During their career, Ellery Queen wrote hundreds of radio plays for a series called The Adventures of Ellery Queen. Between 1939-1948, the show was broadcast alternately on CBS, NBC and ABC. It was immensely popular, and alongside Ellery Queen’s production of detective novels, the authors wrote an approximate 354 episodes for the show’s eight season run.

On many websites you can listen to and download these episodes for free. Here we’ve found the dates for the majority of twelve episodes, and many more can be found through Google. Something new for your iPod…

The Singing Rat, January 7, 1943
The Adventure Of The World Series Crime, September 30 1943
The Adventure Of The Mischief Maker, January 13, 1944
The Scarecrow And The Snowman, January 20 1944
Dead Man’s Cavern, April 13 1944
The Adventure of the Message in Red, November 11 1945
The Armchair Detective, March 27 1946
The Three Frogs, April 29, 1948
One Diamond, May 6, 1948
The Adventure of the Scarecrow
Adventures of the Sing Bat
The Mischief Maker

http://www.radiolovers.com/pages/ellery_queen.htm

The Langtail Press publishes three of Ellery Queen’s novels in both paperback and eBook. We hope to bring more of these classic detective stories back into circulation this year.

The Halfway House (1936 )
The Door Between (1936-37)
The Devil To Pay (1937-38)

The Langtail Press

I have been thinking about pricing recently. Pricing of books is a difficult science. The price of the raw materials, on the whole, makes up quite a small amount of the total (except with print on demand). The major costs are author costs and the overhead that is needed to make the thing happen.

Ebook land produces a whole different load of issues. There is no cost of printing, storage or distribution (at least not in the normal sense). There is the cost of creating and storing files (although the file is essentially the same file that is used to print hard copy). But there is still the author cost and the overhead. How do you set a price in this context?

Publishers have begun by linking price to the physical world. This does not make sense. How can you have a hardback price, then later a paperback price for an ebook? By asking this question, however, you may begin to raise the question of the differential between hardback and paperback in the first place (because it is not justified by print costs alone). This whole thing is exacerbated by the fact that people expect things on the internet to be free (or at least very cheap).

Publishers have fought against low pricing on ebooks, and this has led to the agency pricing model (where publishers set their own prices). This does not seem to have halted the drop in prices. Also the OFT have now got involved.

Where does this end? The answer is that nobody knows. But it will be fun to watch…

James

Setting up a new business is bound to be a nervous experience. To paraphrase the film Field of Dreams, there is always the question “if you build it, will they come?” Well, I am glad to say that people do seem to appreciate what we are doing here.

Sales have been encouraging enough to maintain spirits. And I have had many encouraging emails from people who are happy to see these books back, with many suggesting favourite authors that might be good additions to The Langtail Press list.

For those of you that have bought books (or ebooks) I thank you. I would also like to thank other people who have helped along the way. I have had much help from the people at Amazon (both on the Kindle and POD side). Lightning Source have been incredibly helpful, steering me through some of the areas of publishing that I knew nothing about. Impelsys, who have created the files from which all these books derive, have been equally patient with the gaps in my knowledge and the mistakes that I have made (which they then need to correct).

Finally I would like to thank the agents and the authors’ estates for the faith they have put in me. It is a cliché in publishing that we are nothing without our authors. But, as with many clichés, it is such because it is true. It is reassuring at this point to feel that, so far, I don’t think I have let them down.

I said in my first blog, that my second would be about how and why I chose authors. The writer of this blog retains the right to change strategy at any time (hence the reason for running his own business) and will return to that next time (unless the strategy changes in the meantime).

James

I set up this business to bring back out of print books, mainly in the crime/ mystery genre, but also a selection of thrillers. This job has very much been a labour of love; reading and selecting books for publication. It has also been a steep learning curve, as I have had to learn parts of the publishing business and processes that I was only dimly aware of. I have new-found respect for some of the masters of the darker corners of publishing.

I am very proud of the list that we have managed to put together. We have some of the greats of the crime/mystery genre. John Dickson Carr, Anthony Berkeley and Freeman Wills Crofts (coming soon) are some of the early pioneers and founding members of the Detection Club, which is still going today. It is wonderful, as a lifelong fan of the genre, to see how things developed and be able to bring these books back to life again.

The idea of The Langtail Press is to make these books available in both hard copy and ebook format. Ideally we will grow the list quickly, bringing back more books from these authors and also other authors that have slipped out of print. If you are a fan and have an author that you love, whom you would love to see back in print please feel free to contact me.

My blog will be both a commentary on where we are as a business and the new titles and authors that we are publishing, and also an occasional commentary on the publishing industry (I am afraid that I won’t be able to help myself). These are very exciting times for people that love books: with wider availability than ever before. Internet retailing, print on demand and ebooks allow the long tail (from which we derive our name) to live and thrive. If you order one of our books from Amazon, it will in all likelihood be printed that same day and shipped to you as if it was held in stock. Ebooks offer fantastic opportunities for the cheap delivery of books to readers (no print, storage or distribution costs although the files are relatively expensive to create at the moment).

This feels like enough of an introduction. Next I will talk a little about some of our authors and why I chose them.

James