How did it feel when you first heard music played on the glass harmonica?

One spring day, I drove a few hundred miles to the nearest person with a glass harmonica. I had listened to recordings while writing the novel but I’d never heard the instrument live.

A scientific glass company makes glass harmonicas today, and they are rare and quite expensive. I’d found this amateur musician, who prefers to remain anonymous, via the Internet… and it felt a little like Internet dating.

When I arrived, he stood outside his garage patting his hands with paper towels. He had to get the oils off, he explained – which allows for a purer sound. Inside, we chatted a bit. When he dipped his fingers in water to start playing, he was trembling. I looked away. There was a Benjamin Franklin action figure on a side table; inspiring quotes on the walls.

He played “Love Me Tender.” It took me by surprise – an Elvis tune? But it was so right. His fingers were sure on the spinning glass bowls. The sweet high notes hung in the air with such longing. It was different from a recording, as different as standing right next to a ringing bell versus blocks away. Tears sprang to my eyes. How can it be that we can feel so much at the touch of notes? I vibrated with the feeling of loving tenderly. I don’t know if I can ever thank him enough for daring to play for a stranger.

An “enhanced” ebook companion to The Glass Harmonica was just published. What’s your favorite enhancement?

Henry Garland, Chjara’s husband, sells early American erotica. Researching, I stumbled on amazingly explicit images. I had no idea this happened in Puritanical America. So Such Were My Temptations: Bawdy Americans 1760-1830 was born.

What’s my favorite find? Hard to say. I think a poem from which we made a video. It helped me understand what “ribald” means.

Your characters are uninhibited for their time but question the appropriateness of their behavior, especially selling uninhibited books. Have you ever felt similar qualms about your own writing?

I come from a sexually modest family and I didn’t want Henry to be who he was. But as a writer and as a person, I’ve come to trust the edgy places. If I stay with them, fear goes away. And then I can be more open to the people around me, the people before me. My heart can be more full.

The state of the art in book trailers

By Dorothee Kocks
Published November 2011 in Solander, the Historical Novel Society magazine

I did not expect the making of my book trailer to bring a director to tears.

The scene:  a warm museum room on a rainy day in Leipzig, Germany. The team trooped in: a Norwegian actress, a friendly Brit loaded with camera gear, and the German director, a busy young dad with a thriving film business, doing a favor for his American author cousin and her New Zealand publisher.

It was all business. It was all Lights, Camera, Action. They were almost done. Then the curator, a gallant man with wild, graying hair, offered to play the instrument that inspired the title of the book: a glass harmonica.

Benjamin Franklin invented it, mechanizing the finger-around-the-wine-glass idea. Women swooned when they heard it. Franz Mesmer mesmerized his patients with it. The script warns: an instrument so potent it was banned.

The film crew needed to return to their responsibilities at home.  They were late.  The curator touched his wet fingers to the spinning glass bowls. An eerie sound circled around them in the room. This music from 200 years ago was filled with ache and longing.  The fragility of the glass and the beauty of the sound and the effort of the day combined and suddenly he, the director, was there at that moment of connection with the mystery of being human in this world.

Even in the act of public relations (PR), magic can happen.

What Makes a Successful Trailer?

Book trailers are now so common on the checklist of PR materials, at least one pundit already predicts the end of the era. Your friends and neighbors may still exclaim: There are trailers for books? I’ve never heard of that. But industry insider Lee Goldberg, in a Mediabistro.com interview, said that book trailers’ time has come and gone.¹

Or should be gone. “I look at some of these book trailers from some big name authors and I can’t help but think: ‘Are you out of your mind? Why don’t you just go to the bathroom, take whatever cash you have in your pockets and flush it down that toilet?’” Goldberg said.

Many others, though, only see the beginning of a trend that continues to present new creative opportunities for authors and publishers. Book trailers first became a phenomenon in 2002, which in the current age of technology and app invention is approximately an aeon ago. GalleyCat.com picked up on the phenomenon early on, and editor Jason Boog is one who believes book trailers are here to stay.

“Videos are [a] huge part of what people consume online . . . and there will be writers who can tap into that.” Publishers will scale back their financial commitment to it, he says, because sales data are hard to connect to the cost. He thinks authors should step in and make their own. Through a trailer, writers will find readers they wouldn’t find otherwise.

Rich Fahle, founder of Astral Road Media, adds that the big picture is really about a new vision of writing. He finds book trailers rather boring. The promise is in adding video to an advanced kit of storytelling. Citing Phillipa Gregory as an example, he said writers are integrating back story, commentary, and social interaction into the communities of their books. For The Red Queen, Gregory did a “ton of video commentary around some of the characters.”

“Readers are coming to expect more. When they read a story that they love, they don’t want to leave it behind,” Fahle said.

Many authors learn the possibilities of video by starting with trailers, which have proliferated fantastically in recent years. Called alternately “author videos,” “book trailers,” or “book videos,” the video segments warranted enough attention by 2010 that an award ceremony was born: the Moby Awards, brainchild of Melville House Publishing. Moby Awards feature unusual categories: Book trailer as stand-alone art object and General Technical Excellence and Courageous Pursuit of Gloriousness, for example. The awards have a spirit that is part honor, part spoof, part ongoing commentary on what’s working.

The best trailers, according to Boog, who serves as one of the judges for the Mobys, are easy to spot. “Sincerity is the absolute most important thing. You should make it yourself and it should be something that shows your readers a personal glimpse at you.”

He gives an example of Max Barry’s sci-fi book, Machine Man, about a person who starts replacing parts of his body with robot parts. Barry put the video camera on himself, he talks about how ridiculous he feels, and then he says the only way to show what the book is about is to cut off his own leg and replace it with a robot leg. He pulls out a saw, turns it on, and . . . the trailer ends. It’s funny, it creates a connection between the reader and the author, and people want to pass it from one person to the next.

While Machine Man is not historical fiction, it makes a point: the success of a book trailer depends on creative inspiration, just as a book does. Historical fiction trailers to date have not made the best-of list at Moby’s – only the worst-of. Pirates: The Midnight Passage is an historical fantasy adventure of British privateers facing off against Blackbeard and a mysterious Aztec underworld.

The trailer features everything that Boog feels dooms a trailer – the decision to have actors pretend to be characters, over-the-top acting, and an amateur’s failed attempt to imitate the production standards of highly professional movie trailers. Of course, being named the worst got writer James R. Hannibal quite a bit of attention.

“Literally the day before the awards, sales of Pirates had reached an all time low,” Hannibal said. “The Moby Awards revived them to their best level, and they have only just now started to drop off again,” nearly two years later.

Hannibal’s next book was a techno-thriller, and he used the same company, XPC Media, to create his next trailer. “In my opinion sales of both books would have been cut in half if I never released the trailers.”

“Going viral” is the holy grail of video PR, but it’s a mysterious process that depends on the quirky, passionate reactions of viewers the world over – which thankfully is hard to predict. Intentionally promoting a product is the easiest way to discourage, rather than encourage, people from passing the video along. When one does go viral, of course, everyone agrees the investment was a good idea. Bestsellers can be made overnight.

Industry blogs are undecided on whether publishers will continue to underwrite book videos. Success comes in many guises, including the pleasure of creation. Here are a few examples of what some historical fiction writers, from Pulitzer Prize winners to self-published authors, have done.

Great Book Trailers: the ineffable standard

Richard C. Skidmore, producer and director with VIDEO DOCUMENTS, had never heard of “author videos” when he got the job from Viking to produce the video for author Geraldine Brooks’s historical novel, Caleb’s Crossing. It turned out to be “one of my favorite jobs I’ve ever had.” His instructions from Viking were minimalist: four minutes. No further advice. He realized they could do whatever they wanted.

The result is a video full of an unusual, somber light plus a surprising secret: the person who seems to represent the main character, Bethiah, is actually the Pulitzer-winning author herself.

Reached by email, Geraldine Brooks said she isn’t sure that all books lend themselves to a video. “Some novels create imaginary worlds that should be unique in the minds of each reader, and some kind of imposed visualization could damage that lovely alchemy.”

For Caleb’s Crossing, though, the idea fit. “The island of Martha’s Vineyard is, itself, one of the most important ‘characters’ in the novel.  It’s a unique place and I wanted people who weren’t familiar with the island to get a taste of its salty beauty,” she wrote.

Brooks and Skidmore began their collaboration with Brooks writing a script and Skidmore listening carefully for what would unfold. Then one day they were touring one of the historic houses on the Vineyard. Brooks happened to be wearing something that looked almost historical. Skidmore turned the camera on. It was a creative accident: “part of the magic of a creative enterprise,” Skidmore said.

The video doesn’t announce the author’s actor role. Instead, viewers can guess it, just as they get a mood or feel of the book from the images. The novel builds from the true story of Caleb, a Native American from the Wampanoag tribe who graduated from Harvard in the 1660s. It’s told from the perspective of a fictional missionary’s daughter, Bethiah.

Another creative accident arose when Brooks was feeling shy about the sound of her own voice in the film. Skidmore responded by looking for some background sounds — crickets, waves — but then looked into the music of the time. A composer also, he ended up writing the harpsichord piece that underlies the narration. “It’s so rare in the corporate environment to be given that kind of freedom,” Skidmore said.

You can see the trailer by typing Caleb’s Crossing into YouTube’s search box.

A Debut Novelist’s Success Story: Joseph Wallace’s home run

Joseph Wallace had a first novel that Simon & Schuster loved, Diamond Ruby. Even as an established non-fiction author, he knew the challenge of getting notice for a debut novel. “It wasn’t likely that Oprah was going to bring me on board. The question for me was – what can I do to make the book conversation-worthy?”

So he took some of his advance, considered it an investment, hired a professional team, and made a book trailer with a controversial strategy: he hired an actress to portray his main character, Ruby – not just for a glimpse, but for full scenes.

This was in 2010, and the publisher already had prepared a more traditional author video. In it, Wallace talks passionately about his subject. Based on a true story, the novel follows Ruby Thomas, a poor girl who rose to baseball fame as a pitcher in the roaring twenties. But Wallace wanted more in a video than talk.

“People were telling me it’s a sucker’s game — do it for your ego, it won’t make a difference.” He forged ahead anyway.

He created his video for under $5,000 with elbow grease and personal connections.  He served as executive producer, learning along the way that he prefers writing to the time-sucking demands of film. He found the actor, Carlie Nettles, a girl who appeared in a free, powerful YouTube movie that ended in Cannes, and contacted her parents. His team found archival footage the old-fashioned way, by looking and looking some more.

The video launched at the front edge of the Twitter storm. One person tweeted another about it, who tweeted another, and a book reviewer at the Washington Post noticed. Which in turn led to more attention.

“I do believe it made a huge difference,” Wallace said.

He not only sympathizes with the point of view that readers want to imagine characters themselves without an actor in their minds, he agrees at some level. “I purposely made the decision to go against that theory,” he said, because on balance, he felt people would be more intrigued if they knew what was at stake. “You had this appealing, tough, strong young woman up against tremendous threats. I could not figure out any way to really communicate that in a vivid way without choosing to show an actress and have her narrate it.”

The advice he gives to other writers, and to himself for the future, is that in this noisy world and in a business full of guesswork, the most important thing is to create something that makes you happy. “It has to be something that comes from your own heart and imagination. Otherwise the benefits are too vague.”

His video is at www.josephwallace.com/trailer.html.

A DIY Book Trailer that made it to TV: Richard Wise’s gem of a niche

Richard Wise is happy to acknowledge that he essentially self-publishes his work. His first book, a non-fiction guide to the Secrets of the Gem Trade, earned him $350,000, he says. Then he wrote a novel, also drawing on his lifelong passion as a jewelry trader. The French Blue, as the trailer announces, tells the story of a man, a beautiful woman, and the many journeys and adventures that surround the world’s most fabulous gem. The novel traces the 17^th-century origins of the Hope Diamond, crossing two continents and more than 60,000 leagues. To cover all that territory, the trailer features a ship firing cannons, mine scenes, a belly dancer, and jewels – all for under $2,500.

Wise’s enthusiasm is infectious. “I looked at the stuff that was available, which struck me as pretty lame. I thought, if you’re going to do a trailer, it ought to be like Cecil B. DeMille.”

Working with a video designer, he searched online for companies that sell film clips. He wrote a story book, selected images that fit, and called on a few friends in the gem industry. The book, revised five times and edited by his Brunswick House Press team from its original 1,200 pages to under 600, was ready for release. He wanted to get out the word.

“I’m kind of an iconoclastic individual. I spent 25 years traveling around the world, buying and selling gems.” He turned to writing later in life. “My problem all through my earlier years was that I didn’t really have anything to say.”  While he originally tried a few agents, he decided to go out on his own. He had studied writing and history in college and, through his career, knew where to find his readers.

“Most of the marketing falls on your shoulders regardless of whether you have a mainstream publisher,” he says.

The marketing he did from his non-fiction book paid off also for the novel. The cable Jewelry Television network picked up his novel, took the trailer, and even created its own version of the trailer. The result was that thousands of viewers from around the world, already interested in the subject, learned about his book.

Wise will retire from the gem trade soon and focus on writing full time. At this point, he would like to do more writing than marketing and would think of going mainstream.

On the Horizon: new trailers, new apps, and transmedia

When I searched for “book trailers” while writing this article in August 2011, I could choose from among 22,100 videos. Of that total, 682 book trailers carried a tag for historical fiction. By the time this article appears, the number probably will have significantly increased. Some of them will find success in traditional marketing terms of sales data. Some will create the more immeasurable successes of a creative life.

In the way of marketing, they may not so much disappear as be eclipsed. Next on the hip horizon is the book app. An app, short for application, is software that can run on phones or other small computing devices. Instead of only adding video to a book’s life, the apps allow a variety of media consolidated into one delivery platform.

Boog suggests that app technology particularly is suited to writers of historical fiction. Combine video from archival footage, interview historians of the period, add links to other books as expanded “footnotes”, interweave related stories with visually interesting links – it’s called transmedia story telling. He’s planning an app-book himself – on how writers survived the Great Depression – using text, images, and interviews.

The possibilities for historical fiction can be glimpsed by the current top-selling literary book apps. They showcase the opportunities for adding historical context – an expansion of the “author’s note” in so many historical novels.

One example, released by Penguin Books and among the top-grossing book apps at the Apple store, is an app for Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. The app tries to avoid distracting attention from the book’s text itself, and so doesn’t litter the document with links and highlights. Instead, the reader/viewer can touch light-blue tabs on the left. They present sidebars that include information on the historical context, the locations, the people.

Joseph Wallace intends the sequels of Diamond Ruby to take advantage of this new form. He already has video in the can for the sequels, but plans to use them in different ways.

The app is just one vehicle for the new world of transmedia storytelling. The technical platform is not so important as the impulse to experiment with what Fahle of Astral Road calls “a deeper form of story telling.” Readers will find their way to it via apps, enhanced ebooks, integrated websites or as yet unknown avenues. Readers become part of the author’s inspirational universe. “It’s about sharing. It’s not about promoting anymore,” Fahle says.

Transmedia involves a lot of fancy bells and whistles to be sure. As Wallace says, it’s noise unless it comes from the heart.

Notes:

1. Jason Boog, “Why You Shouldn’t Make a Book Trailer,” GalleyCat, July 11, 2011, http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/why-you-shouldnt-make-a-book-trailer_b34041.

View the book trailer here. 

It’s a question particularly poignant this week, as librarians and booksellers celebrate Banned Books Week. A “virtual read-out” pushes the boundaries on YouTube of what is considered appropriate reading.

I got my answer from a reader recently. She wrote that the experience of immodesty, that brazen state of a woman’s rebellion against the prescribed life, was lost to her. But last year, “for the briefest few hours,” she got it back. When she did, she wrote, “I dazzled and was electrified. And then I was shamed, and shattered, and shuffled out of the room.”

There is something good about trying out what we’re told is wrong. Something brave. At the time of my book, the generation following the Revolution, people were figuring out what freedom meant. And one thing it meant was reading what your betters commanded that you avoid. Henry Garland, a rebel son of Puritans, sells the top two bestsellers from his carriage: The Bible, and Noah Webster’s The Book of Spelling, a dry-sounding title that was a how-to manual for teaching yourself to read. The next hot-selling book seems to have been a tie.

• The Coquette, sometimes called the first American novel, told the story of a woman torn between an upright but boring preacher and a handsome Southern rake. She ends up pregnant, shunned, but sympathetically so – and the book swiftly is banned from the new public libraries.

• Aristotle’s Masterpiece, despite the lofty title, concealed a ‘granny book’ or midwife’s manual –with illustrations, and explicit instructions on how to make a woman ready to conceive.

And then there was Fanny Hill. Now a classic of erotic literature, it follows an orphaned girl into the English urban sex trade – where she has a lot of fun. It could be called that generation’s The Joy of Sex.

Not all of these books were formally banned because the government hadn’t yet taken on that role – but they were certainly forbidden. From the pulpits, in the self-censorship of the newspapers which advertised Fanny Hill obliquely as “Memoirs of –”, people got the message: Don’t go there.

So they went. What is it about the forbidden that actually can drive us to be better people, even better citizens? Sometimes the content itself is liberating. But even more, it’s the experience of navigating that border territory where right and wrong are unclear. There, you find out what you yourself feel is right. Our forebears overthrew monarchies. They did not live as they were told to do. They invented a better way. And sometimes the first step is to do what is banned. Forbidden.

Freedom requires moral courage. And moral courage often arises out of the ashes of moral failure – out of shuffling shamefacedly out of the room, as happens to my characters. You have to be lost to be found.

This article also appears at Elle Lit and The King’s English Bookshop Blog.

The King’s English Bookshop is at 1511 South 1500 East, Salt Lake City, UT 84105 (tel: 801-484-9100). This event is presented in partnership with the Utah Humanities Book Festival.

Bragg’s regular overnights with Abigail provoked jealous journal entries by another young man in the village, who had hopes of his own with fair Abigail, not to mention Hephzibah Crossfield and other young ladies of the town. Abner Sanger, a young farmer, privately slandered Ebenezer as “Lord Debauche.”

As lovers celebrate Valentine’s Day, those aching for a return to traditional romance might be surprised to learn that love in the first years of our country was pretty steamy. By some estimates, one in three New England brides was pregnant in the early Republic, and young unmarried couples often kept their trysts under the same roof as their pragmatic parents, who made sure they knew who the father of any future child was.

We know about the Americans’ intimate habits because couples with babies delivered seven months after the wedding had to admit their sin publicly so their children could be accepted in church. Historian Richard Godbeer painstakingly tracks these records in “Sexual Revolution in Early America,” in which he tells the story of Ebenezer Bragg.

The thunderclap of revolutionary ideas, especially a right to happiness, affected men and women alike. A new era in publishing replaced the dry, humorless self-help of religious elders with racy novels like “The Coquette.” Said to be the third book people bought, after Webster’s and the Bible, “The Coquette” cast a sympathetic eye on a young woman caught between a boring but upright minister and a handsome rakish Southerner.

One of the ways a greater permissiveness took hold was via a new social institution established by the Puritan elders as they grasped for control: the singing school. Puritan sermons emphasized the consequences of sin, with images of fire and brimstone moving people to the kind of paroxysms of fear typical of horror movies today. Those sermons though were contradicted by the psalm singing during the service. Most people didn’t have songbooks, didn’t know the words, didn’t learn musical notation — so singing in church was a decidedly improvisational affair. People sang their notes in a way the elders disapproved of.

To stop all this noodling around with music, the elders instituted singing schools. The only place to meet, though, that was warm enough in winter and big enough to hold the crowd, was the local tavern. And the people who came to learn were mostly young people. Both sexes. The songs tended to be old folk tunes and the singing masters struggled to get the tavern crowd to switch from the old, quite racy lyrics to the scriptures imposed on them. Meanwhile, beer flowed.

The Puritan elders soon realized their mistake but it was too late. Singing schools became one of the most popular entertainments of the latter 18th century.

For those who want to sample old-time romance, the type of singing that loosed the bounds of propriety in the early Republic today still exists. It’s called ‘shape note singing” or sometimes Sacred Harp singing, and in New Hampshire, there are regular ways to join in. Go to http://www.mcsr.olemiss.edu/~mudws/regular.html for information.

Dorothee Kocks, a former resident of North Berwick, Maine, is the author of “The Glass Harmonica: A Sensualist’s Tale,” published by rosamirabooks.com in January 2011. The novel takes place largely in Portsmouth, in the early 1800s. She invites comments at www.dorotheekocks.com.

Two hundred years ago, publishing was a mess. Pirates took work from one country and published it in another, authors cried foul and couldn’t get paid, publishers sprang up out of nowhere to take advantage of the new American mania for reading. Anyone, it seemed, could set up shop.

The publishing free-for-all in the early Republic happened because the booted British no longer could stop the presses if the content disagreed with them. Add to that political revolution an economic one, which was that banks began to lend young, white men money. This was new. Entrepreneurial risk, decried by the Puritans, triumphed as an ethos and the new money policy let sons start businesses without the permission of their conservative elders. Meanwhile, ministers shouted “don’t do it” from the pulpits. New England clergymen hated the novel in particular, with all its multiple points of view and titillating subject matter. They wanted people to keep reading their advice — and maybe also Benjamin Franklin’s.

At the heart of the hoopla, then and now, sat the individual reader. Noah Webster’s runaway best-seller, The Book of Spelling, helped free the reader in those days. Former peasants, farmers with no education, girls as well as boys — any of them felt entitled to pick up the Book of Spelling and study the simple lessons that translated syllabic sounds to letters: the elemental technology of reading. Readers multiplied exponentially.

Many of those readers did exactly what the elites feared they would. They read whatever they wanted. After The Bible and their Webster’s, they bought The Coquette, a novel about a wayward woman that swiftly was banned from the new, public libraries. And after The Coquette, at least in some circles, they might read Aristotle’s Masterpiece. This book had nothing to do with Aristotle, the title a diversion to hide the contents: a midwifery manual with explicit instructions on how to make a woman ready to conceive. Down the perceived slippery slope from there was Fanny Hill, an erotic novel that would have been called pornographic if the word had been invented yet (it would take photography and the mass-market printing of the mid 19th century to create that discourse.)

I learned about all this because one of the characters in my novel, The Glass Harmonica, is an itinerant bookseller and he hides from his wife, the heroine-musician, that his trade in illicit books supports their family. Henry struggles with the ethics of his business — both of them believe that sensuality can lead, surprisingly, to virtue instead of vice. Pursuing happiness, they open their senses to commune with what they call the electrical current of life. Of course, this gets them into trouble.

Readers get themselves into and out of trouble vicariously — safely — in books. When we read, we identify with the characters, make choices with them, experience any manner of different lives. And in the end, most books sell not because of smut, as feared by the ministers picturing a ‘slippery slope’, but because one reader tells another: ‘hey, I think you’ll like this.’ Noah Webster experienced this wave. In the parlance of today, his book went viral without him getting paid much for it. And so Noah got political, and he pushed for the invention of royalties, and earned the moniker of the Father of Copyright for his advocacies for professional writers, a new career invented in part by people like him.

Dread over the e-book revolution arises from many sources: Will writers and local bookstores fall to the same fate as musicians and Tower Records? How will people be paid for their work? And what about libraries — now they can buy one hard cover and lend it a hundred times but with they have to buy a new e book copy for each reader appearing at the circulation desk?

The warning that good books will be replaced by slop reminds me of the hand-wringing from those now-distant pulpits. Same story, different century. Readers are the true arbiters and we readers never shut up about a book we like. One person’s slop is another person’s treasure, and those conversations are, if anything, enhanced by this Facebook, worldwide gabfest we’ve invented in the 21st century. We will sort out the business aspects.

The most poignant fear for me is the loss of the familiar, cherished, soft, fluttery paperback in my hands. I sold my novel to an e-book publisher before I’d bought a device, before I even held an e-reader for more than a second in my hands. I leaped for complex of reasons: personal opportunity, infectious inspiration from my publisher, a friend in New Zealand, not New York, whose idea is to create a virtual book village. I found reasons to continue when the process turned out to be like an old-fashioned guild. I was surrounded by people with ‘ink’ on their hands: a designer who hand-painted the cover, an editor tireless through nearly a year of drafts.

All of this felt good, and yet I was still in the bathtub, reading. It’s my character Henry who taught me not to worry about it. We readers can be many readers in one: we can buy smut and we can buy elevating advice. We can read on paper or on screens. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that original technology: sounds turning to letters. Next week, I go on vacation to an island. I am taking my library with me in a tiny tote bag.

A poet of the period described the instrument’s effect on listeners as “celestial ravishment.” Hypnotist Franz Mesmer used the ethereal sound to entrance his patients. Marie Antoinette tried her hand at it before losing her head. And no less than Mozart, Händel and Beethoven composed for it.

Then, just as suddenly as it appeared, the glass harmonica vanished. America’s sexiest musical instrument faded into oblivion.

Now it’s come to life again. The instrument’s convoluted history is the inspiration for an enthralling new novel by author and historian Dorothee Kocks. The Glass Harmonica: A Sensualist’s Tale chronicles the life journey of a young Corsican woman filled with a rapturous love of music. Banished from her island home for “immodesty,” Chjara Vallé is sold as a servant to an opium addict in Paris. Music paves the way for her to flee to the New World with her lover, Henry Garland, a rebel son of New England Puritans. Trouble awaits as they travel the byways of the young nation, she alternately seducing and scandalizing audiences with her playing of Franklin’s instrument and he clandestinely selling erotic literature, “Nantucket husbands” and other risqué items related to the “science of sexual knowledge.”

“The glass harmonica’s heyday was during America’s first sexual revolution, when the tumult of a fledgling nation led to a questioning of Puritan morality and a rethinking of privacy, marriage, and the intimate promises of freedom,” says Kocks. “Between 30 and 40 per cent of brides in the post-Revolution era were pregnant when they got married. Premarital sex was rampant among the sons and daughters of Puritans.”

Praised by reviewers as “bawdy, geographically vast, and sensual indeed,” Dorothee Kocks’s The Glass Harmonica plumbs the intimate details of early American history to craft a rich and enchanting narrative of music, personal liberation, erotic love, and the virtues of sensuality.

My moment came in my own foyer. A manila envelope with New Zealand stamps announced that the Rosa Mira Books contract had come and I tore it open, expecting a sheaf of papers to sign, date, return. I had places to go and did not expect to pause but then the papers were sheathed in a pale green sleeve, the color of spring. And inside, a fine ribbon wrapped the document and I could feel publisher Penelope Todd reaching across the miles to say: here you are.

Now I am being contacted by newspaper editors who’ve received a review copy, not via email but by post: in a box with Christine Buess’s lovely cover design and inside, petals from Pen’s garden. A slip of paper gives the online address to receive the book.What astonishes me most about the ebook revolution is how deeply personal it is. One expects machine worlds to be cold and distant and yet the opposite has been true as The Glass Harmonica has journeyed toward publication. Of course part of this is due to Pen’s personality but that is my point: we are fully here, on the e-frontier. We meet each other not face to face but somehow intimately. Publishing for the last 100 years or so required layers of bureaucracy: from the writer through agents to editors and publishers, then marketing departments and production houses and distribution centers and pulp paper mills. Now small gardens are springing up.As the first Rosa Mira author, I find myself linked hand to hand with a public relations campaign that is refreshingly not about bamboozling but about finding neighbors in the book world, people who like the same kinds of places. The whole process feels local even as it is so effortlessly global. Here in Utah, I just returned from a walk with my dog and we navigated icy sidewalks and watched a father help his daughter on her bike negotiate a crust of snow. In Dunedin, Pen switches on her camera during our phone call over Skype and the flood of summer bird song enters my study. Meanwhile, in Berlin, Germany, a book trailer seems in the offing as the music museum there houses one of the last surviving 18th century glass harmonicas.

The next step is for the intimate experience of reading to become electronic. I loathed the idea once. I love my paperbacks. I read in the bathtub. But now I have a reading device. I turn the page, and I am carried away. In the end, words are the technology and the magic together, and all else is just details. I hope to meet you here, on the even electronic plain. I’m at dorothee@dorotheekocks.com.