Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 39:12 — 35.9MB) | Embed
Don't miss out on the latest episodes. Subscribe now! Spotify | More

Jayne Ann Krentz is a master of historical romance and paranormal mysteries, with 35 million copies of her books sold internationally, so she’s a perfect author to feature for this month of St Valentine.
Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler, and on Binge Reading today Jayne Ann talks about creating her interlinked JayneVerse – that’s interlinking of her characters across all of her three series. She gets on to talking about her latest books in her Fogg Lake contemporary paranormals, her Burning Cove historicals and her futuristic Guild Boss series.
We’ve got a special St Valentines Day book offer, ten copies of romance author Leeanna Morgan’s Sweet Small Town Romance Coming Home, the first book in her Montana Promises series. Leanna is a good friend of the Binge Reading show, with her work featuring in the 2021 Top Ten as well as in the Top Ten for The Best of All Time.
For fans of Robyn Carr’s Virgin River series, Leanna Morgan’s Montana Promise series is an addictive read that will have you going back for more!

TEN Copies to be claimed – be in first. You will need to enter the Coupon Code WS22V to redeem your free copy.
Offer closes February 15 or when all ten are claimed.
Details on the Binge Reading website and on our Facebook Binge Reading page. Links to the show can be found on the Binge Reading website, and don’t forget, you can get exclusive bonus content, like hearing Jayne’s answers to the five quickfire questions by becoming a Binge Reading on Patreon supporter
For the cost of less than a cup of coffee a month, you can help support the show. Your contributions will ensure we continued by paying for hosting, sound editing and transcription costs while my time in putting it all together still remains free. If you’d like to support the show, check it out on www.patreon.com/thejoysofbingereading.
Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode:
- Why writing is something Jayne Ann can’t stop doing
- How a successful career took a long time to get launched
- The linking of her stories into one Jayneverse
- The attraction of the psychic dimension
- The writers she admires most
- What she’d do differently second time around
Where to find Jayne Ann Krentz:
Website: www.jayneannkrentz.com
Instagram: @JayneAnnKrentzAuthor
Facebook: @JayneAnnKrentzAuthor
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/2387.Jayne_Ann_Krentz
What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.
Introducing best-selling romantic suspense author Jayne Ann Krentz

Jenny Wheeler: Thank you for being here, Jayne. It’s wonderful to have you on the show. Welcome to all our listeners.
Jayne Ann Krentz: Thank you so much for inviting me. I’m excited.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s great. I have known of your work for many years. I was an Amanda Quick fan years ago with the Arcane Society, but when I looked you up, I saw that you’ve sold 35 million copies of your books.
That was something I hadn’t realized – how huge your following is. You are a best-selling author with an international reputation, but it wasn’t that easy getting started, was it?
Jayne Ann Krentz: No. Back in the day, this is how old I am – I am going to have to stop doing this part of interviews because it ages me – but seriously, back when I started, there was no self-publishing option. That was not something you could do, so that meant you had to get past the gatekeepers at the publishers and that took me six years.
Jenny Wheeler: And you were writing for yourself and just the joy of it for that whole six years.
Jayne Ann Krentz: I wouldn’t call it the joy of it. I always say that if you’re doomed to write you don’t have any option. It really is a kind of an addiction. It’s a compulsion. If you can quit writing, you will quit writing because there are enough frustrations in the business that you’re not going to fight it. Every writer I know has just kept at it. That’s how it works. I think it’s because we can’t stop.
Every author creates their own world – and Jayne’s has a romantic vibe
I say that, but there does come a time for some writers when they do stop. All of a sudden, I look back and there are names that have just gone, and I have no idea where they went. I guess they walked away from it. I can’t do that.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s interesting. Now you have created what you described at the end of one of your recent books as a JayneVerse, like a universe but it’s a JayneVerse. That’s an interesting concept and something that almost seems to have stolen up on you. Can you explain to readers who don’t know what a JayneVerse is?
Jayne Ann Krentz: I have my editor to thank for pointing that out. We were talking one day about the next book. What would the next book be like? What did I want to work with? In so many of my books I want to work with similar things. I love working with the psychic vibe. I love working with a certain kind of hero, a certain kind of heroine, certain kinds of plots. I don’t do gory serial killer plots. I do more murder mystery-type plots.
I like the romantic vibe in the books, and after a while you create a world of that. Every writer has a verse, I think, a metaverse or whatever, and they spend their entire careers exploring that universe. It’s endless. It’s as broad as your imagination. In some sense, every author has their own personal universe and that’s what they write out of.
Creating the ‘Jayneverse’ out of that vibe
That’s what they write from and that’s what they explore. I hadn’t thought of it that way until I had this conversation with my editor. She’s the one who said, oh, a JayneVerse and I said, yes, I think that’s exactly what it is.
Jenny Wheeler: Your JayneVerse is written in three different pen names, and it is fairly neatly categorized into contemporary stories, historical stories and futuristic stories. The aunt goes across the three time zones under three different names, but you are now starting to link up some of your people and characters in this JayneVerse, aren’t you?
Jayne Ann Krentz: Yes. I think that was where it was headed all along. The three different timeframes – past, present, and future – for me were more about finding new plots. My characters are still my characters, my plots still have the same kind of murder mystery, the same kinds of problems.
I think every author is drawn to explore certain kinds of conflicts, certain kinds of emotional drama, and if you stray too far from whatever it is that you’re writing about, if you stray trying to broaden it and do something entirely different, I think you lose your power. Your power comes from whatever draws you, the emotional part of the story. It is different for every author. I have been doing this long enough to know what draws me, what compels me, and I’m going to be doing it probably the rest of my life. That’s who I am.
The plots in three different worlds expanded my ability to come up with new stories. The themes and conflicts I work with are very similar, but the worlds that I write them in look different simply because of the historical era.
The finer details of creating multiple universes
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. You have different locations and different settings and different technical aspects, different technology that they’re working with.
Jayne Ann Krentz: Yes. If you set out to consciously build a universe – which I should have done years ago when I realized what was happening, but I was unconsciously doing it anyway – the technical stuff is crucial. You don’t think about it, but whatever the source of power is in that era is a theme. It anchors the whole story because readers will come to that world with a certain expectation. If you take them into the 19th century, they have an expectation of how the underlying power works. I’m talking about steam engines and the basic mechanics of it.
Jenny Wheeler: Gas lights and that sort of thing.
Jayne Ann Krentz: Yes. In the futuristic world, I had to come up with a new source of power, something that wasn’t the same as it had been back on earth. That’s when I realized it’s an important part. Any aspiring authors out there who are looking to build their own universe, think about the source of power.
The other thing to think about is the social conventions. If we write in the 19th century or early 20th century, they’re close enough in time and we’ve read enough and we have a sense of them. But if you’re setting up a futuristic universe or a paranormal universe, then you want to think about the social conventions. I’m talking the basics like marriage, family, education, how the government works – those kinds of things give you a skeleton for your story.
Jenny Wheeler: Probably these days, one of the key things is how women were or were not able to exercise their independence and strength.
One of the attractions of historical novels – clearly defined gender roles

Jayne Ann Krentz: Yes. The roles of the sexes. That’s very important to how your story is going to read out. One of the reasons people like the historicals – and people are really fond of that era – is that the historical era had more clearly defined roles established for men and women, so therefore you could create conflict by having a character go up against those rules.
In the contemporary society we don’t have those rules as solidly visible, and so the conflicts are harder to come up with. But if you have a time and a place where women did not do something – they could not be executives, they could not be this, that, or the other thing – you’ve got a conflict in a plot that you can’t have in the modern world.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. The most recent books we’ll be talking about today are Lightning in a Mirror, the third book and the final one in the Fogg Lake series. That one is by Jayne Ann Krentz. Guild Boss is in the futuristic series and your name for that series is Jayne Castle, and The Lady Has a Past set in Burning Cove, California.
That’s the Burning Cove series and it’s historical, even though it is only 1930s California, Hollywood in the 1930s, which we hardly feel is historical these days. It is a glorious, jazzy, vibrant era to write about, and your name for that one is Amanda Quick.
Those are the three names you have settled on, although at one stage you had about seven different names, didn’t you?
Multiple pen names now resolved down into three
Jayne Ann Krentz: I think if you survive in this business long enough you acquire a whole train load of names one way or another. Theoretically, it’s probably not the best idea. I know it’s not the best idea because it’s so hard to promote three different names.
Every time you start out under a new name, you are going to have to rebuild an audience. You can put it on the back of the book that you’re so-and-so and that you write as so-and-so and you can put it on your website and every place else, but the reality is most people don’t pay attention to the author bio. It’s hard to restart with a new name and I don’t recommend it.
I wound up with them years ago and it’s served me well because it defines my three eras. When people pick up an Amanda Quick book, they know they’re going to get a historical. They pick up a Jayne Castle and they know they’re going to get a futuristic, and the Jayne Ann Krentz will be contemporary. It’s useful in that way.
But today, if I go into a signing – assuming we ever do signings again – invariably 20-30% of the people in the room will say, oh, I didn’t know you wrote as Amanda Quick or I didn’t know you wrote as Jayne Castle. Part of it is because I would say a good percentage of readers do not read across different those timelines.
They prefer a particular historical or futuristic setting, and they don’t care about the other settings. It’s not that they don’t like your writing. It’s just that era does not attract them.
Does Amanda Quick feel a different person from Jayne Castle?

Jenny Wheeler: That’s right. I would think particularly people who liked historicals might not want futuristic. They might be able to handle contemporary but the gap to futuristic might be a little too big or not their thing.
Jayne Ann Krentz: Exactly. I’m as guilty of it as anyone else. One of my favorite mystery writers years ago made his fame and fortune on the classic American private eye – that dark, urban private eye story.
But he also wrote westerns, and I never did read the westerns. I just don’t read westerns. It’s nothing against him or his writing.
In fact, my editor offered me his latest book when I went up for a plane ride home and I got all excited. Then she said, it’s one of his westerns and I said, oh. She said, it’s just a private eye on a horse. I said, private eyes don’t belong on a horse. So I was as guilty of it as everybody else, and I totally respect that.
Jenny Wheeler: It makes you understanding about your audience, doesn’t it, when you can say that. Do you feel differently when you’re writing?
When you become Amanda, does that feel a slightly different persona from Jayne Ann? Is there a different way you approach the story? Do you have different little rituals for each author’s hat you put on?
Slipping into the era of the story whether it’s 930s California or the future
Jayne Ann Krentz: No different rituals, but I think I just slip into the era. It’s not so much the story. There’s a certain vibe to the 1930s in California, there’s a mythical version of that era. It’s glamorous. It’s fast. It was a very exciting time, and women were for the first time coming out of the home. They were moving, they were doing things like flying airplanes, et cetera.
It was a really important time for women, which World War Two pretty effectively put a stop to. After World War Two it was all about, we need to get back to normal and everybody tried to go back. But in the thirties they were still visualizing the future as something new and different and exciting.
Then there was the glamour factor. The Hollywood glamour factor is just unbeatable. I love to work with that. In the United States, California was the place you went when everything else wasn’t working back home. You went to California to find a new life. The whole West Coast is built on that here, so that gives me the kind of characters I love to work with – that entrepreneurial, self-made, reinvent yourself kind of character, which is at the heart of all my books. 1930s California was perfect for that.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. The Arcane Society featured very strongly in some of the early Amanda Quick books, but in Lightning in the Mirror it suddenly pops up again. Is that the first time you’ve done that – introduced Arcane into the contemporary ones?
Jayne Ann Krentz: No, I’ve used Arcane across all three worlds. There were some trilogies that started in the past and then went into the contemporary world. In Too Deep was an Arcane book. I can’t remember my old titles but there were several of them. Lightning in a Mirror is a little different because it’s the end of a trilogy that featured a small town in the mountains here in Washington State that was the unwitting of victim of a government experiment gone horribly awry back in the sixties.
Modern generations left to clean the mess left by their predecessors

The fallout from those experiments is now affecting the generation after that, the modern generation. They are cleaning up the mess that was left from this exotic psychic, paranormal laboratory that was run by the government.
I set out to do the research on that and it’s like opening a cupboard door and everything falls out. It turns out the US government was heavily into paranormal research in the fifties and sixties, all the way up into the seventies when it came to light and the funding got cut off. Before that, they and the old Soviet Union were heavily into serious paranormal experiments, so I had everything I needed to work with for a plot. I didn’t have to invent anything.
Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. All three of your books do have strong paranormal, romantic suspense. However big or little the paranormal might be, you can’t avoid getting a little bit of psychic stuff in there can you?
Jayne Ann Krentz: I love working with the psychic thing. I should specify for those who are listening and think they like paranormal or they do like paranormal, that there’s a lot of variety within the category of paranormal. I don’t do the supernatural stuff, therefore you’re not going to find vampires and shapeshifters and werewolves in my books. I could enjoy reading them, but I don’t write them. They don’t fit my core story.
But I do like the psychic vibe, and I think that probably came from my mom. She always had a bit of a psychic vibe and took it sort of seriously. She didn’t go wacky with it, but she respected things like intuition.
Psychic stories are ‘one step beyond intuition’
I think the reason the psychic vibe works not only for me but for my readers is because it’s that one step beyond intuition. Everybody knows or has a sense of intuition. All I’m asking is to take it one step beyond, not to a super fantasy version of it.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes, and quite a number of your characters have enhanced senses of one kind or another.
Jayne Ann Krentz: Yes, and I’m always aware of the fact that if you’ve got something that strong and that powerful, there’s going to be a downside. That downside is where the drama comes in because I don’t do super characters or superheroes. They have got their problems too. They’re human beings.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. Coping with some of these enhanced senses cuts them off a little bit from other people.
Jayne Ann Krentz: Cuts them off from other people and it gives them their own set of problems. I’m totally winging it here because what do I know? I don’t have any enhanced senses. But it would seem to me that with the extrasensory stimulation coming in, if you did have this kind of thing, then it would affect your life in a lot of different ways, including right down to the panic attacks and things like that – things that would stir up senses in a way that would be unpleasant.
Jenny Wheeler: The other aspect of it is the romance. You have been a vocal supporter of romantic fiction ever since you began, although with your stories the romance is probably more of a subplot. It isn’t the whole focus of the story in a lot of cases.
‘Popular’ fiction did not get the respect it deserved
You did contribute to an essay collection which seriously examined romance writing and I wondered if you would like to talk a little bit about how you might have seen the romance fiction side of things develop over the time you’ve been writing.
Jayne Ann Krentz: What I’ve come to feel over the past few years is that it wasn’t just romance that didn’t get any respect. It was popular fiction in general. It has always been the lesser literature, if you will, whether it be science fiction or mysteries or westerns or glitz novels or romance. The culture doesn’t give it a lot of dignity and respect as opposed to literary fiction.
I think the thing to do and what I was trying to do with that book, Dangerous Men Adventurous Women, was step back and say, okay, this is a category of writing that has been denigrated for decades, generations. I mean 300 years of criticism, and it’s not just romance. Popular fiction in general, the Gothic novels in the 1900s, got the same hit.
The important thing to ask is, why hasn’t it gone? Why did it survive? It’s kind of a Darwinian thing because something that survives against all odds and against a lot of social pressure, you have to ask what’s driving it. The key is to look at what it does provide, and what it does provide is it transmits a culture’s core values. We all know what a hero or a heroine is supposed to do when the chips are down. They are supposed to do the right thing.
Transmitting core values and reaffirming the reader

We know what a hero is supposed to do, and where do we get that? We get it from our popular fiction. That’s its contribution. That’s what it does. It transmits those core values and it reaffirms them to the reader. I think that’s the real secret of why popular fiction has survived.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s interesting. I had a bit of a feeling myself when I was younger that it was partly because men were the ones who were said to write more literary fiction and a lot of the popular fiction was written by women. The gatekeepers of the people who said what was great and what wasn’t – a lot of them were men as well. But it is more complicated than that, isn’t it?
Jayne Ann Krentz: Certainly, I think romance fiction was the stepchild. I was in a group of writers one time a few years ago and there were several successful writers in the group.
We were all from popular fiction – there was a science fiction writer, a mystery writer, me and a couple of others, various areas – and they all whined about the same thing, which was basically, I don’t get any respect. That’s what opened my eyes to the fact that this isn’t just romance. It’s popular fiction that isn’t viewed the same as literary fiction.
The problem is you have to look at us having two different tasks. I think literary fiction is designed to illuminate the human condition but it does not take its task as solving the problem.
It just wants to make you see it, and so it tends to focus on things like despair and grief and depression because those are monumental dramatic issues for humans. But it doesn’t try to solve those problems. In popular fiction, you’re trying to solve them. You’re trying to overcome them long enough to do the right thing.
The driving compulsion to write that many authors feel
Jenny Wheeler: It’s interesting to have this talk because when I started this podcast nearly four years ago, this was very much one of the drivers. I have always loved popular fiction myself. I have read literary fiction, but a lot of the fiction when I was a young woman I didn’t really identify with. People like Henry Miller and Phillip Roth, I didn’t like them. I didn’t want to read them.
I almost had a bit of a rebellious feeling against literary fiction and couldn’t understand why popular fiction – not even romance, but popular fiction itself – wasn’t, as you say, given more respect. When I started this podcast, I didn’t want to try and do the literary fiction people.
I probably wouldn’t have had a chance of getting them anyway, but that wasn’t where my interest lay, and it’s been tremendously revealing to talk to so many popular fiction authors and discover how utterly passionate they are about their work. It’s not the old saw of, “they just write to a formula”. It’s nothing like that at all.
Jayne Ann Krentz: No, it’s like I said before. If you can quit, you will quit. It’s a driving compulsion to write.
Turning to Jayne Ann Krentz’s wider career
Jenny Wheeler: Turning a little to look at your wider career, this is one I always like to ask people and you might have already answered it for us, but what would you see as having been the key to your success, the thing that’s kept you going when times have been tough or it hasn’t seemed as if you’re making much headway? Was there a key turning point for you along the way?
Jayne Ann Krentz: I can’t say there was a key turning point. As I said, I just couldn’t quit. I told myself over and over again I would quit. Six years of rejections is hard and I’d swear off of it for a month. Then I’d find myself thinking of stories again and I had to get them down on paper again.
Jenny Wheeler: What was your breakthrough book?
Jayne Ann Krentz: The first book I ever sold was Gentle Pirate, which was decades ago now. It was part of a romance line – not Harlequin, the line was called Ecstasy. That was the first one I ever sold, and there were a couple of smaller lines at that time.
I’ve only ever written romantic suspense. I have never done straight up romance and I’ve never done straight up suspense. I’ve always written this combination of the two and I see it as its own genre.
What does an ideal working day look like for Jayne Ann Krentz?
I think romantic suspense works because the danger heightens the stakes in the romance and the romance heightens the stakes in the danger. That’s why it’s such a dynamic focus for my stories. It could also be because I grew up on Nancy Drew.
Jenny Wheeler: What does an ideal working day look like for you?
Jayne Ann Krentz: I’m a morning person, so I’m going to get my best writing done before noon. After that, I’m going to be pretty exhausted, so I’ll be doing things that don’t require the same kind of thinking. Writing is different from plotting is different from research or trying to outline or anything else.
I tend to be one of those people who can’t plot well in detail. The problem is that I can do it, but they’re not my best ideas. I don’t get my best ideas until I’m in the creative state, whatever that is, the other state of mind that you get into when you actually start writing. Do you write?
Jenny Wheeler: Yes, I do and you get into a flow, don’t you? I am writing book 10 now. I have self-published them all, but with the first few, because I’d been a journalist, I did try and heavily outline them. I said to myself, as an ex-journalist I need to know where I’m going with the story. I don’t start a news story without knowing what I’m going to be putting into it.
Now I have evolved so that I prefer to leave it a little bit more open. It’s much more fun. You get more interesting ideas, but it is a lot more scary because there’s always that chance you are going to completely fail.
Jayne Ann Krentz: Or take a terrible wrong turn and waste a lot of time. It’s totally understandable. I’m the same way. As you say, there is an anxiety associated with it, but I do think the anxiety gives us some energy too.
What happens when characters refuse to follow author directions….
Jenny Wheeler: Do you have that experience people talk about of your characters either refusing to do something you’ve decided you want them to do or going off on a completely different tangent?
Jayne Ann Krentz: Yes, all the time. I’ve learned to live with it. How about you?
Jenny Wheeler: Not quite so much, no. Maybe I’m not quite ready to be that adventurous yet but getting there.
Jayne Ann Krentz: What kind of books are you writing?
Jenny Wheeler: Historical mysteries set in 1860s California. I entirely agree with you about this California thing. I think it’s the most exciting era for a lot of reasons, but also because in the earlier years, before society got too heavily established, the late sixties and seventies, women had more freedom before society started to clamp down on them again. That’s part of the reason I like it.
Jayne Ann Krentz: Fascinating. Tell me real quick, what are the characters like? What kind of a mystery?
Jenny Wheeler: It’s family orientated. I started out with three brothers. In every book the main characters have to vaguely end up together at the end, but the main story is the mystery and the romance is the subplot. I have been expanding from those three brothers into all their associated relations ever since. A bit like Barbara Freethy. I could keep it going for quite a long time, I think.
Jayne Ann Krentz: Excellent. That’s exciting. Congratulations. I’ll look for it.
What Jayne Ann Krentz likes to read….
Jenny Wheeler: Thank you. Circling back and talking a bit about your reading taste, because this is The Joys of Binge Reading and we like to give our listeners some idea of what you’re reading at the moment, what your tastes are in reading and if you’d like to recommend anything to people.
Jayne Ann Krentz: A friend of mine, Rachel Grant has a two-book series out. The first book is out now and it’s called Dangerous Ground. The second book will be out in January and these are published by Amazon, so I’m sure they’re available worldwide. The second book is called Crash Site.
Rachel is a former Egypt archeologist, so she has that kind of information to work with. Her heroine is always an archeologist. I think of her as the modern Elizabeth Peters with the Amelia Peabody character, except she’s doing very contemporary women who have much more adventurous sex lives and much more adventurous action. They are very well written, the research is top-notch. She is an action-oriented writer, so they move very quickly. That’s Rachel Grant and Dangerous Ground and Crash Site, which I can highly recommend.
I love my friend Christina Dodd’s combination of mystery and romance. She does a suspense novel. There’s a relationship on the side, but the suspense is the dominant story. Anything by Christina Dodd. If you like romantic suspense, she does a really good version of it. She also has a whole series of books set in the 19th century if you like historicals, and she wisely kept the same name for both, so just look up Christina Dodd.
More of Jayne Ann Krentz’s favorite books
I can highly recommend my friend, Susan Elizabeth Phillips’ most recent book, which is When Stars Collide. She is so good at romantic comedy, but it’s not lightweight romantic comedy. There is a lot of heart to it, a lot of emotional drama.
I could go on, but those are three names.
Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. That’s wonderful. Looking ahead into this next 12 months – we have all had a very turbulent last couple of years and everything’s being disrupted, but what are you working on? Any new projects? What does your next year look like as far as any of us can project anything?
Jayne Ann Krentz: Lightning in a Mirror which is out in January is the newest Jayne Ann Krenz book. In May the next Amanda Quick book will be out – another 1930s California setting. It’s called When She Dreams which is all about a psychic dream experiment gone bad in California in the 1930s, so you can see I’m sticking with my roots.
Then next November will be another Jayne Castle dust bunny book. For those of you who don’t read the Jayne Castles, probably best not to go there. The dust bunnies are a little psychic animal, they’re like the perfect dog, the perfect animal pet you ever had. They are set on another planet, so it’s a whole different universe for me. Those are written under my Jayne Castle name, but the next one will be out in November. It’s called Sweetwater and the Witch.
Jenny Wheeler: What are you actually writing now?
Jayne Ann Krentz: Sweetwater and the Witch. The writing time is usually about 8-12 months ahead. It’s usually about a year between starting the book and getting it published. You can do them faster if the publisher can schedule them faster, but there’s a lot of stuff involved with this kind of publishing. It’s easier to time it if you are doing the self-publishing. You have more control over so many aspects of it. But I’m with a publisher so I’m stuck with whatever their routine is.
The benefits of being a hybrid author
Jenny Wheeler: I presume that at this stage you’re very happy to stay like that because you’re so well-established, but if you were starting out today, would you be tempted to go self-publishing?
Jayne Ann Krentz: Oh, yes, in a heartbeat, absolutely. There is a lot to be said for that. Either way you’re going to have to teach yourself how to write. You can learn some basic craft things, I suppose, but writing is very much a self-taught process. Every book we learn something, don’t we? Every book is a learning experience.
Jenny Wheeler: Do you like to interact with your readers and where can they find you online?
Jayne Ann Krentz: Yes, I love to interact with the readers, and they can find me online at a couple of different places. My home on the web is my website which is www.jayneannkrentz.com You can also find me on Facebook, @Jayne Ann Krentz Author, and on Instagram.
Where to find Jayne Ann Krentz online
I’m not terribly active on Instagram because I don’t quite know what to do with Instagram. It’s like, oh, here’s a picture. And I have two videos up on TikTok and gave up. This is not going to work for me. Facebook is probably where I’m most active. If you want a list of my books, if you want books sorted by series, if you want upcoming titles, backlist titles, whatever, that is all over my website. That’s the core place.
Jenny Wheeler: We will have links to all of those sites you’ve mentioned so that you can always go to the podcast episode show notes and see all of those. That is one useful resource that will be sitting there for evermore.
It has been great talking today Jayne, it really has, and I am just in awe of what you have achieved.
Jayne Ann Krentz: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure to meet you, and I want to say hello to everybody in Australia and New Zealand and that part of the world. I went through there on a cruise a few years ago and it was so fantastic. I’ve never forgotten it. Those memories will always stay with me and I met a lot of lovely romance readers and writers in the process.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. Thank you so much.
Jayne Ann Krentz: Thank you.
If you enjoyed Jayne’s romantic suspense you might also enjoy….
Fiona Barton’s hot international thrillers

Thanks To Our Technical Support:
The Joys of Binge Reading podcast is put together with wonderful technical help from Dan Cotton at DC Audio Services. Dan is an experienced sound and video engineer who’s ready and available to help you with your next project… Seek him out at dcaudioservices@gmail.com or Phone + 64 – 21979539. He’s fast, takes pride in getting it right, and lovely to work with.
Our voice overs are done by Abe Raffills, and Abe’s another gem. He got 20 years of experience on both sides of the camera/microphone as a cameraman/director and also voice artist and television presenter. Abe’s vocal delivery is both light hearted and warm and he is super easy to work with no matter the job. You’ll find him at abe@pointandshoot.co.nz