The Mortality Bridge website just went live. It’s got three sample chapters you can read online or download as PDF, ePub, or MobiPocket files for your e-Reader.
It also has playable/downloadable audio of Chapter One (with more on the way over the next few weeks), and some background information on the novel’s origin and history.
Following publication in July the site will have Google Earth maps of the routes taken at the novel’s beginning and ending. (The middle’s going to have to wait until Google’s mapping cars complete their survey of Hell — I’d say a year or two, given the rate at which Google is digitizing the universe.)
I’m considering putting up some deleted scenes after the novel’s release as well.
I like each of my books having its own website, but since my writing website and blog weren’t designed to be an umbrella over these, I’m starting to feel spread a bit thin. So over the next few weeks I’ll also be updating this blog and my website with a view to centralizing and consolidating a lot of these disparate sites. The book sites will remain the same, but the blog & writing site will be fused and better designed to act as a hub.
Meantime, please take a look at mortalitybridge.com and let me know what you think!
Great page, Steve. Clean, effective presentation of the novel. Going to download the audio tomorrow. Quick question: were you at all tempted to embed a Scribd excerpt directly into the page?
Hi, Phil, thanks so much for your kind comments! I’ve checked out the Scribd reader and I like its simplicity and friendly GUI. But it doesn’t style up well with a website theme — like embedded YouTube vids, it looks the way it looks wherever you put it. I’m looking to control the elements of the viewer to integrate them into the site (as well as I can, anyway; I’m nobody’s Zen Web Design Master).
Also, I can put my book-specific graphic wingdings for spacebreaks in the HTML pages (dunno if you can do that in Scribd). The only down side for me is that the user has to continually scroll down. Since I have to use a raw HTML text to set the ePub and MobiPocket files in a way that’s attractive and readable, it’s no big deal to just go ahead and run some macros on the HTML and set them into a site page template.
Scribd doesn’t faithfully translate the fonts and design of PDFs. The PDFs on mortalitybridge.com were made from the publisher’s copy, and look the way the printed version is going to look.
Isn’t that more than you ever wanted to know? 🙂
The first chapter has a Mobi version, but Chapters 2 and 16 link to the ePub version again, instead of the listed Mobi version, in case you were wondering…
Arrgh. Fixed — and thanks so much for letting me know!