Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson here, writing again as Kathy. I thought you might like to know how my experiment in republishing  the children’s books written back at the start of my writing career is going. It progresses, quickly in some areas and with excruciatingly slowness in others.

Only one book hit a roadblock, and I do mean a roadblock. I went in to check on the progress of my historical novel for ages 8-12, Julia’s Mending, originally published in 1987, and discovered that Amazon had “blocked” publication as an e-book.

Why? Because it is already available online for free, and that’s a big no-no on Kindle. The thing is, it was never made available as an e-book by the original publisher. They’d barely imagined the concept of e-books that long ago. A little hunting around online gave me the answer: the book is being offered at a pirate site. In other words, some nefarious person made a bootleg copy of my book, probably by scanning it, and tossed it out into cyberspace without a by-your-leave. Lucky me. I get to track down a way to contact the pirate site (NOT an easy task, from what I’ve heard), convince them to take down my book, since they’re in violation of copyright, and then convince Amazon that it’s no longer out there for free. Aaargh! I will do all that, but not just yet. It will require more calmness and patience than I’m capable of right now, even a couple of weeks after discovering the problem.

The good news is that this doesn’t affect Amazon carrying the print-on-demand edition of the book. In fact, Julia’s Mending is already available there, along with The Mystery of Hilliard’s Castle and The Mystery of the Missing Bagpipes. For those wondering, it takes Amazon about ten days to get a copy to a customer when it says “ships in 1-2 days.”

With the other books, the process has gone smoothly. I have now reissued three titles and made two previously unpublished children’s books available as e-books and paperbacks at the major e-book outlets. Well . . . mostly. The computer problems at Barnes & Noble a couple of weeks ago seem to have slowed things down at that site. The two new ones, Shalla and Katie’s Way, aren’t available yet for Nook users, but they are for Kindle and iBooks and Kobo and are listed at Baker & Taylor and a bunch of other places I’ve never heard of.

I worked with the talented Dave Fymbo at LimelightBookCovers.com to find just the right look for each book while at the same time “branding” them all as books for young readers written by me. Those are the covers scattered throughout this blog. An outfit called Draft2Digital has done all the heavy lifting in the tech department to format the books and distribute them to booksellers. To read more about the middle-grades novels now available and to find buy links, click here

And now, a couple of questions for readers of this blog, especially those of you who are parents or grandparents of 8-12 year-olds. Are kids in that age range reading books online? Or do they still prefer the feel of holding a printed book in their hands? And whichever way they’re reading, are they at all into traditional mysteries or historical fiction?

Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson has had sixty-three books traditionally published. She won the Agatha Award and was an Anthony and Macavity finalist for best mystery nonfiction of 2008 for How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries and was an Agatha Award finalist in 2015 in the best mystery short story category. She was the Malice Domestic Guest of Honor in 2014. Currently she writes the contemporary “Deadly Edits” series (A Fatal Fiction) as Kaitlyn. As Kathy, her most recent book is a standalone historical mystery, The Finder of Lost Things. She maintains websites at www.KaitlynDunnett.com and www.KathyLynnEmerson.com. A third, at A Who’s Who of Tudor Women, is the gateway to over 2300 mini-biographies of sixteenth-century Englishwomen.