Welcome to E-Book Week

By Chester Campbell

March 3-9 is E-Book Week. The e-book revolution has changed the face of the publishing world. The major publishers were dragged into it kicking and screaming, but they're now pushing ahead. There's still a lot of disagreement about prices and royalties, with some publishers charging as much for e-books as they do for print books, though they don't have the same production expense involved.

Authors who are able to negotiate contracts that leave them with their electronic rights typically cut the price for their e-books. After writers like Joe Konrath struck out big-time in the e-book business with prices like 99 cents or $2.99, showing huge sales numbers, this became something of the standard for pricing. When Amazon started paying 70 percent royalties on books at $2.99 or above, that became the benchmark.

The ebookweek.com website is full of information on the electronic publishing business. There's an excellent history of e-books at the website here.

I suspect most of the books written by the authors who appear in this blog are available as e-books as well as books in print. Some, like my The Poksu Conspiracy, can only be purchased in the .mobi format for the Kindle. But it isn't necessary to own a Kindle to read it. Amazon has programs to download allowing you to read their e-books on your PC, laptop, cell phone, and wherever. And if you own a Nook or other e-reader that uses files such as EPUB, you can get a free program at calibre-ebook.com that will let you convert files from one e-book format to another.

For the author who owns their rights, e-book royalties at 70 percent can be as much or more than paper royalties even with a low price. Personally I'm doing better than ever since most of my sales are e-books. If you haven't read an e-book lately, celebrate E-Book Week by ordering one now.

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Writing Techno-Thrillers

Tom Clancy is the master of the techno-thriller. I was an avid reader of his books from the first, The Hunt for Red October. I enjoyed his use of technology, though at times it grew a bit tedious, such as his detailed description of the bad guys fashioning a nuclear bomb. I was impressed enough, though, that I put quite a bit of technology into my first manuscripts in the early nineties.

I found the genre required a great deal of research into a variety of subjects. I went to the Vanderbilt University Library and got a courtesy card after explaining that I was an author, though unpublished at the time. I spent a lot of hours going through the stacks and reading up on technical subjects, both in books and magazines. Much of the information I needed came from the Engineering section of the library.

I wrote three Post Cold War thrillers that required extensive research. The first, Beware the Jabberwock, now in the Kindle Store, was not as heavily dependent on techno business as the following books. It did include a high-tech security system for an island off the Florida coast, for which I got an assist from my brother, whose electrical engineering career included being director of engineering for the local electric utility. I also researched some technical aspects of aerial photography. In earlier times I had been intelligence officer for an Air National Guard tactical reconnaissance group.

The second book, The Poksu Conspiracy, involves South Korea and nuclear power generation, plus some nuclear weapons issues. I frequented the Vanderbilt Library extensively on these subjects, allowing use of the jargon for getting a nuclear power plant online. I solicited advice from my brother regarding a sophisticated electronic setup for detonating a bomb.

The third book, which turned out as long as a Clancy thriller, is titled Overture to Disaster. Like the first book, it begins in the fall of 1991 as the Cold War was ending. Following parallel plot threads, it tracks a Belarus police investigator seeking answers to his brother's death and the aftermath of an Air Force special operators mission to bring out an important defector from Iran. This required research into the MH-53J Pave Low III special operations helicopter. After writing the part about the mission, I sent it to an operations officer in a spec ops unit for critique. I also did extensive research into Soviet weapons and the use of nerve gas.

Overall, I found that writing techno-thrillers requires a dedication to technical research and finding people who can supply obscure information. It was a lot of fun twenty years ago, but I have since gravitated to whodunits that require a limited amount of outside digging. Those early novels wandered all around the globe. Now I stick mostly to the Nashville area, with a few excursions to places not too distant.

Chester Campbell

Visit me at Mystery Mania