Check out my blog on Murderati, where I talk about the role of fictional food in defining characters.

Because of the anticipated publicity for TNT’s new TV show, “Rizzoli & Isles,” Ballantine has decided to move up my publication date a full month earlier, to June 29. Mark it on your calendars!

While cruising through the Barnes and Noble site recently, I noticed something I’d never seen before on the page for my book, Gravity. There was something called a Lexile number, and mine was 730L. What the heck was that, I wondered. So I clicked on the link and found this explanation:

A child’s grade level and reading ability are two different things. That’s why a Lexile® measures the child’s ability based on reading comprehension, not grade level. A Lexile (for example, 850L) is the most widely adopted measure of reading ability and text difficulty. Lexile measures are valuable tools that help teachers, librarians, parents and children select books that will provide the right level of challenge for the child’s reading ability—not too difficult to be frustrating, but difficult enough to encourage reading growth. A child typically receives a Lexile measure by taking a test of reading comprehension, such as the Scholastic Reading Inventory, the Iowa Tests, and many end-of-grade state assessments. The Lexile measure of a book is based on word frequency and sentence length, and is displayed on Barnes & Noble.com product pages. The higher the Lexile measure, the more difficult the text is likely to comprehend.

To learn if Lexile measures are available in your area, contact your school district or state department of education. For more information on Lexile measures, visit www.Lexile.com.

Please note: A Lexile measures text difficulty only. It does not address the subject matter or quality of the text, age-appropriateness of the content, or the reader’s interests. Parents are encouraged to preview all reading materials.

So what did it mean, that Gravity had a Lexile number of 730? I hopped on over to the Lexile site, to compare where my book stood against others, and was surprised to find out that, according to Lexile, Gravity has a reading difficulty akin to an average book in the Nancy Drew series, making it appropriate for readers from age 8 to 12. Which astonished me, considering the fact that Gravity is so full of NASA and engineering terminology that it requires a glossary to explain the vocabulary. I then did a search of my other titles and found that my medical thriller Harvest was rated even less difficult to read, at 620. And that is chock full of complicated medical terms.

Then I noticed that Lexile numbers for mystery authors are all over the place. Robert Parker’s in the 500’s. Patricia Cornwell and Michael Crichton have similar Lexile numbers to mine, in the 700’s. Dean Koonts’s books have Lexile numbers over a thousand. Nathaniel Hawthorne beats us all with a Lexile of 1340. Astonishingly enough, Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, a book written in the voice of a child, told in charmingly simplistic terms, rates a Lexile of 1180.

What does it all mean, anyway? Does a low score mean we’re simplistic writers? Or does it mean we write with more clarity, making our books easy to comprehend? Does it mean that a school kid who reads our books will get less credit because our books aren’t considered difficult enough?

Or does it mean our books are more likely to be assigned in schools because librarians feel our writing is appropriate to students?

ICheck the site and see if your own books are listed on the site. You can do a search by writing in the author’s name.

I found more information on Lexile here. It offers a grade-equivalent of the Lexile text difficulty scores. And yep, according to the chart, my books are for appropriate for kids from Grades 3 – 5! I had no idea that Harvest was a young adult book!

A terrific article in today’s New York Times shows a cost analysis of producing paper books vs. e-books:

At a glance, it appears the e-book is more profitable. But publishers point out that e-books still represent a small sliver of total sales, from 3 to 5 percent. If e-book sales start to replace some hardcover sales, the publishers say, they will still have many of the fixed costs associated with print editions, like warehouse space, but they will be spread among fewer print copies.

Moreover, in the current print model, publishers can recoup many of their costs, and start to make higher profits, on paperback editions. If publishers start a new e-book’s life at a price similar to that of a paperback book, and reduce the price later, it may be more difficult to cover costs and support new authors.

Despite the panic among publishers about e-book prices, according to an article in today’s NY Times business section, e-books are still a very small segment of sales:

Last year, less than two percent of all books sold were e-books, according to Bowker, which tracks the industry. By contrast, trade paperbacks and hardcovers made up approximately 35 percent each of sales, Bowker says. Mass market paperbacks came in at 21 percent.

Here are the numbers:
35% Trade paperbacks
35% Hardcover
21% Mass market paperback
2% Audio
2% E-book
5% Other

Also interesting is where books are being sold.

27% Large chains
20% E-commerce
11% Book club
8% Mass merchandisers
5% Independents
29% Other

What startles me is how quickly E-commerce is starting to dominate the picture — and how the independents are suffering as a result. The last time I checked, my own sales through Amazon.com were still under 10% of my total. I wonder what that percentage is now.

Here I am with four of the five members of the dream time for “Rizzoli & Isles.” These are the writers who’ll be crafting the episodes of the TV show, which will be premiering this summer on TNT. We are (left to right): David Gould, me, Janet Tamaro (who’s also co-executive producer), David Caplan, and Joel Fields. This is one terrific team, and they come with a combined breadth of experience from other TV shows, from comedies to dramas. Most of all, they’re truly nice people, with the chops to breathe life into Jane Rizzoli and Maura Isles.

I had the pleasure of joining them for dinner when they visited Boston last week on a research trip, collecting impressions of Boston before they head back to L.A. to start writing the next nine episodes of the TV series. So there we were, at a very nice restaurant, chatting about serial killers, weird murders, autopsies, and all the other stuff that thriller writers talk about. I’m afraid we may have given other diners indigestion, but hey — we were just talking shop. After meeting them, I have every confidence that some terrific stories will be coming out of this team.

And in other news: TNT has approved the name for the new show. Yes, after all the hand-wringing over finding the right name, they’ve now decided it’s official:

Rizzoli & Isles.

Coming to TNT this summer!

And she really looks like she’s into the character!

An alert reader just wrote me complaining that the Kindle price for my upcoming book ICE COLD is in the $14.00 range. That’s unreasonable, he said, when brand new releases from St. Martin’s Press are now priced in the $8.00 range. I thought he must be mistaken, until I checked Amazon and discovered that Kristin Hannah’s latest, just published in February, is indeed priced in the $8.00 range. So are Michael Palmer’s and Iris Johansen’s upcoming releases. These books are published under the MacMillan umbrella, which just fought for higher Kindle e-book prices — yet suddenly, their Kindle e-books are going for LESS than other publishers’ new-release Kindle versions.

Did I miss something? Has the war between MacMillan and Amazon just re-escalated? Can anybody fill me in?

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And in other news, I just found out I’m the 17th most borrowed adult fiction author in UK libraries — right under John Grisham. A nice surprise!

Well, this is cool! As a repeat visitor to Turkey, it’s fun for me to watch an ad for by books in Turkish.

Over at Galleycat, there’s plenty of commentary about Apple’s new iPad, which has been described as a possible “Kindle killer.” Well, I don’t know about it being a Kindle killer, since the Kindle still has the edge when it comes to portability and battery life. I don’t plan to run out to buy an iPad — at least, not yet.

What’s got me excited, though, is the fact Apple will be selling e-books on its own iBooks site. If this is anything like their iTunes site, it will be a huge boon for authors and publishers alike. I understand the books will be offered in pdf form. Apple will make the books a snap to download, and no doubt they’ll be temptingly priced (assuming they can come to an agreement with publishers.)

This is our best weapon against online piracy. If you can make it easy and inexpensive to obey the law, maybe people actually will.