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.

It was the last event on my publicity tour of the Wales/England border for the new novel which, like most of them, is set in that general area. I did signings at bookshops from Abergavenny to Oswestry, some very encouraging, one a bit disappointing but, as usual, they all added up to an enlightening experience.

Since last year, one of the regular shops had shut down and a new one had opened - but for how long? Nobody feels secure any more in the book business, which is currently changing faster than any comparable industry.

The usual story is that small independent bookshops are being badly hit by the chains and their special offers - three for two, buy-one-get-one-half-price, etc. But things are not so good for the chains either. I spent two hours in a branch of Waterstones and watched people come in, scrutinize a couple of books and leave without buying anything - possibly to go home and compare prices with Amazon, the internet giant.

All the vowels in Amazon make it a difficult word actually to spit out, which probably annoys high street booksellers no end, and you can only sympathise. My hardback novel, like lots of others, is currently selling at almost half-price on Amazon, which no high street bookseller has been able to match.

And if you want to buy it electronically for your Kindle e-reader, it will cost you just over a third of the full retail price of £18.99... and you can have it sent to your Kindle inside a minute.

Of course a Kindle edition is, essentially, worthless. It has no second-hand value and it's difficult to give as a present. You don't even really own it and Amazon, in theory, could wipe it from your device in seconds. But it's still catching on big time, with thousands sold every week, and could, in theory, eliminate the book - particularly the novel - and therefore destroy every bookshop in the country.

There are, at present, however, still a large majority of readers who find the actual book more sexy than this fairly prosaic-looking bit of kit. And if you want to buy the actual book and get it today, the high street is still the answer.

That's not much of an advantage, though, is it? Which is why booksellers are considering their options - one of which includes more contact with actual authors than they've ever had before. There was a time when, unless you were a serious Name, bookshop owners would peer at you contemptuously over their half-glasses and put on rubber gloves before handling your work. Now they regard you as a potential saviour.

Not that Names aren't still important. The Local Celeb is the first person to be drafted into the war against the net. Only Fools And Horses and Green Green Grass star John Challis lives close to the Powys border, and his local shop currently has a window devoted to his book, Being Boycie, which includes Marlene-style leopardskin and a bottle of Peckham Spring water. On a good day, you might even spot the man himself as he slips in, with that familiar furtive smirk, to sign a few more copies for stock.

But you don't actually have to be famous these days to get recruited. You don't even have to be local. One independent bookseller told me how his shop had adopted a guy who'd self-published his first children's book. Even though he wasn't local, they thought the book was really inventive, put on a big display and spread the word to every customer. Eventually they had kids queuing round the block to meet the author... who soon acquired a real publisher.

The high street's other weapon is the The Signed Copy. A couple of years ago, the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood launched what was known as The Long Pen - a device for signing books online, which has never really caught on like The Old Felt Tip. So authors are hitting the road as never before to provide what Amazon can't offer - a squiggle which can make a book into a collector's item.

One day a few weeks ago, I crossed the Welsh border six times, eventually arriving at a bookstore with a coffee shop (something else you can't experience online) to find rows of chairs set out, mainly for customers who'd never heard of me. I had one hour to sell the book to people already softened up by the promise of tea and cakes and a book that might actually escalate in value.

The downside of an exercise like this is that your new fans all have cameras, and you'll wind up on the net looking like an idiot.

Looking like an idiot (again)... Phil Rickman with fans at a recent book-signing

But it can seriously swell your ego, if not your wallet, when, as I did last week, you walk into a bookshop in Hay-on-Wye to find one of your signed first editions on sale for (swear to God) £650!

I pointed out to the manager that I had a couple more at home which I'd be happy to sign and sell to the shop owner for only £300 each.

She smiled.

'He'll offer me a tenner won't he?' I said.

She nodded grimly.

I didn't think this happened when you'd actually written the words, but a live gig is different from sitting on the sofa with your guitar across your knees and only the dog to laugh at you.

"It's OK," I tell the crowd. "This happened to Coldplay at Glastonbury. We can just start again."

And this is what we do because Allan (lead guitar) and Gordon (keyboards) are experienced musicians. Only one of us is incompetent.

Luckily, I'm better on the hip/hop/trance number, mainly because I can hide behind a phoney West Indian accent while wearing a baseball cap back to front. I smile apologetically at Owain Glyndwr.

Owain doesn't smile back. He looks kind of furtive. In this ancient painting he's in disguise, too, wearing the friar's habit of local hero Sion Cent. It's far from an official portrait but I'm convinced it really is Owain, because we're at Kentchurch Court, the stronghold of the Scudamores, on the Monmouthshire border. Owain's daughter, Alice married a Scudamore, and this is where he's widely believed to have retired (and then vanished) after his final defeat. And the face in the picture is eerily similar to the great man's living descendent, John Scudamore.

The family have been at Kentchurch for over a thousand years, and keeping a place like this intact gets harder all the time. Which is why, for a reasonable fee, they're letting us use it to launch my new novel.

Yes, I realise it's only a few weeks since I was mocking the writer Jasper Fforde for promoting his work at fan-gatherings like The Fforde Fiesta. Well, I'm sorry, that was part of the cover-up. My launch for The Secrets of Pain, is even more bonkers. But it's the sort of thing writers are having to do to stay afloat in the Internet era, in the same way that illegal downloads are forcing rock bands back on the road.

The band. I'd better explain. The new book is part of a series, and one of the regular characters is a singer and songwriter. Snatches of his lyrics, ghosted by me, have appeared in the books. One day, Allan Watson, a long-time reader and composer up in Glasgow, emailed with an offer to write some music and actually complete the songs.

It was an intriguing idea, and within a few months we had an album. Eighteen months later we had two, and on the second one I actually did a bit of singing. So now I'm in a band, and we're playing live to about 150 readers in Owain Glyndwr's retirement home.

Performing at Kentchurch Court

Suddenly, with ebooks and audiobooks and literary festivals as common as rock festivals, publishing a novel has become a multi-media phenomenon.

The original idea was to hold the concert outside - a real Glastonbury job, with a backcloth of the border hills and the deer park. It's well-known that Owain Glyndwr was good at managing the weather, and I was hoping he'd shift a few clouds for us. But half an hour ago it started to rain and we had to carry the amps back into the house.

Inside, there isn't really enough room or sufficient seating and one bloke walks out because he can't hear. But, with a stained glass window behind us and the chandelier overhead, the atmosphere's amazing.

And, of course, there's someone else to make up the numbers and he's wearing a friar's habit and he can see every chord I fluff.

Owain's very strange unofficial portrait is actually hanging in the area of Kentchurch we're using as a stage - me and Allan and Gordon, down from Glasgow for the day, and Krys on backing vocals and Terry, the blind painter, on second guitar. We fixed up for Allan to spend the night in the dim, oak-panelled, four-postered room known as Glyndwr's Bedchamber where, in spite of me repeatedly assuring him that it was seriously-haunted and he could expect to lie there shivering until dawn, he seems to have slept very well.

I'm still nervous, though, and keep glancing at the face in the picture. However, apart from the afforementioned forgetting of lyrics, nothing strange happens. Not on stage anyway.

But, at the end of the passage, is the Ladies loo...

The women's lavatories at Kentchurch are very ornate and contain a grandfather clock. I know this because afterwards I get a guided tour from Jan Scudamore, who runs things.

Afterwards?

Yes, earlier, a friend from Aberystwyth emerged from this same convenience more than little shaken. Seems she was on her own in there and, on the way out, her shoulder was gripped - quite hard. By an unseen hand.

If I was making this up, I'd go back up the stairs to the wall beside the big window and the face of the man in the friar's habit would have acquired a small, subtle smile.

In fact, I don't like to go back up there, so we'll never know.

I've got another novel out.

Every single time, you forget exactly what this means.

In the old days, when a writer just did the writing, it was easy. You simply bought extra newspapers so you wouldn't miss a review. And the publishers (apparently) would send you a case of wine.

Now they only send you a list of instructions. For a couple of weeks, your life is not your own. To publicise your book, you're expected to learn the skills of a sales rep, stand-up comic, children's entertainer and... well, it gets worse. At the Radio Wales book programme, Phil The Shelf, we're often approached by publicists who confide, in pimp-like tones, that a particular author gives good interview...

At least, the writers always go away from our studio with the knowledge that I've actually read the books. This is seldom the case with radio presenters, especially the famous ones who will steer the conversation away from the actual book at the earliest possible opportunity. Don't forget to mention the title of your book as many times as possible, the publishers warn.

Then there are the bookshop signings where nobody turns up. And even worse, in the early days, the libraries. I was once invited to do a gig at Blackwood Library and turned up to find the audience consisted of three librarians and a bloke they'd dragged in from the street even though he'd never heard of me. It was a good night in the end. Librarians are very friendly and informative. 'You don't have much sex in your books, do you?' one observed ruefully.

Literary festivals can be even more discouraging. I once did one in Devon with Peter James, now a number-one bestselling crime writer, and Charlie Higson, now the author of the mega-selling Young Bond series and famous on TV.

Unfortunately, this was the year before The Fast Show became the new Monty Python. We pulled a crowd of about 15 and afterwards sat dolefully around a table of books that nobody wanted signing, watching the queue for Sue Townsend's gig winding twice round the building. In the end, I think we signed each other's books just to make it look as if something was happening.

Even when your sales start to improve, you need to be continually inventive to stay on top. It's time, then, to study the techniques of a master: Mid Wales comic-fantasy writer Jasper Fforde, creator of Thursday Next and the Nursery Crime series.

Jasper's website - feel free to check this out for yourself but beware of flashing images - is a wonderland of whimsy, where you can follow the adventures of his red suitcase, Samantha Samsonite, as she tours America. And if you live, as I do, not far from Jasper, you'll doubtless recall his Porsche, its paintwork covered with hundreds of little green frogs.

But these are only the trimmings. Serious fans can now book advance tickets for the 2012 Fforde Fiesta, a whole weekend in which grown people can do Jasper-related silly things. The downside is you have to do them in Swindon.

Frankly, the rest of us think Jasper should be banged up somewhere dark and quiet before too many publishers' publicity departments are contaminated by whatever he's got. Although I fear it could already be too late. When I was daft enough to write a children's book, the publisher took me to lunch to introduce me to someone more experienced - the author of a series about a vampire pirate. He would tour schools with piles of his books, dressed in pirate kit and waving an imitation cutlass. Never failed, he said, watching me turn pale.

Anyway, I resisted, and the book bombed.

But if my publishers are reading this, I'd urge them to consider the late great JD Sallinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye and a famous recluse, who shunned the public and survived for decades on the huge profits of that one book.

Way to go, JD...

PS I just ran into Jasper Fforde - at the bank, as it happens - and he denies all responsibility for the Ffforde Festa, insisting it's been devised and organised by fans. 'I just turn up,' he says. Huh, he'll be saying vandals painted frogs on his car, next...

This is the term invented for dark Scottish crime novels about doomed hardmen with noses broken by Glasgow kisses and arteries clogged by fried Mars bars. The street-level, socially-aware antidote to traditional upper class English crime by Agatha Christie and co.

It's all a marketing scam, of course, promoted by people who conveniently forget that, as well as breeding Ian Rankin, Chris Brookmyre and Stuart MacBride, Scotland is also the home of the awfully genteel, endearingly inoffensive Alexander McCall Smith whose characters make Miss Marple look hard-boiled.

But Tartan Noir really works. It's a killer brand that's sold millions of books in places a long way south of Scotland.

It seems to have begun back in the 1970s when William McInvanney, an established literary novelist, turned out a couple of intelligent thrillers featuring a Glasgow cop called Laidlaw. It never became much of a series, but it did inspire the young Ian Rankin to create a similar cop operating in Edinburgh - John Rebus.

The first Rebus novel, Knots And Crosses, wasn't meant to start a series either. It was intended to be a one-off literary novel, which just happened to be about a policeman. Then Rankin discovered that being a crime novelist allowed you to tackle big social issues and make a reasonable living.

So, although it took him another 15 years to break through bigtime, he had that essential lit-cred from the outset. He was also wise enough not to overdo it on the dialect. Nobody had to read a sentence twice to work out that any guy who messed with Rankin's serial villain, Big Ger Cafferty, wid have his heid used as a fitbaw (Yeah, I know that's Glasgow, but I can't do Edinburgh).

Anyway, when he did break through, Ian Rankin was suddenly the most successful crimewriter in the UK - the biggest name in the biggest-selling genre. And Tartan Noir was in business.

Well, obviously, the article in Red Herrings got me thinking, why no Welsh noir? I mean, this isn't Burns country, this is the land of RS Thomas, for heaven's sake. Wales can out-noir Scotland any day of the week.

And it has the crimewriters. Think about John Williams's acclaimed Cardiff Trilogy, the stylistically-unique Harpur and Iles series from Bill James, the lesser-known but bleakly-brilliant novels of Roger Granelli. And the word noir just isn't dark enough for Robert Lewis's books about terminally-ill private eye Robin Llewellyn.

In terms of landscape and climate and being different, Wales can also take on massively-successful Scandinavia, killing-ground of Henning Mankell, Jo Nesbo and the late Steig Larssen.

So what's going wrong? You can't say nobody's trying. Howard Marks's first thriller, Sympathy For The Devil, features a female cop who has everything except a Welsh Dragon tattoo, and the climax unfolds in a Pembrokeshire where all the blokes, implausibly, are called either Ianto, Iolo or Gethin.

Is that part of the problem? The fact that Anglo-Welsh crime writers just can't resist an element of self-mockery?

Personally, I like it. I think Robert Lewis's Merthyr jokes balance the blackness perfectly. But I know that it all ends in the surreal whimsy of Malcolm Pryce's Aberystwyth, where (in the new one, The Day Aberystwyth Stood Still) private investigator Louis Knight is hired by a man called Raspiwtin to look into the possibility that executed criminal Iestyn Probert was brought back to life by aliens in 1965.

And it's a fair bet that Malcolm Pryce outsells all the serious crime writers whose books are set in Wales.

I don't really have an answer to this. Maybe it'll come with a cult Welsh-language crime novel translated into English. Or perhaps a critically-acclaimed Welsh literary writer will start a crime series, like Kate Atkinson, Susan Hill and booker-winning John Banville. Someone cool and edgy, with a feel for the Welsh landscape and the cultural tensions. Someone who can throw an obliquely sinister light on the Wales that outsiders think they know.

But if you're listening, Niall Griffiths, maybe you need to rein in the dialect just a bit...