Jane – Yeah, we’re called “writers.” Gong back and forth is one of many and several types of process, and as long as it ends up with words getting written, it’s nothing to worry about. Complain, sure – I think every writer I know, whatever their process, is convinced that if they only look hard enough, they can find an easier way to do things than whatever they’re stuck with.

Hanneke – Neither the Enchanted Forest books nor the Kate and Cecy books currently have any legal ebooks available. There are, however a set of fantastic audiobooks from Random House/Listening Library that I’m pretty sure are available for legal downloading (they cast all the voices, so it’s like listening to a radio play!). There’s currently a court case over books with older contracts that don’t mention electronic rights; once it’s settled, we’ll know more about what we can and cannot do. All my other books either had the rights reverted, so we could do our own ebooks (the Lyra books), or were reverted and resold with new contracts that do include electronic rights, or the publisher came back with an addendum to the contract for electronic rights, so they’re all available from Amazon, B&N, Itunes, and other obvious legal websites..

I’ll pass the names on to my agent, but really, dealing with pirated copies is like playing whack-a-mole – you smack one down and another one pops right up somewhere else.

I’ve just been given an e-reader, and am now trying to re-buy all my favourites as e-books as fast as my purse will permit.
Kobobooks appears to be the e-bookstore of choice for several large publishing houses, (among them Penguin and DAW, HarperCollins and Scholastic) to sell their epub- or pdf-books to European buyers, and I’ve found your Lyra books there, as well as The 7 towers, Thirteenth child and Snow white and Rose red.
But the Enchanted forest books, as well as the Sorcery and Cecilia books, aren’t available there.

I googled ‘Dealing with Dragons ebook’ and found a lot of places that appear to offer downloads, e.g. epubbud, and store.payloadz – com, but I wasn’t sure these are legal stores that pay you. I will not buy from pirates, but some of these sites looked like real shops, so I’m getting confused.
Looking for ‘Sorcery and Cecilia ebook’ also netted a lot of download sites, but most of those were more clearly illegal torrents: the one that looked as if it might be legal was filestube – com: is that a legal outlet for your books, or is it a pirate too?
It might be worthwhile to get your agent onto this, get her to warn the publishers to send them cease-and-desist orders or whatever they are called.

Also, if you know or can easily find out which e-stores sell your ebooks legally, you might consider naming them, or linking to them, on your Books-pages on your website.
That way, anyone who finds your website, wants to buy your e-books and wants to make sure the income goes to the right person will be steered in the right direction.

For paper books, I understand not wanting to privilege one shop above another, and so naming none. Besides, any bricks-and-mortar store can order in your paper books for their customers, from all over the world.

But for ebooks, the stores (and the publishers) seem to be intent on setting up a monopolist structuring of the ebook-market. There are only a few legal e-book stores that the publishers deal with, and each store seems limited to one or a very few formats, and customers are limited to the store in their region. This means that the list of legal places where people can buy your ebooks is probably short enough that it’s possible to name them on the books’ pages, without slighting anyone.

Sorry to bother you with this, I know it should be mailed to your agent or publisher, but I can’t find out where to send it to.
I’m just a reader who enjoys your books, not a writer, so I don’t know my way around this whole writer’s business world.
If you want to ‘moderate’ it off this thread, please do so: I named the pirates as a warning to your loyal readers and fans, but if you think they might go there and buy from them you wouldn’t want the names in a public forum.
Maybe you could mail it on to your agent to look into?

Is there a term (other than wishy-washy) for those of us who go back and forth between pantsing and outlining?

I used to not mind when books left off with a major cliff hanger, but the more I read, the more it bothers me. Usually it’s because the author hasn’t figured out how to write a balanced arc. I hate when a book has nothing going on, nothing, nothing, nothing, and then finally there’s some action and some build up and … then the book ends. GRRRR! Rather than entice me to read the next book, this just makes me avoid reading books by that author.