Celebrating Aunt Agatha's.

RHYS BOWEN: I first visited Aunt Agatha's bookstore in Ann Arbor, MI when I was touring for my second book. Touring was actually a grand word for driving around with my husband, from Motel 6 to Red Roof Inn. The audience at Aunt Agatha's was 2 --Robin and a Welsh woman who had stumbled upon my books. Robin was so warm and welcoming then that I've kept going back.

And when Her Royal Spyness came out Robin emailed me to say there was a "Harry Potter like frenzy" which made me feel terrific. We've had dinners before my events. We borrow space to fit everyone in and I am not the only writer for whom Robin has built up an audience.

Today they celebrate their 20th anniversary with a big booksigning party/orgy featuring Steve Hamilton (who is in the picture with Robin), Loren Estleman, Kent Kruger, Louise Penny, Julia Spencer-Fleming, myself and many more. So I'm delighted to host Robin as our guest on Jungle Red Writers.

RHYS: Welcome Robin and let me ask you some questions about the store and the state of the industry in general:

I suppose the first question that comes to mind is how can a small and specialist store like yours keep going in times that are so unfriendly to bookstores?

ROBIN;  We've found that since the demise of the superstore - Border's mothership was a few blocks away - that we have been busier.  I think having a niche helps, definitely.  We are the only bookstore in our downtown area that sells popular fiction, which helps (the other new bookstores downtown are more new age type stores) and used books are a big part of our business.  The markup is better and the out the door volume is higher.  A $3.50 paperback is still a bargain.  And I think people still want some kind of community gathering place.  Our book club attendance has grown, and our author events can be lively.

RHYS.What made you decide to start a mystery bookstore in the first place?

ROBIN; Two things:  one, my husband worked at Borders and was unhappy with "corporate" life - Borders had been acquired by K-Mart.  Two, I loved mysteries.  It seemed like a good fit, and we had previously lived in Minneapolis where there's a wonderful store called Uncle Edgar's.  That really gave me the idea, down to the fact that he used to have his kid in a playpen in the front (we had a baby swing),

RHYS. Have e-books had a big impact on your sales? Are there any plans to incorporate them into retail stores somehow so that you get a share of this revenue? (I know Google was trying something once but that it didn't work).

ROBIN; E-books have certainly had an impact.  It's part of the market share - everyone wants a slice of the reading pie.  Our slice just won't be electronic.  We see that we have to feature and discount hardcovers we believe in - and it's worth it to us to help support authors we love.  That's what we're good at, anyway.  It may be a skill that's rapidly becoming antique, but we're clinging to it.  One thing we do see is that mass markets - which we LOVE! - are taking a big hit.  Thank heavens for Berkley Prime Crime.

RHYS. What trends do you notice in mystery buying. What's hot and what's not?

ROBIN; My husband and I were just talking about this.  Since we are selling more hardcovers by big names as there's nowhere else to get them downtown, we were trying to figure out the sweet spot.  A hot book will sell fast and furious for two weeks and then fall off the table.  It's figuring out when the edge of the table is coming up that's tricky!   We do well with mass market cozies, selling them 4 or 5 at a time to cozy readers.  We do well with (for us) established authors in hardcover, i.e. authors we've worked with to establish with our customers.  (A short list for us would be Loren Estleman, Steve Hamilton, Kent Krueger, Louise Penny, Rhys Bowen, Julia Spencer-Fleming.  We will sometimes sell a case of those author's book the first week of release.) Maybe the hot book of the summer was GONE GIRL by Gillian Flynn, with a general tendency to psychological writing - Tana French, Sophie Hannah, S.J. Bolton - all do well for us.  So does international fiction though that's not as hot as it was even last year.

RHYS. Okay, give us some predictions. Which new or unknown authors should be be watching? 

ROBIN: Hmm.  So far this year I think Julia Keller's first crime novel, A KILLING IN THE HILLS, is a knockout.  My husband is a huge fan of Elizabeth Hand, who had her second crime novel, AVAILABLE DARK, out this past spring.  And we saw a breakout last season with G.M. Malliett's WICKED AUTUMN.  We're looking forward to the second book.  Cornelia Read - though she has several books out she's not as well known as she might be.  I loved VALLEY OF ASHES.  I was also a fan of Eleanor Kuhn's A SIMPLE MURDER, about a Shaker community after the revolutionary war.  And again, though she has several books out, both of us are HUGE fans of S.J, Bolton.  She is now writing a series rather than standalones.

RHYS:. Do you think that real paper books have a future or will we all be electronic in a few years?

ROBIN: I don't think ALL electronic, though I think as readers brought up on e-books age it will trend that way.  I hope at that point to be either dead or retired!  But I have hope when I see my children, who are young adults, and my nieces and nephews (all under 14) reading actual books.   I still think there will be collectors who will want a paper book.  They are beautiful objects that have been with us for hundreds and hundreds of years.  I don't see books going away completely.

RHYS. What book do you wish someone would write?

ROBIN:Now, that is why I am a bookseller and not a writer!  I did read an exquisite book this year, THE THING ABOUT THUGS by Tabish Khair, that was a combination of lots of things I love.  It's set in Victorian England and is really gorgeously written and put together.  But I wouldn't have thought of it myself!

RHYS. and lastly... you were president of the IMBA recently. What happened to the best seller list? Those writers who would never make the NYT got a terrific boost from seeing their names on the list. I know I did when I saw my first Evan book there and I still have the list on my board where I was number 1 over James Lee Burke, Janet Evaonvich and Daniel Silva!

ROBIN: Well, exhaustion!  I was president of IMBA but more onerously I was in charge of the bestseller list, which, because we are all pretty busy, mostly involved hounding people for their lists.  So a combination of laziness and busy-ness, I guess.  If there was a way to cajole everyone into participating we would still be doing it, and I may take another whack at it at some point.

RHYS: Robin, thank you so much for coming to visit. We hope the party today is a rip-roaring success and we hope that you continue to flourish (at least as long as we keep writing books!)
And I'll be posting pix of tonight's event on my Facebook page tomorrow (www.facebook.com/RhysBowenAuthor).
And the Jungle Red sisters are heading off to Bouchercon tomorrow morning. I'll try to get some candid pix of us too! More to follow.....

Jan Brogan Turns Back TIme!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: YAY Jan! Our very dear blog sister, Red Jan, has entered the e-world. We've been talking about turning back time this week--are you humming Cher in the background?--and our Jan has managed it! She's taken her first book, which came out---well, let her tell it. (And if the fonts look funny, what can I say. I lost the battle with Blogger.)

JAN BROGAN: So if you could go back to 1991, what would be different?

Not that much, was what I thought. I'm not the most aggressive marketer, and I had allowed my first novel, Final Copy, to sit on the shelf for four years before I sold it to Larcom Press, a small New England publisher. Before publication, it needed to be updated.

In the early and mid 1990s, fax machines weren't standard in newsrooms - and although laptops existed, they were still expensive. Cell phones were practically the size of a shoebox and still pretty rare. In fact, when my husband, who was then in the cell phone business tried to convince me that someday even stay-at-home-moms would carry cell phones, I laughed and told him he was dreaming.

So since clearly, my talents did not lie in predicting the future, I decided to head to the past.

Instead of updating Final Copy to 2001, when the book would be published, I traveled backwards and set the novel even earlier - in 1991.

Remember 1991?

George Bush, the senior, was president and he launched Operation Desert Storm.

Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested after 11 dead bodies were found in Milwaukee.

Terminator II, The Silence of the Lambs, and Thelma and Louise were big movies.

And the Internet was just beginning to take off.

But the reason I chose 1991? Final Copy, and the main character, reporter Addy McNeil, starts off with a venture capitalist plunging to his death at a biotechnology conference on the waterfront, and a lot of the story has to do with the rough and tumble world of fledgling entrepreneurs that needed millions and millions of dollars to invent sexy new drugs. I wanted to choose a year when this industry was particularly desperate.

And I might have been stuck in 1991 forever if it hadn't been for some bad luck and some good advice.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: What was the bad luck?

JAN: Larcom Press, an incredibly supportive publisher that put out quality New England mysteries, went out of just as I was finishing the sequel, A Confidential Source.

HANK: What did you do?

JAN: I cried for a while, and then I called my agent.

HANK: AW. And we can all relate, no question about that. So all worked out nicely, as things often do. SO what was the good advice?

JAN: Well, my agent thought A Confidential Source could still be sold to a bigger publisher, but wanted to call it "first in a series," which he said would generate a lot more interest from the New York publishers - so he asked me to change the man character's name.

HANK: Whoa. That's kind of weird. I mean--you'd written the entire book, heard Addy be called "Addy" again and again, and --you know, when you name a character, and there she is in print, it must be difficult to undo in your brain.

JAN: . It was remarkably hard to contemplate, sort of like renaming one of your children. But I realized that if I made that change, at least I wouldn't be stuck in 1991 forever. And my agent was right, two different New York publishers bid for the new series.

HANK: So for your reader fans--there's one little secret that may make FINAL COPY a bit of a, well, mystery. The protagonist of this book is named Addy McNeil. Your other mysteries have a protagonist named Hallie Ahern. But I must say, she reminds me just bit of Addy. What gives?

JAN: Well, yeah, now it can be told! Addy McNeil IS Hallie Ahern.

It did cause some confusion from reviewers who had liked Addy McNeil and couldn't help but recognize the similarities when Hallie Ahern made her appearance. Before I put the e-book up, I considered whether I should rename Addy McNeil and all those characters in Final Copy to be consistent with A Confidential Source.

HANK: Oh, no, talk about confusing!

JAN: But to tell you the truth, Final Copy has always been my favorite book, the one closest to my heart, and even all these years later, I still couldn't go in and change Addy's name. She was Addy McNeil in 1991, and she's Addy McNeil now.

HANK: SO, back to the future. You've written four very successful novels, all via traditional publishers. Why are you putting out Final Copy in digital yourself?

JAN: Larcom went out of business, the rights reverted to me. I sat on those rights for a long time. But now as epublishing has taken off, it seemed like the time - and an opportunity to reach more readers.

HANK: Clearly, from the amazing numbers, epublishing and self-publishing is a juggernaut. Even so, it's--still a bit cutting edge. What were the pros and cons for you--and what have you learned about the self-publishing world?

JAN: What I've learned about e-publishing so far is that there are a lot of different opinions about it. But one thing is for certain, the author has to get out on the Internet and promote it. Also, pricing was baffling me, I had no idea what to charge for the book - so I went with suggestion I found on the web, at $2.99 per E-book - which is a huge bargain compared to what my other E-books cost.

The big controversy simmering now is about whether authors should join Amazon Kindle's new Select program, which makes a self-published e-book part of a "lending library." Amazon promises authors a percentage of a pot, but to take part, you have to make the book available exclusively on Amazon Kindle. That seemed a little bit like strong-arming the author to me, so I didn't opt in.

HANK: Let me ask you: How are you different now from when you started? How do you see the mystery world now? And your place in it?

JAN: Hmmm, let's see. When I wrote Final Copy, I was more experimental, but as I got into the Hallie Ahern series, I think I began conforming to certain perceived rules of mystery writing. Now after four books, I care less about getting a book published and more about creating a new and interesting work.

HANK: What did you learn on your recent adventure in France (besides acquiring the fabulous leopard dress)?

JAN: It's only taken like....twenty years....but now I'm into the process of writing and stretching myself. And in part, I learned some of that on my adventures in France. My friends there are all writers and artists, ex-pats who lives in southern France because they live and breathe art. A friend who is the director of the art school there always makes the connection between literature and the visual arts and he was really able to penetrate this sometimes-thick head of mine.

But you cannot blame any of these friends for the inappropriate leopard dress decision - that was actually two years before that when I was in Provence with my daughter. I haven't worn that dress ONCE at home, and I didn't even bring it back to Provence last summer so I could wear it there.

Anyway, one thing I've learned about my role in the mystery world is that I'm definitely not mainstream. I'm more fringe -- and I'm really much more comfortable on those edges.

HANK:. And now, Where can people find you? Besides here, of course!

JAN: Final Copy is available at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com right now and soon with smaller distributors. Here are the links, since you asked :-)

http://www.amazon.com/Final-prequel-Hallie-Ahern-ebook/dp/B006JEE8K4/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&qid=1323896627&sr=8-1

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/books/1004534461?ean=2940013814394&itm=1&usri=final+copy

HANK: And since it's all about time here this week--just tell us when you'd rather be living--French revolution? Civil War? D-Day? Restoration? Roaring Twenties? Or--what's your choice of another time? (And one lucky commenter will win Jan's new/old/new book! )

Do 99cent Kindle books Mean the Death of Publishing?

RHYS BOWEN: I confess to checking my Amazon stats at regular intervals--I know. It's an obsession that results in bleak despair every time my numbers go down, but I can't stop myself.
Today I found myself checking the top hundred mystery bestsellers and what a surprise--I find that most of them are ninety nine cent Kindle books. Several of them are by names I recognize--legitimate writers. So I'm wondering several things--can they actually make a good living by selling their books at 99 cents? That means they earn 33 cents a book. A thousand books gives them 300 dollars.(which it will have cost them to have the book set up in Kindle format) Ten thousand gives them $3000 . That means they have to sell an awful lot of books before this is worth their while.
Perhaps some people do sell a hundred thousand kindle books. But how would readers find out about you if you're not on that bestseller list?
My next point to ponder is whether we are lowering the expectations of the readership. Some of those 99 cent books will be good. Most of them will be poorly written and have been rejected by regular publishers. Will readers come to think that this is how a story should be? Silly question really. They are already used to the fragmented style of TV drama , the lack of characterization of action movies.
And my third point--how will this affect the publishing industry? I've already been given one star reviews by Kindle readers who are angry that my Kindle books are being sold at $11.99 (a price set by my publisher for the first year). Will those readers eventually force down the price of all books as the power and scope of the e-reader grows?

I had an interesting brush with this myself last spring when St. Martin's had me write a free e-story featuring Molly Murphy, to coincide with the release of Bless the Bride. The cover clearly says A Molly Murphy Story. It is not a full book. Suddenly I find that it had risen to #2 on free Kindle. Then I find that I am getting all these one star reviews because IT IS NOT A WHOLE BOOK. This blew me away. It was free. It was a good story. It's like getting a sample chocolate at Sees Candies and then complaining because it's not a whole box.

My point is that readers are becoming entitled. They want the best, right now, and they don't want to pay for it. And those people putting up their own 99 cent stories on Amazon are sadly catering to them. It may just mean the end to legitimate publishing.
What do you think?
(And I was asked to republish this blog that first appeared on my own Rhys's Pieces site. If you've already read it, I hope you'll forgive this repetition.)

On Reading with Robin

Jan: I first met Robin Kall when I was working on A Confidential Source, and I needed some background on talk radio. Robin got me into the studio at WHJJ, introduced me to Rhode Island's celebrity talk show hosts and then not much later, wound up with her own talk radio show. Now, her show has been on 920AM WHJJ for almost NINE years. Even at the early hour of 7 to 8 a.m. Saturday mornings, it's still one of the state's top rated talk shows, and it lives streams at www.920whjj.com.

Robin now authors a "Well-Read" column every Tuesday on www.golocalprov.com in the lifestyles section, where she suggests book titles and takes on all sorts of topics like book clubs, book lending, e-books, and summer reading. As far as I'm concerned, she will always be the LAST WORD on reading.

I asked her just how many books publishers and publicists send her and whether it ever becomes a burden?

ROBIN: I receive about twenty books a week between what comes to the station and to my home. And burden?? Never. It's so much fun to open those cardboard mailers from the publishers to see what's inside.

JAN: How do you choose which book to talk about or review?

ROBIN: If something looks interesting - for example, if it's a debut novel, and it's a reputable publisher, or if it has blurbs from authors I like, or if its a compelling non-fiction topic, something new and relevant - I will consider it for the program even when I'm booked. Usually, though, the program is already filled with interviews of author of books I've requested. As I only have the one hour a week sometimes it's impossible to review all of the books I'm interested in.

To handle some of the overflow -- books I like but can't fit into the radio program -- I will sometimes tape a segment during the week and put it up on my site. The site gets lots of hits, so as much as I enjoy a live interview on a saturday morning, the web site is another place to showcase the authors that I want to share with my audience. (plus no commercials!)

JAN: From your perspective, what's the craziest thing about the book biz?

ROBIN: It still amazes me when certain titles are sent to me. Books I rarely feature on my show, sports-oriented books, or politics, war books, big international spy thrillers. It's obvious that they are being sent out blind which is shocking at a time when we're hearing about how tough the business is and the ways that the publishers are cutting costs. These books are often the ones that come Fed Ex.I think I just found a way for the industry to save some money. Regular mail. Book rate even!

JAN: Recently Robin, you interviewed people to find out why they read: What was the answer?

ROBIN: Pure entertainment. people want to sit down with a great book and be totally immersed in its story. I did get a few of those 'escape into someone else's life for a bit' answers, but for the most part people enjoy their favorite books for the page-turning fun!

JAN: After hosting a reading radio program for nine years, why do you think people continue to read when they could be watching movies or YOUTUBE or reality TV all day long?

ROBIN: Good point. there are so many ways we can distract ourselves and still those same 24 hours in each day. With all of these other things competing for our time, and the list continuing to grow, I think people who enjoy reading will only put up with youtube,reality tv to keep current. It's not where they will turn for the most part. I place movie in another category. I've found that readers are usually movie watchers.(good movies.)

JAN: From your show, do you notice any trends in reading?

ROBIN:It seems like every book I read has dust motes in it. And some character is always padding down the hall for a steaming mug of coffee. And there's been an awful lot of books with Tiger in the title. Tiger Mom, Tiger Woods/Swinger. Tiger Wife. Tiger, Tiger. Or every book title is about someone's daughter, or someone's keeper, or someone's wife.

In terms of the big e-reader trend, I haven't joined in yet, but of course we cannot ignore its popularity. Many of the book people I know are using them in conjunction with not instead of books. Recently, my aunt noted that riding on the train with her e-reader there was nowhere to place her train stub...not something i would have thought of, but books serve so many purposes!

JAN: Do you think people read more in the summer and why?

ROBIN: There is so much talk about 'summer reading' and I'm not certain there is really more reading going on in the summer. it might be a marketing thing...the long lazy days of summer in this 24/7 world of ours might at this point be folklore, but I like to think of summer reading as a state of mind. when a chunk of time is set aside to simply derive pleasure from turning the pages one after the other with not so much as glancing at a clock. if done at beach,in hammock or that type of setting even better!

Check out Robin's website at www.readingwithrobin.com

And come back tomorrow when guest bloggers and private eyes, Colleen Collins and Shaun Kaufman explain how to find important clues in the trash.

By Colleen Collins & Shaun Kaufman

Will the World be Taken Over By Technology?

Hi, Rhys here again. A couple of interest coincidencs happen this week:
A few weeks ago I was approached by my publisher Minotaur to write a Molly Murphy story that they would put up as an ebook, to help to lure new readers to my series at the time Bless the Bride came out. I did this—it’s a quel when Molly is a teenager, and it’s called The Amersham Rubies. So I was going to mention it at some stage on the blogs when I got an email from blog mate Julia Spencer Fleming asking me to mention her ebook promotions, tied to the release of her next book, One was a Solider. I’ll give Julia’s details at the bottom of this article.

There has been so much buzz recently on the future of publishing and whether the real paper book is now on the way of the dodo. Certainly my e-book sales are outstripping my real book sales on Amazon. Maybe it’s only a matter of time before the libraries all just stock ebooks. Some people tell me they still love the feel of a real book in their hands, but that won’t be true for the next generation. My seven year old grandson loves his Kindle. He likes the fact that he can make the type bigger and that he can listen to the book when he gets too tired to read.

What this will mean for writers, I’m not sure. However I don’t believe the world will be taken over by technology for a couple of reasons. One was that I was in a big craft store this week and it was really busy. Women and children were being crafty all around me, in spite of the fact that nobody these days needs to make anything. People enjoy making things. It’s in our genes. Look at the incredible popularity of all the craft mysteries—knitting, quilting, scrapbooking, cooking, you name it, there is a mystery series about it.

And I was in a friend’s house the other day admiring the art work on her walls when it struck me that we still like paintings, although photographs give a more accurate rendition. So why do we like art work when in a technological world we’d have photos and even holographs on our walls? And why do we like a real fire in the fireplace when our houses are well heated with a central furnace?
There must be something in us that likes the real, the traditional, the safe, the sturdy. We go to real plays rather than movies. We play real board games with real people. We cook for family gatherings when we could easily buy all the food pre-cooked. We get satisfaction from gardening and growing our own vegetables. We are not designed to be idle people. Our genes expect us to forage and hunt, to cut wood and make fires. And we like to turn pages to. So I’m hopeful that real books will continue to be part of our future. How about you?

And while we're on the subject of e-books, two announcements. My Molly story, The Amersham Rubies will finally be available as an e book on May 10th. And here's the snippet Julia wanted me to announce: Here's your chance to start Julia's Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne series for almost nothing. In the Bleak Midwinter is available as an e-book for only $2.99 through April 12 at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, the Sony Reader Store and other online venues. Also available for the even nicer price of $0.00: Letters to a Soldier, with correspondence to and from the War Zone by characters in the upcoming One Was A Soldier. You can download it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, the Sony Reader Store and the iBookstore.

Ebooks are the Future, and the Future is Here

Today Jungle Red talks with Marcia Talley, Agatha and Anthony award-winning author of the Hannah Ives mystery series and more than a dozen short stories, and the 2010 President of Sisters-in-Crime, about SinC's look at the future of publishing.

Last summer, Marcia and a team from the Sisters in Crime Board hit the high-tech e-book world on the West Coast, where they talked with:

• Amazon’s Kindle and other e-program representatives
• Google’s Google Books team
• Apple’s iBookstore team
• Smashwords ePublishing founder and CEO
• Owners of Seattle Mystery Books and M is for Mystery (San Mateo)

about how changing technology will affect writers AND readers. Last week, JR visited with Paul Hochman, Director of Social Media for SMP,about the importance of social media in today's publishing. From the SinC team's report, it seems apparent that electronic publishing formats are inextricably intertwined with social media, and that
authors who want to succeed in this new world had better get savvy, quickly.

MARCIA: That’s right, Debs. As bookseller Jim Huang, a member of our team said, “It’s not that everything is going to change. Everything already has changed!”

DEB: Marcia, can you give us your impressions of the companies you visited? One of the things I found most reassuring was that all these people seem to really LOVE books.

MARCIA: Absolutely. They all talked about books they were reading, they collect books, they search out bookstores whenever they visit a new town. I had to laugh when I saw the ‘bumper sticker” on one of the employee laptops at Google. It said, “My other data device is a book.”

The thing that impressed me the most was that almost without exception, the individuals who are running the e-book operations at Amazon, Google and Apple came from the world of New York publishing. They understand the business inside and out. But unlike New York publishers – that are paralyzed by towering levels of bureaucracy and but-we’ve-always-done-it-this-way attitudes – these folks are not afraid to smash old paradigms and take risks. Each of these companies has more than 20,000 employees, yet they operate as “little villages” where individuals are allowed to make decisions, collaborate with colleagues in other areas and gather feedback. They’re also characterized by charismatic founding leaders who are still very much part of the day-to-day operations of the companies.

Secondly, Amazon, Google, Apple and Smashwords are all committed to selling books. OMG, what a concept!

“Every book ever printed, in any way, all available in less than 60 seconds anywhere in the world,” says Amazon. Apple wants to offer iBooks wherever in the world users have access to iTunes. Google’s vision is for people to have whatever they might want to read through what Google terms “books in the cloud,” aiming, like Smashwords, at the enormous global Internet market – 1.8 billion users and counting.

All these companies are customer-centric. “We start with the customer and work backwards,” Jon Fine of Amazon told us. “And we’ve enlarged our definition of customer to include authors.” The tools that they provide for authors, both at the beginnings of their careers (print and electronic publishing options) and for those who are already established (promotional tools) – and for free! – are truly impressive. Amazon Central, Search Inside the Book, Amazon Associates, Google blogs and calendars, Google Search Stories (you have to check out “Parisian Love,”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsSUqgkDwU ) to name just a few. For complete details, I urge you to check out the Sisters in Crime 2010 Summit Report at

http://www.sistersincrime.org/associations/10614/files/Summer%202010%20Publishers%20Summit%20Report.pdf

which we made available to our members in August but has just been released for wider distribution.

DEB: Will people continue to read "paper" books? I was intrigued by the "bundling" concept.

MARCIA: I think paper books are going to be around for a long time. I have an iPad and my husband has a Kindle, yet there’s nothing quite like the experience of lying in a hammock while reading a good, old-fashioned paperback book! No batteries, for one thing, and if you fall asleep and drop it – particularly in the bathtub -- the damage is minimal. But you asked me about bundling. Google is exploring bundling, an option that will allow readers to buy an e-book and a print book as a bundle. For
example, a customer may go to the website of Powell’s Books in Portland, OR and order the “bundle” for a new book. While Powell’s delivers the physical book, Google would be the delivery mechanism for the e-book portion of that order. This is in the works now.

DEB: What about royalties? At present, authors are taking a big loss on ebook royalties. Will that change?

MARCIA: I think it will have to change, as authors and their agents 'wise up' and start negotiating for higher royalty percentages when new contract time rolls around. The Authors Guild has been actively weighing in on this issue with a series of articles (Check out "Ebook Royalty Math: The House Always Wins)

http://authorsguild.org/advocacy/articles/e-book-royalty-math-the-big.html.

This is a fascinating look at the numbers; it's easy to see that authors with major houses are presently getting screwed. [Sorry, technical term.]

"Resistance, in the long run," the Author's Guild notes, "will be futile. As the e-book market continues to grow, competitive pressures will almost certainly force publishers to share e-book proceeds fairly. Authors with clout simply won’t put up with junior partner status in an increasingly important market."

Indeed, I've heard some authors with major houses question why they even need a NY publisher. If an author can put a book up on Kindle and get 70% of the profits, or on Smashwords and get close to 85% ... it’s kind of a no-brainer. An author getting less than 25% under her current contract is going to start taking a hard look at exactly what her publisher is putting on the table.

DEB: Will bookstores survive the revolution?

MARCIA: Borders is certainly floundering big time – declaring bankruptcy and closing 200 stores -- and there was a recent bloodbath, excuse me, “realignment” at Barnes and Noble where up to fifty top people were fired, including Dan Mayer who was their head mystery buyer and a good friend. The last time I was in a Barnes and Noble, I thought I’d walked into an Apple Store: everything up front, with the exception of the cash registers, was dedicated to the sale of Nooks. Nuff said. Independent bookstores are closing right and left, and yet, some independents and specialty bookshops are thriving, especially those that offer frequent author signings and/or autographed first editions by mail. Google is presently in discussions with the American Booksellers Association to enable sales of Google Editions on the ABA’s
IndieBound (formerly BookSense) platform. This would allow independent bookstores to sell e-books to their customers.

DEB: Will electronic publishing give authors more control over their work?

MARCIA: I would like to think so! There’s that embarrassing sailing boo-boo in Sing It To Her Bones that I’d like to correct, for example. Certainly with Smashwords the author has total control; she can change the text multiple times, change covers, change the price, all at no cost. And with an e-book, the reader, too, can control his reading experience: font size, spacing, being able to click from the table of contents to a particular chapter, or even view a behind-the-scenes author interview. Sobering thought. I write in my pajamas.

DEB: Marcia, you have a new book coming out, A QUIET DEATH. Will it be available as an ebook?

MARCIA: This is the question that readers keep asking! The hardback comes out in May, the trade paper about six months after that. I'm told by my publisher that all of my books will soon be available as e-books and that they are working out "details" with Ingram. So I guess the answer to your question is “stay tuned.”

I’m glad you asked about A Quiet Death, though. It was inspired by an article I read in the London Times a couple of years ago where a bus got to the end of the line and the cleaning people discovered a shopping bag full of old love letters and photographs.

I moved the plot to Maryland. Hannah is returning from a charity luncheon in Washington, DC, when her train is involved in a horrific crash. Although injured, Hannah remains at the side of her seatmate, reassuring the critically injured man until emergency workers free him from the twisted wreckage.

Nursing a broken arm, Hannah is discharged from the hospital with her ‘belongings,’ including a distinctive shopping bag she last saw in the hands of the stranger on the train. Hannah’s attempt to reunite the bag with its owner unwittingly sets in motion a chain of events that could put her own life in danger. Unintimidated, her search gradually narrows to a remote cottage on Maryland’s eastern shore, where Hannah discovers how fine a line there is between love and hate, forgiveness and betrayal, and how easy it is to cross over that line to murder.

DEB: Marcia, thanks so much for sharing. The next few years are going to be very interesting for publishing, but I think people are going to keep reading, and that there will always be a place for good books.

Speaking of which, congratulations on A Quiet Death (I've read it--it's fabulous!) and I can't wait to have a real copy--and one on my e-reader.

What about you, readers? Will you embrace both?