I am writing this before the 1st of May – is this a record? And does it mean that I’m now entirely organised and together, with the latest opus safely off to the publisher? What do you think? The truth is I’m doing it because I’m just a little bit stuck with No. 13, and it takes my mind off it for a bit.

I must tell you about the April competition. It is, of course, the clever people at Pedalo who pick the detail of the book jacket for the competition page, and I see it, like you do, when the website is updated. I have no prior knowledge of which book it is, so my first task is to work out the answer. And this time I couldn’t make up my mind – there were three books I thought it might be. I e-mailed Pedalo for help, and once I’d been told the answer, it was obvious, but – was it too difficult? Er…no. After that slightly false start I got the biggest postbag I’ve ever had for the competition, and hundreds of you (literally, hundreds) got it spot on. You are all clearly much better at this than I am!

So the five winners have been informed, and I’m really sorry to have to disappoint so many of you. But have another go this month, won’t you? The prizes will be the same as last month – signed first US editions of Death in the Family. What do you mean, is that because I’ve got more copies of it than I know what to do with? Well, yes. US publishers are very generous with their author copies.

And speaking of the US edition – for a reason that now escapes me, I went into Amazon UK, and called up a list of my books. To my surprise, it was headed by Death in the Family, which, as you must be tired of hearing by now, is the American title for what is known here as Births, Deaths and Marriages.

Now, I don’t know if you are an Amazon customer, but those of you who are will know that they do an offer called ‘Perfect Partners’, where they offer the book you’re interested in coupled with another one they think you’ll like, at an advantageous price for the two. And when I clicked on the Death in the Family page – guess what its ‘perfect partner’ was? Yep, it was Births, Deaths and Marriages! That would be a fun read.

I told Amazon that they were the same book with different titles, and Amazon immediately removed the page, thereby confirming my faith in them. I’ve dealt with Amazon as a customer and an author ever since I took my first faltering steps on the information superhighway (as opposed to my most recent faltering steps, that is), and I have nothing but praise for the way they run their business. Admittedly, that mistake would have been unlikely to happen in a bricks-and-mortar bookstore, but they remedied it as soon as they were notified, and that’s good enough for me.

I was also trying to find out who distributes my books in Canada, and went into a Canadian online bookstore, where I found Scene of Crime – An Anthology of Love Poems by Jill McGown. I wrote to them, too, pointing out that the love poetry quotient was pretty low in Scene of Crime, and they too corrected the error. But now I want to know what sort of love poetry one could expect in a book called Scene of Crime? Not your average hearts and flowers.

I don’t think I’ve anything else to declare, so I’d better get back to No. 13. It’s easier now that the weather has remembered that this is Britain and not the south of France!

See you next month.

Love,
Jill

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