BIG NEWS!

See how big it is?

We have obtained our own domain and have moved the entire website there! Try it now:

http://www.quackingalone.com

Go there and bookmark/favorite the site and visit it instead of this one, as soon as you can. I will eventually take this one down, but it’s going to be up a while so as not to cause too much of a disruption. I don’t know exactly what we’re going to do with regards to the website references in Mary Anne’s books, but even if they can’t be changed hopefully we’ll catch and redirect most of you to the proper place via this blog entry.

We’ll see you over there, okay? Love, hugs, kisses, and bricks – AOFM.

Yes, I actually had a real, live, working Kindle in my very own hands. My hands shook, my palms sweated, my fingers gripped it tight, so very, very tight. My brown eyes glistened with lust that turned to love at first grasp. But then came the time of horror, of desolation, of pain. My hubby, my own ever-loving hubby looked at me and said, “You have to give it back now.”

My fingers held it tighter and I shook my head no, no, NO. And John said, “It’s not yours. You have to give it back.” He held out his hands, very carefully, like a cop trying to talk a deranged psycho holding a gun into giving it up. I could have made him fight me for it. I could have forced him to pry it out of my clinging hands. But then, the Kindle might have been hurt. I couldn’t hurt the precious little device. So I untangled my fingers, and handed it back.

Of course it wasn’t mine. Our home economic outlook is improving — hubby got an honest to God computer job (Thank you City of NMB. You’ve given the world so much more than Vanna – although she rocks too.) Still, improving is a long, long (did I say long, yet?) LONG way from improved, steady, stable or normal. We’re on the right side of the hill, climbing up instead of sliding down, but we haven’t arrived yet. So, I couldn’t have forked over money to buy a Kindle, especially not this one.

See, even if I’d bought a Kindle, it would have been a Kindle 2, which I’m sure is a device I’d love as well as its younger, bigger, badder sibling. But the one I was holding was the latest, the greatest – it was a Kindle DX. It belonged to my boss who didn’t understand it, didn’t adore it with a deep and unfettered well of pride and joy and love, yes dammit, love. It belonged to my boss who didn’t even really know what it was or what you did with it. He’d gotten two – yes two – of them as gifts from a savvy fellow lawyer who earned a nice fee when the boss settled a case. I won’t go into the deep professional appreciation I personally have for this other lawyer. I’ll just say he once saved me from myself. To his continuing annoyance, I call him Saint Walt, which amused the hell out of one Family Court judge who’d heard him called many things, but never saint anything.

The Saint understands and appreciates his Kindle. Oh he may not love it the way I would, but I’m sure he at least respects the device. It delivers his Wall Street Journal every morning. My boss, God love him, he’s been a personal savior for my family in so many ways, but technology isn’t his thing. He didn’t even set up his Kindle. My hubby, the computer guy, was working at my office while between jobs and the boss asked John to set up the Kindle and show him how to use it. That’s why the hubby had it – and why he (unwisely) allowed me to hold it, oh so very briefly.

To test the Kindle set up, John intended to order samples of a couple of my books, so that I could see how they looked on the actual device I write for and don’t own. Because the cursor’s home position is the buy button, hubby accidentally bought E-mail Enticement  and Brotherly Love.   It’s apparently pretty easy to accidentally buy something, and Amazon has a quick return system.  Since my boss isn’t what I’d call a romance novel kind of guy, John returned the fulls and then downloaded free samples. 

And I got to see my work for the Kindle, actually on the Kindle.  ‘Twas truely awesome, mind-blowing and inspiring.  Now that the Kindle for PC app has arrived, I can download e-books to my pc, but it won’t be the same.  Nothing equals seeing the work on the device.  Anyone who can buy a Kindle, should buy one.  I haven’t had an opportunity to hold a Nook in my hands yet, but thanks to SMASHWORDS, E-mail Enticement  and Brotherly Love are just now, hot off the presses, available in Barnes & Noble in e-book form.  (Stop reading.  Go buy them from B&N now!)

The Nook looks to be a grand device, but I haven’t had an up-close-and-personal chance to hold it, fondle it, and love it.  Frankly, I don’t want that opportunity.  How many times can I stand having my heart shattered?  I guess men do that love ‘em and leave ‘em thing with ease because only one of their organs is involved in the lovin’ and it’s not their hearts.  My heart was involved with the Kindles at least one of which – if not both – are residing in a shelf in my bosses’ office.  I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and hope the boss is actually using the one installed in the spiffy leather cover that Saint Walt also gave him.   

But I know that at least one of the devices is sitting on a shelf in the bosses’ office, alone and unloved.  He told me I could use it as long as I kept it in the office because he wanted it available for “general office use.” Okay, stop laughing.  No, the boss did not intend to encourage his staff to read romance novels or mysteries or whatever at work, on company time.  Just this week the attorneys got a lecture on the need to bill more hours.  Like I said, the boss doesn’t understand the Kindle and seems to feel that to be useful, a device must be business-oriented.  I’d thought I explained to him that if someone holds your Kindle, they hold your bank account.  After all, that’s what the buy button does – it, get ready,  BUYS.  So no, I’m not going to insert my debit card or God forbid, a credit card with constantly slashed lower limits and higher minimum payments.   I’m assuming that hubby set up the “office Kindle” with the bosses’ credit card.  (So maybe I should do some of that general office using, hmm?  Nanh — then I’d have to read whatever romance I bought and then bill for it and it’s hard to convince an insurance company to pay my hourly rate for reading a romance novel.  It would be a hell of a job perk though!)

I must confess that part of the bosses’ confusion over using the Kindle is my fault.  In my (misguided) effort to convince him to love the lovely little hunk of technology he held, I pointed out some of the business uses.  For example, when the boss travels, we can e-mail him word docs we’re working on for approval.  I also pointed out that it reads pdfs and he has trouble pulling up those attachments on his cell phone.  The Kindle means we could email him several hundred pages of medical records and he could review them on a plane on his way to depose an expert witness.  The Kindle even has an experimental feature of web browsing, so he could check his email on the device and do some limited browsing.  The device does have some potential business uses, but they are limited and not something those of us who do nearly all of our practicing in the office will ever use.  So, poor Kindle DX the 2nd sits and waits. 

As for me, I keep recalling the old saying about if you love something, set it free.  If it comes back to you, it’s yours.  If it doesn’t, it never was.  Well, neither of those Kindles was mine.  To try to get one, I even entered a contest sponsored by a blog (Lisa and Laura Write) that gave away a Kindle.  But like my contest entry said, I knew I wouldn’t win.  I don’t have good luck.  I don’t even have bad luck.  I have anti-luck; I actually repel good fortune and send it skittering away, to land on a less cursed soul. 

In their contest, Lisa and Laura state that the universe gave them a Kindle.  Okay, universe, I’m waiting…………

To paraphrase Hugo, the Abominable Snowman in the Bugs Bunny cartoon – if I get one, I’ll say, Just what I always wanted.  My own little Kindle.  I will name it George, and I will hug it and pet it and squeeze it…….

I guess, the Universe knows that I’d also be hitting the buy button, way too much.  (Sigh!)

But someday, my George will come.  Hope you get one too!!!

I had a plan.  I blogged about my plan last time.  I was working on a new historical romance.  Once it was done or (at least) well underway, about the beginning of next year, I was going to stop and do an edit of Griffin’s Law.  The next to be published Griffin’s is complete and has been resting pending an edit.  Griffin’s is a contemporary romance set in a law school and is sort of a crossover between E-mail Enticement and a historical.  Okay – if you insist- think of Griffin’s  as the Grey’s Anatomy of the legal profession.

Anyway, I’ve been hard at work writing my new historical.  Rather, I’ve been trying to be hard at work on the historical.  I’ve been coming home after work and opening the computer to the MS every night.  I’ve been opening it faithfully every Saturday and Sunday morning for the past few weekends.  Sometimes, I’ve even written a few lines on it.  But inevitably, after a line or two, the story leaves me and I start sneaking over to my desktop to play Snood or Solitaire.  Or flipping over to check sales on Amazon, Createspace, Scribd, Smashwords, etc.  Or getting sucked into something on Google News that I keep in customized form as my homepage for Internet Explorer.

After a while, I’d feel guilty for doing whatever it was rather than writing, and I’d go back to the MS.  And I’d manage a few more lines before something lured me out of it again.  The whole thing did get me some unusually good sleep.  I wasn’t getting pulled away from the land of dreams by lying there and plotting dialogue in my head.   As Miss Snark would have said, something in all of that should have hit me over the head with a cluestick.

But no cluestick loomed on the horizon.  Just me, and my creative conundrum.  Oh, and my plan.  Don’t forget the plan.  I had plotted my course and I swore upon the altar of all of the deep fried, refried crabs in the universe that I would stick to the plan.   So there I sat, day in and day out, just me and the flying Snoods. 

See it was my plan.  When I made it, I didn’t need no stinkin’ Muse and I didn’t consult no stinkin’ Muse.  I used logic and reason in plotting a path.  And I learned all over again why I’m not a plotter.  Some writers never sit down to start a book without a pretty complete outline of all of the major plot points.  Those writers know where they’re going before they get there. It’s hard for me to understand them or to imagine how they do it, but may God Richly Bless Them and all folks in the universe who are careful and organized. 

I sit down with an idea and my keyboard and I know it’s going well when my characters take over to tell the story.  I’m not a plotter, so why didn’t I know I wasn’t a planner either?

The distraction didn’t work and none of the Snoods hit my thick skull hard enough.  So Muse got desperate.  She recruited —–MR. BRICK.  And we all know, Mr. Brick always gets the job done.  So Friday night after work, I gave a deep sigh and opened my keyboard, never knowing that the cohorts in crime were about to strike.  

They were devious.  It started as just another bout of Muse’s distraction.  Only this time, instead of Snood, Solitaire or Google News, Mr. Brick struck my head or my mousing finger or both.  I frittered away time by reviewing some of the files in “my documents.”  And EUREKA -   Muse finally got her way.  I landed on one I’d started sometime between E-Mail Enticement and A Sixth Sense of Forever.  

It’s a contemporary romance/legal suspense that follows in the footsteps of E-mail.  Yes, Virginia, it occurs where love and law intersect.  There’s a love triangle, a family law firm and a murder.  The hero’s gonna be charged with killing his brother and there’s gonna be a trial.  A real, live murder trial.  I’m sure there’s also gonna be a Mary Anne style over-the-top high drama happy ending.  It’s just that right at the moment, I don’t have the vaguest idea what it’ll be. 

See, there’s no plot, no outline and most definitely — no plan.  There’s just me and my fingers itching to get back to the keyboard because I can’t wait to tell the rest of the story.  By the Great Green Toadfrog – I can’t wait to find out what the rest of the story might be.  All I know is that if I have fun telling it, I believe you’ll have fun reading it too. 

I seriously hope Muse lets me get back to my historical.  I loved the story, loved the characters and thought and think it’ll be a great tale.  But for now, Muse seems to want me to linger right there at the intersection of love and law.  As she usually is, Muse is probably right.  There’s a great goobeldy gob, frog kicking humongous pack of great writers doing historical romance. 

However, there aren’t quite so many writers out there with law degrees who tell tales about what happens when love and the law throw down.  I’m not sure if its Muse or Mr. Brick gifted with the marketing genius.  Maybe it’s a combination.  Just what have those two been up to, anyway?  Should I look forward to some buff little creative…..err,  Mricks?  Bruises?  Musey B’s? 

Guess I should have suspected that Muse and Mr. Brick would get together sometime.  In a few months, if my skull survives, y’all can look forward to a Myrtle Beach Murder Mystery where once again the law learns that tangling with love can only lead to one place — a happy ending.

So, I leave you with one piece of advice.  In an insane world, planning and plotting is the most insane, inane waste of time.  Instead, just follow the Muse wherever she leads.

You may not wind up where you thought you would, but you’re bound to be someplace interesting.

E-Mail was written much earlier and had been out and available on Kindle and in e-book form. But sales figures for the book didn’t show much interest, so we didn’t hurry to make it available in paperback. The lack of interest sort of echoed the reaction from literary agents when I queried the book initially, which was quite a few years ago. Of late, interest in and sales of E-mail have risen dramatically. Perhaps E-mail’s time has come. I hope so.

Unlike the other books I have published to date, E-mail is a contemporary. I have written one other contemporary in the vein of E-mail, but it hasn’t gone through the editorial wringer yet.  I’ll slot the final edit of the new one (Griffin’s Law) for early next year, when my WIP – a new historical romance- is well along the road towards completion, if not actually complete.  But, like I said above before I started rambling, E-mail is different from the other work readers have seen to date.

I like to describe the style of E-mail as being a book that fellow attorney John Grisham might have written — if only John wrote romance.  The book is the first of (hopefully) a number of novels about what happens when love intersects with the law.  E-mail is based on a statute from my home state of South Carolina that makes it a felony for an adult to send e-mail to a minor if the e-mail is intended to entice the minor sexually.  

Since the book centered around my home state, I decided to set it in my home town.  Myrtle Beach is an interesting blend of locals and folks who’ve moved from other states or countries.  It’s a tourist town that swells to big city size during the summer.  Visitors tend to see the hustle and bustle of the summer or spring break crowds and think they know and understand the town.  Actually, they don’t.  At its heart, Myrtle Beach is and will remain small town South Carolina, southern and rebellious to the core.  My boss tells a story about how a would-be politician who “wasn’t from around here”  learned this lesson the hard way.  The politician campaigned for County Council on the platform that he’d served on the Council in Ohio.  He said, elect me and I’ll show you how we ran things up North.  That politician lost by the biggest margin in our state’s history.  It’s awfully easy to overlook the fact that Myrtle Beach has traditional southern values – unless that reality smacks you where it hurts.

In E-mail Enticement that reality smacks the hero precisely where it hurts the most.   The hero is Alix Angelis, a Greek billionaire who owns an empire headed by its flagship brand of luxury hotels.  One day Alix sails his yacht into Charleston harbor.  He rents a car and explores the coast.  When he discovers Myrtle Beach, he decides to open a hotel in the tourist mecca, and he becomes friends with Chad, a local who is a restaurant mogul in his own right.  Alix begins to spend part of the year on the Grand Strand. 

When Chad opens a hotel in Vegas, Alix attends the ceremonies.  They coincide with the anniversary of Alix’s father’s death.  It’s the time of each year when he faces his failure to live up to his father’s dying wish.  Alix had promised his father that he’d follow the family tradition of marrying a lady he fell in love with at first sight.  Except Alix had never fallen in love at first sight or otherwise and didn’t much believe the emotion actually existed.  So on the occasion of the Vegas gala, he drank far too much and let the alcohol foment a rebellion.  He deliberately wed Sue, a Southern belle he didn’t love, didn’t want to love and felt sure he would never love.  On Sue’s part, she didn’t much care about the emotion as long as she had access to the nearly bottomless well of Alix’s bank balance. 

It didn’t take Alix long to realize the belle was a real bitch and that being wed to a woman you actively hated wasn’t an easy form of rebellion to face over the breakfast table.  He’d have likely ended the marriage earlier except that he got a call one day from SC’s social services department renewing a plea that Sue take in her younger half-sister.  Alix hadn’t known Sue had any family and the thought of any relation being abandoned was intolerable to his deeply rooted Greek value system.  So Alix elects to take in the half-sister, Rachel, even after Sue tells him if he takes her in, she’s his problem.  And quite a problem she turns out to be.  He waits at the squalid foster home to pick her up to drive her home.  By the time Rachel reaches the bottom of the ramshackle staircase, Alix has fallen in love with her as men of his line always did – deeply, irrevocably, and at first sight. 

But Rachel is his wife’s half-sister and she’s a teenager who is still in high school.  Alix stays in his marriage to stay near Rachel, even if he can’t let her or anyone have a clue about his feelings.  The day finally comes when Sue pushes Alix too far by taking a lover and bringing him to Alix’s bed.  The Greek can’t take that, even to be near Rachel.  The book begins with the divorce trial where Sue calls Rachel as her final witness.

The story follows the rest of the trial and the closing bombshell, which wins Alix freedom on his terms.  Alix had intended to broaden his relationship with Rachel slowly, to give her time to mature.  But part of the testimony yanks him out of logic and awakens his Greek temper, and sends him down a road that escalates things with Rachel much too quickly.  Well, too quickly according to his plan.  When she gives him an ultimatum that she’ll walk if he doesn’t consummate his alleged feelings, he realizes that the girl is much older than her years.  He follows nature’s calendar instead of man’s, but the rest of the world doesn’t see the inner maturity and certainty.  So he tries to hide their relationship and ends up losing her completely.

To get her back, Alix has to show his peers how he feels about the very young girl.  Even though it jeopardizes his business in a very real way, he does exactly that.  But shortly afterwards, Rachel vanishes, leaving only a letter full of lies.  Sue finds the e-mail exchanges between Alix and Rachel and shows them to police, who charge Alix with Rape and with Enticing A Minor By E-mail. 

Then Alix must go on trial before a jury of Myrtle Beach folk who turn out to be much more Bible belt Southern than he’d ever realized.  The trial is televised due to intense national interest in the case.  His only defense is showing the world his helpless adoration to prove that regardless of her years, Rachel enticed him first and that she consented to a relationship that was very much mutual.  The statute he was charged under provides that at 17 consent is an absolute defense.  So Rachel’s testimony could clear him, if only she hadn’t vanished.  Alix has to wonder whether any of it had been real, or had it all been an elaborate con?   

The story follows the trial from opening to closing arguments and lets readers in on a real surprise near the end.  It closes in high drama, in typical over-the-top “Mary Anne” style.  Also typically of my style, by the end, the power has changed hands. 

If you enjoy legal suspense books or movies you should give E-mail Enticement a read to see how passionate the law can be when it intersects with love.

A while back, I started blogging about my dissatisfaction with Mobipocket.  As you may know, Mobi is the ebookbase distributor that used to be THE place for indie publishers to sell ebooks.  The little French company was going gangbusters until 2005 arrived and the American giant, Amazon, gobbled up little Mobi.  Many thought that the purchase meant that Amazon’s already immense assets and web presence would advance the brand, provide a killer venue to the indie publishers, and make the Mobi format the industry standard for ebooks.  But, of course, it didn’t work out that way.

It was a strategic takeover for the Giant which was apparently already eyeballing plans for an ebook distribution service of its own.  The purchase meant that Amazon could cannibalize the company by siphoning off pieces and parts of the Mobi technology. I’m no gadget guru (my hubby wears that hat), but I suspect that computer folk would be able to examine the Kindle app’s code and see the fingerprints of its Mobi forerunner.  Once the Giant licked all the red off the Mobi sucker, it could toss the sucker in the garbage. 

And that’s what its done.  Except, Amazon doesn’t want to pay for the sucker – so it hasn’t.  How could the company get all the goodie out and not pay the bill?  By not officially killing Mobi.  See, Mobi never paid royalties until they added up to $150.00 per indie publisher.  Right now, Amazon owes hundreds and hundreds, likely thousands and thousands, of little indie publishers (like yours truly) royalties.  In my case, they owe over $100.00.  If Amazon did the honest thing and killed off the Mobi ebookbase app, it would have to pay for the funeral.  So it hasn’t officially killed the company – it’s just neutered it.  Amazon has decreed that no new Mobi publisher accounts can be established.  Won’t those pesky writers eventually just give up and go away after they realize that they aren’t selling anything at Mobi anymore? 

The death of Mobi became crystal clear this week when Amazon announced partnerships with Microsoft and Apple.  Next month, PC and Mac users will be able to download free Kindle apps.  This means that all of those users will be able to buy Kindle books for their PCs and Macs.  This announcement follows on the heels of Amazon beginning to market the Kindle in countries outside the US.  So if it wasn’t clear earlier, now the whole world knows that Mobi will be no more.  And if that’s the case, Amazon owes Mobi publishers a duty of good faith.  What does good faith mean?  It means it should officially close the ebookbase app AND PAY OUT THE ROYALTIES IT OWES. 

If Amazon wants to be the voice of indie publishers – and it sure looks like that’s what it wants – then it also has to fix its royalty structure.  How broken is the Amazon royalty arrangement?  Lets say you want to sell your house.  Will you list it with a realtor who promises that you get to keep 35% of the profits?  35%?  That means that you, who own and have maintained the house, keep less of the money than the realtor who sells it.  You own the house and you sell it, so you make 35% of the money and the realtor makes 65%.  Would all the sellers run to sign up for that arrangement?  Not likely, because if you’re selling your house, you’ll think most of the profit should be yours.  Yes, the realtor is performing a service and yes the realtor should be paid.  But the realtor doesn’t get more for your house than you do.  Well, it doesn’t unless the realtor is Amazon.

Who’ll make Amazon be fair with the writers?  After all, if you want the market, you’ll pay whatever price Amazon sets.  Who else on earth could offer indie writers access to so many buyers? 

Well, sports fans, lets re-wind this week’s amazing adventures and examine events.  Who could challenge Amazon?  GOOGLE is one contender.  That company has announced a forray into the ebook market beginning early next year.  But, it appears from early announcements that while Google will sell ebooks direct from its store, that it will also allow buyers to purchase through its store via links to Amazon, Barnes and Noble and the like.  If that is the case, given Amazon’s already unfair royalty structure, it looks like sellers would make almost nothing for ebooks sold via Google books.  So Google has the online cred, but it doesn’t look like the real deal challenger to the Giant.  It looks more like Google wants to gather around the virtual campfire with Amazon and sing Kumbaya.  

Another potential rival is Barnes and Noble.  The company’s new Nook and its partnership with Smashwords gives it some serious ammunition.  At this point, the Smashwords partnership is mostly hypothetical, as (to my knowledge) none of the Smashwords books have yet appeared for sale on B&N or Fictionwise.  I know mine haven’t appeared on either site yet.  While B&N may build an online presence that will rival Amazon’s someday, its strength in the past has been through actual bookstores where customers walked in to buy a print and paper book.  B&N’s saavy strategy look to make it a future heavyweight, but it needs some growing time before it could best the Giant.   

So is there out there in the universe any company that could and likely would challenge Amazon in a real, Giant-killer fashion? WAL MART COULD.  And after this week, it looks a lot like Wal Mart will do what it often does.  Wal Mart will don the white hat and ride into the ring and offer indie ebook publishers a fair deal.  Why not write the ads that way?  I would if I were writing the copy for Wal Mart.  This week’s hardcover price wars look like the first shot in a future ebook war.  I’m only surprised that it has taken Wal Mart so long to join the battle.  I e-mailed the company ages ago, well before the Kindle, to ask the company to consider an online ebookstore.  Of course, I was a little dog, yapping in the wind.  But now it looks like the storm has finally gathered. 

I hope Wal Mart enters the e-book fray because if it does, it’ll do it the Wal Mart Way.  I expect the company would demand huge price concessions from sellers, but it might enter the market with the first one-price e-book store.  Why not have Wal Mart partner with Smashwords and use the price model recently suggested by Smashwords founder, Mark Coker’s Huffington Post blog?  Mark suggested selling e-books for $4.00 each.  I don’t think that price would ever work in an Amazon world.  Under the Amazon structure, a $4.00 price tag would net the author $1.40 per book and the company $3.60.  Ahmmm, I don’t think so……..

I’d love to see Wal Mart enter the e-book war with a 50/50 deal with the writers.  Let the big dog come in as a partner to the little guy.  Wal Mart founder Sam Walton would cheer from the lofty perch in Heaven where he surely resides.  All e-books selling for $4.00 would be a good deal for the buyers and the sellers if the author and Wal Mart each made $2.00 per book.  Because at a $4.00 price with Wal Mart’s web presence, the store that Sam built could slay the competition.  Wal Mart could even partner with Lightning Source to set up that company’s machines in its stores and give buyers in the store access to all e-books from the Wal Mart site.  That way in store buyers could pick up a $4.00 print and paper version of all the e-books.  In my head, I hear both the cha-ching of more money trucks driving up to Wal Mart, the coffers of indie writers doing a hell of a lot better, and the cries of the Royals in the Publishing Castle growing louder.

For now, it still looks like an Amazon World, but the companies’ growing pains are showing.  Just yesterday, the Kindle store had some sort of gigantic snafu that erased all sales of Kindle authors.  The problem appears to have gotten fixed, but on the Kindle website, the authors’ comments clearly showed that they didn’t trust Amazon.  One author published a post that included the phrase in all caps – NO TRUST.  Why no trust?  Because the company doesn’t treat its authors as partners.  It treats the authors as peons.  Add to that the factor that amongst the Kindle authors are lots of folks who’ve already been burned by Amazon’s unethical Mobi methods.  If Amazon won’t pay the Mobi royalties, and it’s keeping more money than writers make for their Kindle books, who knows what the Giant is up to with the Kindle accounting?  

I hope that Amazon fixes its problems.  Yes, that would mean the ebook world would remain an Amazon kind of place to be, but that wouldn’t be so bad if Amazon would clean up its act.  The company must come to realize that it will reap what it sows.  To date, it’s sewn bad faith and inequality.  That breeds mistrust and disloyalty.  If Amazon becomes a partner instead of a dictator, it would have a shot at defeating all contenders because it would have the advantage of time and the devotion of its writers and customers.

If Amazon doesn’t clean up its act, then I think it will learn a business lesson the hard way — the Wal Mart Way.

I finally got the paperback cover completed for E-Mail Enticement, the text formatted, and the whole thing uploaded to CreateSpace. The e-store page for it is up, but the book itself won’t be available until we approve the proof copy currently on its way to the humble Graham abode.

Also, be on the lookout for it to appear on Amazon’s site. I will, as usual, update the links on Quacking Alone when Amazon does all of its voodoo to get the book up there.

In the meantime, please enjoy an image of the full paperback cover here (also accessible via the sidebar and the complete list of books page). And buy it on your Kindle or other favorite e-book reader if you don’t need a 5″ x 8″ projectile with which to smack a beloved cranium.

Until next time, chitterlings, be good and if you see me approaching, DUCK!!

I think historical romance is any romance that takes place in a previous era.  In other words, if it’s not contemporary, then it’s historical.  To me, the period of a piece sets the mood.  Beyond that, I think details are pretty much fair game.  Okay, a Regency novel where the heroine e-mails a friend for advice might be (are you sitting down?) a little over the top even for me.  But precise details like whether the railroads ran a specific route, intricate details about heirs to a particular title,  the names of places and people -including dukes, earls and the like – can, and often should be created entirely from the mind of the author.   I don’t care whether women were wearing a particular style during the years of my story - in fact, I don’t care that much exactly what anyone was wearing.  If I describe a gown in detail, it’s because those details will play an important part of the scene.  Otherwise, I don’t sweat the small stuff.

I read romance – be it historical, contemporary, suspense or paranormal – for the love story.  I write romance to tell a love story.  Let’s consider that for a second; let’s let it percolate in our disturbed little brains.  We read and write romances because of the love story.  If moving a historical event serves the story, then I’m all for that too.  If a reader wants to immerse herself in accurate details of history or science, then she should read non-fiction. If she wants to immerse herself in a romance well, she should read … romance. 

Authors have creative license to build any world they choose and have the characters in their world act any way they choose.  It may be the planet Web-A-Lot populated by the spider people or it may be the planet Earth populated by dukes, earls, commoners and Scottish clans I put there, but either way, it’s my world.  Creating a story is creating a world.  Paranormal and Sci-Fi writers aren’t the only folks who get the license to build it their way. 

Often I’ll choose a period of history, like the Regency, and set my story there because I know what pre-conceptions a reader will bring to the story.  In that familiar era, so many know exactly where the bar is located.  I can have my hero and heroine acknowledge the bar as they leap it on their way over the top.  It can be something as small as “what three dance rule” or something as large as public liberties allowed on the dance floor to prove a public commitment a la A Faerie Fated Forever.  It works for the author’s world if it works for their story.

My comment bearing my theory got trashed on RTB, but what I found interesting was one particular commenter.  She originally posted a comment to the effect that if authors don’t take historical details seriously, how will the romance genre ever be taken seriously.  In reviewing the comments for this blog (I’d saved the link) it appears that one got re-written.  It now reads something like, writing historical details accurately will give romance “better press.”  Maybe that’s my problem – I won’t sell my creative freedom in exchange for acceptance by anyone. 

As has been noted many times previously in this blog, I write romance over the top.  In my stories, when men fall in love they won’t act like men of whatever era generally did when they fell in love.  They won’t act like men of this era generally do when they fall in love.  The heroes in my stories surely won’t behave in a manner that a man anywhere would be likely to empathize with or endorse.  The bigger, badder, better than life heroes in my stories will fall madly in love, will do whatever it takes to get the heroine, will sacrifice anything to keep her and will generally behave the way women would like men in love to act. 

Some writers craft historical romance with careful and intricate attention to every detail of life in that era.  Good for them, and I mean it.  If they choose not to build a world and create a story that could exist within the boundaries of a specific time period, then I respect them for holding true to their vision.  If I choose to build a world by re-building, revising or relocating people, places or things of a particular era, then good for me too.  I think it’s all about what you decide to pay attention to in your tale.

Lavish, splendiforous descriptions of the setting for a particular ball or what people at that ball are wearing don’t serve my stories and don’t focus the reader’s attention where I want it.  I’ll save my flights of splendiforousity for describing feelings, emotions and interaction of the hero and heroine on a close and personal level.  I don’t consider historical details any more of an impediment than I do language.  If there’s not a word that says exactly what I want, then I’ll make one up – splendiforousity, for example. 

My approach would not suit anyone who yearns to be taken seriously.  It would not suit anyone worried about “better press.”  Life is serious.  Reality today is damned depressing.  My books are all about escaping reality, whether it’s reality of today, yesterday, or a hundred years ago.  My stories will start you down familiar paths and then will slowly, a step at a time, re-paint the landscape until the same place doesn’t look the same at all.  And maybe it isn’t.  At the end of my stories, there will be a HEA that takes you over the top in an excessive, dramatic, reality-blowing way. 

When I write a romance, the last thing I want is for you to take it seriously.  Life is serious; the news is serious; stretching a budget to find money for food or the light bill is serious.  Dear Lord above, I don’t want my romance to be serious.  I want my stories to help readers escape from all the reality surrounding them.

So here’s my proposal — let’s NOT take it so seriously.

Of course, it also turns my thoughts to Faerie which is my “rest of the story” spin on the famous legend of the Clan McLeod of the Isle of Skye in Scotland.  After Ian’s handfast marriage to a faerie princess ended after a year and a day, per his agreement with her da, the Faerie King, the princess returned to the land of faerie.  Her braw, strong hubby watched her go, holding their infant son, without making a single protest.  Later, the babe cried and the princess returned to comfort him, leaving him wrapped in a faerie flag that could be used to protect the Clan.  Interesting story, but what laird worth his highland blood would let a beloved go without fighting to keep her?  And after she left, we have a fine laird with a castle and no lady wife.  When he marries, how will the princess feel?  Surely, the many tears she’d shed would anger her powerful father into appearing at the wedding reception and pronouncing a curse. 

Check out the trailer for A Faerie Fated Forever, and you’ll get a glimpse of that handfast marriage that ended in a curse that the current laird must meet or risk living his father’s tormented, unfulfilled life.  You’ll also get a glimpse of the gorgeous terrain of the highlands and hints of the rest of the plot.  So watch the trailer and buy the book or the e-book. 

After watching markets recently, I’m betting you’d buy the e-book. 

My personal experience has been that e-books are moving and paperbacks are not.  I distribute e-books via Smashwords and Lightning Source (LS), and they seem to do well via all the e-tailers the sites feed.  I distribute paperbacks through Amazon’s service, CreateSpace (CS) and they’re not moving at all.  I know, Amazon has its limitations and it doesn’t reach most of the market.  And yes, I intend to distribute through LS which covers much more territory, but to do that I have to buy a block of ISBNs and they cost around $250.00.  And then I have to pay a fee of around $75.00 per title to get them listed with LS.  In this economy given the current circumstances of my household where survival is a luxury that might depend on things like a Christmas bonus and a big tax refund, the LS stuff is going to have to wait.

But the paperbacks aren’t moving at all.  I even reduced the price to $9.99 per, bargain basement level for CS/Amazon books, and nada.  Yet the e-books still move nicely so the work is selling – thank y’all very much.  With those thoughts boogling through my brain, I ran across a story on Reuters headlined “Book Trade Seeks A Deal With Google.”  Despite the headline, much of the story discussed next week’s Frankfurt Book Fair and the changing publishing landscape.

The Reuter’s Story notes that this year’s book fair is being held amidst the “long-feared transformation of the industry for which few are well-prepared.”   Why isn’t the industry better prepared?  As the story notes, the publishing industry watched the music and news industries go through the digital revolution earlier.  If the big publishers didn’t see the handwriting on the wall, it’s because they weren’t looking.  And those companies owed it to their shareholders to be watching and changing as the curve progressed.  They didn’t, so now they must play catch-up. 

The article notes that technology research firm Forrester estimates that by the end of 2010 – next year – 10 million e-readers will be in the hands of buyers looking to fill them with digital books.  That total DOESN”T include other media that carry e-books like PCs and Cell phones.  According to a number of stories, Nintendo DS is even introducing e-books for their popular device.  The dawn of the e-book era is at hand.

The industry that hasn’t been prepared will have to scramble to make changes.  All of the changes will have to focus around the core of the revolution – IT PUTS THE POWER IN THE HANDS OF THE BUYER.  Given that power shift and that e-books can and should cost less than printed volumes, the Royals in the Castle will have to change the way they do business if they want to survive.  It means that publishers will have to tighten their belts and streamline, just like all the Commoners have been doing for a while now.

Publishers will have to eliminate using agents as gatekeepers and throw open the castle drawbridge.  The Royals will have to take direct submissions from the people who built the Castle (the writers).  Literary Agents will survive by courting the writers and selling their services, which only makes sense.  Real Estate Agents don’t sit back in their offices and reject most of the sellers who want to list their homes for sale because the houses aren’t big enough, expensive enough, aren’t built of the right material or just aren’t houses that appeal to the Realtor.  And writers will have to learn that advances will be limited or perhaps nonexistent.  That means, a writer won’t make a living on his/her craft for a few books down the road (if ever), unless a movie deal comes along (less likely than being struck by lightning, by the way).   But writers will get paid to write, even if they have to keep their day jobs. If everyone streamlines, the industry can not only survive — it can prosper.

The new devices and formats court new readers.  Never has there been a better opportunity for publishers to broaden their market.  The companies that survive and prosper will be those who learn the Wal Mart lessons – (1) give the people what they want;  (2) don’t screen the offerings according to what editors or the literary establishment want to push;  (3) sign writers in much larger numbers because the power and the money accompany the volume; (4) charge less per book but put out a lot more books with a lot less cost by selling all of them as e-books, a fraction as paperbacks and a select few heavy hitters as hardcover. 

Does anyone buy paperbacks anymore?  Less and less, I think and the number is dwindling everyday.  My tears in my always refilled coffee cup for my lack of CreateSpace/Amazon paperback sales aside, the dwindling paperback market is a GOOD THING.  It signals that change is not just coming, it has arrived.

This change puts the power back in the hands of the people – which is where it always belonged.

It seems the newest thing in publishing is the book trailer – essentially a short video to whet your appetite for a book. It’s much like a movie trailer, except more of a pain in the gluteus maximus because you don’t have any video footage to begin with and you do them for authors who just looooove words, words, and more words.

At any rate, with much fury, frustration, and cursing with Windows Movie Maker, I have finally completed Quacking Alone’s very first book trailer.

Behold, A Faerie Fated Forever, the book trailer:

As readers, I think we all have some things that turn us off from the get go.  I know there are plot descriptions I can read and almost every time I’ll slide the book back on the (real or virtual) shelf.  I’ve created taboos because if I buy a book with one of these plots, I’ll almost always have buyer’s remorse.  Do I hate the book because it’s bad? Maybe, my preconceived ideas created hurdles so high that no writer could have written a story about these plotlines that I’d have enjoyed.

Here are some of the plots that turn me – the buyer - off:

1.   It’s About The Marriage:

I’ll admit it.  I like reading about the courtship.  I want to know who they were before they met.  I need to see how that first contact goes.   Is the connection immediate?  The thrill of the hunt or the chase and the obstacles fate throws in the path on the way to the altar matter to me.  By all that’s happy and holy – I have to be there for the first kiss. 

I’ll never buy a romance where the characters are married at the start of the story.  I’ll have missed too much to care about them or connect with them.  I respect writers who make it clear on the cover copy that this is a book about the already married.  I know to give this one a pass but I might buy the writer’s next book. 

My pet peeve is buying a book that reads like it’s about the courtship but before I get a quarter of the way or half way through, they’re marching up the altar.  The rest of the story is about how unhappy one or both is during the early part of the marriage and the HEA the author is really headed for is the couple settling into marital bliss.  If I bought that one, I did it because I was misled by the cover copy.  It makes me feel cheated.  That writer tricked me into buying the book and it’s something I’ll remember.  I won’t buy one of her books again.

Thrill me with a long and lusty hunt and don’t bag the game too early.

2.  It’s About History or Politics:

When I read a romance novel I want it to be about — get ready; are you sitting down?  THE ROMANCE. 

Sometimes a cover will catch my fancy and I’ll pick up a book about so and so who is a lady in waiting to Queen Whoever in the Court of Ain’t It Grand.  A damned good cover artist designed that one but he or she can’t make up for the writer’s foibles.  I’ll put it down so fast I create a draft that flutters nearby book covers or creates a lag in cyberspace.

I get more than enough politics by watching the news and I studied history in grammar school, junior high, high school and college.  I often get history lessons on the news or on the occasional documentary.  I don’t want political intrigue cluttering my books and I don’t want details from history distracting me from the story. 

The interaction between the characters should create the complications.  If a writer resorts to politics or history to create the conflict, it removes me from the characters.  If I don’t care about the characters, I won’t care about the story.

Don’t tell me a story about how he’d marry her if only King Crabass hadn’t forbade the union.  I’ll just wish for a stronger hero and a heroine who makes smarter choices. 

3.  It’s About The Great Switcheroo:

This lesson I learned from hard-knock experience.  Like The Who sings, I won’t get fooled again. 

I don’t just hate – I despise authors who dangle a fake lure and make it nice and shiny.  Inevitably, I reach for the shiny lure — only to have it jerked away when the fisherman reaches for the acceptable lure he knew he’d use all along.   Come on, you know these stories.  They’re the pits.

The cover copy will generally describe a hero who’s betrothed to or has courted nice little Susie Sunshine for years.  Then along comes Maggie Midnight.  Susie’s nice and acceptable and generally described as being as interesting as toast.  Maggie is mysterious, alluring and doesn’t have the right family background.  Should the hero toss Susie to the curb and give in to his gut wrenching, page turning lust for Maggie? 

Maybe I’m just twisted and perverted (Stop it right now.  I see y’all out there mentally erasing that maybe.  It’s my blog and I’m allowed my crutches, thank you very much.)  Anyway, MAYBE I’m just a depraved human being, but my answer to the hero’s question is ……hell, yes.  Kick Sunshine to the curb and bring on Midnight.  He’ll  make the same choice, won’t he?  The back cover copy sure made it sound like he would.

But he doesn’t.  After panting after Maggie for enough pages to get the readers on the edge of their seats, the hero realizes that he needs more sunshine in his life.  The interesting, mysterious lady is only good for grubbing.  He wants the bland with his breakfast every morning.

I’ve learned to be suspicious of this one no matter how many tricks the cover designer pulls out of his paint box.  If the cover copy gives a hint of a plot that even sounds like this, I’ll break my cardinal rule and flip to the back of the book to see who Mr. Magic ends up with.  If the last page has him billing and cooing with Susie, I’ll shelve the book every single time.

This plot device breaks the rules of trust between a writer and reader.  Build the interest and then cut the cord if you like – but you’ll lose the sale every time, no exceptions.

Writers are free to write as they choose but readers are free to buy what they choose.  And the power of the debit card wins, hands down.  I do my best to remember that cardinal rule as a writer.  Of course, my dream book may be your nightmare and vice versa.

Different strokes stoke different folks.