This is a question authors sometimes get, and it’s a lovely one. (Thank you!) There’s a short answer, and a longer answer, and ordinarily I don’t inflict the longer answer on people in casual conversation. But I’m going to elaborate here, because hey, what are blogs for? And it’s the time of year when people are buying books (right?) so maybe this will be useful.

Caveat that everything I’m about to say applies to traditionally published authors (some parts of the answer might be different for...