Coffee Shop Writing

There's been some discussion amongst the hard-scribbling coterie of Jungle Red on the merits of library writing. It certainly has it's appeal--quiet (or at least relative quiet, depending on your library of choice), the lack of household distractions (for those of us who don't have offices outside the home), and the set structure (one of the things we've been working at in our Writer's Challenge--a certain block of time set aside to do nothing but WRITE.)

All pluses, certainly. But I have to admit there is one big drawback for me. My local library doesn't have TEA. We all have our little addictions, our writing rituals, don't we? And mine is tea. I can make a pot at breakfast in the morning, nurse a first cup and then a second until lunch, then make another cup (or pot) in the late afternoon for that blessed second wind.

Now it doesn't matter how tepid and scummy that cup of tea gets, as long as it's next to my keyboard and can be sipped occasionally. Silly? Yes. But it works. And I can't quite get my head around working TEA-LESS.

This started me thinking about our other writing rituals--whether we write with distraction or without, and just how exactly our brains are wired. I have a friend who writes with old movies playing on the DVD player. Another who writes with choral music for background. Others who write in the midst of household chaos.

I find I can't write to music, except very, very occasionally, Bach, or choral chant. I absolutely CANNOT write with the TV on. But--I am a coffee-shop-writer. I have my favorites, my local Panera or sometimes Starbucks. There is that structure. You give yourself two or three or four hours to do nothing but write. No laundry, no phone calls, no toilets to be cleaned or dinner to be prepped. And there is something about that level of ambient noise and the bustle of people coming and going and often other people working, that somehow stimulates the writing center of my brain.

It's an odd contradiction, and I wonder if there's some sort of logical scientific explanation for it. Something to look into, and in the meantime I'll keep debating over the library . . . do you think I could sneak in a thermos of TEA in my laptop bag?

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?

Rhys Bowen's Bless the Bride

What an exciting day for Jungle Red! Our very own elegant and talented Rhys Bowen has a new book in her fabulous Molly Murphy series, Bless the Bride, out as of yesterday.

And it's a special treat for me, as I've been a fan of all of Rhys's work since the very first Evan Evans book, but I feel a special affinity for the Mollys.

Bless the Bride is the tenth book in the Molly Murphy series, and in it Molly, having resisted giving up her independence, is finally getting married. She has also promised to give up her career. But she is offered one last lucrative case, which she can't
turn down. It seems easy enough--to locate a missing valuable object for a rich Chinese merchant. Things get complicated when the object turns out to be a young woman, bought and shipped from China. Molly must decide whether she can return the woman to the clutches of a cruel despot.

When he is found murdered the missing bride becomes the suspect. Molly is harboring a wanted woman and she may have single-handedly rekindled the tong wars.

DEB: Molly is a young Irish immigrant in turn-of-the-century New York, but the issues she must deal with resonate very strongly with today's women. The series seems to revolve more and more around the theme of
women's rights. Is this deliberate?

RHYS: Molly has always had a strong sense of justice so naturally she'd be drawn to cases where she felt she could right a wrong. In For the Love of Mike she sees abuses in the garment industry and gets involved in the workers' struggle. She briefly joins the Republican Brotherhood's struggle in Ireland, so it's not just women's rights that have motivated her.

But recently I find my themes do reflect the powerlessness of women at the time--the Gilded Cage of a married woman, the suffrigists being thrown into jail for daring to march. And this story was a great opportunity, given that Molly was about to marry--on her terms, her choice of husband, which I knew was not the case for many women in New York at that time.

DEB: I'm fascinated by how evocatively you portray Molly's New York. How did you do research on New York's Chinatown? And what fascinating things did you uncover?

RHYS: Of course I go to New York often and I wander Molly's streets, so that is a good starting point. I have a visual concept of Chinatown (that has now spread out to include Canal and surrounding streets... with their enticing basements where you can buy knock-off designer stuff.)

I have many photos of the period. So those are starting points. Also I have lived for 40 years next to the biggest Chinatown outside of Asia. I've spent many happy hours wandering around there. (And eating there. Great fan of dim sum, even the deep fried hen's feet.) I am used to shops with rows of ducks hanging by their necks, of fish swimming in tanks, men reading Chinese newspapers, stalls of long beans and hairy melons.

I thought I knew quite a lot about the history of the Chinese in America, but as I started to read I was horrified. We speak righteously about human rights abuses in other countries. Well--one hundred years ago our government tried to expel the Chinese. Authorities turned a blind eye when Chinese were rounded up into their huts and burned alive. A law was passed that no Chinese could become a US citizen even if born here. And no Chinese was allowed to import his family. They essentially had no rights at all.

My biggest surprise--in the 1900 census there were 3000 Chinese men living in New York's Chinatown and 30 women. Of course there could have been small-foot wives hidden away, but essentially it was a society of bachelors, working day and night and hoping to make enough money to go home. They could never fit in, because of the braid they wore, but they could never cut off the braid if they wanted to go home, because no braid meant disrespect to the emperor and instant beheading. So these poor men lived in limbo.

My other interesting fact--some Chinese men married Irish girls, who preferred a hard-working sober man to an Irish lout. But they were shunned by both societies.

I found some great first-person accounts of life in Chinatown at that time, including a map of each business on Mott Street. So I've been able to be very authentic in my details.

DEB:Will Molly really give up her career? Is this the end?

RHYS: Can you really see Molly sitting at home and giving tea parties? She may give up her business but she's not going to stop sleuthing. In fact I'm already halfway through the next book, tentatively called Hush Now, Don't you Cry.

DEB: I'm so glad to hear there's another book in the works! And I can't wait to read Bless the Bride.

You can have a peek at the first chapter (I did) on Rhys's website, http://www.rhysbowen.com/, and you can see her tour and signing schedule at http://www.rhysbowen.com/road.html, which includes Left Coast Crime, Malice Domestic, and the Romantic Times Convention.

Rhys is one of my two favorite co-panelists--Rhys, Louise Penny, and I have had a great time appearing at two Bouchercons as The Three Goddesses. I can guarantee that both Rhys and her books never fail to entertain and delight!