Is it true that the government can watch what you are reading if you read online?

ARE POETRY BOOKS PUBLISHED ELECTRONICALLY?

Can you slow down, please?

I saw the Ranch on the news tonight. Can you tell us what happened?

Is it true that the Ranch supports personhood?

Not all of us support the personhood amendment. You can be pro-life without supporting personhood.

You can be Christian and pro-choice.

Life is a GIFT from God!

Are there going to be protesters on campus when we go back?

Several more people registered “?” status. One or two went offline.

“Okay, I am reading your questions,” said Catherine Powell, who proceeded to read each question out loud and then give brief answers to each. Yes, reading on your phone counts. By regularly she meant more than twice a year? An e-reader is a device that allows you to read a book electronically. E-books are often published simultaneously with print books, but some books, especially those that are self-published or specialty, are only published in an e-book format. She did not answer the question about the news or personhood or politics or protesters—protesters? Janine supposed that was what Manfred was talking about in his message, and she wondered what Catherine Powell would say to that. “Let’s table some of these other questions for later, okay? It looks like, based on the survey, 22 percent of you read e-books regularly. So we have a lot of ground to cover!”

The webinar was only scheduled to last an hour—they never went over the allotted time, Janine noticed—and it was already 6:22. Years ago, Janine had been surprised to have a student teacher assigned to her, a sweet and quiet girl from St. Augustine. Her first lesson, delivered to Life Skills I—a class of hoodlums, non–English speakers, and the mathematically disabled—was on making a soufflé. “What the fuck is a soufflé?” one student wanted to know. The student teacher began a long and overly in-depth answer that included some information about the history of France, and the students asked so many more questions (a favorite way of avoiding work) that by the end of class all anyone had accomplished was the messy cracking of a dozen eggs into his or her mixing bowl. “Look at all them eggs,” said one student, whose favorite joke was putting food down his classmates’ pants. “Wasteful.” The student teacher’s next lesson, on pigs in a blanket, had gone much better.

“Let me get to the slides,” said Catherine, near the end. She quickly read through a PowerPoint list of guidelines for marketing e-books to readers.

Every book has an audience—you just have to find yours.

Be sure to keep it snappy; people prefer shorter to longer.

Or if it is going to be longer, tantalize them with romance and unforgettable characters!

Occult themes are also popular.

Know your market. Who reads the type of book you are writing?

Sell, sell, sell!