The shoot took place in New York. The severe black gown is part of Mary’s uniform as a housemaid at Buckingham Palace. Her hairstyle is equally plain, to suit her assignment.

Oh, that vexing apron. Aprons are meant, in theory, to protect your dress from the muck and filth of housework (open fires, stone-flagged floors…). Yet white aprons show every bit of dirt and wear, so they’re incredibly difficult to keep clean and crisp. Yes, Mary finds this annoying.

The model is photographed against a white backdrop.

Afterwards, her image is placed into context: this time, it’s a drawing room at the Palace.

From these images, to this:

And that’s the cover story! What do you think?

In brief, though, lots of readers appear to believe that illegal downloads are “like a library card on the Internet”. There are lots of problems with this assumption and today I’m just going to pick at the 3 most basic:

1. Libraries buy books and lend them as a community service (paid for with your taxes). “Free ebook” sites steal books for personal profit.

2. When you borrow a library book, you agree to return it after a short period. You are under no obligation to return a stolen ebook.

3. Authors are paid for their work when libraries buy their books. Authors earn nothing from pirated ebooks.

Basically, downloading illegal copies of ebooks is theft. Authors who can’t get paid for their work may soon be out of work. Publishers who can’t earn back the cost of producing books may reduce the number of books they publish.

This is extremely simplistic, of course, and I hope you don’t feel personally patronized. But for much of yesterday’s Twitter discussion, this was the level of discourse and so I started with the basics.

And now I’m tired, and jaded, and these specious comparisons of book-thieves to librarians make me want to soothe my spirit at a real library: one with ebooks and traditional books, one staffed by smart, bookish people with plenty of great recommendations, one that’s a vibrant part of my community. I hope you’ll join me.

The audiobook editions of A Spy in the House and The Body at the Tower are now on sale! They’re performed by Justine Eyre, who has an absolutely beautiful voice.

And finally! The French edition of the second Mary Quinn novel, The Agency: Le meurtre de l’horloge, will also be published in February. I was wondering what they’d call it.

I think The Clock Murder works very nicely indeed. And I thoroughly approve of the orange. What do you think?

I hate waiting for them to load. They assume you read ve-ry slow-ly (Stephanie Burgis’s trailer for A Most Improper Magick is the exception that proves the rule). The music is crap coming from my laptop speakers. And they don’t make me want to buy the book. Result: I almost always axe them at the 15-second mark.

So what did I do this week? Inspired by Montreal-based auteur Non-Working Monkey (warning: Monkey has a potty-mouth), I made a book trailer. Mine, however, is an anti-book trailer that contains a piece of the finest performance art ever to emerge from the bizarre tool that is Microsoft Word’s Autosummarize. Or something. Anyway, here you have it.

I’m the one in the red boots.

This week in book news:

Fight Club meets High School Debate Tournament for YA fiction! Alyssa at the Shady Glade is organizing the first ever YA Bloggers Debut Book Battle! Over the next several weeks, 24 titles will compete – and Spy is among them. Ooh. I can’t wait to see how this turns out.

In the lead-up to the Big Day, I am doing my best to be omnipresent. (There is no hope of omniscience or omnipotence, but I do what I can.) What this means is, starting on February 28, I will be blogging. Every. Day. Specifically, I will be guest-posting or giving interviews here (don’t worry, I’ll come back each day and link to the correct post):

Sunday, Feb 28 – interview at Bookworming in the 21st Century
Monday, March 1 – guest post at GreenBeanTeenQueen
Tuesday, March 2 – interview at Steph Su Reads
Wednesday, March 3 – interview at Books are Life
Thursday, March 4 – guest post at Books by their Cover
Friday, March 5 – interview at That Chick That Reads & a guest post at Teenreads.com
Saturday, March 6 – guest post at Reading in Color
Monday, March 8 – guest post at the Epic Rat
Tuesday, March 9 – guest post at Chick Lit Teens & at Book Chick City, & an interview at In To Views
Wednesday, March 10 – interview with the Catastrophizer
Thursday, March 11 – guest post at the Story Siren & an interview at Shades of Romance
Friday, March 12 – guest post at Rebecca’s Book Blog
Saturday, March 13 – guest post at Ticket to Anywhere

That’s a lot of me. But wait – you’re not off the hook yet. New reviews of Spy are cropping up everywhere!

BookPage says it’s “entirely true to the genre, full of thrills and danger and wonderfully sharp writing”.

Publisher’s Weekly calls it “richly described… Mary’s lively escapades… will hold readers’ attention and whet their interest for the next installment”.

Bookphilia got the metanarrative jokes (YAY!) and confesses, “I did absolutely no work on Friday because I was reading it and couldn’t put it down”.

Its sensibilities are a bit too modern for the BookWitch at first, but eventually she reckons, “if you want a female Alex Rider in Victorian London, then this is for you.”

Persephone Reads calls it “transporting”.

BookLoons loves the “rich setting in Victorian London”.

Heck, even Kirkus Reviews liked it, but I can’t link to the review without a subscription. Take my word for it?

Phew. I’ll see you on Sunday.

I finished my novel (and that’s a whole different series of questions which I’ve answered in parts, week by week, and will continue to do so and collect as FAQs). Once I had a complete, polished manuscript, I wrote a query letter for literary agents. I won’t get into query letters here because lit agent Nathan Bransford has already done a splendid job explaining them. Kristin Nelson, another impossibly chipper agent, posts further examples at Pub Rants. So I shined up my query and my husband, Nick, emailed it to six literary agents. Why not send it myself? Partly because I am thin-skinned and an obsessive email-checker at the most relaxed of times, and partly because Nick is lovely, amazingly supportive of my writing, and utterly fearless with stuff like this.

I got lucky: in two days I had six replies, all of which were requests for more. In five cases, “more” was a one-page synopsis and the first three chapters; the sixth agent, from William Morris, simply said, “I’d love to read it”, so I sent the full ms. A week later, this agent’s assistant emailed to say that she was halfway through, “really enjoying it”, and would I let her know if I had interest from other agencies in the meantime. (I cannot tell you how many times I stared at the words “really enjoying it” and wondered what secret code they masked.) A couple of days later, I heard from the hard-working assistant again: the agent thought the book had merit but didn’t like it enough to represent it, so she’d passed it on to a colleague, Rowan Lawton. I did a tentative happy dance.

When Rowan emailed me a couple of weeks later, she had some questions and detailed notes for me. The ms I’d submitted was for an adult historical mystery. Rowan, however, pointed out that it was really a coming-of-age story and asked if I’d consider revising it as a YA novel. I was completely surprised. But when I thought about it, I realized that she was right. Those changes would make it a better novel.

I cut 30,000 words (paring the ms from 95,000 to 65,000 words) and compressed the plot. I changed the main characters’ ages – Mary Quinn went from 21 to 17, and James Easton from 29 to 19. One thing I was careful NOT to do was simplify or lighten the novel’s themes and ideas. I hate being talked down to – always have – and would despise myself for doing so to others. Rowan and I did two edits together before we were ready to go out on submission. At this point, I officially signed with William Morris.

My job now was to buckle down, write the sequel, and try not to obsess too much; I wasn’t the one selling the book. This was, shall we say, challenging. But a few weeks later, I opened an email (I’d been on holiday with my extended family) from Rowan that said, “I have some great news for you! Do give me a call…” ARGH. It was a Friday afternoon in Vancouver and thus darkest night in London. That was one of the longest weekends of my life. Eventually, Monday came around and I heard the News: Walker Books wanted World English rights for three novels. (I have carefully resisted the use of exclamation points here, in case I never stop. But they’re there, in my head.)

And that’s how Spy came to be published.