At long last, Beekeeping for Beginners is available on audio, here. Also available in libraries, I understand. (It will be out in print as an extra in the Pirate King paperback, later this spring.)
Enjoy!
Beekeeping for the non-technological
Having trouble downloading Beekeeping for Beginners?
Sorry if I misled you as to the ease of this process, it was not deliberate. There is A Step Between.
As I understand it, the story is sold in a whole bunch of places, some of which are already formatted for their proprietary readers (Kindle, Nook, Sony, etc.) For others, you just need to download a free reader program.
For example, Barnes & Noble has one here, Amazon’s is here—and most of the Big Boys seem to have some way of giving you free access to the books, since they then hope you will go ahead and buy from them.
Better?
Again, there’s a list of people selling the e-novella Beekeeping for Beginners here.
And it will be available in the UK markets within the next three weeks. With, one hopes, less trouble.
Beekeeping for Beginners, and other points of view
A few years ago, I started playing with ways to work bits of third-person viewpoints into what are otherwise memoirs. Those don’t actually fit, of course, since “I” have no way of knowing exactly what “he” is thinking, even if I’m standing next to him at the time. However, the book I was working on (Locked Rooms) required being able to see certain events from others’ eyes, and short of having Holmes write down what he was seeing—or worse, sit and describe every nuance—jumping out of Russell’s point of view was the only way to do it.
But really, if Mary Russell were writing her memoirs, would she permit herself to 1) describe only what she knew at the time, and not what she learned later, or 2) sit and listen passively as one character after another told her where they’d been and what they’d been doing? I don’t think so. And although I’ve had a couple of letters gently remonstrating me for this occasionally awkward combination of first and third voices, I think most readers find it a smoother read than having Holmes forever pulling out his pipe and beginning, “Well, after Damian and I got onto the fishing boat, I had to decide…”
Some months ago, my editor asked me if I’d write a story the publishers could do especially for e-book readers, tying it into Pirate King. It could be anything, she said: maybe there was a minor character somewhere who’d caught my imagination, or a new tale fitting into the gaps between two of the books? And as I thought about it, my mind kept coming back to those alternate points of view.
We all know how Russell’s story begins (If you don’t remember, it’s here.): She was fifteen when she first met Sherlock Holmes, fifteen years old with her nose in a book as she walked the Sussex Downs, and nearly stepped on him. But what about the man sitting on the ground? What on earth did he make of this young girl, wearing her father’s clothes, acting the smart-aleck?
I turned to watch the owner of the slow footsteps approach. The lad was wearing an old and too-large suit, a jersey in place of shirt and waistcoat (it had been cold that morning when I—and, it appeared, he—had set out) and a badly knit scarf, with a cloth cap pulled down to his ears and shoes that, despite being new, pinched his toes. His nose was buried in a book, as if to demonstrate his noble oblivion to any world-famous detectives who might be hunkered on the ground.
And because Russell is, after all, only fifteen years old, much that is going on around her is beyond her experience—not only outside of her point of view, but her vision.
But not Holmes’.
Beekeeping for Beginners is on sale today, here. (In UK markets, July 25th.) Let me know what you think of it.
Wednesday (oops) on Writing
Today’s subject is deadlines, and the breaking thereof.
Not really, although I do mean to post on Wednesdays, and this week got away from me. Writer’s Wednesdays (or in this case, Thursday) here on Mutterings are my musings on various aspects of the writer’s trade and life. This week: a venture into e-publication.
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Last week I was in New York for Edgars week, which included a day-long writing symposium. In addition to my own panel (billed as a “no-holds barred look at a writer’s life,” although it didn’t turn out quite so wild-and-wooly as one might have anticipated) and a great interview of this year’s Grand Master, Sara Paretsky, one of the discussion points was modern trends in publishing. No surprise, really: all any group of writers seems to talk about these days is to e-book or not to e-book, and this particular panel included an editor from St Martin’s Press, that house that simultaneously lost Barry Eisler, who decided to go for self-publishing in e-format, and gained Amanda Hocking, who decided she was sick of all the peripheral work of being self-published (and thus self-edited, self-designed, self-promoted, self-hunting-down-the-pirated-torrents, self-formatting, self-everything.) There’s an in-depth discussion between the two writers here, and all I can say is, I’ll be most interested in hearing from them both a couple years down the line.
Me, personally? If I had any OUP books, I’d put them up. I do have one or two short stories that haven’t seen print in a while, and I might do those, but I was also thinking of using them for a collection. I’ll probably hang onto them for a while longer before I decide.
However, as I’ve mentioned, a while ago Random House asked me to do an e-novella that they can put up a couple of months before Pirate King, as part of their various and many-armed marketing plan. I’m trying to urge them to sell the rights to some kind of print version as well, for those of you who want actual books in your hot little hands, and I’m relatively certain those will come along eventually. But in the meantime, it’s strictly an e-book venture, and the similarities and differences have made it an interesting experience.
As far as the writing goes, being a sort of long short story, it was a change from the complexities of a novel, since there was a simplified story line rather than all a novel’s threads that weave together and get tangled and give the poor writer hives, and make her swear that she’s going to give it up and take up watercolors instead. It’s much easier to keep focus on a single track. On the publishing side, because it was for my usual publishing house, much of the process has been that of a regular book—except that, due to the length (50 pages rather than 350) they chose to do an e-edit, which I hate. Really, really hate. Really.
Research, writing, characterization, edit/discussion/copyedit, all those steps were the same. But then last week I was given the cover, and I can’t say precisely why, but it has a distinctly e-feel to it. Maybe because it’s tighter, with all the print nearer the same size? (I suppose the concern is, on an iPhone, small print would vanish entirely.) The colors, too, seem to me particularly suited for a screen rather than paper. I’m not one to judge, since I don’t read many books on an e-reader, but for those of you who like e-reading, do you have any comments on e-book covers? Most e-books seem to use the same covers as their print versions, but are there occasionally different looks? And if so, how do they differ?
Anyway, here’s the cover for Beekeeping for Beginners (the book’s page is here, the pub date is July 6) and by way of contrast, Pirate King (here, and Sept 6). What do you think?
