Friday, May 6, 2011

Remastered Originals

I'm releasing my first four books, Motion To Kill, The Last Witness, Cold Truth and Deadlocked as ebooks (and in print via POD) beginning in June with Motion To Kill. Originally published from 2002-2005 by Kensington as Pinnacle paperbacks, the books did well but, as is the fate of most original paperbacks, went out of print.

THAT'S THE GOOD NEWS! Because now I have the exciting opportunity to release them again. But what to call them? How to describe them? I got an email the other day from another writer who nailed it, calling these books "remastered". It's the perfect term because of the process I've been going through getting them ready for their second act.

My publisher no longer had the electronic files for the first two books and wanted too much money for the files for the last two books. My buddy Lee Goldberg recommended I use Blue Leaf Book Scanning Service to scan the books and create Word files, which I did for the incredible low price of $30/book. The conversion process resulted in a lot of errors that required careful proofreading which meant that I had to read these books again for the first time in years. I don't know how other writers feel about reading their books, but once I'm finished, I'm finished. The joy is in the process and when the book hits the shelves (real or virtual), I rarely dip into it and never read the whole thing.

Once I began editing Motion To Kill, my latent OCD tendencies blossomed and I couldn't resist doing a start to finish edit, fixing the quirks of my early writing and correcting the mistakes that many careful and devoted readers have shared with me over the years. I have always said that anyone who paid $7 for one of my books had every right to point out my mistakes but that there was no prize for whomever found the most errors! BTW - the same will hold true for the ebook edition notwithstanding the much lower price!

So now I think of these books as remastered originals - fresher, sharper and current. It's like getting a do-over with my kids!

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