SquawkRadio

We all know what books are, don’t we?  They’re 400 or so pages, bound together with a shiny cover on the front.  Sometimes a mass market book will last for years.  Some of my most beloved romances, the ones I keep in the attic, have pages of an odd yellow color, and an even odder smell, like a closet that got rained on.  Some of those books, if I open them too wide, spray their pages at my feet like rain itself.  These books (Laura London’s The Windflower, a whole set of Georgette Heyers, even a Barbara Cartland or two) were written by authors who might have been writing in their own attics.  They wrote without much input, except perhaps from a spouse or an editor.

My father is a poet.  All the time I was growing up, his readers wrote him snail mail, as we would call it.  Loads and loads of snail mail.  He had a bathtub full of it, and every once in a while he would pull out a letter and answer it.  In my experience of helping him answer mail (one of the primary ways I earned cash as a teen), most people who write poets are would-be poets themselves.  It isn’t an interaction with readers, even if he had tackled the whole bathtub.

Here’s my feeling:  Squawk Radio, and places like it, have changed books.  Forever.  Writers don’t sit in an attic, writing our books in isolation anymore.  We log onto the internet in the morning instead.  Readers are everywhere, telling us what they like and what they don’t like.  In my last series of books, beginning with Much Ado About You, readers changed the stories irrevokably. 

Readers liked the Earl of Mayne, from Your Wicked Ways—so I picked up a throw-away character and brought him over to a new series.  I’d never done that before!  They adored Josie, my plump littlest sister, for the challenges she faced; so I thought hard about what it meant for her to have a curvy figure in the Regency, and wove that into her story. 

Not coincidentally, Squawk Radio started while I was writing this series, and I began to feel as if the fabric of books themselves were changing.  Growing.  As I came up with blogs about writing and life, it forced me to think about what I was doing, to philosophize a character, or a story.  That was invaluable.  It helped me—forced me!—to grow as a writer.

For my last two books, The Taming of the Duke and Pleasure for Pleasure, I’ve written an extra chapter and posted it on my website —a chapter that readers wished they had seen in the book. 

If you’re reading Desperate Duchesses, stop by the bulletin board and add your idea to the question about Extra Chapters.  In about a month, I’ll post a new chapter for Desperate Duchesses on my website—a chapter that didn’t exist before readers asked for it.  Frankly, I’m hugely curious.  Will they want to see my heroine, Roberta, ten years later?  Will they want one more scene in bed?  Is there something they want explained, a character they particularly loved?

And I have a new feature on my website—beautiful little Easter Eggs.  If you click on one, it opens a “window to Eloisa’s study”—gives you a bit of background information about one of my books.  I’m going to add Easter Eggs for each new book—and guess what readers want more of in future Easter Eggs?  How many children a given character had.  Did this brother/sister/aunt ever get married—and to whom? 

See how books are changing?  I feel as if they’re porous now: more open to the wishes and dreams of their readers, more of a collaborative product.  They are not just a collection of yellowing pages, but a joint project, a collaboration.

This is my farewell blog for Squawk Radio, and it’s not one of regret, but celebration.  I think this community has had a huge effect on shaping the way we read and write books—AND THAT’S NO SMALL ACCOMPLISHMENT!!!

So for my final question… how has the way you read/write/analyse/enjoy books changed in the last five years?  Do you buy books for different reasons?  Do you read books you never would have?  What’s changed for you?