The good news? There’s a new page on Facebook devoted to bringing together authors who have published their out-of-print books in electronic format, and the readers who are eager to get their hands on those republished books. Here’s the description from the Backlist Ebooks page:

“We’re print-published authors who have released our out-of-print backlist titles as reasonably priced ebooks. Our Wall has announcements of new projects; check out the page tabs for the books we’ve put into e-vailability.”

The Backlist Ebooks page is well thought out and easy to navigate. The Authors tab lists participating authors (the number keeps growing), along with links to their websites and books. The Genres tab tells you who writes what kind of book. My favorite is the Resources tab, which provides valuable info about ebooks, where to buy them, what equipment you’ll need to read them (a computer is sufficient, no special player needed), and the various formats available.

This line from the info tab says it all: “We’d like to create a thriving backlist ebook community.” I’m very excited about connecting with readers and other authors on the Backlist Ebooks Facebook page.

Last week I gave a presentation to Long Island Romance Writers, my home chapter of Romance Writers of America, on the Opening Hook—how to start your book with a bang. Who doesn’t love great first lines? Here are a few of my faves:

“I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.” MIDDLESEX, Jeffrey Eugenides.

“One hot August Thursday afternoon, Maddie Faraday reached under the front seat of her husband’s Cadillac and pulled out a pair of black lace underpants. They weren’t hers.” TELL ME LIES, Jennifer Crusie.

“Jack Newton had no choice but to frame himself for murder.” MOMENT OF TRUTH, Lisa Scottoline.

“Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear. Of course no childhood is without its terrors; yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn’t been president or if I hadn’t been the offspring of Jews.” THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA, Phillip Roth.

“After nearly a quarter of a century of marriage, Richie Meyers, my husband, told me to call him Rick. Then he started slicking back his hair with thirty-five-dollar-a-jar English pomade.” AFTER ALL THESE YEARS, Susan Isaacs.

“’Where’s Papa going with that ax?’ said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.” CHARLOTTE’S WEB, E.B. White. (Thanks to my chapter-mate Jeannie Moon for suggesting that one.)

“On the morning of November 25, a woman named Jo-Layne Luxe drove to the Grab ‘N Go minimart in Grange, Florida, and purchased spearmint Certs, unwaxed dental floss, and one ticket for the state Lotto.” LUCKY YOU by Carl Hiaasen.

“What I warn you to remember is that I am a detective. Our relationship with truth is fundamental but cracked, refracting confusingly like fragmented glass.” IN THE WOODS by the ridiculously talented Tana French.

“The building was on fire, and it wasn’t my fault.” BLOOD RITES, Jim Butcher (My gratitude to the Good Twin, Patricia Ryan, for that gem.)

“Suicide bombers are easy to spot.” GONE TOMORROW, Lee Child.

“My name is Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.” THE LOVELY BONES by Alice Sebold.

And finally, one of my all-time favorites…

“Daisy Devereaux had forgotten her bridegroom’s name.” KISS AN ANGEL, Susan Elizabeth Phillips.

What’s your favorite first line?

I’ve taught countless writing workshops on many topics, and at the heart of all of them is one fundamental question: How do I get (and remain) happily published? Everyone in the biz has his or her answer. Here’s mine.

1. Read all types of fiction, various genres and literary fiction, and analyze what you read. Don’t confine yourself to romance or suspense or paranormal urban shapeshifting or whatever—you don’t learn that way.

2. Join a writers’ organization. That’s where you hone your craft, learn the market, make contacts within the industry, and get the emotional support you need to keep going.

3. Don’t try to adhere to someone else’s way of working. Maybe you do your best writing at 3am. In crayon on toilet paper. While cleaning out the gerbil cage. Pantser, plotter, it’s all good. Every writer must discover what works for him or her. It’s a very personal experience.

4. Be willing to learn from others, both your favorite authors and your writer buddies. No, don’t just yes me, really do it! I’ve seen mediocre writers improve dramatically and get published by taking critiques to heart and doggedly studying their craft. I’ve also seen gifted writers who were too arrogant to learn from others and whose best work is holding up table legs.

5. Give yourself permission to write garbage. Yeah, I’m talking to you! Don’t be such a damn perfectionist. No, this does not mean you pack up your garbage with an SASE and send it off to your dream agent. It means don’t expect instant brilliance. You’ve got to flex the writing muscles. It’s a process.

6. It’s become a popular meme, but that doesn’t make it any less true: Talent. Persistence. Luck. Pick any two.

Night fishing sounded like so much fun. You get to fish. At night. With your pals on a boat in the Atlantic.

Okay, here’s the thing about boats. They rock. Which is not an issue for the lucky people who don’t get seasick. And here’s the thing about seasickness. You don’t find out you’re one of the unlucky ones until you’re on the damn boat. And here’s the thing about damn boats. When you’re on one, you can’t just stroll off it and end the torment. Well, not unless you’re a very good swimmer. In the case of night fishing in the Atlantic, not unless you’re an Olympic-caliber swimmer who sweats shark deterrent.

I’ll spare you the grisly details.

Oh, the hell with that. If I had to suffer, so do you. We boarded the boat—it was called the Puke Bucket as I recall—at around 7:00 on a beautiful summer evening. We carted plenty of food and beer aboard, of which we partook in prodigious quantities as the boat motored out of the bay and into the ocean. The engine was chugging, the chum was flying, the suds were going down easy.

When we were miles from land, the captain cut the engine, which was when that rocking thing started. Here’s something else about seasickness. One can deny the signals one’s stomach is sending one’s gray matter only so long before push comes to shove. Or more accurately, before beer and fried chicken come geysering through nostrils.

The first few times, I ran to the head (the Worst Toilet on the Atlantic to you landlubbers), ignoring the prominent sign that said basically, If you came in here to heave your beer and chicken, get your nasty self out to the rail. Eventually I took my nasty self to the rail because, well, there just wasn’t enough time to flee to the head and anyway I had no more energy left to do anything but stare down into the inky water and, um, feed the bluefish.

The best part (you just knew there had to be a best part) was around, oh, midnight when the engine started up again and I uttered a little prayer of thanks that we were finally returning to dry land—only to discover that Captain Quint had decided there weren’t enough blues at our current location and we were going farther out into the Atlantic. My first and last night-fishing excursion lasted nearly eight hours. Can’t say I didn’t get my money’s worth.

Why did I tell you this disgusting story? Why, to illustrate a fundamental principle of the writer’s craft, of course. It has been said that for a writer, there’s no tragedy. It’s all material.

That horrific fishing trip found its way into my book Too Darn Hot, which was originally published by Zebra Books and has just been reissued in electronic form. The restaurant-reviewer heroine, Lina Holland, finds herself (you’re way ahead of me, I know) suffering a world-class case of mal de mer on a fishing boat in the Atlantic. Meanwhile the hero of the story catches the first bluefish, a surly bruiser which sinks its teeth into the hem of Lina’s pants and refuses to let go. She’s forced to drag the sumbitch to the rail so she can enjoy her beer and chicken all over again.

I can hear you thinking, Time out, Pammy. Fish do not eat people’s pants.

The hell they don’t! Okay, the culprit was a bonito, not a blue, and it went after my husband’s pants, not mine. Plus it was a different fishing trip altogether. But you get the picture. It’s all material. If I hadn’t endured that horrific night of “fishing” (I didn’t so much as drop my line in the water), I wouldn’t have had the background for my favorite scene in Too Darn Hot. Yay, tragedy.

I live on Long Island, New York. When I first started writing romance novels, the closest chapters of Romance Writers of America were in New York City and New Jersey. They’re great chapters and I did make it to several meetings, but both locations are just too far from my home—no way could I get there every month.

Writing is such a solitary experience and I yearned for the company of other writers, not to mention the education, networking opportunities, and mutual support a writers’ organization provides. RWA had been in existence for 15 years at that point (this year is the 30^th anniversary!), yet for some reason there was no chapter on Long Island.

I hesitated to get the ball rolling and commit myself to what I assumed would be a time-consuming, work-intensive endeavor. But I wanted that chapter, dammit! Long story short, I talked myself into it. I drafted a letter and sent it to all the RWA members with Long Island Zip codes. (This wasn’t email, mind you, we’re talking Pony Express.)

Many of those I contacted joined immediately! I needn’t have worried about being overwhelmed. The charter members of Long Island Romance Writers threw themselves into the new chapter and quickly turned it into a successful, dynamic writers’ group.

Early on we considered hosting an annual conference as some chapters do, until some wise person pointed out that Long Island is a stone’s throw from Manhattan, home to, well, the whole dang publishing industry. We could put on a half-day event and attract, not only scads of writers eager to pitch their books, but the agents and editors who were eager to be pitched.

Thus was born the renowned annual LIRW Agent/Editor Luncheon, which has been bringing together writers and publishing pros for 13 years. Many successful writing careers have had their start at this event. This year’s Luncheon was held in June at the beautiful Fox Hollow Inn in Woodbury. Our guest speaker was Steven Zacharius, President and CEO of Kensington Publishing Corp. Steve’s speech about the state of the industry was immensely informative and entertaining.

I’m proud to be the official Founder of LIRW, but I cannot tell a lie. All I did was give that first little nudge. Our terrific chapter has been a group effort from the start, and I’m even prouder to be associated with the talented, dedicated members who have made this organization what it is today.

If you read my “Was I a Bet?” post, you know that I wrote my first book in 1992 as part of a bet with the Good Twin, Patricia Ryan. Meteor Publishing bought that book, which was titled Secret Harmony. (Yeah, well, the heroine’s name is Leah Harmony—I’ve gotten better at naming books.) Four months before the scheduled November 1993 release date, I was lying on a sun-drenched Cape Cod beach admiring cover sketches and reviewing the galleys when my editor called with some less than welcome news.

Did I say less than welcome? Try devastating. Meteor Publishing Corporation was going out of business. Well, technically they weren’t going out of business, not yet (that would come later), but they did cease publishing. Immediately. So I had the singular experience of informing all my friends and relatives who’d been eagerly awaiting my first novel, bragging about me to everyone they knew, that it wasn’t gonna happen.

Two years later my for-real first book came out, a paranormal romantic mystery called His Secret Side (Okay, I am not responsible for that lousy title, the powers that be at Harlequin chose it). That book was followed by eleven others while Secret Harmony languished on my hard drive. Just like you never forget your first lover, I never forgot that book, and a part of me always knew it would have its day.

The years flew by in a whirl of million-dollar advances, worldwide book tours, and movie-of-the-week deals (oh, I do crack myself up). Someone invented electronic publishing and I decided to get in on the action, starting with the two novels I had rights back to. I renamed that first book Snowed (the hero and heroine are snowed in at a swanky Gold Coast mansion) and published it with Smashwords and Kindle.

But before I could release Snowed for publication, I knew I had to edit it. I mean, I’d written it how many years ago? <counting on fingers…have patience…almost there> Eighteen years ago! OMG! Eighteen years ago no one even knew what OMG meant!

Eighteen years ago no one had heard of digital photography. My hero, James Bradburn, is a professional photographer and one scene actually takes place in his darkroom. And I wanted this story to stay current, so I had to update it. Okay, so let’s see…Got it! James uses digital for his pro work and old-fashioned film for all his personal stuff. Which is cool because in all the ways that count for a romantic hero, he’s an old-fashioned guy. Problem solved.

Except then there were the cell phones. Which is to say, there weren’t cell phones, not in this book. Or in real life back then, at least they weren’t ubiquitous as they are now. The thing is, some of the plot points in this book kinda depend on the fact that my heroine, Leah, is incommunicado, snowed in as she is with this insanely sexy, wealthy, brooding shutterbug for four long days and, yeah, nights. (Not tellin’, you’ll have to read it, though I will say, I’m never shy when it comes sex scenes.)

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah. Anachronisms. I did some rewriting and managed to get around the cell-phone thing. So then we come to the Suez Canal. What, you ask, does the Suez Canal have to do with romance? Not a flippin’ thing except that in the book I have a minor character whose stated age does not compute with the fact that he was supposed to have been a young reporter in Egypt during the Suez Canal crisis. Which occurred, hello, in 1956. It was no big deal to age the fellow, so that’s what I did. Well, I wanted to keep the Suez Canal thing, don’t ask me why, and no, none of the action takes place in Egypt, it’s all in the snooty Gold Coast of Long Island. Well, that and rural Arkansas where Leah hails from.

So what brings a sweet southern belle (try muleheaded entrepreneur) like Leah to Gatsby territory? A stunning secret, of course—hence that cringe-worth original title—and a deep need to confront James Bradburn for past sins. I loved this book when I first wrote it and I fell in love all over again when I tweaked it for twenty-first-century consumption. If you’d like a sample, there’s an excerpt on the Snowed page of this blog.

This book was inspired by my sister-in-law, Terry Biener, who is a restaurant reviewer and has taken me along on a bunch of reviews with her. In her case, she’s not anonymous. The owner and staff know who she is and make sure she and her guest sample a wide variety of dishes. And yes, it’s as cool as it sounds to be on the receiving end of all this great food and personal attention.

Anyway, we were at this wonderful, quirky restaurant on Long Island when a story idea struck me: The heroine is a restaurant reviewer. The hero is a chef and the owner of a struggling eatery. She can make or break his beloved restaurant.

The Good Twin designed the cover, BTW. Ain’t it gaw-jus?

It was way back in 1992. Protein soup bubbled and blorped in the primordial ooze. Fish had yet to sprout legs and lungs and sashay onto dry land. Those brainiacs at CERN were yammering about something they called the World Wide Web. No one listened. They were always going on about something.

And yours truly was spending her days copyediting book manuscripts sent to her by publishers. Correcting grammar, spelling, punctuation, word usage—

WAKE UP, I’m telling a story here! Now, some of the books I had to whip into shape were romance novels. Not theretofore being a romance reader, I found myself fanning my blushing cheeks. These stories were hot! I mean, once the hero worked his way past the heroine’s hoopskirt and corset stays, the reader got treated to your basic flea’s-eye view of the naughty goings-on.

Now, I knew I wanted to write fiction, and coincidentally—or not so coincidentally if you haul genetics into the equation—my identical twin sister, Patricia Ryan (a.k.a. the Good Twin, and yes, I know what that makes me) had also been bitten by the writing bug.* We both decided to try our hand at romance novels, which just happen to be the healthiest genre out there, with millions of devoted, book-buying readers. Plus, like almost every woman out there, we love stories featuring a strong, satisfying relationship.

I don’t recall which one of us first came up with the idea of a bet, but we had the details hammered out in short order. Whoever wrote and (here comes the tricky part) sold a romance novel first would be the winner. The loser would have to pay for a year’s worth of hotel stays at the numerous writers’ conferences we attend.

I completed my first novel in three months (a feat I have yet to duplicate) and soon sold it to Meteor Publishing Corp., which published a line of romances called Kismet. In the meantime Pat finished her book and won the industry’s highest award for an unpublished work, the Golden Heart. A sale to Harlequin Temptation followed soon after.

So I won the bet, right? Well, not exactly. Four months before my book was to see print, Meteor went out of business. I kept writing, though it took me two long years before I sold another book, this time to Harlequin Intrigue. So I sold a book first, but Pat was the first to be published.

We went dutch on the hotels.

*Pat and I were used as freaky examples of genetic similarity in The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Decoding Your Genes, by Linda Tagliaferro. For real. Page 238, check it out.

Good Twin & Evil Twin face off