I am so pleased that Soho Press is releasing another book in Helene Tursten’s Irene Huss series set in Göteborg. The series began in 1998 with Detective Inspector Huss (published in English five years later). Translations of two more books in the series – The Torso and The Glass Devil – were published in 2006 and 2007. Then nothing . . . until 2012. Night Rounds, the second book in the series, will come out in English this March.  As anyone who enjoys reading translated series knows, we often have to be detectives and assemble characters’ lives from what we can gather after the fact, putting together the series arc like a puzzle. Can I hope that the next five books in the series might someday be translated?

Night Rounds draws on Tursten’s life experience as a nurse and is set in a private hospital where a power failure leads to the death of an elderly patient in intensive care. The ICU nurse has vanished and is later found murdered, sprawled over the failed backup generator. One of the staff reports that she saw a figure on the grounds just after the lights went out: a woman dressed in an old-fashioned cape and cap. She is certain it is Nurse Tekla, who hanged herself in the hospital attic in 1947. All of the staff know the story, and many believe they have seen glimpses of the ghost before.

As always, Irene investigates systematically, teasing out the relationships of the hospital employees and tracking clues into the past. Her workmates operate as a team, with occasional sparks. A young female detective is being harassed by a colleague who sends anonymous pornography; when he’s caught, he’s merely transferred and Irene finds herself trying to mentor the young woman, who isn’t inclined to bide her time or bite her tongue. There is a sympathetic portrait of mentally ill homeless woman who lives on the grounds of the hospital; social issues – racism, family dysfunction, the sex industry – are present in all of Tursten’s books, though never didactically.

And as usual Irene’s family plays a secondary role in the story, as one of the detective’s twin daughters gets involved in the animal rights movement and finds herself in over her head with activists who are willing to use violence to make their point. One of the real pleasures of this series is the interludes of ordinary family life. Irene is happily married (to an even-tempered man who is an excellent chef! perhaps that’s a bit of wish fulfillment) and has two children who get up to the usual drama that adolescents go through. There’s a nice balance in the books of police work and everyday life, without too much domestic detail; just enough to give readers a realistic and engaging portrait of a capable detective who has a life outside the job.It’s refreshing to encounter a detective who doesn’t flinch from the grim realities of police work but still manages to be present for her children and keep a firm hand on her own emotional tiller. In many ways, this portrait of a woman police officer is a feminist one, demonstrating the way a woman can be herself in a traditionally masculine culture.

The Swedish television series starring Angela Kovacs , made by the ubiquitous Yellow Bird Studios, is quite good, though its dramatization of The Torso seemed to me far more graphically gruesome than the book. My favorite aspect of that novel is the contrast drawn between Danish and Swedish cultures, particularly in terms of attitudes toward the sex industry. I’m not sure what Danes think of it, but it shed a lot of light on Swedish attitudes for this American reader.

Now for the part that has turned out to be much harder than I expected – three women writers who are in some way similar:

• Mary Logue, whose Claire Watkins seems like a remarkably sane and balanced police officer in rural Wisconsin and who always has time for her daughter
• Yrsa Sigurdardottir, who does a nice job of weaving in her heroine’s family life with a light touch
• Leena Lehtolainen, who I can’t say much about because her series has not been translated into English – but I wish someone would! From what I’ve heard from Paula Arvas, a Finnish scholar who was a speaker at last spring’s Stieg Larsson symposium at UCLA, her work is not considered as “important” as harder-edged books by men mainly because she doesn’t write about society’s underbelly and focuses instead on more ordinary people. She has twice won the award for best crime fiction in Finland and has been nominated for the Glass Key award. There are apparently 11 books in the Maria Kallio series, the most recent published in 2011. But it’s not too late for someone to get cracking and translate this series, since Lehtolainen got an early start – her first novel was published when she was only 12 years old!

In this complex mystery, Edie Kiglatuk makes her living as a guide for white hunters who want to test themselves against the harsh arctic environment. This is not a job typically held by a woman, but Edie is well attuned to the land and has a living to make. The community she lives in clings to the ice and rock of Ellesmere Island, a place so unforgiving that it was largely uninhabited until in 1953 the Canadian government decided it needed inhabitants to ensure a claim to it. (I gather the US had designs on it for strategic reasons.) They chose Inuit because they had the best chance of coping with the hostile environment. McGrath has written a non-fiction account of these settlers and the unfortunate experiment that left them stranded far from home and up against the elements, the government having forgotten their promise to return them to Hudson Bay if life proved too difficult.

In this harsh climate Edie has overcome years of alcoholism and made a tough life for herself, which includes her hopes for a nephew who is training to be a nurse. When she takes a pair of qalunaat (white men) hunting, one of them is shot. Her nephew comes to help by snowmobile, and when weather conditions allow, her aunt (who proves pigheaded independence runs among women in the family) flies in to take him to the nearest hospital. In spite of their best efforts the man dies, and everyone is eager to declare it an unfortunate hunting accident. But Edie has her doubts, and when more violence strikes even closer to home, she has to get to the bottom of it, which involves a trip to Greenland and some harrowing physical challenges.

The plot is perhaps a bit over-elaborate, with a mulit-national cast of bad guys, but the major characters are wonderfully drawn, with real sympathy and respect for native people living under difficult circumstances without romanticizing the very real challenges they face. The people and the land they live on come alive in this story. It would be a good one to read on a hot day; I read it at the start of winter, and it made me feel very cold, indeed. Once I checked a map, I realized just how far north Ellesmere Island really is.

McGrath wrote an essay about her experiences doing research for her books in the Telegraph. I’m very tempted to read her non-fiction book, The Long Exile: A Tale of Inuit Betrayal and Survival in the High Arctic, but I think I will wait until it’s warmer.

As for women writers whose work is in some way similar . . .

• Dana Stabenow, who writes about her native Alaska with a vivid sense of place.
• Asa Larsson, who also loves arctic Sweden and makes it sound quite beautiful.
• R. J. Harlick, whose mysteries are set in area where the inhabitants of Ellesmere Island once lived.

Death in Oslo, the third in a series featuring the profiler Johanne Vik, starts with an intriguing premise. A woman has just been elected president of the United States, and as the book opens we learn that she has triumphed in spite of closely-guarded personal secret. In fact the book opens with her thought: I got away with it. But of course, she hasn’t, really. Her first foreign trip is to a safe country, the home of her ancestors, Norway. But the unthinkable happens. Madame President disappears – on the 17th of May, of all days, Norway’s independence day and an occasion for raucous partying. Johanne is upset when her partner, Adam Stubo, is drafted to work on the crisis. Johanne has her reasons to avoid the FBI agent who is working on the case. She takes their small daughter with her to a secret retreat, the apartment of her mentor, wheelchair-bound Hanne Wilhelmsen (who features in a series that has mostly not been translated yet except for 1222). As Adam deals with the public side of the investigation, Johanne and Hanne come into it via a different route. And all the while, the reader knows who is behind the disappearance. We just don’t know how he pulled it off – or why.

Death in Olso is great fun. It’s a complex story with a lot of characters from all over the world, but Holt draws them so skillfully that it’s no trouble keeping them apart. She also does a nice line in puzzles and keeps us guessing, right up to the end – and even then, things aren’t tied up neatly. There is a whacking great coincidence on which much of the story hinges, but as hinges go, it’s not squeaky and moves very smoothly. I particularly enjoyed the consternation of Norwegian officials when the unthinkable happens, and the contrast between their response and that of American security agencies.  All in all, it’s terrifically entertaining and is peopled with memorable characters I would like to meet again.

Now, as for three more women writers who are in some way similar – oof, this is always hard . . .

• Yrsa Sigurdardottir – who also creates likeable characters with interesting personal lives and also likes puzzles in her plots.
• Minette Walters – who combines intricate plots with social and political issues.
• Liza Cody – who creates memorable characters with a feminist edge and a lot of compassion.

It’s not too late to join the Sisters in Crime 25th Anniversary Book Bloggers Challenge at either the easy, moderate, or expert challenge (or, if you’re a triathlete like Maxine, all three). The deadline is whenever. I will eventually collate all of the posts in one gigantic listing. I know I’ve discovered some new writers thanks to others who have taken the challenge. And though she probably doesn’t know about the challenge, Anne Holt herself has made a list of her ten favorite female detectives for The Guardian.

Asa Larsson is an excellent writer, and in this series she adds to her stylish writing a group of intriguing characters and a vivid setting that the author infuses with love. Its one of those settings that seems terrifically appealing because the author has made it so, though in reality I doubt I would really enjoy living in Kurravaara, a village outside Kiruna so far north that in the winter the sun barely shows its face and in April, when this story takes place, the sun rises before 4 a.m. Rebecka Martinsson, who is now working as a prosecutor, seems happy, settled in the home that she left in her late teens after a difficult set of circumstances, described in the first book in the series, Sun Storm (apa The Savage Altar). She spent lonely years in Stockholm as a student, then as a obsessively hardworking tax lawyer, only called home to the north when a friend was in trouble. Things haven’t been easy for her, and events in previous books were traumatic, but as Until Thy Wrath Be Past opens, Rebecka seems grounded and fulfilled.

Snow, thought district prosecutor Rebecka Martinsson, shivering with pleasure as she got out of her car at the house in Kurravaara.

It was seven in the evening. Snow clouds enveloped the village in a pleasant, dusky haze. Martinsson could barely make out the lights from the neighboring houses. And the snow was not just falling. Oh no, it was hurtling down. Cold, dry, fluffy flakes cascaded from the sky, as if someone up there were sweeping them down, doing the housework.

My farmor, my father’s mother, of course, Martinsson thought with a trace of a smile. She must always be on the go, scrubbing the good Lord’s floor, dusting, hard at work. I expect she’s sent Him out to stand on the porch.

Her farmor’s house, faced with gray, cement-fiber Eternit siding seemed to be hiding itself in the gloom. It appeared to have taken the opportunity to have a nap. Only the outside light above the green-painted steps whispered quietly: Welcome home, my girl.

She is soon presented with what seems an unfortunate tragedy: the body of a long-missing girl is found in a river. She and her boyfriend went diving months ago, and now that her body has  been discovered, authorities conclude they died in an accident. But readers know they were murdered, that while diving in an ice-bound lake someone deliberately blocked the hole they had cut in the ice. We learn in the opening pages exactly what happened from point of view of the girl, who remains in the story, observing and commenting on the action. Though I am not fond of supernatural elements in mysteries, Larsson pulls it off in large part because the dead girl is a vividly-realized character in her own right, a maverick child of a neglectful mother who came to live with her great-grandmother, who delights in the company of this irreverent, rebellious child. The passages that give us her point of view after death give the reader a strong sense of a willful, daring young woman who won’t rest until her story is told.

Rebecka, inspired by a dream, suggests that the water in the dead girl’s lungs be tested, and so they discover that the girl drowned in a lake, where in the late years of World War II a Nazi supply plane went down. Someone, it seems, wants to be sure the wreck is never found. She and Inspector Anne-Marie Mella, who has become estranged from her closest colleagues following a decision she made in The Black Path, begin to investigate. In some ways, this isn’t much of a mystery; we have a strong inkling of who in the small village is likely responsible and we see some of the story from the point of view of a participant or witness to the murder. And yet, Larsson has created a compelling story as we peel back the historical layers and the tainted relationships behind the deliberate drowning of two young people.

I loved the first book in the series, and admired The Black Path (though I found the ending in both books to be out of scale with the rest, a bit too over-the-top). In this latest volume in the series, Larsson really hits her stride. She has given us a cast of characters we have come to know and care about, a setting that is vivid, a ghostly young woman who has a grounded, earthy reality, and a compelling story that explores Sweden’s troubling relationship with Nazi Germany. She offers a terrific combination of psychologically probing character development, action, and (for lack of a better word) a kind of poetry in her writing style that makes this series a particularly fine contribution to the genre. Highly recommended.

By the way, Maxine also includes Asa Larsson as she takes the SinC25 expert challenge – and links to her reviews of all the books in the series.

Three more women authors who seem somehow similar to Asa Larsson:

• Karin Alvtegen – who has a similar interest in the underlying psychology driving characters.
• Karin Fossum – who also examines the many layers of complexity in seemingly innocent small communities.
• Laura Lippman – who explores the long-term consequences of troubled relationships and childhood insults.

Agnete Friis, Lene Kaaberbøl, and Bronwen Hruska at Bouchercon 2011

As slowly as I am working my way through this challenge – to write about ten women crime fiction authors and recommend three similar authors for each – I am tempted to make this number six and seven, but that would be cheating. Certainly when you read Kaaberbøl and Friis’s first collaborative effort, The Boy in the Suitcase, there is no roughness to indicate there is more than one author at work. The translation, by Kaaberbøl herself, is also smooth, making it easy for the Danish-deficient reader to get lost in a good book.

And a very good book this is, too. In the first scene, a woman has been persuaded to pick up a suitcase at a train station by a frantic friend. Before she puts the heavy case in her car, she decides to see what’s inside, and is surprised to see a small boy.

His knees rested against his chest, as if someone had folded him up like a shirt. Otherwise he would not have fit, she supposed. His eyes were closed, and his skin shone palely in the bluish glare of the fluorescent ceiling lights. Not until she saw his lips part slightly did she realize he was alive.

What follows is a choppy series of scenes from various points of view. A man in Denmark gets a picture of the boy and a phone call asking if he accepts a deal. A man dreams about a family he doesn’t have and fantasizes about a house outside Krakow where he hopes to live with the woman he loves as soon as he’s finished one little thing. A woman watches her son play in the sand at a park. And then there’s Nina Borg, who had just lost the moral high ground in a confronts an abusive man who is coaxing an immigrant woman away from the shelter where she’d sought refuge. Before she can catch her breath, she gets a phone call from a friend who is desperate and needs a favor. She wants Nina to pick up a suitcase at the train station. As she says to Nina, “you know about such things.”All of these fragments lead up to the opening scene and Nina’s impulse to make the little boy safe.

Nina does, indeed, know about the things desperate people do, and about the reasons a small boy might be drugged and smuggled into Denmark. She works with immigrants who have come to Denmark without papers. She doesn’t trust Danish authorities who are quick to deport her desperate clients, but she realizes she’s caught between them and people who would kill her without compunction. She is a complex character who feels compelled to save the world, but can’t spare any attention or affection for her own children. She’ll fly to Africa to work with refugees, not so much because the Africans need her as that she feels a need to put herself into extreme situations. She’s an irritating mess, but the authors trust their readers enough to give us a less-than-ideal protagonist. Throughout the story our sympathy is called on in uncomfortable ways. Of course we feel for the mother of an abducted child, but we also are privy to humanizing elements of the man who carried out the kidnapping.

The authors have done a terrific job of creating an involving story out of complex contemporary issues by focusing on the particulars: on characters under stress, on the little things that make us care. They also show a great deal of respect for readers. The thrills aren’t mechanical and the way the story is constructed challenges the standard “hero’s journey” recipe for suspense and resolution. Nina Borg is so far from heroic, she calls the very idea of heroism into question. Flaws that are commonly forgiven in male protagonists – becoming so obsessed with a cause that his spouse and children are neglected, bucking authority as a matter of principle, taking life-endangering risks – are harder to forgive when the character is female, and that should make us think. Why do we see some qualities as strengths in men, but somehow disturbing in women? Are heroes who risk everything more selfish than they appear?

One of the reasons I like this book so much is that the authors ask us to participate in making sense of the story and a protagonist complex enough to match. Oh, and did I mention it’s a corker of a story? Three cheers for Soho for adding this terrific series to their already impressive list.

Now for the difficult bit. (I had no idea this would be so tricky when I cooked up this challenge.) Three women authors who are in some way similar:

• Sara Paretsky, whose V. I. Warshawski is sometimes insufferably self-righteous, yet also prone to bouts of self-doubt;
• Liza Marklund whose series heroine Annika Bengtzon resists the anchor-weight that the role of wife and mother sometimes puts on her when she’s hot on the heels of a story;
• and Abigail Padgett whose characters are smart and principled women with serious emotional problems, including Bo Bradley who doesn’t routinely take her bipolar medications and Blue McCarron, an anti-social social scientist who is sometimes aggravatingly sententious.

This is my fifth entry for the Sisters in Crime 25th Anniversary Book Bloggers Challenge.

When I got Tana French’s third novel to review, I opened it with some trepidation. I was impressed with her first book, In the Woods, but I was more than usually frustrated by it, too. I found so much of the writing really brilliant, but the brilliance was thrown about (it seemed to me) indiscriminately, so that the scenes that mattered were no better dressed than the ones that really didn’t, like wearing diamonds on a track suit because they’re such lovely diamonds. And I disliked the narrator intensely for being so immature and coy and apparently proud of being utterly neurotic, and I disliked his equally immature female partner. I skipped the second book because the premise sounded so implausible and I was afraid I’d experience that same mixture of delight and disappointment.

But  Faithful Place was a top-notch read for me. It’s about a no-nonsense cop from a hardscrabble part of Dublin who parted with his roots and his family when he joined the police, which seen from the perspective of his neighborhood was as good as joining the enemy. His break from his family and the close-knit community of Faithful Place actually came earlier, when he planned to elope with a girl he loved, the two of them planning to Ireland for a new life. She stood him up, and he was left stranded, estranged from his past but without the future he’d dreamed about.The next best way to start fresh is to sign on as a police officer.

He’s done well and gone on to undercover work and, as the novel opens, is running complex undercover operations. He learns that his girl’s suitcase was found jammed up the chimney of an abandoned house. Her betrayal, the betrayal that shaped his life, is suddenly something very different, and he has to return home to find out what happened to her all those years ago.

Faithful Place is story about a family, their sense of belonging, and the place they call home. The city block where they live their claustrophobic lives becomes an emotional landscape that’s bigger and more dramatic than that of those globe-trotting thrillers in which the fate of the world hangs in the balance. It’s also a microcosm of a nation at a particular point in time that has a lot to say about how macroeconomic forces shape people’s lives. French’s writing style is just as talented as it was in her first book, but much more controlled and in scene after scene pitch-perfect. It’s funny and touching and sometimes poetic in a very Irish vein, and while the story itself may not be full of surprises, neither is Greek tragedy. This is one of those mysteries where character, setting, and its sense of place really carry the day.

Three similar women authors of crime fiction . . . let’s see . . .

• Denise Mina – who is also good at nailing a time and place and has terrific dialogue that conveys those things;
• Margaret Maron – who is very different in tone, but who created a strong sense of place and family in The Bootlegger’s Daughter;
• and Jennifer McMahon – who writes very well indeed about the close relationships that children develop and the very richly detailed worlds they inhabit.

It has been a while since I last took stock of who has been taking the challenge. High time I provided some links from bloggers who are writing about women crime writers in response to my invitation to mark Sisters in Crime‘s 25th anniversary.

Maxine Clarke has been flexing her reading muscles in a big way. As a regular reviewer for Euro Crime and the founder of the friendly FriendFeed Crime & Mystery Fiction group she keeps her finger on the pulse of mystery publishing – and at her own blog, Petrona, she posts lots of excellent reviews and commentary. For the medium challenge she has profiled the following women authors, all from different countries:

• Diane Setterfield, author of The Thirteenth Tale, paired with Charlotte Bronte;
• Catherine Sampson, reminding me of some books set in China that I’ve been meaning to read, paired with Liza Marklund and Diane Wei Lang;
• Saskia Noort, a Dutch author who is also a resident of my TBR, paired with Claudia Pineiro and Simone van der Vlugt;
• Katherine Howell, author of an Australian police procedural series that sounds very interesting, paired with Sue Grafton; and
• Miyuke Miyabe, a Japanese author who has just gone on my long list of writers to try, paired with Dominique Manotti.

Maxine has not only completed the easy and moderate challenges, but she plans to tackle the expert one, as well! I’m looking forward to it, and hope she will remember the tight deadline of “whenever.”

At The Bunburyist, scholar and author of short stories Elizabeth Foxwell has several posts filled with erudition. In one post she profiles women with “Ink in their Blood – women writers who started out as journalists, including Edna Buchanan, Carol Nelson Douglas, Gillian Linscott, Eve K. Sandstrom, and Celestine Sibley. “AKA” presents five women who wrote under pseudonyms:  M.C. Beaton (Marion Chesney), David Frome /Leslie Ford (Zenith Jones Brown), Anthony Gilbert (Lucy Beatrice Malleson), Evelyn Piper (Merriam Modell), and Dell Shannon (Elizabeth Linington). What a lot of creativity among those women and their multiple pseudonyms. And what interesting backstories for the authors who first wrote the news.

At Goodreads, Norma Huss profiles Dorothy Gilman, an author who inspired her own writing, adding to her profile M.C. Beaton and Carolyn G. Hart.

Sarah Ward at Crimepieces takes the challenge by writing about Asa Larsson, whose new book Until Thy Wrath Be Past is definitely one I intend to read as soon as possible. She also recommends five other women authors: Mari Jungstedt, Fred Vargas, Jennifer Egan, Ann Cleeves, and Yrsa Sigurdardottir.

Mrs. Peabody investigates Ingrid Noll’s mystery, The Pharmacist, which sounds quite creepy and psychologically suspenseful. She also recommends Josephine Tey, Fred Vargas, Maj Sjowall, Dominique Manotti, and P.D. James.

The library director at Goshen Public Library highlights some women writers for the challenge, including Sheila Connolly’s Fundraising the Dead

Bernadette, who contributes to Fair Dinkum Crime and writes thoughtful reviews at her own blog, Reactions to Reading, has added a couple of blog posts to the challenge. In her second challenge post, she focuses on historical crime fiction, with a new favorite, Ariana Franklin in the lead, adding notes about Elizabeth Peters, Imogen Robertson, and Victoria Thompson. (My, I have a lot of catching up to do.)  She also profiles “genre busters” – women writers who have done something different within the genre. She starts with an intriguing feminist author, Finola Moorhead, whose Still Murder was published in 1991 by Australian publishing house Spinifex which specializes in “innovative and controversial feminist books with an optimistic edge.” She adds to the genre busters Natsuo Kirino, Dorothy Porter, and Karin Alvtegen.

And – oh my goodness, here’s Laurie King, who is rising to the challenge with a few words about S. J. Rozan and her new book, Ghost Hero, a Lydia Chin book that she calls “a zinger.”

Thanks to all who are participating. If you feel inspired to take the challenge – at whatever level – tag your posts SinC25 and I’ll look for them. At the end of this process, I’ll compile a list of all the authors mentioned. I know I’ve already added a lot to my “to be read” list.

photos courtesy of soyrosa and moriza; postcard courtesy of janwillemsen.

The narration seems to be aimed at the Dick and Jane crowd. “This man is an author. He writes stories. He’s just finished writing a story.” The gender roles in the film are interesting – men write and use machines to build and cut things, “girls” work on the part of the process that involves moving paper around and sewing it together. There’s nothing about how it goes from the author to the printer, or from printers to readers – it’s all about the machines. But what’s really fascinating is how very different the process was not too many years ago. When the type is hammered flat I was reminded of the craft work involved in letter press printing turned into an industrial process.

Hat tip to Library Link of the Day.

Ellen Hart spoke next, giving a practical outline of what is involved in putting a book online, steps she had to figure out when she decided to convert her backlist titles of the Jane Lawless series into ebooks.

• First, you need to be sure you have the publication rights or work to get rights reverted from the original publisher. This can take some time. She found that dealing directly with the publisher was the most efficient way.
• You need to get the printed book scanned (she had hers done by a company that does this using a device that looks like “a tiny tanning bed for books”) – or you can work from a digital file. Make sure any editorial changes that were made are reflected in the digital file. If you use a company to do this step, you’ll want to get the scanned files back in mobi, ePub, and pdf formats. Mobi is the format Amazon uses; most other ebook vendors use ePub. Among such companies are 52novels, BookBaby, and Booknook. (Ellen was very happy with Kimberly Hitchens at Booknook.)
• Cover design  is important. Ellen said that words have to be relatively HUGE and graphic has to be simple and sharp in order to stand out when only postage-stamp size. She recommends The Book Designer as an interesting blog on the topic of cover art.
• She recommends giving each book an ISBN, which can be purchased at www.isbn.org. This is expensive, so buy in blocks if you plan to do more than one book. Because an ISBN is so commonly used to identify books, it’s extremely important for distribution. (NB: This is the key to why Amazon started selling books. There was no other widely-used consumer product with a standard inventory control system. I forget where I read that. Maybe it was just something I dreamed.) You can’t use the ISBN of a book already published, because it’s specific to the edition.
• Metadata will help people discover your books. Make a list of all the words that people might be searching for – setting, subject matter, genre, etc.  Before you get ready to upload, also be sure to have review quotes and blurbs on hand, because these will be entered as you upload and will help readers make up their mind about your book.
• DRM (digital rights management) is optional. It makes copying difficult and is designed to discourage people from sharing your book. Unfortunately it can frustrate users and is easily cracked, so Ellen prefers to go without it. This will be a choice you’ll be asked to make as you upload your book.
• Pricing is complicated. It’s easy to lower a price, but hard to go up—because customers get irate. Amazon’s royalty structure encourages prices at $2.99 and up. Low prices may be harmful for the business in the long run (and your percentage is much lower). Good job, Ellen!

Marcia Talley followed , giving detailed step-by-step instructions on how to clean  up and upload a document to Amazon and other ebook platforms. She had a lot of examples; here are some random notes (I was getting tired):

• Need to have a Word document – scanning may be best if you have been edited; otherwise you need to work every edit into your original manuscript. Even so, you need to proofread scanned text, because the OCR (optical character recognition) can go wrong. She showed some amusingly garbled phrases to illustrate this point.
• In Word, use the “show” icon to tidy up the invisible problems of  extra spaces or tabs or hard returns where they don’t belong. (Do you still put two spaces after a period, just like you were taught in typing class. Don’t do that!! Your typing teacher lied. You’ll have to delete that extra space.) Take out all of the contents of headers and footers, including page numbers.
• Ctrl+A and make sure the format is consistent throughout – with properly indented paragraphs, etc. Use standard fonts and avoid any fussy special fonts; they won’t work in ebooks. (A short editorial comment here: the absolute lack of design is one of the things I despise about ebooks.) Use find/replace to take out double spaces – need to be one space between sentences only. Yeah, that typing teacher was a sadist. Set your manuscript to have curly, not straight, quotes. Use page breaks rather than section breaks.
• Have your bank account info ready – it will be needed to set up your account – not to spend money, but to earn it.
• Make sure the cover art is 72 dpi – if the upload doesn’t work, it won’t tell you why it didn’t work, but chances are your cover wasn’t 72 dpi.

There was a lot more detail in her presentation slides.

The dinner speaker was Meg Gardiner. Her talk was followed by a panel on marketing and consisted of a self-published author, an agent, and a staffer from Open Road Media. I didn’t take notes for this, but the message was “use technology to build personal relationships with readers” and the tools are twitter and interactive websites that tie into the story.

The writer suggested writers look for readers outside the usual genre circles; connect with interesting people and then let them know what you’ve published. Traditional publishing gives you visibility only briefly, when the book is newly released, which doesn’t give it time to build buzz; Open Road does this for authors, continuing marketing campaigns long after the launch. The speaker from Open Road said they don’t see any reason to have book trailers, but they do use video more in a documentary sense – filming short pieces that tie a book into current events or hot issues. The agent sketched out a way for an author to build an interactive website that invites readers into a character’s world, an alternate universe where the site acts like a “wormhole” between the real world and the fictional one, creating a stronger bond of intimacy between the reader and characters. All agreed that authors need to develop an ongoing relationship with readers, which may not take a lot of money but does take time. Although each one described work that could be material for two full-time jobs, they all agreed that writers need to find a balance between market-oriented relationship-building and writing.

All in all, it made for a very interesting day. Eventually there will be some video highlights of the sessions available, so you can see all the bits I left out.

photo courtesy of jm3

Libby thinks the way publishers are behaving with electronic rights is ignorant and blundering.  But don’t rush out to make your own ebooks until you have considered the pros and cons of traditional and self-publishing.

Advantages of traditional publishing: don’t underestimate their marketing support. Though they may not offer much personal support except for a small number of books they are promoting heavily, they do send out advanced reader copies and their distribution channels are strong and broad. Having physical books on retailers’ shelves helps get the word out in a different way than online chatter can do. Contrary to rumor, publishers still perform editing. Booksellers are valuable for the handselling they do, and traditional publishers get books into those stores. Awards tend to go to traditionally published books, though that is changing. Reviews, which tend to favor traditional publications, also give authors a valuable third party endorsement. It’s much hard to get reviewed by influential reviewers if you’re self-published.

Disadvantages: the percentage of ebook sales offered to authors is too small. Publishers tend to be inflexible. They are slow in reporting sales and royalties and slow in paying them. The marketing they’re good at is very short-lived – no more than six weeks for a new book, after which the next group of newly-published books is given the spotlight and your book is no longer promoted at all.

Advantages of self-publishing ebooks: control is in the hands of the author. This is attractive to a lot of writers. There is no need to go through intermediaries – agents and publishers. Libby recommends paying for critical services: cover art (which is different than traditional cover art because it is small and has to “pop”); editing – either copyediting or copyediting plus a developmental editor who can help shape a book. Conversion is a cost. Amazon is where her books sell most strongly, but they have so much control in the industry that it’s worrying.

Disadvantages: Amazon is bad when it is bad – which is often (meaning frequent technical problems when uploading ebooks and their associated files and metadata). There is little available at the moment in the way of third-party recommendation mechanisms (such as respected and widely-read reviews). Since there are no gatekeepers, every ebook has to distinguish itself while in the company of some awful dreck. It’s very difficult to know what works for marketing and very hard for readers to discover what’s good. Pricing is tricky – it’s a buyer’s market right now and Libby’s experience is that low is the most powerful price point. She pointed out that you can’t easily move up in pricing without sales plummeting. Moving down in price is another matter. However be aware that you pay a steep price for going low; Amazon pays a much larger percentage on books priced at $2.99 and up in order to discourage the 99 cent book price point expectation.

She also spoke a bit about marketing and the changing role of agents, who can’t make the income they did when advances are dropping so low. Incidentally, she’s a good speaker – very relaxed, yet energetic.

Next, there was a conversation between author Cathy Pickens and bookseller/publisher Jim Huang. Cathy made the scandalous announcement that Jim actually has read ebooks. (He’s a well-known defender of printed books.) That, of course, gave him an opportunity to talk about why he loves print, which was a good addition to the mix. Jim then made the point that authors don’t have to choose between agent and Big Six publishers and self-publishing; small houses offer a third way. Small publishers have the same distribution potential as major publishers so long as they are represented in the Ingram distribution system. What you need to know in choosing a small publisher is its “access  to market” – and that means the terms of sale are critical. These conditions for retailers (in this case, booksellers) have to match the industry standard (including discount and returnability) and be advantageous enough for booksellers to carry them; that’s what access to market means for authors. Beware of small publishers that can’t provide retailers the conditions that they need to make selling their books a realistic business proposition; you will lose a major advantage of having someone publish your book. Jim also argued that .99 cent pricing is bad for business, not just because the revenue is low but because it makes it seem all books are fungable – when each is actually unique and each choice should be based on the book, not the price of it.

photo courtesy of BMeunier and  MorBCN