In a sense, he’s never been out of print. Mulholland’s hardcover edition of A Drop of the Hard Stuff is still selling well, and their trade paperback just joined it in the stores a month ago. HarperCollins have the rights to thirteen of the Scudder backlist novels and have kept them all in print (although, with fewer backlist titles in stores these days, they’re not always easy to find.)
But three of the Scudder novels, A Stab in the Dark, A Walk Among the Tombstones, and A Long Line of Dead Men, have been out of print for a while now. I managed to regain the rights, and earlier this year self-published them all as eBook editions.
But “print” sort of implies paper and ink, doesn’t it?
You know, that’s just what I was going to say. While I trust I’ve established my street cred as an eBook enthusiast, that doesn’t mean I’m eager for printed books to disappear—or for my books to cease to exist in that form. When I self-published The Night and the Music last fall, I was able to bring out a trade paperback edition close upon the heels of the eBook; both, I’m pleased to report, have enjoyed a very gratifying reception.
And now it’s my pleasure to offer the three books as trade paperbacks, in the same format as The Night and the Music. The same great team at Telemachus Press readied the books for production, and the good people at Lightning Source saw to the printing and binding, and here’s how they look:
Any questions? Ah, I see a few hands raised:
Will the books be in stores?
Not in brick-and-mortar stores. Online booksellers—Amazon and Barnes & Noble—will be able to supply them. And a handful of the leading mystery specialty booksellers are carrying the new books—and all of their copies are signed.
I was just about to ask how to get signed copies.
Great—go right ahead and ask.
Uh, how do I get signed copies?
You can order them online from LB’s Bookstore. They’re $16.99 apiece plus $3.99 shipping. But if you buy the three-book set, they’re yours for $49.99 postpaid. (If you do the math, that’s a savings to you of about $13.)
Oh, I want a set! But I’m in school here in Toronto, and my sister’s back home in Taiwan, and my cousin’s in Sao Paulo, and my best friend’s in Stuttgart, and we’d all like to buy signed copies. And you only ship to U.S. addresses!
Ah, that was then and this is now. We’ll ship to you. We now ship internationally by USPS Priority Mail. Costs vary, of course, depending on where you are and the weight and measurements of your order (and as I type those lines I remember why we stopped filling overseas orders in the first place. Ah yes, it all comes back to me…) But we’ll ship to you anywhere in the world at our cost plus $1.99 per item handling charge.
Or there’s an alternative. These fine stores have signed copies, and will cheerfully ship them anywhere in the world:
Murder by the Book
3210 Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard
Portland, OR 97214
(503) 232-9995
Murder on the Beach
273 Northeast 2nd Avenue
Delray Beach, FL 33444-3705
(561) 279-7790
Mysterious Bookshop
58 Warren Street
New York, NY 10007
(800) 352-2840
Mystery on Main Street
119 Main Street
Brattleboro, VT 05301
(802) 258-2211
The Poisoned Pen
4014 N Goldwater Blvd #101
Scottsdale AZ 85251
(888) 560-9919
Seattle Mystery Bookshop
117 Cherry St
Seattle, WA 98104-2205
(206) 587-5737
Any more questions?
I love the new covers, and they’ll look great on the shelf next to The Night and the Music. Any chance the rest of the series will be available in the same format?
Wouldn’t that be nice? Right now it’s not an option, but if things change I’ll be quick to carpe the old diem and hurry them into production.
Will you let us know if that happens?
Count on it. Meanwhile, just click on LB’s Bookstore and grab yourself a set of three. (And if you missed The Night and the Music, or someone swiped your copy, it’s right on the same page.)
