Award-winning, bestselling, thought-provoking mysteries
So I get home after a week in New York with publishers and Bethesda with Malice Domestic, and to my shock I find that the book elves haven’t shelved the boxes of books stacked in my new study. What, you guys on strike or something?
So guess what I’m doing this week? Oh, in addition to going through the page proofs of The Bones of Paris, arriving today.
Some weeks ago, Team LRK put up an e-book collection of my writings on that fellow with the pipe and the violin. At last, it’s available in an actual paper version! There are eight essays that range from my explanation of how old I think Sherlock Holmes is to the very academic introduction I wrote for The Grand Game (“Textual, Higher, Radical, and Midrashic Sherlockian Criticism”, an excerpt of which is here).
If you have a bookstore nearby with a print-on-demand Espresso machine, you can get one of these babies now: Laurie R. King’s Sherlock Holmes.
And if you want me to sign a copy for you, order one from Bookshop Santa Cruz, here.
First of all, I want it to evoke the book without giving away the plot.
(Garment of Shadows: young woman in Western clothes gazes at a vaguely North African landscape: check.)
Then, it needs to catch the eyes from across a crowded bookstore—or as a 2” version on a screen.
(Rich glow of color; a bit of sharp contrast; legible font: check.)
It must reward a closer look (or click) by revealing some intriguing subtleties.
(Moroccan buildings; arabesque frame around the edges; pair of figures at the top—one of whom can only be Sherlock Holmes. Definitely a check.)
Those revealed subtleties must add up to a sense of the unexpected: a slight jolt of surprise is what makes the reader’s hand reach out and pick out the book from a display.
(Demure clothing at odds with the setting; crisp dark colors against hazy warmth; the figure’s stance suggesting that she feels out of place. Check.)
The cover can’t be green. The people who work in the sales department are clear on this: Green Covers Don’t Sell.
(Okay, orange is comfortably across the color wheel from green, so yes, a check here.) (And yes, this is a joke.)
Although if it is green, it has to be really, really green.
A touch of humor is great, whether the dust jacket encloses a comic or a solemn book, since people read for pleasure—even if it’s only the masochistic pleasure of a grim political tome.
(There’s something decidedly humorous about that paired silhouette at the top, showing Holmes and a woman facing off through a magnifying glass: her upraised chin shows that she is undaunted by his deerstalker. I may never have heard of Mary Russell, but that silhouette tells me there’s a quirky element here.)
Basically, I want my book’s cover to reach out and convince a mind-boggling variety of would-be readers that they will love this novel, that they will consider their hard-earned dollars well spent, if only they will open the cover and read the cover blurb…
Where they discover that the story is about a young English woman who is married to Sherlock Holmes, and how she finds herself standing in a Moroccan city, bewildered but undaunted.
A simple task, really.
Garment of Shadows: check.
I promised yesterday that I would post today on the question of Independent Booksellers and their relationship with eBooks, and here we are.
Yes, Indies sell eBooks, more and more Indies all the time. They (and I, frankly) have too long been frustrated by watching their customers browse the shelves, stand reading a book for a minute, put it back on the shelf, and pick up their phone to type away.
And that customer ain’t typing notes for their own novel, you can bet your bottom dollar on that. No, they’re sending their order to a retailer that doesn’t have the bother and overhead of running a store with actual shelves.
But now, there are actual bricks-and-mortar (or in California, two-bys-and-stucco) stores that can deliver your eBook into your device, quick and easy and at the same price as the big boys.
For example, my own county’s venerable and vibrant Bookshop Santa Cruz. Take a look at their home page, here. You will see, directly below the “buy books” search in the sidebar, a “Search Google eBooks” box. If you type in Pirate King, you’ll see my novel, at the same price Amazon sells it for. My other local, Capitola BookCafe (whose site is here), has a box that searches books and eBooks together. Pirate King takes you to the hardback that is sitting on the store’s shelves, under which is a note, Other Editions of this Title. Et voilà, the eBook, same price.
(Although as with the question of e-versus paper-royalties, it’s not simple. Some publishers don’t follow what’s called the “agency model,” which means Amazon’s versions of their eBooks may be cheaper than Google’s. But let’s not get complicated here.)
Now, the booksellers don’t earn as much for an eBook as they do for an actual physical book. On the other hand, they aren’t bleeding ongoing transfusions into the veins of online marketers.
But there’s one catch. And that is, Amazon doesn’t always play well with others (see “agency model” above) and eBooks are one of those places. If you have a Kindle reader, you pretty much have to buy the books that go onto it in the proprietary Kindle format. Other readers are okay with the Kindle app; Kindle isn’t okay with the apps from Sony or iPad or Nook.
Which doesn’t mean you should toss the Kindle your Mom gave you for Christmas, although for the next one you buy, you might consider one of the android versions.
For those of you who have one of those other devices, Indie Bound has a list of shops that you can support by buying your eBooks through them, here.
If you are a bookseller, or if you know and love a bookseller, you might mention to them two helpful additions to the machinery of getting customers in the habit of buying eBooks from stores instead of Brazilian Rivers:
1. Put up a few notices, at the cash register and on the shelves, to let the customer know that it can be done.
2. To make it even easier for the customer, set up a QR code leading directly to the store’s ordering page and add it to those notes. Customers can just scan the code and key in their order. This is what a QR code looks like—point your smart phone at this one and you end up at my own home page—and they’re as simple to set up as it is simple to download a QR reader app to a smart phone:
So, that is today’s public service announcement: Support your local Indie, buy an eBook from them today.
Of course, if you want an actual print book, maybe with the author’s signature, they can probably help you with that, too.
