaw in Kavanagh, Q.C. I literally felt like I was channeling that character when I wrote those scenes!

 

About the Book

 

When Mrs. Laura Farnsworth discovers the blood-stained body of a man wearing the distinctive red coat of the British army, her first instinct is to let dead dogs lie. It has, after all, been just two days since the Battle of Plattsburgh, and the disposition of enemy corpses is hardly her purview. But then the man proves himself to be very much alive by grabbing her ankle and mumbling incoherently.
After almost twenty-five years in His Majesty’s service, Lieutenant Colonel Geoffrey Langston never expected to wake up in heaven, much less being tended by an angel. But when he regains consciousness in the presence of a beautiful, dark-haired woman and with no memory of how he came to be there, what else can he think? Except it’s rather odd for an angel to have an American accent.
As the long-widowed Laura nurses the wounded Geoffrey back to health, the attraction between them heats from a simmer to a boil. Bound by his oath to the British crown, Geoffrey should be working to find his way back to his regiment and from the, to England. Instead, he’s sleeping with the enemy…and thereby committing the crime of desertion if not treason. But then, who’s going to find out?
If only Geoffrey didn’t have a family back home who refuse to take “missing in action” for an answer.

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Other Books by Jackie Barbosa: