It’s Not About the Town. It’s About Being Known.
I didn't set out to write about a small town. I set out to write about home, and it turned out the two were the same thing.
Point Perry isn't on any map. I made it up—a little coastal town in South Australia, the kind of place where the jetty is the centre of everything and everyone knows whose ute is parked outside the servo. But readers write to me like it's real. Like they've been there. And I think that's the whole secret of small town romance, right there: it isn't really about the town. It's about being known.
A place where time slows down
We're all so busy. My own days are early mornings, the gym, a walk, coffee, editing deadlines, author events, marketing (urgh), kids and ageing parents—usually most of that before lunch. And then you open a small town romance and everything just … slows.
That's the first thing readers are reaching for, I think. Not the love story yet—the pace. A town where the same faces turn up at the cafe, where the seasons actually mean something, where nobody's rushing. It's an escape, but it's a gentle one. You're not being whisked off somewhere glamorous. You're being invited somewhere quiet.
This is my experience of why I write them, anyway. Other authors will tell you something different, and they'd probably be right too. But for me it started with wanting a place to slow down and land. A place that captured the community I grew up in, where I spent my childhood.
The chemistry has nowhere to hide
Here's the thing a big city can't give you: in a small town, two people can't avoid each other.
The city girl who buys the Christmas tree farm has to deal with the grumpy cowboy already living on it. The one who swore they'd never come back has to walk past the person they left behind, at the one café in town, probably more than once. There's no getting lost in the crowd. That forced closeness is where all the tension lives—the bickering, the stolen glances, the slow thaw, the gossip, the meddling. Small towns do the work for you. They put two people who shouldn't fall in love in each other's path, over and over, until they do.
That's why the setting matters so much in these books. It's not wallpaper. It's the thing pushing the two of them together.
Love as an anchor
I write low-spice, small-town, second-chance love. Warmth over heat. And I've thought a lot about why that's the corner I keep coming back to.
What I care about is how the characters react to what goes on behind closed doors, rather than the action itself. The look that passes between them. What they don't say. The quiet moment after, when one of them realises something has changed. That's the part I want you to feel.
Because readers come to these stories carrying real things. Hard weeks. Grief, sometimes. And a small town romance says: love finds its way in, even here, even now. Not a fireworks kind of love. The kind that shows up and stays. The kind that feels like an anchor when everything else is moving.
Finding ourselves in the ordinary
The characters in these books aren't superheroes. They're a bit tired, a bit stubborn, carrying something they haven't told anyone. They burn the dinner. They say the wrong thing. And I think that's why we love them—because they're us, dropped into a place a little kinder than the real world, and given a happy ending we can believe in.
That's the promise of a small town romance, when you get down to it. Not that life is simple. But that even ordinary, imperfect people get to be loved.
If you'd like to visit Point Perry, you can start for free.
Light Up My Heart: A Point Perry Christmas is my award-winning Christmas romance, and it's free to read—a small town, a grumpy hero who's sworn off the season, and the girl from his past who's come home. It's the easiest way to see whether Point Perry feels like home to you too.
👉 Start reading Light Up My Heart free →
And if you'd rather I just let you know when the next Point Perry story lands, pop your name on my newsletter list—no rush, no spam, just a note from me when there's something new.
Jo x
