Daisy in Polish

by Carola

My Daisy Dalrymple mysteries are now coming out in Poland. The Polish publisher bought the translation rights to the first 10, and I gather they're putting out one a week. This is the cover of the first, Death at Wentwater Court:

Cute and eye-catching, if somewhat inaccurate as far as the story's concerned. Very different from the original cover:

and the large print:













Not to mention the equally cartoonish US paperback:

and the UK edition:

Or the audio and two German editions each with different artwork!
They're calling the series Daisy D. I wonder if Dalrymple is impossible for Polish-speakers to pronounce.

There seems to be a boxed set of all 10. I'm not sure exactly how this works. Perhaps readers can buy the box along with one book and fill it as they come out? Or perhaps once all of them are out, they'll start selling the boxed set already filled. This box has the cover of the second in the series, The Winter Garden Mystery.

The spines of the volumes are very clever, producing a cat that strongly reminds me of the Pink Panther, which also adorns all three front covers that I've seen. Here's the third, Requiem for a Mezzo:

Interesting--especially as I can't remember ever writing about a cat in any of the Daisy books. There may be a casual mention somewhere in the 21 I've written to date, but I'm a dog-person and so is Daisy! Her stepdaughter's dog, Nana, appears in several of the books, finding a body in one and digging up a Clue in another, only to run away with it and rebury it. Nana even graces one cover:

I'd never actually described her appearance in detail, so now the artist has defined her.

With the help of friends and relatives, I've managed to put a welcome message in Polish on my website. A couple of days later I got more than twice as many hits than ever before--though I can't tell whether there were a lot of Poles!

While on the subject of cover art, I'm thrilled that the artist who's done so many great covers for Daisy (including Black Ship, above, but not Wentwater Court) is passing through town today and we're hoping to arrange to meet. I'm trying to decide which is my favourite, in case he asks.

99c for Kindle experiment

by Carola Dunn


My Regency e-publisher is experimenting with pricing on Amazon. She asked me if I'd like to find out what happened if one of my (36) Regencies was priced at 99c (UK 77p) instead of the usual $3.99. I said okay, and she chose A Lord for Miss Larkin, originally published in paperback in 1991.

 
No murder here, but there is an abduction so at a pinch you could call it crime fiction. What it does have is dogs, as you might guess from the paperback cover. The heroine has a Newfoundland, and three of her four eccentric aunts have West Highland Terriers. (The protagonist of my Cornish mysteries also has a Westie.) 


 

 http://www.amazon.com/Lord-Larkin-Valiant-Hearts-ebook/

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Larkin-Valiant-Hearts-Trilogy-ebook/

This book is the first of a trilogy, so if sales go up, the second and third books may follow at the regular price--one can always hope!

The second book, The Road to Gretna, features an elopement--or rather two elopements that get entangled with each other--and an extremely troublesome kitten. 

The third, Thea's Marquis, doesn't feature any animals, but it does have a villain or two and it ends with a thrilling rescue...

 It will be interesting to see what the pricing does for the sales and whether any increase carries over to the sequels and even to the rest of the 36. We won't know for a month or two, when the numbers come in. Fingers crossed!


  

The Perfect Protagonist

By Beth Terrell

I’ve heard it said that the most important character in any work of fiction is the villain, because the villain is the catalyst for the action and the one who forces change on the protagonist. But for me, the most important character in any novel is the protagonist. The most menacing villain in the world won’t save a book if we don’t care about the protagonist. (Think of Silence of the Lambs. Hannibal Lecter was a fascinating villain, but only because we cared about Clarice Starling. The later Lecter books don’t strike the same chord, because there’s no one we can believe in.) Since we're talking about mysteries and crime fiction, the protagonist is generally the sleuth, the person who is going to solve the mystery.

Can you imagine Miss Marple slugging it out with a hopped-up pimp in a shadowy alley that smells of urine and rotting garbage? Can you imagine Mike Hammer sipping tea in a parson's parlor, quietly ruminating about the psychological foibles of a small-town microcosm of society? Well, maybe you can--we're readers and writers after all; we live on imagination--but the image just doesn't hold up over the long haul. Poor Miss Marple would end up with a cut throat or a broken hip, and Mike Hammer would punch out the parson, and the balance of the universe would be restored. The story must be true to the characters.

This is not to say that the characters "take over the story" and begin writing it themselves (even though a lot of writers say they do). We like to believe that our characters, through our very own literary magic, can, like the Velveteen Rabbit, become real if we only want it badly enough. In a sense, they do become real--to us, and we hope to our readers. But what really happens when the characters "take over" is that the writer is in that creative zone, where the creative brain has suddenly realized who the characters are, what they would do, and where the story needs to go. It isn't working at the writing any more. It's playing. Let it play!

If it feels like the characters are taking over, this is the time to let them. Just remember that characters, like flesh-and-blood folks, don’t always make the right decisions. For paper-and-ink folks, the right decision is the authentic one. The wrong decision doesn’t ring true. Characters, like the rest of us, want to take the easy way out. They don’t want all this trouble, but we, as writers, have to give it to them anyway.

Characters also go astray sometimes. The creative brain thinks, “Oh, wouldn’t it be cool if Miss Marple slugged the parson?!” and Miss Marple thinks, “Hey, that’s way more interesting than nibbling on scones and sipping tepid tea!” and veers off in a direction that isn’t true to character and doesn’t serve the story. The creative brain can lead you to some wonderful places, but it can also lead you far afield. As writers, we get to play with our characters, but sooner or later, if we want to pursue this business called writing, we have to put on our editor hats and make sure they stay true to themselves.