Buffets for Readers? Coming Right Up!

 By Nancy Jill Thames

Conjecture about where Amazon is headed with book distribution is always in the back of my publishing brain. Subscription services? What's that all about?

Think "NetFlix" for books. 

It turns out that the next wave of book distribution is already making headway with ravenous readers in the form of "book buffets" as a recent article on Jane Friedman's blog put it.

Now, I'm one who not only reads magazines back to front, I also read the fine print. Here's what I think -- on the positive side, book subscription services, which charge roughly between $8.99 and $9.95 a month for all the books you can read will enable voracious readers to download all they want. For readers who read a book or more a week that's a good deal!

If you don't have time to read, and pay for a subscription every month -- that's a disadvantage. But that's the way a subscription service works.

Personally, we have NetFlix for movies, Pandora for music (upgraded for no commercial interruptions), a home warranty plan with First American and Ameriplan for dental. Why not books?

How do authors make money? I'm glad you asked. Whenever readers download a portion of our books or the entire file, we are paid a percentage accordingly. I say, great! Book subscription services are simply other platforms to get people to read.

The Jillian Bradley Mystery Series can be read from the two following subscription services:
SCRIBD BOOK SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE

OYSTER BOOK SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE

Just a hint - both services offer a 30-day trial subscription for FREE! Are you hungry yet?

What do you think of this idea? Do you have a subscription? Inquiring authors at Cozy Mystery Magazine would like to know.

See you in my books.

~Nancy Jill 

NANCY JILL THAMES

Nancy Jill Thames is the author of seven books in the Jillian Bradley series. She is an award-winning blogger and  listed frequently on the Author Watch Bestseller’s List. In addition, she won first place in her church's 4th of July Celebration for her chocolate cream pie.

When she isn’t plotting her next book, she spends time with her six grandchildren in two states, tags along with her husband on business trips, and plays classical piano for her own personal enjoyment. She is an active member of the Leander Writers' Guild, American Christian Fiction Writers (ACFW CenTex-Chapter), Central Texas Authors, and supports the Central Texas SPCA with a portion of her book sales. She resides with her husband in Leander, Texas.

To learn more about the author and check out her books, please visit her blog at  

Cozy Mystery Author, Nancy Jill Thames.

The Doctor gets Cozy

What can be cozier than a nice, big, fluffy scarf? Or perhaps a sturdy trench coat to keep out the wind and the rain? Paper bags full of Jelly babies?  Queen Victoria fighting wherewolves? Old fashioned phone booths that are bigger on the inside? Not much that I can think of!

Concrete angels that come to life when you look away, and then zap you into the past when they touch you? That's fairly cozy for aliens...

But not quite as cozy as Agatha Christie and the giant man-wasp.

Dr. Who, series 4, episode 7.

David Tennant stars as the tenth doctor, a Time Lord who runs around time and space fixing little problems that threaten to destroy whole worlds.

In the episode "The Unicorn and the Wasp" Fennella Woolgar stars as the world's most popular novelist, Agatha Christie, who just happens to be attending a dinner party with a cast full of the usual suspects: a kindly old Colonel, a retiring clergy, one "Professor Peach." Any mystery with Agatha Christie's name attached could do no less!

Of course, there was a murder, in the library, with a lead pipe. But who dunnit? And what's with the giant wasp? With The Doctor as the egomaniac detective with uncanny knowledge of the world(s), Donna Noble as the plucky young girl who charges ahead to solve the crime, it's a mashup that fans of British TV, comic sci-fi, and cozy mysteries will all love.

The mystery of who did the killing is rather quickly solved, only to be replaced by "What is this giant wasp, and how do we kill it?" Giving homage to Christie, her little gray cells are the only ones that can sort out this mystery. And when she does, a mystery that has hung over Christie's real life all these years is also "solved."

I loved the humor of this episode, a light note in an otherwise intense era for Dr. Who. It is rather a relief to find that the whole world isn't in danger, that The Doctor isn't brooding over worlds lost, and that his plucky girl detective isn't brooding over love for him.

Woolgar is everything I hope that Christie was in real life. She's beautiful, intelligent, and capable of solving any riddle. In this episode she struggles with self doubt--something that was very real in her personal life in the time this show covers. Part of me hankers to know what really happened when Christie disappeared, but real life is so disappointingly real. The Unicorn and the Wasp, like all of Dr. Who, is an escape, for the viewer and maybe even, a little bit, to the memory of our dear Agatha.

Want to know more about Dr. Who? Check out his wikipedia page.

You can find The Unicorn and the Wasp and a hundred other Dr. Who episodes on Netflix, as well as whole series of Poirot and Miss Marple.