Saturday, January 29, 2011

HEAD GAMES, THE eBOOK, IS COMING


I get a lot of questions on the eBook front these days.

TOROS & TORSOS has been available as a downloadable eBook for Nook and Kindle for a couple of months now. As a result, I've been increasingly receiving inquiries about HEAD GAMES, the only one of the Lassiter novels not offered in eBook format, and whether one can be expected.

The answer is, yes, sometime in March, likely — April at the latest — HEAD GAMES will be released to Kindle and Nook.

I retained digital rights for my first four books, so I have been taking some time to figure out ways to best present/augment the books in this new format. Learning curves can be irksome, but they also can give you some fresh perspectives.

TOROS was released with some preview materials regarding ONE TRUE SENTENCE attached at the back.

For HEAD GAMES, I decided to cast a wider net. In addition to the novel, the eBook version will also include a reader's guide with suggested book club questions/topic discussion points.

I've also enclosed the original short story that introduced the Hector Lassiter character (and figures tangentially in the novel), "The Last Interview." Excerpts of TOROS & TORSOS, PRINT THE LEGEND and ONE TRUE SENTENCE, the fourth and forthcoming novel in the Lassiter series, will also be included.

I'm still mulling possibilities for bringing over my two collection of author interviews, ART IN THE BLOOD and ROGUE MALES, to eBook format and how best to do that.

An obvious notion would be to expand the books: incorporate interviews with authors who didn't make the books as originally published. That's one possibility.

Because I have audio tapes of the interviewed authors, I'm investigating the possibility of incorporating some audio files as part of an enriched format. Unfortunately, not all eBook readers are created equally, so it may be a matter of allowing the technology to kind of even out across platforms before attempting anything quite that ambitious.

So, eBook fans, what are your thoughts on supplemental materials? Is it overtaking the plumbing, or a value-added enticement? Beyond the book itself, what would interest you in an eBook version of a novel or nonfiction title?

One True Sentence Book TRAILER