Jackie Barbosa

How Traditional Print Publishing Works

Jackie Barbosa — Thu, 17 May 2012 20:27:23 +0000

In light of the DOJ’s lawsuit against Apple and several publishers for collusion in the setting of retail prices for ebooks (Dear Author has a great post on the latest revelations from the case), I thought it might be worth talking a little bit about why the major New York publishers were so worried about the rise of digital books that they embarked on this scheme in the first place. So, get in your “way back” machine and let the mists of time fade away before the world of Amazon and Kindles and wi-fi/3G. Back to the days when books were…well, BOOKS.

DISCLAIMER: I’m not an expert in this field. My observations are based on a combination of what I’ve gleaned from my own experience in print publishing and a rudimentary grasp of accounting. I am pretty sure that everything I’m saying is reasonably accurate, but I could be off on some details. If so, mea culpa!

The business model for a print publisher looks something like this:

The publisher acquires the book’s content from a writer, usually by paying that writer an “advance” on anticipated royalties. This advance is a guaranteed minimum amount that the author will earn from sale of the book. Depending on the format of the book (hardcover, trade paperback, or mass-market paperback), the author’s “cut” of the cover price of each book sold ranges from a high of around 15% (some hardcover deals MIGHT go as high as 20%) to a low of about 4% on certain mass-market paperbacks. Whether or not the royalties due the author from sales of the book ultimately equal or exceed the original advance (“earning out”), the author is never required to pay back any portion of that advance, although an author who persistently fails to earn out her advances is an author in danger of not getting a new contract.

The publisher further invests additional upfront monies in production of the print book—editing, cover art, typesetting, printing, marketing (directly primarily at booksellers, not reader, by the way), etc. The publisher then sells the books at wholesale to retailers, who in turn sell the books to consumers at either the cover price or at a discount price wholly at the retailer’s discretion. Because the publisher isn’t waiting for actual readers to buy the books, but rather registering the sale of the book to retailers, the publisher recognizes an immediate boost to its balance sheet when the books are printed. (This also, incidentally, explains why publishers don’t tend to think of readers as their customers, but booksellers, and why a huge proportion of their marketing budgets are spent on convincing retailers to order their books.) How big a boost the publisher gets from any individual book is tied directly to the format of the book (hardcover has a higher profit margin than trade paper and trade paper a higher margin than mass-market paperback) and the size of the initial print run (the more books are printed, the lower the unit cost for each book and the greater the profit).

This, by the way, is how all other manufacturers of products recognize sales, at least as far as I know. Apple doesn’t wait for you to go to Target and buy an iPod to recognize the sale of that iPod. Apple’s customer in that transaction is Target, not you, and Apple doesn’t really care whether Target makes or loses money on selling the iPod to you or even whether Target actually sells any individual iPod. As long as Target pays Apple the wholesale price for the iPods it intends to sell, Apple is happy. (As an aside, Apple is an interesting example here simply because, unlike the majority of manufacturers, they do place some price controls on their products that prevent retailers from discounting beyond a certain point and thereby using Apple products as “loss leaders”.)

In any event, however, this model that recognizes the income from the sale of a book to the retailer rather than the consumer is the reason traditional publishers are so keen to “protect” their print books from the encroachment of ebooks. Although the profit from the sale of an ebook may actually be greater than the profit from the sale of the same book in print format (the exception to this is hardcover—the profit margin from hardcover is much, much higher than for the corresponding digital edition of the same book), that profit can’t be recognized until an actual consumer purchases the book from a retailer. The publisher can’t “guess” at how many copies of any given ebook Amazon will sell and book the profit for those sales when the book is released. This means that the publisher now effectively sells one copy of the digital file to retailers and then has to wait (possibly for several months between reporting cycles) before it can book the profit of the individual sales of copies of that file to consumers.

Now, you may be thinking that this should make that much of a difference to publishers. After all, if the profit margin for a digital book is as high or higher than for a print book and there are no printing or distribution costs and copies never run out, in theory, everything should come out in the wash. In the long haul, the publisher might actually make more money from digital sales than print. And, of course, that’s true—as long as we eliminate the hardcover format from our discussions. But hardcover is where print publishers make the bulk of their profits, and when you combine the loss of hardcover sales due to digital adoption and the much longer window between the release of a title and recognizing its sales, and you can see that publishers could have a real liquidity problem.

Moreover, without order numbers from retailers, sales numbers become virtually impossible to predict. At least when booksellers ordered X copies of a book, the publisher could expect some percentage of X to sell. When they just ship off one digital file to a retailer, there’s really NO way to guess how many copies the retailer actually thinks can sell. Orders were a tangible measurement of salability. And that’s important for publishers to know, because it’s how they gauge the salability of the books they’re acquiring now. If they don’t know have firm numbers to tell them how well their soon-to-be-released titles are faring in the marketplace, they’re operating in a vacuum, mostly guessing how well the current books are going to do and hoping they’re making the right choices for future releases.

At this point, I’m sure you’ve got another objection. “But, wait, Jackie! What about returns? Don’t those screw things up just as much as digital books?”

I’m sure most of you know that books are one of the few items retailers can return to the manufacturer for credit. This system was born of the Great Depression, when booksellers feared they wouldn’t be able to sell the books they ordered, and publishers offered them the option to return unsold books for credit. This setup probably saved the book industry in the 1930s, but its legacy is a huge burden to publishers today.

Or is it?

Okay, I don’t know much about retail accounting, but I do know quite a bit about financial industry accounting. And one of the things I know is that accountants always make allowances for losses. Sometimes they allow too much and sometimes they allow too little (hello, 2008 financial market collapse), but by and large, the “loss” associated with returns on books is probably already built into the publishers’ profit and loss statements. They assume a certain percentage of books they print will be returned for credit and account for that accordingly, so that “loss” is already recognized, for the most part, when they record the sale of a new title to retailers. (By the way, that percentage is also accounted for in the author’s royalty statements for years, unless a book happens to sell through its entire print run.)

So, all of this is my way of saying that, while what the Big 6 and Apple did when they colluded to raise the price of digital books in the hopes of stemming the ebook adoption tide appears to be 100% illegal, they didn’t do it just because they wanted to shaft ebook readers or even because they were afraid of Amazon gaining too much market power. The shift to digital represents a real challenge to the model of traditional publishing, which is really a manufacturing model. Publishers made content into books. Retailers bought the books and sold them to consumers. It was no different than selling iPods.

Digital books came along and threw a huge monkey wrench into the gears, and the major publishing houses still haven’t figure out how to handle it. That doesn’t make their actions any less illegal or objectionable, but ebooks and print books really aren’t interchangeable products from the standpoint of the manufacturer, and that’s why publishers were so desperate to protect print.

Just a Little Something

Jackie Barbosa — Tue, 15 May 2012 18:28:32 +0000

This is going to be a very brief blog post. I’m trying very hard to get Hot Under the Collar ready to upload by mid-June. I’m behind my original hoped-for schedule by a couple of weeks, mainly due to my naughty vicar’s stubborn refusal to be naughty. (He will be naughty. I promise. Even if I have to rip his pants off myself!)

In the meantime, I had Kim Killion at Hot Damn Designs do an ad for me, which will be running at Dear Author in July. It’s so awesome-looking, though, that I couldn’t wait until July to share it with the handful of folks who drop by here. Therefore, without further ado:

Okay, back to the trenches! Miss me while I’m gone…

If You’re Not at RT…

Jackie Barbosa — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 23:03:47 +0000

You can still download the handouts from my workshops using the links below:

If You Liked This Book…

Jackie Barbosa — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 23:15:31 +0000

There’s a discussion over at Dear Author about the practice of purchasing Amazon reviews. Apparently, there’s a service called Fiverr that offers to post 5-star reviews for books–at a price. In a word, ugh!

But that’s not really what I want to talk about. In the thread, Courtney Milan pointed out that some authors are more assertive than others about soliciting reviews from readers, and that this might in some cases account for a high number of reviews relative to sales for some books. The strategies authors employ to accomplish this include offering a free copy of the next book in exchange for a review or even just suggesting that, if the reader liked the book, she should consider reviewing it.

Now, I’m not saying there is anything wrong with this practice (although the free next book in exchange for a review thing makes me squeamish for reasons I can’t quite articulate). But, I don’t do it and I don’t have any intention to. And part of the reason for that is…what about the readers who didn’t like the book? I think they are just as deserving of encouragement to register their opinions as the ones who do like the book.

I don’t want to be seen as soliciting only those expressions of opinions that serve me. By the same token, I’m not sure that adding a note at the back of the book that said, “Whether you loved this book or not, please consider reviewing it” feels a great deal more comfortable. I figure readers can decide for themselves whether they feel strongly enough, one way or the other, to review my book.

I also never, ever answer fan mail with a suggestion that the reader consider reviewing my books. That might seem like a perfect opportunity, since the person obviously liked the book(s) enough to take the time to personally contact me, but it just feels icky to me to do that.

What do you think? If an author asks you to review a book, are you more likely to do so? Does it seems presumptuous to you?

Amazon Is No Longer Price-Matching All Self-Pubbed Books

Jackie Barbosa — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 17:46:25 +0000

This is a word to the wise–if you normally shop at Amazon and don’t shop around before buying, you may now be paying too much for certain self-published books.

I discovered this morning that the price of my novella, THE LESSON PLAN, has reverted back to $2.99 (the list price) on Amazon rather than $1.96 (which is its price on other sites). Without going into a long-winded explanation of why I had the list price at $2.99 on Amazon and less elsewhere, I’ll just say that this was giving me more favorable splits on my sales (70% instead of 35%) due to the way in which Amazon chose to calculate payments on my sales. (I emphasize that this was Amazon’s CHOICE. They were never under any obligation, under the Terms of Service, to pay me 70%. The fact that they did so was to my benefit, but I knew at any time, they might change that. I just didn’t expect them to change it by NOT price-matching.)

The reason this matters to consumers is that Amazon has made a pretty big deal in the past about always having the lowest price for digital books, or at least, never pricing their books HIGHER than any other retailer. Occasionally, because price-matching took time, there might be a period of time during which a book was free or cheaper on other sites than on Amazon, but by and large, you could pretty well count on Amazon having a price that was at least as low as any other retailer. Now, you can’t do that.

Edited: I was going to leave the price at $2.99 on Amazon, but on further review of the TOS, I’ve decided I really have to drop it to $1.96 or raise it to $2.99 everywhere else. I will, however, point out that if you have a Kindle, you can get THE LESSON PLAN at AllRomance eBooks in Kindle format without DRM for $1.96 and ARe’s royalty terms for authors are much better, if you care about that sort of thing (which, of course, you are not under any obligation to do!).

Just thought I’d give you all a heads-up . If the book you’re looking at isn’t discounted, look around–you MIGHT find it cheaper elsewhere. Others may not be as quick to decide to lower the price on Amazon as I’ve been.

A Quick Reminder and a Sneak Peek into HOT UNDER THE COLLAR

Jackie Barbosa — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 23:04:21 +0000

I’m not sure how many folks who read my blog live in or near the San Diego area, but if you do or if you happen to be in San Diego this weekend, I want to remind you that I’ll be speaking at the San Diego Chapter RWA meeting on Saturday, March 17. The morning session will be a panel on The Agent’s Role in the Digital Age including me, Avon author Anna Randol, and our wonderful agent, Kevan Lyon. In the afternoon, I’ll be giving a workshop on self-publishing, including a lot of the nitty-gritty ins-and-outs as well as a look at costs, sales figures, and income. If you can make it, I’d love to see you there!

And now, for something completely different, I’ve been working on the next Lords of Lancashire novella, Hot Under the Collar for the past few weeks. Given my sparse writing time, I’ve been eking out only a few hundred words per day, but I’m really enjoying Artemisia and Walter’s story so far. Here’s a little tidbit, just to whet your appetite:

By the time she reached the entry hall, she was more amused by the prospect of shocking her young visitor than annoyed by the interruption. Smiling, she pulled open the front door, prepared to find a scrawny, spotty-faced adolescent on the other side.

Her smile collapsed. Her amusement shriveled. Her skin tingled with heated, feminine awareness.

The man who stood on the doorstep was anything but scrawny or spotty faced. He was, in fact, as fine a specimen of manhood as Artemisia had ever encountered…and she had certainly encountered her fair share. Including this one, although in the past, fifty or more feet of a churchyard in which she could never again set foot had separated them, insulating her from her own unattainable desires.

For there had never been a man more unattainable than Mr. Walter Langston, Grange-Over-Sands new vicar.

“Good afternoon, Miss Finch,” he said, making an amiable half-bow as he spoke. His shoulders were quite broad, and his black coat pulled just enough over his back for her to imagine the lean, corded musculature that must lie beneath. He wore his hair longer than was currently fashionable, past his shoulders and pulled back into a queue with a black ribbon. When he straightened again, she could not prevent herself from thinking that he had the least vicarly face she had ever seen, possessed of neither a weak chin nor bushy eyebrows nor sunken cheeks and eyes. In fact, were it not for his black coat and white necktie, she would not for a moment have believed that he was a man of the cloth.

He most certainly should not be a man in clothes.

With that utterly inappropriate thought, she realized to her humiliation that she was gawping like a virgin on her wedding night.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Langston,” she returned, though she decided to pass on dipping an answering curtsey. That was far too proper and demure a gesture for Grange-Over-Sands’ reigning trollop. “You must be here to see my father. I’ll just go and fetch him.”

Horace Finch spoke highly of the new vicar, describing him as intelligent, friendly, and an excellent orator. Her father attributed the recent surge in church attendance to these qualities, though Artemisia suspected that phenomenon owed more to Mr. Langston’s youth and marital status than to his ministerial qualifications. Notwithstanding, it was kind—and perhaps a little foolhardy—of him to call on her father, whose few remaining friends had stopped coming to see him as soon as it became apparent that Artemisia had no intention of leaving.

“Ah, but I’m afraid you’re mistaken, Miss Finch. I came to see you.”

A Small Rant about the Birth Control Debate

Jackie Barbosa — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 02:06:31 +0000

In case there’s any misunderstanding, let me state for the record that I fully support insurance coverage for contraception–although I’m not necessarily convinced all forms of birth control need to be available with co-pays. I pay a lot for my health insurance and pretty steep co-pays for a lot of my covered medications, so I don’t see that “covered” and “free of charge” are necessarily the same thing.

But here’s the thing that’s getting on my nerves. A lot of people are justifying the Obama Administration’s position on the basis of the medical benefits of oral contraceptives outside of birth control. Now, I’m well aware of these benefits and it’s certainly important that we talk about them, if only to raise awareness of women’s health issues.

BUT…and this is a big but if the ONLY thing oral contraceptives did was to prevent pregnancy, insurance should still be required to cover it. It bothers me that we feel like we need to justify the use of contraception by pointing to other reasons women might need it. What’s WRONG with using it just to prevent pregnancy? What’s the big deal with allowing women to choose when (and if) they will have children? Why are we afraid to say we want to be able to enjoy a healthy, fulfilling sex life without having to give birth every few years whether we are prepared to bring children into the world or not?

I’m here to say this loud and clear. I have an IUD which I’m getting replaced in a couple of weeks (it’s reached the end of its 10-year lifespan). And I have one so I can have sex without the possibility of pregnancy. I don’t care if it has other health benefits. I wouldn’t have it if I wanted to get pregnant, whatever those benefits might be. But I don’t want to get pregnant. (Yo, I have three kids already, and at my age, the risk of Down Syndrome and other birth defects is very high.)

So, to all the conservatives out there, yes, I want to fuck without consequences. Get over it. You should be GLAD I don’t want to bring endless children into the world who I will bring up to be bleeding heart agnostic liberals like myself. (Come to think of it, maybe I should reconsider my position on this…)

Do Excerpts Work?

Jackie Barbosa — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 01:46:33 +0000

People debate the wisdom of including excerpts of other books at the end of a book the reader has purchased. While some readers say they like them, others feel they are “advertisements” and don’t like having “paid” for a book that includes that extra content. It’s especially bothersome, it seems, when the excerpts “pad” the apparent length of the story that was bought and paid for, making a novella’s page count appear to equal or exceed a category-length novel.

Despite what I perceive as fairly strong dislike of excerpts in some quarters, I decided to include them at the end of my ebooks anyway. I figured they couldn’t hurt and might help. I am very careful to disclose the excerpts and their word count/page length in my product descriptions to avoid misleading readers as to the length of the promised work. So far, I’ve heard no complaints and now, three months after the release of The Lesson Plan, I’m prepared to offer an unqualified answer as to whether they work or not.

Do excerpts work? HELL YES!

Here’s how I know. At the end of The Lesson Plan, I included the first chapters of both of my Spice Briefs, Grace Under Fire and Taking Liberties. These two stories are “related” to The Lesson Plan. Grace has been out since April of 2011 and Taking Liberties came out about three weeks before The Lesson Plan. Both had Amazon ranks that bounced between the 20k and 60k marks before The Lesson Plan came out. And now, because a picture is worth a thousand words, here’s what the ranking charts for those two books look like since December 1. (The Lesson Plan released on December 18.)

Grace Under Fire

Taking Liberties

Up until mid-January, when The Lesson Plan picked up more sales momentum, the rankings for the other two stories are still pretty erratic, but it’s absolutely clear to me that around about mid-January, the peaks and valleys became less dramatic (meaning more steady sales) and the average ranking trend is downward.

Moreover, I’m not seeing similar trends in the rankings of any of the rest of my backlist. It’s not just that readers who buy The Lesson Plan are liking it and then going out and seeking my other titles. If that were the case, I’d be seeing similar movement in other books, including Carnally Ever After, which has a lower price point than either of the Spice Briefs. (It continues to hang steady in the 5k-10k rank range as it has since December. That story did, however, double its sales when The Reiver went free and included an excerpt from Carnally at the end. Another data point in my conclusion!)

So, if you’re wondering whether excerpts will turn off readers, all I can say is that the readers they do turn off would appear to be wildly outnumbered by those who like getting a taste of your other books so they can decide whether or not to buy them.

The Story of My Mom’s Stroke

Jackie Barbosa — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 02:59:27 +0000

I figured I should probably write out this story, not only because it will save me the trouble of explaining to multiple people who’ve followed the saga on Twitter and Facebook, but in tiny increments, exactly what happened, but also because it might help someone else out there who has a similar type of event.

As you know if you follow me on Twitter or Facebook and were around this weekend, my mother was transported to the hospital by ambulance on Saturday morning after arriving at her volunteer “job” as a tax preparer. Shortly after she came in, the people she was working with realized she was extremely confused and disoriented and couldn’t communicate, so they called the ambulance. They also called her home number, where they reached my best friend (aka “my other sister”) who is living with her. Debbie called me to let me know what was going on and I immediately headed to the hospital.

My first thought when I heard she was “confused” was that her blood sugar might be low. She’s gone on a diet and lost about 30 lbs in the past 6 months, and while this a great thing, it sometimes means her Type II diabetes meds tank her blood sugar. I’ve seen her when she’s getting “low” and she’s mildly disoriented, so I thought if it was really low, that could be a lot worse.

Anyhow, I met her at the hospital a short time later, a little after 10am, I think. By the time I got there, they’d already done a CT scan and it hadn’t shown anything, but CTs are fairly crude and I was told this didn’t mean she HADN’T had a stroke. They ruled out possible low blood sugar as soon as I let them know she is a Type II diabetic.

However, her symptoms didn’t seem to fit classic stroke. She had no muscle weakness on either side of her body. She had no noticeable visual impairments. She wasn’t slurring her words. But she also wasn’t able to communicate at all. She would start talking, but after a few words she would start “speaking in tongues.” That’s really the best way I can describe it. The first few words would be completely comprehensible but the rest were gibberish syllables–things that SOUNDED like they could be words, but weren’t. She seemed to know that she wasn’t saying the words she wanted to say, but I don’t think she realized then that the words she was saying weren’t words at all. She also couldn’t always understand what we were saying to her, and many times we had to answer the same question multiple times within a few minutes.

Debbie arrived at the hospital shortly after I did with Mom’s medications so the hospital would know what she was taking and stayed for an hour or so with us in the ER, but then had to leave to go to a wedding. My sister was making her way down from her home in the mountains with a stop to pick up her nineteen year old daughter on the way. (My niece can drive and has a car, but my sister was afraid to let her drive because she was so worried and upset.)

Around noon, the ER doctor told me they suspected a small stroke and that she would be admitted for further tests, including an MRI. My sister, her husband, and my niece arrived as they were settling Mom in her room, so I left because I had kids who were home alone.

And after this, things at the hospital got, in my opinion, a little weird. First, the nurse told my sister that my mother wouldn’t be on that floor if they thought she’d had a stroke. Huh? But didn’t the ER doctor just say she’d probably had a stroke? And hours and hours passed. No visit from an attending physician. No visit from a neurologist. And apparently, no MRI order.

I was finally able to get back to the hospital at about 5pm and I was AMAZED. My mother was no longer speaking in gibberish and, when she couldn’t think of what she wanted to say, she would pause, searching her memory for the right words. There were a lot of pauses, some of which we could fill in and some of which we couldn’t, but we were able over the course of the next several hours to arrive at a sequence of events for the morning.

She woke up at about 5:30 with a headache, but realized she didn’t need to leave right away, so went back to sleep. When she woke up again at 7:00, she still had a headache and knew she didn’t feel “right” but she figured she didn’t have time for this nonsense and that she had to get to the Center to do her volunteer work. She took a shower, but she couldn’t figure out how to take her meds (and she’d inadvertently forgotten to take them the night before) or how to make herself breakfast, so she didn’t do either. She did, however, get together all the laptops and paperwork she needed to do the tax preparations, got in the car, and headed off to the Center, which is about 12 miles from her home. On the way there, she couldn’t figure out how to turn on the windshield wipers, yet despite the fact that it was raining and difficult to see, she continued to drive and did eventually make it to the Center despite driving past her exit the first time. (Can you hear me having palpitations? Of all the things that happened, this one scares me the most!) Fortunately, the folks at the center immediately realized things were not right and called the ambulance.

They didn’t actually get around to doing an MRI until Sunday morning, and that was AFTER the neurologist had come in and (IMO) basically dismissed my mother as a slightly dotty old lady who was overreacting to her symptoms and me as an overprotective daughter who doesn’t want to admit that her mother is getting a little senile. He said her symptoms didn’t “fit” stroke and he suspected it was a confusional migraine. And I would almost have bought that if it wasn’t absolutely clear to me as he was speaking to her a full 24 hours after the event that she was STILL having memory and word-recall problems that were WAY outside the realm of normal. He also told me I was wrong when I said she was having aphasia. He claimed that word only means a complete inability to speak and comprehend speech. Um, the Mayo Clinic begs to differ with you, sir.

ANYHOW, it turns out she DID have a stroke. The neurologist called this morning and explained that the type of stroke she had is very rare, but “makes sense” with her symptoms. (Yet, apparently, he couldn’t think of this before. But maybe, as my sister said, that was because he was looking for horses, not zebras.) What the MRI showed was small pockets of damage in about 10-15 spots in the left hemisphere of the brain. This indicates that she had a clot but instead of blocking all blood flow for any period of time, it quickly broke into several pieces and disbursed to different parts of the brain. That resulted in these scattered deficits (like being able to drive a car but not turn on the windshield wipers!) rather than huge areas of disability.

The good news is that these types of strokes have a very quick recovery and we’ve certainly seen that. She went home this afternoon and I just spoke to her on the phone and she sounds like her normal self. There are still a few things that aren’t “quite right,” but she’s just so much better, I couldn’t be more relieved and thrilled. The next few weeks will involve follow-up care, and we’re all a little nervous about leaving her home alone for long periods of time for at least a few more days, but wow, I never thought things would be this much better this quickly.

To everyone who offered thoughts, prayers, and good wishes, thank you so much. I am so blessed to have so many friends from so many different parts of my life, and I appreciate you more than I can say. With friends like you all…well, I’m just blessed. That’s all.

Beginnings

Jackie Barbosa — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 22:24:26 +0000

I love starting a new manuscript. It’s a bit like opening up the chocolate box of your ideas and characters and figuring out what’s inside. Yesterday, after a few weeks of dithering and thinking, I wrote the first few paragraphs of Hot Under the Collar. The opening is always a big hurdle for me to overcome whenever I’m starting a new book. It sets the tone for everything that follows and helps me find my way “in” to the characters and the story. Usually, the first few hundred words I write end up in the final version of the book, although not always. In this case, I have a feeling they’re going to stick with only minor modifications.

Cumbria, England, 1803

The good Lord had a devilish sense of humor. That was the only possible explanation for the series of events that had led, inexorably, toward Walter Langston’s current predicament.

To be fair, there was nothing amusing in the accident that had brought an abrupt end to his nascent—albeit not terribly promising—military career. If he had been shot in the arse or even the foot, the story would probably have made good fodder for post-prandial gatherings, but when the errant bullet struck one’s collarbone and left one with less than full use of the adjoining arm, there wasn’t a great deal to laugh about.

He could, of course, have continued in the army despite his disability, but the truth was, he hadn’t wanted to. Having been shot once by mistake, Walter had little inclination to put himself in a position where he was guaranteed to be shot at on purpose. A single encounter with a projectile was enough to last a lifetime. It had certainly come close enough to ending that lifetime.

Unfortunately, he had been equally disinclined upon his recovery to return to the life he’d led prior to purchasing his commission. It was one thing to live off the largesse of an older, titled sibling at twenty three or twenty four and quite another at nearly thirty. Walter had required a profession, and with the military option now closed and murdering both his older brothers—not to mention two nephews—in order to come into the viscountcy out of the question, there was only one remotely acceptable option. The one to which he, as the third son of an aristocrat, had purportedly been born but had misspent his youth proving himself unfit for.

He was a vicar.