Covers can make you crazy.

Book covers are an interesting part of the publishing business, especially for authors. Readers love them. They sell books by helping the reader pick it up and look through it. One of the most interesting covers out there at the moment is the latest Laurell K. Hamilton book, with the torso wrapped in a leather corset. That's all you see, but it's so highly suggestive of the contents that it makes you want to read the book just on the cover alone.

So it would be fair to say that covers can be important, right?

It might surprise you to know that authors have no say in their covers. Good, bad, or downright awful, the author must simply clamp her jaw together. If she's smart, she'll smile widely and exclaim "How lovely!"

Sometimes you just can't manage that, though. One of the most famous really bad covers in recent history is the one with the heroine with three arms -- Christina Dodd's book, Castles in the Air. Christina didn't stay silent about that one. Go here for her cover horror story, and to see a bigger version of the cover.

All About Romance reviews covers, too, and have a Worst Cover award every year. Scrolling through these is like watching an accident happen. You can't look away despite your horror and despair.

Contractually, authors have no input into their covers. All decisions are left with the marketing department in consultation with the editor. You do get to fill in a cover questionnaire, and depending on how thorough the questionnaire is, how detailed you make your answers, and if the art department reads it, you stand a good chance of the cover coming out looking like it has something to do with the story inside.

I'm exaggerating a bit to make my point. Although it sounds like an odd process, the building of covers for novels works very well most of the time. Marketing departments do actually know what they're doing.

Sometimes an author can very tactfully point out a mistake, after the cover is done ("he's supposed to have blond hair, not black".) This happened with one of my covers; The Case of the Reluctant Agent. If the reader had read the first book of the pair, Chronicles of the Lost Years, the cover on Case of the Reluctant Agent gave away whodunit. That's not something you want in a mystery, so I did try politely to point this out. The marketing department told me that they had decided to leave the cover as is. So Agent went out into the world with its secret revealed on the cover, and I held my breath and hoped that readers wouldn't notice. So far I haven't had any grumpy fan mail about it.

However, occasionally, if you have a very good relationship with your editor and the publisher in general, an author can have more than minimal approval of the cover. The cover for Lucifer's Lover came about this way.

My son needed to design a commercial graphic for a graphic arts course he was completing, and he offered to design a cover for me, for Lucifer's Lover, which had just been sold to Archebooks. I gave him the synopsis, he asked me a few questions about what I had envisioned for a cover, and went away. The cover he came up with was simple, delightful and perfect for the book. It said it all, and I was over the moon about it. I was so thrilled, in fact, that I sent a copy to my editor, and very politely asked what they thought about it.

They thought it was fabulous, too, and it was shipped off to the art department, pronto. Then came the bad news; the image my son had used had limited copyright, and couldn't be used for commercial purposes. But the art department liked the cover so much, that they built a similar cover, using commercial images.

Here's the cover that was published:

And here's my son's version:

The best of both worlds

I just love my local book superstore. All those thousands of titles to drool over, and a coffee store, too! But lately, it’s become a mildly frustrating experience.

On most Saturday nights, Mark and I head down to the book store to have a coffee and watch the world go by. We’re habitual people-watchers, for a number of reasons including the collection of potential novel characters I scribble down once the more interesting people are out of sight.

But after the coffee is done, we wander the shelves of books, and soak in all the titles. For this stage we actually split up and go our separate ways. I am not all that keen on finding out which professional wrestler has released his autobiography this week, and Mark has just as much interest in the how-to-write section (which is far too small for my taste!).

Once I’ve done circling through the non-fiction shelves, I head for the really big fiction section. And it’s here that I always start to laugh at myself. I’ll see at least a dozen titles I want to buy…but I won’t buy them, because honestly, truthfully, I-swear-to-whatever-deity-is-yours, I’d much rather read them electronically.

It’s like all the books I bought back from the RT Convention in Houston, earlier this month. I can see the pile from here, if I lean over the top of my laptop a little…. There’s easily 40 books there. (The irony is, I intended to avoid collecting free books this year, to economise on suitcase space, so you can imagine what previous years were like.) All those books, and guess what I’m reading? Yeah, the novels I have on my Palm Pilot.

I can’t explain how this preference for electronic developed, because (also honestly, truthfully, etc) I thought I preferred to read actual books.

I do love looking at them. Whenever I see decorating magazine photos of a room with a case full of books, I stop for a second glance. Rooms with books in them look lived-in, welcoming and warm. I always check out the titles of books on the shelves of anyone’s home that I visit.

I love turning a book over and reading the blurb, admiring the cover, even dipping into the prologue or first page a little. I really enjoy running my eye over a long shelf of books to see if anything interesting jumps out at me. And I also get a great kick in finding a friend’s books on the shelf of the bookstore, looking over my shoulder, and quickly re-arranging the shelf so my friend’s titles are face-out (shh!! – it’s one of the privileges of having written for so long, that most of your friends are writers, too).

But these days when I’m drooling over the books on Saturday nights, I just can’t make myself buy them. There’s a resistance, a foot-dragging, that makes me put the book back on the shelf, get out my Palm Pilot instead, and scribble down the title and author info, so that I can find the electronic version on-line, later.

In an earlier blog entry, (Pros & Cons of Pixels and Paper) I listed all the advantages of reading electronically. That list was dashed off in about five minutes. The advantages of reading paper books took much longer.

Somewhere, somehow, I learned to love reading electronically. Now, I prefer it to the point where I get quite annoyed when I find that a title I want to read isn’t available electronically.

There’s another minor frustration to shopping in the big store, too: I can’t find out what everyone else thinks about the book. And it’s at this point that I start laughing at myself. I’ve got used to shopping for books on-line, with their reader reviews and ratings. If I find a title that intrigues me, I’ll surf the net to find other reviews and maybe visit the author’s website and check them out. Another great advantage to on-line shopping is being able to find out which book comes first in a series, or simply, which title was first published.

Standing there in the big store, it’s sometime difficult to figure out which title comes first, and I certainly don’t have a handful of other readers’ feedback to help me decide if this book is a wall-thumper or not.

Is there any advantage to shopping in the bookstore? Yep. Instant gratification. You can buy it and be reading inside five minutes. (Although, this also applies to electronic titles you buy on-line.) Or even dip into the middle or the end of the book to see if the early promise holds up.

And it’s possible to buy a lemony-sucky dud on-line, when two minutes of examining the real book in a store would have made you put it back on the shelf. I confess that has happened to me. Once. And I’ve bought dozens (many dozens) of books on-line. So I’m not about to let that scare me away.

I do enjoy strolling through a bookstore. And it’s a great way to browse and take in a dozen different authors at once, find new authors, and delight in the covers. So I’m not about to stop any time soon. I guess I’m just spoiled by the best of both worlds.

Another Don't-Miss Party...And I Have To Miss It!

I’ve learned in the last week that I’m not going to be able to make it to ThrillerFest this year. This is a double blow for me.

1) ThrillerFest is in New York City. I love New York, since 2004 when I was there for a week and it persisted in not living up to a single cliché, and handed out at least one major surprise a day.

2) ThrillerFest itself will be a smorgasbord of my favourite authors, and their books. These are the people I’ve been reading for decades, and some of the few authors whose wires are still invisible to me.
As a writer myself, I read many books that I can predict the ending from the first chapter and I can see all the author’s mechanics working in the background to provide the story. It’s not their fault. I’ve just been reading and writing for so long that I can spot the wires at 100 paces. Unfortunately, I can no longer enjoy that author’s work.

There are a double handful of writers whose stories are still a pleasure for me. Steven King is a perfect example. I can still get lost in his story world, and never stumble over his word use, and never, ever, spot clanky mechanics or can predict what’s coming next. (And I solved Saw in twenty minutes!)

There are a lot of these authors at ThrillerFest, and even though I would have been registered as an author, don’t let that fool you. I was going as a reader, to drool and chat, get autographs and, well, be thrilled.

The Don't-Miss Party of the Year

One of the more interesting aspects of attending any Romantic Times Convention is watching how 1) the hotel adapts to the three ring circus it is hosting, and 2) how the general populace in the hotel reacts to said three-ring circus.

The Regency Hyatt in Houston did pretty well. Mark and I got into the hotel on Monday, which is early by convention standards. It gave us a chance to go shopping. We visited Memorial City mall, which had dozens of shops you just don't get in Canada, so I went mad.

Coming in early also gave us a chance to size up convention HQ -- the bar -- and to get to know some of the bar staff (also known as "networking"). A couple of the conversations were a bit eye-raising. We wondered aloud if the hotel and staff were braced for the onslaught, and got airy assurances that they had hosted many conventions as big as, if not bigger, than ours.

By Wednesday night they were sweating buckets trying to keep up. Full brownie points to them, though: they had double the staff on Thursday night, and kept adding staff for the rest of the conference.

One of the nicest things about getting in early was the chance to catch up with friends and meet new friends before the madness truly got rolling. One of them was Danny, a romance reviewer from Germany, who once kindly translated my German book title. I finally met her in person as she attended the convention, too (left).

Some of the best conversations I had were in the elevators, when I stepped in wearing one of my costumes/outfits. On Wednesday night I was wearing a ball gown with black opera gloves and a four foot train, and joined a collection of Moulin Rouge can-can girls. We had to assure the handful of normal people cowering in the corners that this was a readers and writers convention. Wednesday night was the Ellora's Cave party, and I got to snuggle up with the Ellora's Cave cover models:

My friend and author Nathalie Gray was absolutely perfectly dressed for the occasion (left) -- I love the cheeky wink she's giving.

On Thursday, Mark finally gave in to heavy pressure to enter the Mr. Romance contest...again. He was a contestant two years ago in St. Louis. The organizers needed at least eight people to meet their sponsor's requirements, so Mark agreed to participate in the pageant. Which meant he was instantly whisked away for rehearsals, and Mr. Romance functions. Between you, me and the gatepost, I'm not sure why he resisted. He loves meeting and talking to people (I got the writer's gene instead). And he had a blast for the rest of the convention, too.

Thursday night was the faery ball, and you couldn't move without brushing up against a pair of wings of some sort. Bewildered non-convention-goers would sit in the bar -- which was right in the middle of the hotel, where you could watch everything that was happening. Their expressions were fascinating as they watched the fairies, imps, elves, and other assorted faery folk parade past.

By Friday, the hotel was just about fully adjusted to the onslaught. When I took breakfast that morning, I commented to the maitre de', Oscar, that "you look a tad stressed." He had a restaurant filled to the brim with RT people. There were many group tables of eight or more, and lots of people were coming to the entrance, seeing a table of friends, and joining that table. That meant the staff had to scurry around finding extra place settings, chairs, cutlery... Oscar lifted a brow at me. "Just a little," he said, trying very hard to sound cool and contained.

Friday night was Heather Graham's Vampires of the Wild West party. It was a bewildering mix of vampires and cowboys and combinations thereof. One of the best moments at that party, though, was when my friend and author Lise Fuller's husband turned up in his Army dress uniform. He'd flown down from Colorado to surprise her. He was the hit of the party, and proved to have a wicked sense of humour.

Saturday was murder on high-heels as far as pushing your stamina was concerned. We had the Bookfair running through the morning and early afternoon, and barely two hours later, the Mr. Romance competition. The competition was touched with scandal and gossip. One of the contestants pulled out at the last minute, and the organizers hurried around looking for a replacement. That's a lot easier said than done. You have 2,000 readers, nearly all of them women, and 500 authors, nearly all of them women, too.

What they did was a stroke of brilliance. They asked Staff Sgt. Jesse Wiseman, husband of one of the writers, to fill in at the last minute. Jesse is not the next Fabio, but he has a wonderful sense of humour, and enough style to pull it off with total panache. His free pose at the end had every woman in the room weeping, because he came on in his dress uniform, carrying a bag, as if he was just returning home from the war. The model ran up to him and threw herself into his arms....

It was fitting that Jesse was announced first runner up, although Maggie, his wife, has assured me that his mates at the base are still laughing themselves silly over the whole affair.

It's even more precious a moment when you consider that Jesse is shipping out tomorrow for his third tour of duty in Iraq. My best wishes and hopes go with him.
Sunday morning we spent in the bar, wishing friends farewell as they checked out. It was a mass exodus, and by Sunday afternoon, you could hear a pin drop in that bar. After the pajama party that night we did our best to make the bar as rowdy a joint as it had been all week, and our small corner was rocking. The rest of the bar had early arrivals for the next convention -- engineers and technical people -- still watching us out of the corner of their eyes, so we didn't let the team down.

Monday morning when I went to breakfast, Oscar hurried across the restaurant to meet me before I sat down. "Not stressed at all now!" he assured me with a big smile, and shook my hand.

One of the best conversations I had was when I went into the Starbucks store that is attached to the lobby. The woman who made my coffee shyly stepped around from the counter and handed it to me. "You're one of them romance writers, aren't you?"

I agreed that I was.

"Oh, we've had so much fun watching you people this last week. We're going to miss you!"

Ebook Reading 101 - Part B

Paper or Pixels?

As promised, I’ve built a list of pros and cons. E-books have advantages you may not have thought of. And paperbacks have their downside.

Paper Books (Paperbacks, Hardcover & POD/Trade)

Advantages (rumoured and fact)

· They look pretty, and irresistable, on the shelf.
· You can tell how much of the book is left to read at a glance.
· You can re-sell them to second-hand bookstores*
· Great covers!
· Usually flawless editing.
· You can shop for them from your desk.
· In bookstores, you can dip into the book anywhere you like to sample it before buying, including the end of the tale. (Yes, there are folk out there that will read the last page ahead of time!)
· Well-made books with lovely covers and beautiful paper are a joy to hold. They’re almost too precious to read.

Disadvantages (whinges included)

· They take up huge amounts of space on the shelf
· They weigh a ton
· They collect dust and can grow mildew in the wrong climates
· You can’t adjust the font to suit reading conditions.
· You can’t auto-scroll
· You can’t read in bad lighting conditions.
· you can lose a book if you don’t “file” it correctly on the shelf.
· People are always failing to bring back borrowed books (it’s a cliché for a reason)
· It’s easy to lose your place
· Nearly all books, except for the skinny ones, need two hands to be read.
· Not all books published are available as paperbacks.
· They’re more expensive than the e-book version.
· All paper books are 50,000 words or more. Your favourite author’s short stories won’t hit print until there’s enough of them for a whole volume.
· Everyone on the bus/train can see what you’re reading. (Think of some of the more lurid covers out there these days….)
· Buying on-line means waiting for the postal service to bring it to you, which could be anywhere up to several weeks – and you have to pay postage on top of the price of the book.
· If you’re a devoted reader of a single genre, then knowing where you are in the book (half-way through, nearly done, etc), tells you when to expect certain events (the happy ending, the big break up, the huge cliff hanger), and you’ll find yourself waiting for them to happen. It can destroy reading-for-enjoyment.
· Have you noticed, lately, that the ink used in some paperbacks smears and smudges as soon as you touch it?

E-books

Advantages (rumoured and fact)

· Dozens, even thousands, of books can be carried with ease.
· You can always have a book with you.
· They line themselves up alphabetically.
· They don’t collect dust or mildew.
· You can adjust the font to suit reading conditions.
· You can auto-scroll.
· You can hold the book with one hand.
· You can read in the dark.
· You can usually tell at a glance how much of the book is left to read.
· e-books are cheap.
· You can buy short stories and novellas as stand alone “books”
· Great covers!
· No-one can see what you’re reading unless they lean over your shoulder.
· You can shop for them from your desk.
· Instant impulse fulfillment. You can go “ooooh!”, buy it, and be reading it inside five minutes.
· If you’re a very savvy reader, and understand a genre inside out, then not knowing where you are in the book (half-way through, nearly done, etc) means that you can get lost in the tale, and events that you would normally have anticipated by how far along you are in the book can now catch you by surprise.
· If you ever do manage to “lose” a book, you can find it again by using your device’s search function.
· Most of the on-line bookstores keep a copy of every book you buy on their servers, from where you can download it as you need it. So even if you do manage to wipe out your entire collection, and your back-up, you can still retrieve your library from the bookstore itself.
· Often, e-readers come with an in-built or attachable dictionary, which means you can flip over and check what that bizarre new word really means (Koontz, for instance, is a master at dropping in words I’ve never heard before!)

Disadvantages (whinges included)

· If you run out of batteries, you can’t read.
· In some formats, fonts like italics are badly represented. This depends upon the publisher’s preparation of the ebook.
· You can’t always tell at a glance where you are in the book – depends upon what style of ebook reader you’re using.
· Not all books published are available electronically.
· Not all ebooks published are always available in the format you want.
· Editing from some of the smaller publishers can be hit and miss.
· It is possible to accidentally delete a book (which is where sensible back-up procedures save you).


And finally...

The number one reason many devoted e-book readers buy paperbacks is because they want a copy for their keeper shelf – one that will last. But there’s danger in that thinking. Paperbacks simply do not last forever. There’s flood, fires, pet cats, inquisitive kids, vandals and thieves. Even if you avoid all that, the book itself will yellow, the pages grow brittle, the glue dry up and eventually the book becomes too fragile to handle.

And then you could get caught the way I did. I moved countries and was forced to sell my entire collection of precious keepers. The money helped me move, but ten years later, I’m still trying to replace some of those hard-to-get titles! (Desmond Bagley springs to mind).

If I’d had my collection as e-books I could have bought them with me, or emailed them ahead of myself, or even burned them to disk or saved them on a zip drive and mailed them ahead of me.

With sensible back up storage, and the permanent storage of your books at the bookstores where you bought them, there’s no reason an electronic keeper collection won’t last forever.

* * * * *

There are readers who say they simply prefer “real” books because of the feel and weight and reading experience. Often, this is just another way of saying they want to stay with what is comfortable and known to them.

Most of the disadvantages of e-book reading are a result of the newness of the species, and will eventually be ironed out as publishers and devices catch up with the print media in standards and reader expectations.

E-book reading takes a bit of adjustment to your thinking and habits, but it is well worth the effort, and you don’t have to give up paperbacks altogether. As some titles are only available as either paperbacks or ebooks, it pays to get comfortable with e-reading.

If you’re already an e-reader, the next time someone objects about e-books, whip out this list and let them see what they’re missing out on.

(*Selling books to secondhand bookstores is a subject for another day – one that has its own set of pros and cons).

E-book Reading 101 – Part A

What’s an e-book?

I was shocked silly the other day when a colleague at work said, quite seriously, “What’s an e-book?”

I managed to reply with a straight face, but the questions he asked after that told me that he genuinely didn’t know what an e-book was, and he was also curious to learn more. But basic primers on e-books, e-reading and the e-book industry are virtually non-existent.

Having been a part of the e-book publishing industry since its birth (barely ten years ago), I hadn’t realized until I was asked that question that some people simply don’t know about e-books. They’ve settled into buying their books from their local bookstore, and if they’ve ventured on-line at all, it’s to come to places like Amazon.com or the other big on-line storefronts that the chain bookstores provide. These vendors sell paper books, although they are just beginning to offer e-texts that can be instantly downloaded.

Some readers haven’t had the courage to order a book on-line yet. And that’s just the paper versions. They’re not even aware of the submerged part of the iceberg: e-books.

Missing half the fun is common amongst all readers. I have recently started teaching a new term of my romance writing course, and the first lesson is always about the true extent of the romance industry. Without exception, these writers are shocked at how much of the genre they’ve been missing out on all these years, and a big part of that non-accessed portion is e-books.

So what is an e-book?

It is simply a single title or anthology collection of fiction or non-fiction that is made available in electronic format. Note; the length can be anywhere from 1 page to 1,000 pages. The length of the tale doesn’t prevent it from being sold as a stand-alone e-book.

You probably already read a lot of text electronically. There’s blogs (like this one), on-line news and magazine sites, email newsletters (including whole magazines), RSS feeds, discussion boards, and email discussion groups. Most of the time you’re reading for information.

E-books are a natural extension of these sources of written material, and they are also distributed via the Internet. E-books differ, however, because they are most often read for pleasure (e.g. fiction) and usually take longer to read than a single session in front of your computer.

That fact alone builds big resistance to e-books from traditional readers.

To get away from having to sit upright at your desk to read them, a huge variety of e-book readers and other electronic devices have been developed that will let you read e-books in the same settings and positions as you would read a traditional book. They include:

• Laptops and Tablet PCs (not specifically designed for e-book reading, but nicely fit the bill, anyway)
• Dedicated electronic devices, such as the Rocketbook, the new Sony electronic reader, Fictionwise.com’s reader, and other proprietary reading devices
• PDAs such as Palm Pilots, and handheld computers
• Cell phones (e-books sent to cell phones in instalments are hugely popular in Asia, for instance, and will soon catch on with the rest of the world)
• Smart phones are a combination of PDAs and cell phones, and can handle text either way.
• Printing out your book.

This last method is the least logical and most expensive of the lot. However, in the near future, big brick & mortar bookstores may climb onto the e-book boom and offer kiosks inside their stores where you can buy your e-book and receive an instant print out that is bound like a normal book.

The next question is, naturally, why would you bother reading e-books, when there’s plenty of paper ones around?

The answer is very long, but for now, let me point out a fact that may stir fiction freaks into trying e-books out: There are hundreds of stories only available as e-books. And they’re damned good stories.

Next entry, I’ll give you both the pros and the cons of paper vs. pixel reading. I guarantee that some of them you won’t have thought of yourself.

See you then.

Flat or rich? It’s all in your head.

When I tripped over a website this week that promised to have me reading and comprehending at least four times faster than I do now…well, I paused for thought. The idea of speed-reading my way through a greater pile of stories than ever before is very appealing.

I’m not a slow reader. Years of practice have pushed my speed up considerably. But it’s not something I’ve deliberately cultivated; mostly, I’m reading at the speed I need to read to enjoy the story.

It’s not so much that I want to get through the story faster. I don’t. But if I did finish the tale faster, then I could read more stories than I do now.

It also hadn’t occurred to me that I could read faster and still enjoy the story…or would I?
So I dug around the Internet a little, and came up with some interesting tidbits on speed reading:

Some speed reading methods don’t suit fiction. They’re the “approach” style of speed reading, where you’re taught how to scan, summarise and selectively read texts.

But there’s other methods that are technique-oriented. They literally speed up your reading. These would work for reading fiction.

I also discovered that some speed-readers say it doesn’t ruin reading for pleasure, while others say they reserve speediness for non-fiction and have-to-read tombs for their job.

Here’s some tips I picked up that you could apply to your own reading, if you wanted to read faster:

• Use your finger as a guide and move it along beneath the line. The trick is to move it at a fast, steady speed. You’ll read as fast as you move your finger, and stay focused.
• Take in bigger chunks at a time. Most people who have well-advanced reading skills don’t actually read every single word. They recognize most words by their shape, and take in whole phrases at a glance. The trick is to make your glance encompass more words. I tried this when I read it, and it seems to be quite difficult to do. You end up absorbing some words through your peripheral vision. How accurate would that be? The sites that mention this trick also assure you than you don’t miss anything once you get the hang of it.

Overall, one of the main skills for successful speed reading seems to be learning to read without subvocalising. Subvocalising is where you “hear” the words you’re reading in your head.

I’m not sure I could read for pleasure and not subvocalize. A lot of my pleasure in reading fiction is hearing the words in my mind. Especially the dialogue. I’ll even back up a couple of lines and re-read exchanges of dialogue if I realize that I’ve put the wrong inflection or emotional tone into a character’s speech. Then there’s lyrical descriptions of people and surroundings in books like those of Mary Stewart, or the completely absorbing narrative of writers like Stephen King.

Wouldn’t reading a fiction book without sub-vocalizing make it … flat?

I’m going to need some first hand reassurance before I venture into speeding up my own reading.