Answers to your questions
Dear Friends and Fans of the Three Investigators,
In response to yesterday’s post, a number of you wrote asking about the current book situation, and since others may have some of the same questions, I’ve decided to answer the questions here.
1 All three formats of the first three books (i.e. e-books, paperbacks, and hardcovers) will indeed be available to buy on the morning of March 3rd. That’s the way it’s been set up with both Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and if they do their jobs as promised, that’s the way it will be. For some reason, Amazon only enables pre-sales of e-books, (not physical books), when it comes to small independent publishers like Hollow Tree Press.
2 On March 3rd, I’ll also be sending out excerpts from the first three chapters of The Mystery of the Abecedarian Academy, so that you’ll be able to see in some detail the ways in which that first book launches the new series – something the sales platforms don’t really make possible any more.
3 I’ll be sending out similar excerpts from Chapters 4-6 of The Mystery of the Brobdingnagian Beast on March 6th, and from Chapters 7-9 of The Mystery of the Chimeric Cornucopia on March 9th. As I said in the note at the end of yesterday’s post, varying the chapters from which I'm choosing excerpts is the best idea I’ve come up with to give you an experience similar to the one you'd have if you were leafing through the pages in a bookstore or library.
4 Because the excerpts I’ll be sending (now and in the future), will always be from three consecutive chapters, they’ll also always be from three different points-of-view. In The Mystery of the Abecedarian Academy, the first chapter is written from Bob’s point-of-view, the second from Pete’s, and the third from Jupiter’s. (Unlike my father’s books, the new books have been written in a particular kind of shifting limited omniscient, which works well for books aimed at slightly older readers.)
5 As for the physical books, while both the paperbacks and the hardcovers are really attractive and well-made (at least judging from the proofs) the hardcover is especially fun to hold in the hand while you read. In fact, it really invites reading, somehow – and the Amazon version is sewn in the traditional manner, not just hot-glued.
6 Unfortunately, the printing costs are much higher for hardcovers, and their higher price-to-print ends up being reflected in the higher cost of the books themselves. We can sell the paperbacks for $14.95, but the hardcovers will be $19.95 – with the extra money all going to printing.
Note to my non-American subscribers:
1 Grok tells me that both Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble will ship physical books purchased on their American websites to addresses in the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, India, Spain, France, Denmark, and indeed, just about any country on the planet – with a few exceptions like North Korea, and some logistically tricky spots.
2 The costs for shipping will be higher than they would be with a ship-to address in the United States, and (depending on the country), the books may need to pass through customs, but Grok insists that just about anyone reading these words who wants a physical copy of one of the new books should have little trouble getting it.
3 At the moment, Steven and I haven’t started the process of trying to find publishers for the Spanish and French and Italian and so on translation rights, but we’re hoping that many of the foreign publishers who published my father’s books between 1964 and the 1990s will be interested in publishing ours as well.
4 To my surprise and great delight, I did get an unsolicited inquiry from one such publisher recently, but just as it took quite a while for me and Steven to get our books in place for English-language publication, it will also take us a while to get them into place for publication in other languages.
I think that answers all the questions I got yesterday. I won’t be posting again until I send the first set of excerpts out on March 3rd. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the whole process works smoothly from here on out.
Warmly,
Elizabeth
