Ali Brady - BATTLE OF THE BOOKSTORES

[00:00] Cindy: Welcome to Thoughts from a Page, a member of the Evergreen Podcasts Network. I'm Cindy Burnett, and I am so glad you're here. I personally select and read every book featured on the show so I can bring you thoughtful spoiler-free author interviews.

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[01:05] I am so grateful.

[01:07] Today, Alison Hammer and Bradeigh Godfrey, who make up Ali Brady, join me to chat about Battle of the Bookstores. I have been a huge fan of theirs since they wrote their first book, the Beach Trap and Battle of the Bookstores is equally fantastic.

[01:22] I loved the bookstore setting as I am a huge indie bookstore proponent, so that was so much fun and I also thoroughly enjoyed all of the literary references that they sprinkle throughout this one.

[01:32] Ali Brady is the pen name of writing BFFs Alison Hammer and Bradeigh Godfrey. They are the USA Today bestselling authors of romantic, heartwarming, funny novels including The Beach Trap, The Comeback Summer, Until Next Summer and Battle of the Bookstores.

[01:46] I hope you enjoy our conversation.

[01:49] Welcome Bradeigh and Alison. I am so glad you all are here to talk about your latest book, Battle of the Bookstores.

[01:55] Bradeigh: Thank you for having us.

[01:57] Alison: Yes, thank you. We're so excited to be back.

[01:59] Cindy: I'm so glad that you're back as well.

[02:01] So why don't we start out with one of you giving me a synopsis of Battle of the Bookstores. Alison, would you like to do that?

[02:07] Alison: Sure,

[02:08] I will start so the book is called Battle of the bookstores coming out June 3rd,

[02:13] and we like to think of the book as You've Got Mail meets The Hating Game.

[02:16] So it's about two booksellers who work at bookstores that are side by side in a neighborhood outside Boston, Somerville, if people are familiar with that. So our two characters, we have Ryan, who manages Happy Endings, a romance only bookstore, and then Josie manages Tabula Inscripta, a bookstore that sells serious literary fiction.

[02:35] So the two bookstores have been side by side, and our booksellers have never been in competition until, Bradeigh.

[02:42] Bradeigh: All right, that's my cue.

[02:44] So then the same owner buys both stores, and this owner thinks, I don't need two bookstores side by side. I'm going to combine them into one larger bookstore. But he only wants one manager, and the other one is going to lose their job.

[02:56] So he puts them in a competition with each other over the course of the summer, saying whichever store has the most sales over the course of the summer will become the manager of the new combined bookstore.

[03:06] So Ryan and Josie are instantly at odds.

[03:09] But unbeknownst to them, they're also chatting online in an anonymous booksellers forum.

[03:15] So as their rivalry heats up in real life, they become deeper friends online.

[03:20] And what could possibly go wrong?

[03:23] Cindy: Exactly. What could possibly go wrong?

[03:26] Well, I love You've Got Mail, and that was so much fun to see aspects of that in this book. How did you decide on using that at least as a jumping off point?

[03:34] And the other ideas that you came up with, where did they come from?

[03:37] Alison: We also love You've Got Mail, and we love books about books and bookstores. And that really was our inspiration. We wanted to do something bookish and heavy on the romance. This is our first pure romance.

[03:49] Our other books all had aspects of romance, but they also had elements of women's fiction.

[03:54] So we wanted to do something

[03:56] fun and romantic in a bookstore. And obviously You've Got Mail was one of the first things that came to mind.

[04:02] Cindy: You mentioned the bookstore setting, and you talk a lot about that in your acknowledgments. I am a huge indie bookstore proponent. I love indie bookstores. When we travel, I always track down one that's nearby and visit it, order from them whenever I'm getting books that I am interested in.

[04:16] So I really loved that this story was all about bookstores and how much they impact the community and everything. The other thing I loved about your acknowledgments was, one you mentioned me.

[04:27] Thank you so very much. That was so cool.

[04:29] And then second, you mentioned Mary Webber O' Malley and Pamela Klinger-Horn, who are hugely popular on my show. They come on quarterly and shout out books, as you know, because this one was shouted out and people love them.

[04:41] So it was really fun to see their names in print.

[04:43] Alison: We love them too. I live in Chicago, where Mary lives right outside.

[04:47] So we've gotten to know her in person and Pamela when she comes to town, and we're both just really big fans of them. And I got so many book recommendations from that episode, so I was honored for us to be included and also got so many great reads.

[05:01] Cindy: I'm always happy to hear that.

[05:02] The other thing I really enjoyed about the book was that you swapped the stereotypes for Josie and Ryan. He's the romance reader. He's the manager of a romance bookstore, and she loves the heavier literary books.

[05:13] Bradeigh, how did you all decide to do that?

[05:15] Bradeigh: You know, that's such a great question, because our initial pitch for this book to our editor at Berkeley was the opposite. So Josie was the romance bookstore owner and Ryan was the literary one.

[05:27] And it was our editor, one of the editors at Berkeley, Cindy Huang, who suggested that we swap it. And as soon as she did, it sort of clicked into place as we thought, this is really going to give it a unique twist.

[05:38] There's so many great books out there that have, you know, a woman who loves romance and the guy who's sort of a skeptic. And so swapping them made it really fun.

[05:46] We had to really think about what would make a straight guy like Ryan like romance and how would that change his perspective on it? And then also, why would Josie not really like it?

[05:56] Why would she gravitate more toward literary fiction? It was really fun. It did also raise some challenges because we have this female main character who doesn't like romance in a book that is mostly written for women who love romance.

[06:08] So we had to work hard with her to make her understandable and hopefully relatable to readers.

[06:13] Cindy: I wondered about that and how you would make him the lover of romance. I mean, that was really interesting, and it was fun to think about that as I was reading.

[06:21] Bradeigh: Yeah.

[06:22] I read a Reddit thread a few months before we started writing the book about a person who had gotten a job working for their neighbor reading to a parrot that was plucking its feathers out.

[06:35] I thought it was such an interesting story that they would read to this parrot who was lonely, and it helped them feel better. And as soon as we started working on Ryan's character, I brought it up again, and I said, what if this is how he got into reading romance,

[06:47] was that he had to read romantic novels to a parrot who was lonely? And that's what ended up in the book.

[06:52] Alison: It did. And Bradeigh was like, should we change it a little bit, because I did get it from Reddit, but it was just too good to like a bookstore parrot. I mean, couldn't beat it.

[07:01] Cindy: And the fact that that worked to soothe the parrot.

[07:04] Bradeigh: I know, isn't it crazy? I love this idea of a parrot that's so lonely, it just wants somebody to sit by it and read to it.

[07:10] Cindy: I agree. It made me think a little bit of frog and toad when one of them, I think maybe it's frog, always reads to his plants.

[07:17] Bradeigh: Yes, I love that.

[07:19] Cindy: Yes, the power of reading. And I also like that Ryan was the one that orders all the fun frothy drinks while Josie orders the very basic drinks at the coffee store that is in the middle of the bookstores.

[07:29] Alison: We had a lot of fun with that. And actually at one point we made a little bit of a bigger deal about that in Ryan's sweet tooth. But just their dynamic 

[07:37] was so much fun to write and how different they were.

[07:40] Cindy: So you mentioned that this is a straight up romance versus romance and women's fiction. How did you decide to write a straight up romance?

[07:47] Bradeigh: We love writing romance and we've had romance in all of our books. And we had a conversation with our editor about, you know, positioning a book. It's always a conversation that authors have.

[07:58] How are we going to position books? Are we going to position, Are they going to be shelved with general fiction? Are they going to be shelved with romance? All of our books prior to this one had been in the general fiction section of a bookstore.

[08:08] And we thought that it might be nice to have a book in the romance section where romance readers can really find it because we've had more and more romance as we've published more books.

[08:17] So we were really excited when our editor said, yeah, let's try a pure romance book. And we had a lot of fun writing it.

[08:23] Cindy: Well, that's one of the things I actually wanted to talk about. Romance is clearly having a moment. I mean, romantic books are everywhere. They are so popular.

[08:31] My friend Kelly Hooker and I just put together this literary lookbook that we do twice a year. And as I was scouring all the titles to include in there, there are so many romances.

[08:39] And they also all have much larger print runs than a lot of the other books. So clearly they're selling well. Why do you think that is?

[08:46] Alison: You know, I think that romance has always been a huge genre. I think it's just getting more attention and more respect from the rest of the industry.

[08:54] But romance readers have really kept the book industry going. Like, there are so many of them, and they are rabid readers reading so many books and being so vocal with their support.

[09:05] So I don't know if it's new or if the rest of the world is paying a little bit more attention,

[09:11] but there are so many romance books. And I also think, you know, we've had a tough couple years from the pandemic and other things going on. And when reality gets a little difficult, I mean, what better than a nice romance book to escape into where you know

[09:26] there will be a happy ending? I think that that's something that people really gravitate to.

[09:30] Cindy: I think that's right. It has been a rough few years. And to have a lighter story that will just sweep you away is quite nice.

[09:37] But it's been really fun to see with Booktok and bookstores expanding their romance sections. Bookstores that are just focused on romance opening, you highlight one or two in your acknowledgments.

[09:48] So clearly romance is the thing that is keeping the book world going or at least heavily supporting it. And that's wonderful.

[09:55] Alison: I do have to say that the amount of romance only bookstores that are popping up just makes my heart so happy. It is. You know, it used to be there were a couple of them, but now, I mean, we keep finding out about more of them opening.

[10:08] So we are totally here for it and really happy about it.

[10:11] Cindy: I read Shelf Awareness Pro every day, which is a newsletter for the industry. And I feel like every time I turn around, there's a new one opening that they're listing in there.

[10:18] Alison: It's great.

[10:19] Cindy: It is. Well, you all included a lot of fun literary references, books and authors. Was it just a ball to collect those and insert them into the story? Bradeigh, do you want to take that one?

[10:29] Bradeigh: Yes. We loved including book references because they are booksellers, and booksellers are going to refer to books all the time. I mean, anyone who's a big reader is constantly going to be thinking about the different books that they love, the books that they grew up with, the books that changed their lives.

[10:42] And so we had to think about what are the kind of books that Josie would have liked. You know, she likes big books, she likes deep books, she likes gritty books, and 

[10:50] She likes books that are going to let her feel things, you know, hard feelings, sad feelings, without having to really feel them in real life. She's a little closed off in real life.

[10:58] So that was fun to explore. That for her and then for Ryan, he's such a romance reader, and he really likes more realistic romance rather than paranormal romance, for example.

[11:07] He wants something that he can sort of see himself being part of. And I think it's 

[11:13] Such a sweet thing in a guy to have someone who likes romance and really fully buys into this.

[11:18] Alison: One other thing about the books that we represented. We wanted to make sure that we were being as inclusive and diverse as we could with the authors and books that we mentioned, because that's something that's really important to Ryan as a character as well,

[11:30] You know, his belief is that everyone deserves a love story, so wanted to make sure that we had a good representation in there.

[11:35] Cindy: That makes sense. It was just fun to see the books that you did reference and would send me down a rabbit hole with, like, oh, I love that one too.

[11:43] Or I'm not familiar with that. I need to go look it up.

[11:45] Bradeigh: I love that. I love hearing that. Anytime we can get people to look at more books, that's a win.

[11:51] Cindy: Absolutely. So this is a romance novel, as we have been discussing,

[11:55] so it will have a happy ending. Did it take you two a while to figure out how you would reach the happy ending? Because you have to have a progression here.

[12:02] You have these characters in this case who don't like each other. Then obviously they start to feel attraction, and then eventually you have a happy ending. What was it like trying to reach that?

[12:10] Alison: You know, I'm curious what Bradeigh has to say about that, but my first thought is that the ending was not as hard as the beginning was,

[12:18] because I think that the beginning with enemies to lovers, you have to have some tension, and they have to be enemies at the start, but you also want them to be likable and relatable and be able to get to the point where they become

[12:31] friends and then lovers. So personally, I think that the beginning of their love story was more challenging than the end. Bradeigh, what do you think?

[12:39] Bradeigh: Let's see.

[12:40] We made some kind of significant changes to the end, from the outline stage to our draft stage to the final stage.

[12:47] And we used some beta readers with this book. We hadn't used beta readers in our prior books, and they didn't really like the first ending. It didn't make sense to them.

[12:55] I'm not going to give any spoilers, but if anybody wants to message us on Instagram after they've read the book, we will tell you what the original ending was. It still ended happily.

[13:02] But there were some different things that happened, and we had to sort of work on it just goes back to the characters. How would the characters react?

[13:10] How would the characters navigate this? There's always some sort of a decision point that the characters have to come to as they decide. Are they going to

[13:19] let their relationship go to the next level, or are they going to let circumstances pull them apart?

[13:23] Alison: The other thing our beta readers helped with is we had, There is a scene in the book where the characters are on an overnight trip, and 

[13:32] The beta readers were like, we want only one bed. So we gave the readers what they wanted.

[13:37] Cindy: I saw that in your acknowledgements, and I wanted to ask you about it because I thought that was so interesting that people were pushing for the one bed.

[13:43] Alison: It is a very beloved trope, and people wanted it, so we gave it to them.

[13:48] Cindy: I think it's always really interesting reading romance because it evolves differently than a lot of other stories because you do know what the ending's gonna be, because if you don't get to that ending, nobody is happy.

[13:58] So it's just interesting to kind of see how the characters progress, see what tears them apart, see what brings them back together. And I think, Alison, you mentioned this up front.

[14:06] When you start out enemies to lovers, you want them to not like each other, but you still want the reader to like them. And that's gotta be a little tricky sometimes.

[14:14] Alison: It definitely was the way that we write. We each take one point of view character, and Bradeigh took the lead on Josie, and she did a lot of work on Josie just to make her understandable because she is a little prickly, but did a lot of work to make her who she is,

[14:30] but also being

[14:32] relatable. Bradeigh, how would you describe Josie?

[14:35] Bradeigh: You know, she has a lot of walls up, and she is prickly, and she also really loves her job, and it is important to her.

[14:42] So, you know, Ryan has said some things to her in the past, or she's heard some things that he's said about her. And so she has reasons to be a little prickly toward him.

[14:49] Cindy: I agree. But I really liked her. And her backstory makes you understand why she's prickly.

[14:54] Bradeigh: Yes, that is the goal.

[14:56] Cindy: Exactly. So this is book four with the two of you writing together. What has stayed the same for you with your writing process, and what has changed over these four books?

[15:04] Alison: Oh, good question. Hmm. Bradeigh, do you have a thought on that?

[15:09] Bradeigh: Sure.

[15:10] So let's see. Our first book, The Beach Trap, was about two half sisters who are sort of brought back together when they inherit a house from their father. And they don't like each other, and they didn't really grow up together,

[15:23] And they spend a lot of the time in the book not on the page together. And so writing that was, We divide up the characters.

[15:31] As Alison mentioned. One of us will take the point of view of one character, the other one for the other one.

[15:37] And so it was fairly easy to write those because we were mostly writing just about our character's experience. But as we've written more books, our characters have progressively become closer with each other.

[15:46] So our second book, The Comeback Summer, they were sisters who were best friends, and they lived together and they ran a business together. And then our third book, they were at a summer camp together, Until Next Summer.

[15:56] And then this one, our characters are falling in love with each other, so they are as close as can be. But what makes that tricky from a craft standpoint is that,

[16:04] we're each crafting,

[16:05] on the page, dialogue and interactions between these characters that when we send it to the other person to review,

[16:11] they may say that that's not how my character would respond. And so we have to do more editing back and forth, and more collaboration, which is really fun.

[16:18] But it does make it a little trickier sometimes.

[16:20] Cindy: And your books have also gotten steamier, or at least they seem that way to me. How is it writing the steamy sections? How do you approach that?

[16:27] Alison: They have gotten steamier. And Braeigh is the queen of steam in my eyes.

[16:31] She's really, really good at it. We were talking about The Beach Trap. There's a scene in The Beach Trap where the character is alone in a bathroom stripping wallpaper, and Bradeigh manages to make it steamy.

[16:40] So she's so good at it.

[16:42] So how we do it is whoever's chapter or character, if it's one of our other books, whoever's chapter the steam is happening in will write it. But if it's me,

[16:52] I will kind of do the basics and then pass it over to Bradeigh and let her really bring the magic. But she's just so good at it.

[16:59] Bradeigh: Aw, you're so nice.

[17:00] I think the spicy scenes in romance novels, you know, there's a huge range. Some romance novels have almost no spice. Some have a lot. I think we're somewhere in the middle,

[17:10] but I do think it's an important part of the character development.

[17:14] Every character is going to have sex differently. They're going to think about sex differently. They're going to do different things. And so it should reflect who they are as a person and should reflect their relationship.

[17:24] Cindy: Is it difficult for you to write that, Bradeigh, or do you enjoy it?

[17:27] Bradeigh: I like it.

[17:28] I think it's fun.

[17:30] I think they're fun, but I think they're challenging as well. They take a lot of time and a lot of care. So we really want to make sure, especially with a book like this, where the reader has to wait a lot of pages before they actually get together, it's a slow burn,

[17:44] and we want to make sure it was worth their while.

[17:46] Cindy: Got it. Well, it definitely seems to be popular to have more steam versus less.

[17:50] Alison: Well, one other interesting thing about that that we've noticed, as we've been seeing reviews, is that everybody's judgment of the amount of steam is very, very different.

[17:59] So we have some people that think that this book is, like, very steamy, and other people think that it's mild. So really, there is a big range, and it's a personal preference.

[18:10] But like Bradeigh said. Every book is different because of the characters being different and what their relationship in the story calls for.

[18:17] Cindy: And, Alison, you make a great point, because I do think it is a personal preference, and people are used to so many different levels of steam. I wish there was some kind of universal rating just because I'm not a huge steam person, but I can easily kind of go over it,

[18:31] and that's fine with me. But I feel like I sometimes need to tell people that, because people know that about me. Like, this is steamier than I normally read. I wish there was some kind of rating, like, you know, one pepper to five peppers, that was kind of universal.

[18:42] It would be helpful.

[18:43] Alison: I think that some places do that with the peppers. But then again, the problem is some people. What some people think is a one pepper, somebody else might think is a three pepper.

[18:52] So.

[18:52] So it can be interesting. And also when covers started changing because the covers are all so cartoony and bright, it can be a little bit deceptive and hard to tell 

[19:03] What you're getting into. But to your point, if people aren't comfortable with it, usually it's pretty easy to skim past if you're not into it.

[19:11] Cindy: Well, what surprised you the most when y'all were writing this one? Bradeigh, do you want to take that?

[19:15] Bradeigh: So this book has the You've Got Mail trope that these characters are talking to each other online, anonymously, while they're rivals in real life. And that was surprisingly fun to write those online conversations between the two of them.

[19:28] And I think it was really helpful, especially in the first half of the book where they are battling it out in real life and they're both pretty prickly toward each other,

[19:37] that we also see these conversations with them online, where they are getting to know each other, they're bantering, they're flirting a little bit, they're talking about book recommendations.

[19:48] It was really fun incorporating that. And I think it became, The more we wrote it, the more fun it became.

[19:54] Alison: I also think it adds a layer of depth to the characters, you know, because we had that in our second book, The Comeback Summer, as well, where the characters were journaling,

[20:03] and there's a different level of conversation and depth and things that you can talk about and get into. So I think it'll be fun for the readers to read as well, but also get them a little bit more insight into the characters.

[20:16] Cindy: Yes. The things that they're willing to share when they're not face to face with someone.

[20:20] Bradeigh: Exactly.

[20:21] Alison: That was huge. Yeah.

[20:22] Cindy: Well, how do you choose your character names?

[20:25] Bradeigh: Ooh, this is such a fun question.

[20:28] So we, as we've talked about, this book was very much inspired by You've Got Mail. And so we wanted the character names to be inspired by You've Got Mail.

[20:37] So we've got Ryan, Meg Ryan. And then Josie is inspired by Joe Fox, which is Tom Hanks's character.

[20:44] Alison: Okay.

[20:44] Cindy: I love that. That's a great answer. I wasn't sure what I was expecting, but I really like that names are important.

[20:50] Alison: We usually do a lot of thought on the names, making sure that they're different and memorable. But yeah, these names were the names we picked early on, and they didn't change because we loved that little shout out.

[21:03] Cindy: And you have a character inspired by Pamela, right?

[21:05] Alison: We do. We do. Penelope.

[21:08] As we said, we're both big fans of Pamela. And this character,

[21:13] Bradeigh, do you want to talk about her and how important she is to Josie?

[21:17] Bradeigh: Sure.

[21:18] So this character's name is Penelope Adler Wolf, and she is like Josie's hero. She runs a bookstore, an indie bookstore. And Josie just really looks up to her and wants to be like her.

[21:29] And we wanted to model this person after Pamela, and we actually. I don't know if you remember, Alison, but we asked ChatGPT to help us with the name.

[21:38] We said, brainstorm a bunch of names that sound like Pamela Klingerhorn but are not Pamela Klingerhorn. And it did not give us Penelope Adler Wolf, but it gave us variations on that and we put it together and made her name.

[21:51] Cindy: Okay, that's so fun that you used ChatGPT. I have hardly used ChatGPT and I feel like I am very behind 

[21:57] Alison: I will say, and I don't know if this will fit in as it does relate to ChatGPT. My day job is in advertising. And so the advertising industry has really embraced that technology to not get behind.

[22:08] And so it is a very helpful tool for research or brainstorming. But yes, we don't use it for anything to do with the actual writing?

[22:16] Cindy: Well, it is just interesting to see how it's changing the world. I actually was putting together a book article earlier today all on my own without ChatGPT. But it made me think for some reason, I wonder if they have to run it through some kind of AI software for every article they release to make sure that humans are writing them and they're not being written by AI.

[22:32] It's just a thought.

[22:33] Alison: I imagine teachers have to do that as well.

[22:36] Cindy: I know teachers do it because my kids talk about it all the time with papers and things like that.

[22:41] Tell me if you have a favorite of your books. I know it's probably the most recent, but sometimes people have really interesting answers to this one, so I like to ask it.

[22:49] Alison: Ooh, that's tough. Bradeigh, do you have one that comes to mind?

[22:52] Bradeigh: It feels like asking me to pick my favorite kid.

[22:56] That's tough.

[22:57] I like them all for different reasons. Man, that's a hard one.

[23:01] I don't have a favorite I can't pick.

[23:03] Alison: There are things that I love about all of them. I will say maybe the one that feels a little. Oh, goodness. I was going to say the one that feels a little bit extra special to me might be The Comeback Summer because it was the first time that I wrote a truly plus sized character.

[23:19] As someone who is plus sized, it was very therapeutic and interesting. It was a really good, challenging experience and Bradeigh helped me a lot with it with

[23:31] not having our character be as hard on herself as I am on myself.

[23:35] So that one will always be really special to me. But it's really hard to pick because there are things that I love that are special about all of them. And of course, we're so excited about Battle of the Bookstores and getting that into people's hands.

[23:47] So, it's hard for that one to not be our current favorite, of course.

[23:51] Cindy: But I love your answer. Like I was just saying, I think sometimes it does elicit interesting responses. So before we wrap up, I would love to hear what the two of you all have read recently that you really liked.

[24:01] Bradeigh, would you like to start?

[24:03] Bradeigh: Sure.

[24:04] So, in the spirit of Josie and Ryan and their differing book preferences, I'll give you sort of some romance and some literary fiction.

[24:12] So on the romance side, I've recently read Digging Dr. Jones by Olivia Jackson and Code Word Romance by Carlie Walker. And they're sort of similar, different storylines, but they're both what I would call adventure rom coms.

[24:26] So really fun, romantic, but a lot of adventure heist. One takes place in Central America, one takes place in Europe.

[24:33] Very fun. So I recommend both of those. And then on the literary side, I just finished reading Notes on an Execution and it was very good and very deep and a little dark and I really liked it.

[24:45] Cindy: You know, you mentioned Bradeigh, that adventure romance, and that was something we haven't really talked about at all. The fact that within the romance genre there are all of these sub genres like sports romance and adventure romance and a variety of other things.

[24:58] That's been a fun thing to see too.

[25:00] Bradeigh: It is really fun and I think what makes it really cool is that readers can find the little niches within romance that really speak to them.

[25:08] Cindy: I agree with that. Well, Alison, what about you? What have you read that you've loved?

[25:12] Alison: So many books,

[25:13] It's hard to pick, but I've picked three.

[25:16] One I just finished the other day, The Last Letter of Rachel Ellsworth by Barbara o' Neal. It is women's fiction and it is just, you travel the world and taste all this food and go to India and Marrakesh and it is just really, really wonderful.

[25:29] I love everything that she writes. And then two other ones, Jane and Dan at the End of the World by Colleen Oakley and The Favorites by Layne Fargo. So like Bradeigh, my reading is a little bit broad, but I always love a good romance.

[25:42] Cindy: The Favorites was so drama-filled and different than a lot of books that I've read. I loved it.

[25:47] Alison: I loved it and I do a lot of audiobooks and the audio of it was just phenomenal. I inhaled that book.

[25:54] Cindy: I did as well. Well, Alison and Bradeigh, I'm so glad you guys returned to my show. It was wonderful to chat with you again and I loved Battle of the Bookstores.

[26:01] Alison: Thank you so much for having us. We love chatting with you.

[26:04] Bradeigh: Yes, thank you.

[26:07] Cindy: Thank you so much for listening to my podcast. I would love to connect with you on Instagram or Facebook where you can find me at @thoughtsfromapage. If you enjoy the show and have a moment to rate it or subscribe to it, wherever you listen to your podcasts,

[26:19] I would really appreciate it.

[26:21] It makes a huge difference. And please tell all of your friends about Thoughts From a Page. Word of mouth does wonders to help the show grow.

[26:28] The book discussed in this episode can be purchased at my Bookshop storefront and the link is in the show notes. I hope you'll tune in next time.