Prologue, or not prologue: that is the question

UPDATE July 1st

I've had some very helpful comments, and have decided to open a poll on this topic to coinicide with the offer of free Kindle editions (July 1st-5th) of my books. The poll is here.

*****Original post:

I was planning to write a chunk of stuff about the background and inspiration for Thalassa: the world beneath the waves, but the lurgi has me in its grip, so this is going to be short and sweet, but still kind of relevant.

Thalassa: the world beneath the waves has a prologue. It didn't use to have one. For most of its virtual existence on my hard-drive, the book started at chapter one. These were the very first lines:

"Moanna sat in her favourite window-seat and pressed her face against the cold, thick glass. She looked right up into the deep blue above, wondering what it would be like if the endless ocean were replaced by empty sky, with clouds drifting past up there instead of shifting shoals of fish."

That has also been reworked, so that the new first lines of chapter one are now:

"Jason Morgan was dead. Had been dead for almost a year, lost out in aqua incognita, and his soul had gone down to the Deepwater Dark where the Blue Lady would look after it. Moanna didn’t believe a word of all that. She didn’t believe in the Blue Lady any more than she believed in Papa Noah, but Jason had done, and it seemed the right thing to do to honour his memory with an offering to her."

So much for chapter one. The real issue here is the prologue.

I wrote the prologue because I wanted to start with the mysterious disappearance of the Syracuse, the submarine that Jason Morgan, Moanna's brother, had been aboard. I wanted the reader to know things that Moanna didn't, and to have a foretaste of what was coming. I also wanted to start with some suspense and some action. And the prologue ends with a wreck, linking nicely (to my mind) with Moanna thinking about Jason's death at the beginning of chapter one.

But it grates. My inner marketing-manager (yep, I never knew I had one either, and I'm not sure I like it) is screaming at me "DITCH THE PROLOGUE! START WITH THE PEOPLE!" And I suspect she (why not?) is right. People like people. Aren't they more likely to read the book if it starts with people? And yet I still like the prologue and what it brings.

So I've decided to ask readers - if I ever get any - to help me to decide whether the second edition of Thalassa: the world beneath the waves gets to keep the prologue, or to ditch it and go straight to chapter one. You can find a PDF sample with a prologue on my website. Who knows, if the prologue goes, then those first edition copies which have it may become valuable collectors' items at some point in the future (yeah, right). Just saying...