That is from The Initiation Of Ms Holly by KD Grace, an erotic novel. Mummy porn. It was published by Xcite, an imprint of Accent Books, based at The Old School, Bedlinog, Glamorgan.

I've always liked women's fiction. It tends to be more psychologically-acute, probes deeper into emotions. And women writers, generally, are better at sex. Less self-conscious.

By the time you read this, probably something like one in three women in Wales will have read the so-called 'mummy-porn' sado-masochistic, bondage shlockbuster Fifty Shades Of Grey by EL James.

I spent some time in a branch of Waterstones the other week. There was a table, right at the entrance, piled high with copies of Fifty Shades and its two sequels. And in they all came. The mummy bit is right - many of them had pushchairs. You kept hearing them actually saying 'Oh, everybody's reading it...' which eventually began to sound like baa, baa...

After a while, I felt like torching the pile. But in the end I did what everybody else apparently was doing.

I read it.

And, you know, it wasn't as badly-written as I'd been led to expect.

I mean, it isn't well-written - the the hero, or 'dominant', Christian Grey, billionaire owner of the Red Room of Pain, talks like an alien in an old SF movie, and every few pages the narrator or 'submissive', Anastasia, exclaims: "holy crap!"

It's interesting that the language doesn't get much stronger than that. Here's a woman who gives you hundreds of pages of hot bondage, and she's a prude about talking dirty.

There are no such inhibitions at Xcite - "best erotic book brand, 2010". Yes, there really was mummy porn before Shades but, on Sunday's Phil The Shelf, Accent and Xcite proprietor Hazel Cushion explains how EL James has opened up a whole new.... Oh hell, it's very difficult to write a sentence about mummy porn without falling into a pit of double-entendres, but you get the idea: authors like Xcite star KD Grace have, um, finally come into their own.

We talk to KD (really name, er, Kathy Dickie) about Ms Holly and her adventures in an up-market sex club, appropriately called The Mount. Also the new genre of paranormal erotics, which features people having orgiastic sex with ghosts... possibly 50 shades, one after the other.

At this point, you should know that what Ms Holly is rolling around in her mouth at the top of this column is in fact a chocolate truffle. In a startling opening scene, KD Grace describes how a woman and a man can enjoy the same chocolate truffle in the dark. It's not for the squeamish, but actually more imaginative than anything in Fifty Shades.

If there is anything slightly disturbing about this phenomenon it's the idea of mature women sharing sticky passages from erotic novels in the way school kids used to do in the cloakroom... that was in the days before kids actually started having sex in the cloakroom.

For the publishing industry, what it signifies is the end of chicklit, the genre first aimed at socially and sexually aware young women in the 1990s.

The Queen of chicklit was Jane Green, whom we also meet in Sunday's programme. Now middle aged and living in the US with her second husband, Jane is not impressed by the new erotica. Her latest novel, The Patchwork Marriage, is fully-rounded in a way Fifty Shades doesn't even try to be, dealing in considerable depth with the problems of a woman marrying a man with two daughters, one of whom hates her.

Now that's real pain.

Listen to Phil the Shelf on Sunday from 5pm on BBC Radio Wales.

Let's call it The Writers' Spring.

Here's one of the leaders now, professing "a livid frustration with the self-serving, ivory-towered London publishing and agent elites who have been deluding themselves for so many years that they are indeed the 'Chosen Ones' of pompous literary endeavour!"

Julian Ruck

This is Julian Ruck, who we talk to in Sunday's Phil the Shelf. A man with a virtual weapon, and he's not afraid to use it.

"I felt it was time someone blew the lid off the utterly-disconnected-from-reality and smug world of publishing. It is long overdue."

The author of the Ragged Cliffs trilogy, Julian is the organiser of the Kidwell-e festival, celebrating "the most innovative, exciting and empowering medium to hit the publishing world since Caxton and Gutenberg."

It takes place next weekend, 28/29 July, at the Ffos Las racecourse near Kidwelly, with several writers and ebook experts lined up to speak to a hoped-for 20,000-plus audience... many of whom could soon be published authors.

Anybody can publish an ebook, for very little expense. You get it up on Amazon and then you get all your mates to post five-star reviews saying how brilliant it is. You won't even look sad, because lots of established writers are doing it - Stephen King was among the first.

The reason established writers are increasingly tempted is that a self-published ebook can, in theory - and often in practice - earn you about four times as much as one put out by a publisher. And if you're already a recognised name you have more than a head start.

Publishers, too, are aware that, for minimum outlay, they can relaunch writers who were big 20 or 30 years ago. The late David Williams, Welsh creator of the Mark Treasure series, joins Andrew Garve and 1960s TV favourite Francis Durbridge in a new ebook omnibus, The Best of British Crime.

"The publication of this omnibus revives a trio of the lively mystery novels that have lurked in publishers' archives for years, waiting to be rediscovered," says (living) crime writer Martin Edwards, who's written the book's introduction and is one of the speakers at Kidwell-e.

Which isn't, of course, about established print authors like Martin. It's about all those writers who've been spurned by the self-serving, ivory-towered London publishing and agent elites. It goes without saying that a number of them are actually well worth publishing.

It also goes without saying that a large number will never realise how hopeless they are. Sometimes publishers get it wrong but, more often than not, they don't.

As a first-timer, you might well leave Kidwelly all fired up and convinced you're going to be the next EL James (author of the self-published Fifty Shades of Grey, which I'm afraid we'll be discussing in the next programme).

But the brutal truth is that out of all the thousands who epublish themselves, only a few have really soared so far, and most of these - like EL James - have been repromoted by a print publisher.

Most will earn less than £500 - not much for maybe a year's work. And they tend to be the ones with classy covers and a slick publicity campaign. You can learn the basics of all this at Kidwelly... and, at the very least, it's a lot of fun.

So where does this leave the, um, self-serving, self-deluded publishers?

"Could turn out to be the best thing that's happened to us in years," one leading publisher told me, hopefully.

Publishers can play around with ebook prices, halving them overnight to attract mass-sales and word-of-mouth promotion and then increasing them when sales reach a plateau. They can't, of course, do this with printed books.

But many of them are more than a little scared. "They don't really know where it's going," one long-time bestselling novelist told me a few days ago.

Nor does anyone. OK, virtually all publisher-produced books have decent grammar, correct spelling and a basic literacy, while an appreciable proportion of self-published ebooks... well, it's not hard to see why they didn't get picked up for a five-figure advance.

However, there are now agencies which, for a fee, will tart up your manuscript and give it a classy Photoshop cover. Just as many published authors are boosting their incomes by lecturing on creative-writing courses, others are seeing the possibility of becoming book-doctors and book-midwives.

Pretty soon we'll all be authors - virtually.

Listen to Phil the Shelf on BBC Radio Wales from 5.30pm on Sunday. For more on the Kidwell-e Festival visit the website kidwellyefestival.com.

Angharad Price. Photo: Angharad Elen

OK, three massive, complex, violent Swedish thrillers don't have too much in common with a very slim poetic story set in the Maesglasau Valley of north Wales. Except that both Steig and Angharad were discovered by the same London publisher, Christopher MacLehose, who runs his own imprint inside independent publishers Quercus.

It's not really all that surprising, as MacLehose specialise in translation, and The Life Of Rebecca Jones by Angharad Price was published some years ago in Welsh. But it did get me thinking about what would become the theme for this week's edition of Phil The Shelf.

Before Steig Larsson came along there were already a few Scandinavian writers, like Wallander creator Henning Mankell, doing fairly well in translation. But before Angharad, London publishers had virtually nobody whose novels had begun in Welsh - well, nobody still alive.

So how come we can't get enough Nordic novels while Offa's Dyke seems to be the biggest book-barrier in Europe?

It's not, of course, because the English-reading world is entirely uninterested in what happens in Welsh-speaking Wales. It seems to be all about a shortage of good translators - or, at least, good translators with good contacts in the UK publishing world.

The Life Of Rebecca Jones. Photo courtesy of MacLehose Press

As very few London publishers speak Welsh, they rely on people they can trust to say, "this is a serious page-turner". Or, in the case of The Life Of Rebecca Jones, "this is a classic".

Rebecca was translated for MacLehose by Lloyd Jones, best known for the award-winning Mr Cassini - a Welsh novel in English. Obviously a labour of love, the translation preserves all the poetry in this story of a very unusual family, which produced sons who overcame the constraints of blindness and also, at a later stage, Angharad Price herself, now a senior lecturer in Welsh at Bangor.

It's been widely praised in the London media. The Independent said:

"Price's book achieves a rare feat indeed. A lovingly crafted account of Welsh-speaking rural life on the brink of dissolution or at least transformation, it serves both as a touching, tender document and as a thoroughly artful exercise in storytelling."

It's already a cult, but will it become a serious bestseller in English? A paperback is scheduled, with major promotion. If it does take off, will the Steig Larsson effect create a demand for more Welsh novels?

In other words, will Welsh-language novelists be able to earn something approximating to a good living?

It's hard enough these days for English language writers to achieve a worthwhile income but, as you can hear on Sunday's programme, full-time Welsh writers like Gareth Williams - thrillers, non-fiction, screenplays, kidlit; you commission it, he can do it - need to multitask on a mind-boggling scale.

But Angharad Price thinks Gareth's good and, if all goes well, that could count for a lot.

Listen to Phil the Shelf from 5.30pm on Sunday on BBC Radio Wales.

In the 15 years since Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone came out, several authors have been hailed as the new JKR.

Go on, name one...

Hmm, thought not. Basically there is no new JK Rowling.

Something else you need to know: for the first Harry Potter novel, Rowling apparently got a £3,000 advance from Bloomsbury who, even then, were fairly significant independent publishers.

This is the figure you need to remember because, in those 15 years, publishers' advances have not exactly increased. For an unknown first-timer in the kidlit department, 3K is still close to the going rate.

Which is why most children's writers have another job. Even after several books, kidlit is rarely a career. I remember the much-loved Dick King Smith, author of The Sheep Pig, which was filmed as Babe, telling me that he used to have to write over 10 books a year to make a living.

I hadn't met Dick when, after a contract fell through, my agent said, "Why don't you write a children's book? You won't get paid much, but it'll only take you about six weeks."

He was half right. I didn't get paid much, but it took six months.

That's another thing: children's books, especially those aimed at Young Adults, are rarely quicker to write than adult books. And you get involved in lots of arguments about layers of political correctness you'd never have imagined existed. And problems like having to use kilometres all the time, regardless of what it says on the road signs, because that's what kids are taught in school.

And don't think it's over when you've finished the book. Adult writers are used to doing talks and signings. Children's writers are urged to go into showbiz.

My Young Adult publisher invited me to lunch to meet a well-known publisher's publicist who also wrote a successful series about a vampire pirate. He explained how he toured schools armed with a cutlass... and a big box of his books to flog to the kids. This wasn't about threatening them as much as putting on a performance. Day after day.

Invited to consider developing a similar routine involving my character - a teenage boy who was learning to dowse with a pendulum - I pointed out to the publishers that a few deeply-religious parents might well consider that dowsing could be exposing their kids to Dark Forces.

The truth is, I wimped out - thinking about facing, day after day, new gangs of cynical teenagers committed to taking me down.

Anyway, after two books, I got out of kidlit, under the impression that it was only lesser-known writers or those operating under a pseudonym who got pushed into the minefield of children's entertainment.

Then, for this week's Phil the Shelf, I went to talk to the best-selling Val McDermid.

This is Val, of The Wire In The Blood fame, author of adult novels involving savage killings, torture, etc.

In a major, if temporary, departure, Val's now written the words for a picture book entitled My Granny Is A Pirate which, according to the back cover, is aimed at an audience aged two-plus.

Yes, mine boggled, too. Especially when I saw the author preparing to give the hard sell to a marquee-full of potential new readers.

Out of her bag came a large, fluffy parrot...

Listen to Phil the Shelf on BBC Radio Wales from 5.30pm this Sunday.

In the past few days, I've mentioned him to a writer, a publisher and a literary agent. In each case, you'd have thought we were discussing a particularly inventive serial killer.

Martin Amis in 2006

But wait... you didn't know Martin Amis was Welsh? Here's the history.

The distinguished novelist son of the distinguished novelist Kingsley Amis was born while his father was working in south Wales and went to Swansea Grammar School.

Later, when Kingsley's career was soaring, Martin wound up at the public school Charterhouse, attended around the same time by the future rock star Peter Gabriel and the future crime writer Peter James who, in a recent newspaper interview, recalled:

"I was at Charterhouse School with Martin Amis, many years ago. I didn't see him again until an awards ceremony in 2010. I went up and said, 'You might not remember me, but we were at school together.' He said, 'No, I don't remember you - and you only remember me because I'm famous.'"

OK, there was probably some truth in that, but Peter James doesn't take a lofty put-down lightly. His next novel, featuring Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, contained the following passage:

Amis Smallbone was, in Grace's opinion, the nastiest and most malevolent piece of vermin he had ever dealt with. Five foot one inch tall,* with his hair greasily coiffed, dressed summer and winter in natty suits too tight for him, Smallbone exuded arrogance.

See? How many other novelists can claim to attract that level of venom?

Not that Martin Amis had the best of starts. Becoming literary editor of the New Statesman at the age of 27, a couple of years after the publication of his first novel, was never going to endear him to fellow novelists who had to endure 53 publishers' rejections while working for the local council.

Nor, in later years, did his half million pound publisher's advance, secured by the agent known as The Jackal. Or the fact that he spent a substantial chunk of it having his teeth tarted up.

And now - can you believe it? - the oldest upstart in the book business has emigrated to New York and published a novel apparently sneering at Britain's decent, honest yob-culture.

Lionel Asbo is a fairly broad satire about a violent Londoner who looks a bit like Wayne Rooney before the hair-transplant and comes into nearly as much money as Wayne thanks to the Lotto.

I think it's the best Amis in years, demonstrating his talent for profanely-funny dialogue and unexpected descriptions... without those constant reminders that this is a man who's determined to make the English language gratify his every peculiar desire.

Looking back, you can see the problem. Amis Snr wrote literary novels, comic novels, crime novels, science fiction, a ghost story and a James Bond. The only way Amis Jnr could follow that was to try and extend the frontiers of literature.

So, after three amusing outings, Martin took to producing books in which the actual writing - and therefore the writer - emerged as vastly more significant than the subject or even the theme.

Sometimes it even worked. Often, it didn't. He came off the rails most disastrously, I thought, with Night Train, a hard-boiled American cop novel which pretended to be more important than the books it borrowed from and was actually kind of embarrassing.

His last one, The Pregnant Widow just... went on and on about the kind of upper class people you hoped you'd never have to meet.

You wouldn't actually want to meet Lionel either, but you'd enjoy listening to him in the pub, preferably from a table near the door. This is a novel with a good story, a lot of laughs and an unexpectedly suspenseful ending.

Prior to interviewing Martin Amis for this Sunday's Phil the Shelf, I wondered if he was going to accuse me, with a dismissive sneer, of only saying that because he was famous.

In fact, as you can hear in the programme, he was OK. And I came away thinking he'd become just like the rest of us: worrying about getting it right and giving the readers a good time... and not entirely sure that he was going to crack it this time.

*Martin Amis - as I now know by being able to look him more or less directly in the eye - is actually about five foot six... but you get the idea.

Listen to Phil the Shelf on BBC Radio Wales on Sunday from 5.30pm.

The Artists' Green Room is a tent with sofas and a garden outside, where nobody seems to pay for a drink. I walked in there yesterday in search of Martin Amis, past a table where actor Tom Hollander of Rev was sitting on his own, apparently rehearsing a script - aloud.

The day before, we had to squeeze past Bettany Hughes, Simon Schama and Tony Robinson, deep in discussion over something historical - presumably.

You also pick up snippets of conversation, like this one from BBC arts boss Alan Yentob on his mobile: "Is Salman here yet?"

Sometimes, they can get right up your nose. Last Friday I interviewed Eva Gabrielsson, long-time partner of the late Stieg Larsson, of Dragon Tattoo fame, on stage in front of an audience of about 500. We'd also arranged to record a long interview with Eva for Radio Wales, and producer Tracy Cardwell had reserved a little relatively-soundproof shed known as the Shepherd's Hut which is there specifically for the likes of us radio people.

Except it was already in use.

'It's Ed Davey, the Energy Secretary,' were we told. 'He had to take an Important Phone Call in private.'

This was rumoured to be from David Cameron but, hell, Ed Davey could have gone anywhere to take it on his mobile. Eva Gabrielsson had flown from Chicago the previous night and hadn't had any lunch. Plus Ed was keeping his own audience waiting.

After 15 minutes, I was about to storm in and throw him out of the shed, but he'd locked the door from the inside.

And that's why, when you eventually hear our long interview with Eva Gabrielsson, you might detect the sounds of a crowd of celebs chatting and clinking glasses. We had to record in the Green Room, made even less radio-friendly by the tent frame clanging under the force of torrential rain and a rising wind.

As Ed Davey is also the minister for Climate Change, I'm blaming him for that, too.

Our next interview was with Bafta-winning screenwriter and director Bruce Robinson, so we took no chances. As Bruce only lives a few miles out of Hay, we went to his place.

This is a remote farmhouse where you have to cross a bridge over a rushing stream to get to the front door. A bridge which, according to local legend, was crossed by Johnny Depp, star of Bruce's latest movie, The Rum Diary, an adaptation of the first novel by the late Hunter S Thompson, author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Bruce wouldn't formally admit that Depp had actually come to Hay before they started shooting, but local people remain convinced that he did and I'm one of them, so you can count on it.

Either way, when we run the programme, you'll be able to hear some very amusing anecdotes about JD and the equally rich Keith Richards.

And later, on Phil the Shelf, you can hear Martin Amis. I did find him in the end. But guess what...
...the damn Shepherd's Hut was locked from the inside again.

So you can listen to Martin's erudite commentary on the writing of his very funny new novel Lionel Asbo over the clinking of wine-glasses, celebrity chat... and possibly Tom Hollander in rehearsal.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!

One of an estimated 80,000 people expected to hit this massive site (on the Brecon Road, just past the fire station, if you haven't been before) by Sunday night.

It's the 25th festival - yes, another jubilee - and I suppose I must've covered most of the others for BBC Wales. And every year I forget how much work is involved.

We don't just turn-up, you know - doorstep people with the microphone: 'So, Martin Amis... you've done a new novel. What's it about, then?'

I mean, how insulting is that? Most of the authors here have spent over a year on their books. The least you can do, pre-interview, is read them. Which is a lot of reading. Usually about three weeks' worth. And I've still got three more books to get through before weekend - Martin Amis, Tony Robinson and Julian Clary, if you must know.

Realistically, the most one man can handle is about 20 books, covering a mere fraction of the 500-plus events, but more than enough for the hour-long Haylights programme scheduled for BBC Radio Wales on Sunday.

How do we choose? We usually have a generally theme running through it. Like, one year both Archbishop Rowan Williams and evangelical atheist Richard Dawkins were here, so I went round asking all the celebs one question: God or Dawkins? As I recall, only David Miliband declined to answer, so I think we know where he stood.

This year, appropriately enough for a 25th anniversary, the theme looks like being Hay itself. On Saturday, we talked to the Mayor of London about his book Johnson's Life Of London, in which Boris discusses all the people who've made London what it is today - ie the most influential city in the world.

But what's the most influential town? Could it be Hay, the only place outside London to house a monarch? We're aiming to look at several other reasons why Hay could be the most important town in the world, through the eyes of writers, musicians and other People Who Count.

It's surprising how many of them have made their homes in this one-time obscure agricultural backwater. People like cult movie writer and director Bruce Robinson (Johnny Depp was round his place a while ago) and Britpop pioneer Alan McGee. Bestselling novelist Mark Haddon spends holidays in the Black Mountains, where his new one The Red House is set. It describes Hay's Cinema Bookshop as a Battersea Books' Home.

Of course, King Richard Booth is not seen around as much as he used to be, due to health problems, so the last week has seen him handing over most of his workload to the first Prince of Hay. Another secondhand bookseller, Derek Addyman, apparently is Richard's illegitimate son, following a short-lived relationship with a scullery maid at the castle.

In true Prince Charles tradition, Prince Derek has emerged in a blaze of controversy by attempting to get ebooks banned from Hay, which has recently lost nearly a fifth of its 30-plus bookshops as more readers pack their Kindles to go on holiday. A banner now flies in the town announcing that Kindles are banned from the Kingdom of Hay.

I've been looking round, and so far I haven't seen a single Kindle at the Hay Festival where, when they're not attending an event, people do tend to read - sitting in deckchairs, lying on the grass, waiting for lunch in one of the eateries.

It's like being in some pre-digital time-capsule.

It's a phenomenon best evoked on TV, when the picture goes into black and white and you see men in ankle-length macs and women with pins through their hats, and the men raise their trilbies to the women and offer them a Capstan Full Strength.

Presteigne at dusk

Well, OK, I may have exaggerated the odd period detail, but you get the idea: Presteigne at nightfall, especially when you haven't been there for a while, is part of another era.

For a start, there are no superstores. There's a traditional greengrocer's which, like my dad's old village shop, also sells fresh fish. There are shops trading in second hand goods overflowing on to the pavement. There's a flower shop and a town hall with a clock. And never many people about.

And not much light.

Which is the point. Presteigne is not merely old-fashioned. Because of Powys County Council's bid to reduce its electricity bill, it's also extremely dim.

No surprise, therefore, that this is the home of Ian Marchant, author of Something Of The Night, a new book about the strangeness of Britain after dark.

The title comes from Ann Widdecombe's memorable description of her Tory colleague, Michael Howard. Something of the night about him, Ann remarked - and we might have guessed that she was about to become a novelist.

Anyway, I've met both Michael Howard and Ian Marchant just the once, and maybe I'm not sufficiently attuned to this kind of aura but neither of them struck me as having much of the night about him. Michael Howard was fairly chatty and Ian Marchant seemed kind of sunny. And that's how his book begins.

Ian Marchant

Ian is one of those guys almost destined to live in Radnorshire, where incomers are rarely entirely normal. He's been a singer with various bands, including the almost-legendary Your Dad, and also a travel writer.

"I am a creature of the night," he writes. "Ninety per cent of this book has been written after dark."

His journey into the shadowlife is told in a series of flashbacks from an all-night drinking and confessional session with his mate Neil, a disabled small-time dope-dealer exiled to Ireland. To the strains of old pop music, most of which only one of them likes, we observe their wry but intermittently harrowing game of psychological strip-poker as the night makes its way towards the Hour of the Wolf.

Although it's scattered with statistics about sleep, dreams and circadian rhythms don't expect some kind of encyclopaedia of the nocturnal world. This is an increasingly personalised account, which begins with fireworks in Abergavenny, floodlit football, dog-racing and where to get the best pillows.

It moves on to the search for a nightingale in the Cotswolds and a visit to the Spacewatch observatory set up (in Radnorshire, obviously) to save the world from asteroid damage. There are memories of Ian's student years in Lampeter and a drive to Llanddewi Brefi where "the stars came crashing out in all their glory."

And then it does get dark.

The first danger signs appear in an account of a long drive from Cumbria home to Presteigne, listening to the car radio airing newly-discovered tapes of the poet Philip Larkin reading his own works. Larkin is a recurring murmur in this book which, sooner or later, had to tackle Aubade, arguably the most depressing poem ever written about lying awake with the knowledge that you're riding on a one-way ticket.

A weird, apparently-prophetic dream signals the sudden death of Ian's estranged first wife, turning him overnight into a single-parent suffering repeated panic attacks and the conviction that he won't see another morning. Then comes the temazepam, the Valium, the beta-blockers.

Meanwhile, we learn the tragic truth about how Neil came to be in Northern Ireland. And then there's the death of Ian's father, with whom he had a very negative relationship. And you remember a line from Chapter One.

"Night is when we are most likely to die, commit suicide... the time of our greatest fears."

It's not looking good. You examine the back fly-leaf to see if it says anything about this manuscript being found among the effects of the late Ian Marchant.

But, no, he was still around for the candlelit launch party in Presteigne. And you remember the night in a curiously bright and vibrant churchyard when - OK, with his system not exactly substance-free - he became aware "that I wasn't alone in the universe. that I was part of this beauty, somehow, and it was appropriate that I was there, and loved..."

It wasn't in Presteigne, but you can't have everything.

Like, what's the point? I don't need one. And it's just a passing fad, anyway, like the personal-organiser and the mini-disc. And why would I want another charger to add to the 26 I already have and can't remember what most of them are for? Besides, think how many paperbacks you can get for 90 quid.

Listen, don't think it was only me. Most of the authors I know - and I know a lot of them - say the same things, and what they don't say but think is: do I really want to spend a whole year of long hours, head-beating and hand-wringing to create something THAT DOESN'T EXIST?

Anyway, I used to think all that, but now I can't say anything because... I've got one.

An ebook reader on top of a paperback

I've had it just over a week. Periodically, I switch it on, just so I can switch it off again and puzzle over why it never shuts down on a screen-picture of the same author twice: Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde... how long before it gets to Dan Brown?

Of course, I still say I might never have acquired one if it hadn't been an essential research-tool for the last in the current series of Phil the Shelf, in which several authors, a publisher and a bookseller discuss how the ebook reader has changed their lives and their income levels, in both positive and negative ways.

According to Wikipedia, the first ebook reader, as we know them today, was launched in 2004, to widespread apathy.

Not any more. This Christmas the Amazon Kindle will probably be under more trees than iPhones, Xboxes and all the other alphabetical techno-toys put together. Suddenly, it's like you're meant to feel uncool if you're seen in a train, a bus or a dentist's waiting room without one.

However, among the places you're well advised not to be seen with a Kindle, Kobo or Nook are Derek Addiman's three bookshops in Hay-on-Wye.

The ebook is, potentially, a massive threat to the second hand book industry because you can't exactly put all your used virtual volumes into a box and take them to Hay. Whichever way you look at it, from now on there are going to be fewer actual books around.

You can hear Derek's unrestrained, uncensored views on the Kindle in Sunday's programme, along with the other side of the story.

North Wales romantic comedy writer Trisha Ashley reveals how the ebook has opened up a whole new audience for her novels. And Scott Mariani, who lives near Carmarthen, found he'd become King Kindle when a cut-price virtual version of one of his Ben Hope thrillers shot to the Amazon Number One spot.

More significantly, he also explains in the programme how authors are able to use ebooks to multiply their earnings at the expense of the mainstream publishing industry.

What it amounts to is something approximating to the Arab Spring, where mid-list authors - for so long the underdogs, kicked around by publishers and spurned by High Street bookchains - can finally regain power. Although the sinister side of this is the terrifying trajectory of Amazon to a position close to bookworld-domination.

Is it all going to spell the end of the physical book?

Well, no. Although paperback sales may continue to slump, the hardback will survive, if only because the ebook reader is never going to look good on a shelf.

What we might see is far more attention being paid by publishers to the design and quality of a hardback - in much the same way as more CDs are appearing in digipacks with gatefold sleeves and booklets, to provide something you can't get from a download.

But ebooks are also getting cleverer, as novels increasingly come with extra electronic sights and sounds.

The war has barely begun.

Watch this space...

Listen to Phil the Shelf on BBC Radio Wales on Sunday from 5pm.

Unless, that is, you drop into the Hay Winter Weekend, as we did for Sunday's Phil the Shelf on BBC Radio Wales.

For several years now, the big festival has occupied a fairly vast rural site well out of town, with famous folk ferried to and from Hereford station or their hotels, their meals served in a private restaurant tent.

Hay-on-Wye

But this three-day pre-Christmas event brings the festival right back to where it began, over 20 years ago, building on the success of the local second-hand book trade.

Most of the weekend's events are held in Hay Community Centre, down the bottom of town near the edge of England, and you'll see famous writers poking around the bookshops and queuing for coffee behind their readers - just like the old days.

There are no actual global superstars at the Winter Weekend, but the guests are more relaxed and generally available for a chat. And it's certainly a lot easier for us, not having to chase people and find they've been grabbed by Sky Television again.

On Sunday's programme, from Hay, Adam Hart-Davies discusses The Book Of Time which, as he points out, has more about the nuts and bolts of time and is easier to understand than Stephen Hawking's Brief History of it.

We also break into the secret world with BBC security correspondent Gordon Corera's history of MI6, The Art of Betrayal. And we discover why your dog really doesn't want to eat you, with biologist and canine shrink John Bradshaw.

It was a touch dispiriting, however, hanging around the community centre, to observe, first-hand, the effects on the bookselling business of the recession and the online shopping revolution.

In past years, after every gig, you'd find long queues of fans waiting to get newly-bought books signed - sometimes buying multiple copies for Christmas presents.

This year you could watch people turning up for one particular event and then disappearing. And while a gig would be virtually sold out, when it was over most of the audience would head straight for the exit, without buying a book.

'It's the same everywhere,' one well-known author told me ruefully. 'We had an audience of 500 at the Cheltenham Festival and sold 12 copies of the book.'

The implication is that, in these penurious times, an increasing number of people are prepared to forego a signature in favour of a half-price deal on the Internet.

Meanwhile, with two prominent second-hand bookshops recently shutting down, the town is well split over plans for a big supermarket where the primary school now stands... a site alongside the nation's most scenic car park, once occupied, until it moved up the road, by the Hay Festival itself.

A central supermarket would be good news for local people on low pay, who currently have to travel to Brecon, Abergavenny or Hereford for cheap food. But the idea of a huge store selling food, clothing, electrical goods and - the final irony - cut-price best-selling books - horrifies small shopkeepers and supporters of the concept of an independent Hay.

That means a Hay with no chain stores - a status nurtured for decades by King Richard Booth, now compelled, for health reasons to spend more time in London. Last Saturday, Father Christmas was doing an afternoon shift at Richard's former headquarters, The Limited, and looking, to me, a bit less jovial than of old.

But Hay's always been eccentric enough to come through crises that would have turned a less-confrontational town into a commercial cemetery of sad charity shops. Someone always thinks of something... and knows how to publicise it.

This week, for example, I heard anarchic whispers of a Hay-based campaign against the hated ebooks which, because they have no second-hand life at all, are a further threat to the local economy.

Of which more next week...

Little is known about this case, but it did appear to leave an entire community seriously anaemic before it ended with the full works, including the traditional exhumation and the removal of a head with a spade.

And then it all went quiet for nearly a millennium, until a whole colony of the Undead was reported around Rhuddlan Castle in North Wales by the award-winning fantasy writer Sam Stone.

Sam, who lives at Prestatyn, is one of two Wales-based writers of vampire novels on Sunday's Phil the Shelf, which asks: what, apart from a haemoglobin-rich diet, has kept the Undead alive and flourishing for so long?

I'd kind of imagined that Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series and all the romantic chicklit vamps it spawned would put the final stake through the heart of the sanguinary genre. Not so, apparently. An internet list of the top 10 horror titles this week reveals that four of them are vampire stories.

They've come back to life... as ebooks.

And the top two are both Vampire Federation novels by Scott G Mariani, who lives in the countryside near Carmarthen, where he watches movies and does a bit of archery.

Scott Mariani, without the G, is the bestselling author of the Ben Hope series about an ex-SAS officer who gets involved in Dan Brown style mystical mysteries. The Vampire Federation, his less-serious sideline, creates a whole EC-style bureaucracy through which Euro-vamps survive alongside the human race.

Both Sam and Scott employ the device of having archaic monsters exposed to all the horrors of the 21st century, including texting and the net, although health and safety are played down. So... is it getting too silly? Hundreds of thousands of readers think not.

Christopher Lee

Putting this programme together reminded me of the time we talked to the greatest screen Dracula of them all, Christopher Lee, about his autobiography.

It soon became clear that Lee, while not ashamed of such Hammer classics as Taste The Blood Of Dracula, preferred to be remembered for his other screen roles, such as Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man - a movie recalled by the first book in our new Shelfstarters spot.

Last week we talked to Sue Walton, a professional publisher's copy-editor from Penmaenmawr, who's set up a business to help would-be published writers make their manuscripts more presentable for submission to publishers and literary agents.

Sue's been working with Karl Drinkwater from Aberystwyth on Turner, a novel about a mysterious island off the Welsh coast, ruled by a certain Lord John - so lots of echoes of The Wicker Man.

In Sunday's programme we run a sample of the book past experienced fantasy publisher Jo Fletcher to see if the combination of Karl and Sue has produced a winner.

Jo will also be giving us her opinion on whether vampire fiction is finally coming to the end of the bloodline. A question we decided not to attempt to ask Christopher Lee, remembering what happened at the end of my last interview with the great man.

I'd been saving a particular question, thinking it would be a really memorable way to end the programme. It went something like:

Me: Er... you remember that sinister noise you used to make when you opened your mouth to reveal the fangs... that hiss?

Silence.

Me: Do you think you could do one now?

Lee: No.

Me: Just one...?

But he refused. He refused to do the hiss!

Honestly, you'd've thought I was asking for blood.

Listen to Phil the Shelf on BBC Radio Wales on Sunday 4 December from 5pm.

I think he got the point. Byron, who opens Sunday's edition of Phil The Shelf, is also a journalist. More distinguished, obviously, than I've ever been, but drawn to the same kind of story. The kind that rural Wales has in abundance - not world-shaking but definitely mind-altering. For example, I remember...

...an educated businesswoman in a split-level bungalow on the hillside above a west Wales town explaining very soberly how a comparatively-recent family tragedy had been preceded by an experience of the toili, the phantom funeral.

...a farmer near Machynlleth recalling the sound of the old wooden bier they kept in the attic trundling across its floorboards not long before his father died.

...the secret guardian of the Nant Eos Cup opening a wooden box, brought out of a bank vault, to show me the chipped and blackened remains of what she and others firmly believed to be the Holy Grail.

OK, that one made a rather good radio feature at the time but, generally-speaking, stories like this are of very little interest to serious news media unless told in a certain way. Byron Rogers, Carmarthenshire-born, but now living in Northamptonshire, is a master of the certain way.

His book, Three Journeys, has stories about conjurers and condoms and how once - and not all that long ago - he was mistaken for the Devil in a country lane. Mostly, episodes of the kind you maybe don't realise the value of until you're looking back from exile in Middle England where, if these things happen at all, they seem to happen far less frequently than they do in rural Wales.

Byron was, of course, born in the middle of it, but the old magic seems to work equally well on outsiders. In this week's programme, we talk to Kevan Manwaring, an English bard from Stroud on an endless search for magic in the landscape, who'll be describing the curious qualities of the north east Wales waterfall Pistyll Rhaeadr.

Cover image of Andy Roberts' UFO Down?

Usually it just makes people want to visit the loo, but in Kevan's book, Turning The Wheel, the torrent's previously-unsung aphrodisiac qualities come to the fore in the kind of incident from which folklore is formed.

But some people remain resistant to the spell. We also talk to Andy Roberts who investigated the famous Berwyn Mountain UFO Disaster of 1974, when the crash-landing of an alien craft was said to have been covered up by the Men in Black.

This is an excellent example of the way rural Wales regenerates its mythology. In the old days it was the fairies - the tylwyth teg - who would have been encountered in lonely places furnished with the remains of Bronze Age ritual monuments. Now it's aliens. But are they part of the same phenomenon?

Andy's book UFO Down? is the first serious examination of the Welsh Roswell for many years and may also explain why he's become a figure of hate for UFO-hunters across Britain.

Was he got at by the Man in Black? Find out in Phil The Shelf, just after 5pm on Sunday on BBC Radio Wales.

Unless of course the Men in Black disconnect the transmitters...

At which point, for me, Cox's credibility went right down the pan. Now, when he tells us how many holes there are in the asteroid belt, I'm likely to add a couple on.

The problem is that scientists tend to believe that everything in existence should be subject to human control, and ghosts are nicely outside the box. But they don't go away.

At least one in three people I know has had an experience hinting at some other level of existence. When you talk to these people, they know they weren't dreaming or hallucinating. They know, by the circumstances, that it wasn't somebody's idea of a practical joke. And that's how it's always been. Strange things happen and nobody knows how or why. Not even Brian Cox.

I'm always fascinated by how many autobiographies contain an episode involving a possible ghost, premonition or prophetic dream. Even Hitch 22, the autobiog of arch-atheist Christopher Hitchens has one.

On this week's Phil The Shelf, we talk to actor John Challis, TV's Mr Ambrose Boyce of Peckham, about his uncanny experience while performing in Llandudno. You might not want to buy a second-hand car off him, but it's hard simply to drive away from this story with a contemptuous sniff.

Cover image of MR James' Collected Ghost stories courtesy of Oxford University Press

We also discuss Joanna Lumley's very sinister encounters in the house where Montague Rhodes James was born nearly 150 years ago.

Which is where we leave real-life behind.

The distinguished antiquarian scholar MR James remains Britain's most celebrated creator of fictional ghosts and is the main subject of this week's programme. Actually, ghost is only a loose term for the entities MR James wrote about. He dealt with earthen things, hairy things, creeping things. Which invariably were evil.

Rhondda-born Darryl Jones, now head of English at Trinity College, Dublin, is the editor of a new edition of MRJ's collected stories - all 35 of them - for the Oxford University Press. Darryl's been addicted to supernatural tales since he was a kid, so obviously it was no hardship putting these together with a new introduction, copious notes on dates and relevant history as well as James' own opinions about the existence of ghosts and hauntings.

On the programme, we also hear the work of another actor, Robert Lloyd Parry who's made a career out of impersonating MR James, recreating the evenings, usually around Christmas, when James would sit down amongst academic colleagues and students to read his accounts of otherwordly malevolence.

Of course, it's not only scientists who have a problem with this stuff. For nearly a century the paranormal has been a forbidden area for writers of detective fiction. One of the rules of The Detection Club, formed in 1930 by Dorothy L Sayers, GK Chesterton and others, was:

All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course. To solve a detective problem by such means would be like winning a race on the river by the use of a concealed motor-engine.

The prejudice survives to this day. The hard-boiled, violent private eye novels of John Connolly usually involve an unqualified element of the supernatural, which is viewed with a certain suspicion by some of his crime-writing colleagues.

In his latest novel, The Burning Soul, Connolly's regular narrator Charlie Parker is awoken in the night by a TV that won't stop showing Loony Tunes cartoons... and the voice of a missing girl. It doesn't change anything. It doesn't help him to identify the killer. It's just there because Connolly sees it as part of human experience.

Is it all in his head? You decide. The point about most ghost stories - like most actual ghost experiences - is that there are no certainties. Which is usually what separates the ghost story from the horror story in which all may be resolved, often by mysterious or occult means. MR James had no time for all that stuff. As he said towards the end of his life, They exist, but we don't know the rules.

Maybe just as well...

Listen to Phil the Shelf on BBC Radio Wales on Sunday 20 November from 5pm.

The new series of the Radio Wales book programme starts on Sunday... towards the end of probably the most dramatic year in the book world for three quarters of a century.

Not particularly dramatic in what we're reading - most of the year's bestsellers have been fairly predictable - but in how we're reading it.

And suddenly it's looking like the programme could be sounding dated, even before it starts. I mean... Phil the Shelf? The way things are going, this time next year half the population won't even have a shelf any more. Who needs it when you can carry your entire library in an inside pocket?

Who would have thought this time last year that the ebook would have eaten its way so deeply into the market that publishers would be talking about the impending death of the paperback? Who would have believed that a canny author can now earn a steady living without books or bookshops?

Phil Rickman surrounded by books

It'll never catch on, we were saying. It'll never win more than 10 per cent of book sales, and even that won't last.

People probably said the same about paperbacks when they were introduced in the 1930s. Who wants a book that only gets read once before its spine is all cracked and the cover's curling at the corners?

When the ebook first arrived, authors were the most contemptuous. Authors love real books. It's a great moment when you finally spot someone reading one of yours on the train. Now all you see is everybody bent over a piece of plastic the size of a DVD case with no picture on the front.

Depressing, huh?

But not for long. For some previously-unsung authors, it's been an unexpected new beginning. When the Net Book Agreement was scrapped, allowing shops to sell books at half price or less, only the bestsellers benefited. Big book chains, supermarkets and publishers could handle a reduced margin if they were guaranteed to sell hundreds of thousands of copies.

The ebook has changed all that because there are no production costs - no paper, no printers to pay, no warehouse-space required. This means that a publisher can offer any new ebook for as little as 50p, thus encouraging thousands more readers to take a punt on an unknown writer.

And - very worrying for publishers - an author can now do a deal direct with Amazon, which, with its Kindle e-reader, has already cornered 70 per cent of the ebook market. For the first time, an author doesn't need either a publisher or an agent to succeed. They still help, but they're no longer essential.

For several weeks this autumn the number one bestelling Kindle was by west Wales thriller writer Scott Mariani, who tells me he encouraged his publishers to cut the price as low as possible to reach new readers. It worked. They liked Scott... and looked around for his other books.

The Magic Of Christmas by one of this week's Phil the Shelf guests, Trisha Ashley from Conwy, is already scaling the Kindle charts like a mouse up a Christmas tree.

Later in the series we'll be running an entire programme about the ebook phenomenon... and there's a lot to talk about.

However, our first programme looks forward to Christmas reading, showing that, despite new technology, most readers are still seasonal traditionalists.

Maybe it's something to do with the continuing recession, but comfort-reading has been big this year, with the domestic love-story, One Day always prominent at a supermarket near you. Trisha Ashley's novel is a light romantic rural comedy with lots about Christmas pudding and other goodies (previously she's done chocolate) and a happy ending guaranteed. It's aimed at women, but men read it too - on their Kindles on the train, thus avoiding sneers from the Tom Clancy fan sitting opposite.

A traditional Christmas essentially is a Victorian Christmas, which is doubtless why Anthony Horowitz's publishers have just released his first - and, he insists last - Sherlock Holmes novel, The House Of Silk. He's on the programme, too.

And we also note the first publication in English of Daniel Owen's Fireside Tales, originally published as Straeon y Pentan in 1895, now translated by Adam Pearce.

Perfect material for a bit of Christmas Kindling...

Not for me, mind. I still don't own any kind of e-reader. I like cracked spines and curling pages. Especially at Christmas.

The new series of Phil the Shelf begins on BBC Radio Wales on Sunday 13 November at 5pm, and will be available on the BBC iPlayer for a week after transmission.

It starts on 13 November, to be exact, in the run-up to Christmas - on the basis that one of the great festive traditions is sitting down with a good book, preferably in front of a log fire with no carbon emissions.

We're not quite sure who we're having on the programme yet, but definitely a few Christmas crackers... and possibly a few turkeys. And, as usual, we'll be hoping for a little Christmas magic for at least one contestant in the literary lottery that is our Shelfstarters spot.

As regular listeners know, The Shelf is probably the only book programme in the world that actually gives listeners a chance to get published. You send us the first 25 pages of your unpublished novel, plus a one or two page synopsis of the plot, and if we think it has a chance we'll send it to a publisher or literary agent for an opinion... or even a future contract. Yes, at least three of our Shelfstarters have actually gone on to get published.

OK, why is this better than sending it yourself?

Well, if you submit a manuscript or a sample direct to a publisher or agent you'll normally receive what's known as a rejection slip. This is a very brief response which normally says something like, "Thank you for offering us The Cowbridge Slasher, which unfortunately, we do not consider suitable for our lists at the present time."

What it will not say is: your story is ludicrous, your characterisation flimsy at best and we might have felt slightly more charitable if you hadn't printed it single-spaced on both sides of the paper.

However, if Phil The Shelf sends your work to a publisher or agent, it's part of the deal that the publisher or agent comes on the programme to explain exactly why he or she is turning it down and what you could do to make it a better publishing proposition. If their reasoning doesn't make sense, we tell them. If we think another publisher might be more likely to accept your book, we'll tell you afterwards. You have nothing to lose except your illusions, and, in most cases, it's proved to be a worthwhile exercise.

So... what are we looking for?

Essentially, new novels, as there's not much of a market for short stories and non-fiction can depend more on the subject matter than the writer's abilities.

What kind of novels, then?

Anything from pulp fiction to serious literature, from macho-thrillers to chick-lit. Children's books are also a possibility. And the ground rules are the same: you send us the first 25 pages and a synopsis of the plot and agree to spend a few minutes on the radio discussing them.

Why the first 25 pages?

Because that's as far as most publishers bother to read before rejecting a book. We've had writers who've said, "Oh, if only he'd read the next hundred pages he'd have seen exactly where the story was going." Maybe he would, but he knows that a reader who isn't hooked by page 25 is very unlikely to want to find out.

What do we mean by a synopsis?

What we don't mean is a chapter-by-chapter outline of the entire story. A good piece of advice is to pretend you're writing the blurb - that's the bit inside the front flap designed to seduce the reader. You know the kind of thing: In the prosperous country town of Cowbridge, 12 people have been hacked to death by a killer with a bizarre trademark...

Give it a big build-up, but make it clear that you're in control and know exactly how the plot develops.

If the publisher likes it, what happens next?

Well, it would be nice to say you'd have a contract in the post by the end of the week, together with £50,000 cheque. But these are uncertain times for publishers; they rarely make snap decisions and they hardly ever offer anywhere near that much for a first novel.

First of all, they'll want to see the entire manuscript, which they'll then run past the Sales and Marketing department. Publishing is an industry, and it doesn't matter how beautifully-written it is - if S&M don't think it's going to shift enough copies, it's no deal. But at least you'll know at that stage that you've got what it takes and all you need is the right formula.

What are you waiting for? Twenty five pages and a synopsis, please, to:

Shelfstarters
BBC Wales Wrexham
Creative Industries Building
Glyndwr University
Wrexham
LL11 2AW

The sooner you send it, the more likely it is to get into the autumn series. And this time next year you could be a millionaire.

Possibly.