by David Niall Wilson

Tom Piccirilli on Amazon.com for Kindle

Tom Piccirilli at Barnes & Noble.com for Nook

Tom Piccirilli at Crossroad Press

One of the best parts of publishing so late in my career is the chance to work with people I’ve known for a very long time, and to (hopefully) do good things for and with them. When I published The Tome a million years ago, back in the 1990s, I published a story by Tom Piccirilli. Tom and I met several times over the years, corresponded now and then, and appeared in a lot of anthologies together. When Crossroad Press got underway, we connected again, and it’s been a long, and interesting road.

Tom writes a lot of fiction at the novella length (as he will mention in the interview below) and he writes books in many genres, as well as some that defy categorization, such as the novel Nightjack, one of the first of the Crossroad Press “original-to-digital” releases. His body of work spans decades, styles, and subject matter in a way that few authors manage – largely due to marketing and editorial tampering, I would say. We have brought a great deal of Tom’s work to eBooks and we are working on getting most of it to audio as well. He’s provided:

Novels

Novellas

And Collections

I took a little time and did a short Q & A with Tom Recently. Here’s some thoughts on his work, his eBooks, digital, and the future.

DNW: You’ve been writing a lot of years, and in a lot of genres. How do you feel about the current state of digital books, where bringing all of that work back to new readers has become more possible?
PIC: It’s a hell of a nice thing to see the books we’ve worked so hard on, that have a limited shelf-life, back in print and available to new readers. It offers authors a greater number of publishing choices, and it’s always better to have choices than not have them. It’s also nice that folks who might not have wanted to pay hardback or even paperback prices to take a chance on a genre they don’t normally read in – be it my horror, western, crime, occult, or whatever – will often give a shot to something when it only costs $2.99 or $3.99.

DNW: Of your out of print work that’s coming back, which do you still feel most strongly about? Which book, novella, or collection are you happiest to see coming back in digital?
PIC: I’m glad to see that the novella length seems to be a perfect fit for the medium. Most novellas published in the small press are for the collectible market, so they’re usually offered in a signed limited edition that might cost upwards of $30. Now folks can try out some of my noirellas like Loss, Frayed, All You Despise, The Nobody, Fuckin’ Lie Down Already, and the short novels like The Night Class and The Fever Kill. Again, it’s nice to be able to reach new readers in new formats at book lengths they might not have normally picked up on the first time around.

DNW: You are still doing well with traditional publishing, and have a good foot in the door of digital revitalization of your older work. Sitting as you do on the fence of both worlds, do you have any thoughts about how things might change in the near future? How do you see the evolution of publishing over the next decade?
PIC: It’s changing so rapidly that I’m going to sit this question out. I’m not sure what’s going to happen next, but I will say that I really hope that physical books and bookstores do not go the way of the dodo. I would hate to live in a world without bookstores.

DNW: How much more material do you have that has been out of print, or forgotten, that readers might be looking forward to?
PIC: There’s a number of newly available works like my collection of occult/supernatural stories Pentacle, featuring my unnamed Necromancer and his demonic companion “Self.” Also my “Self” novel A Lower Deep, a couple of westerns Grave Men and Coffin Blues, my early mysteries The Dead Past and Sorrow’s Crown, and some other horror novels like Hexes and The Deceased.

DNW: What are you working on now? What’s next, and where can readers find it?
PIC: My next crime novel will be out in hardcover from Bantam in May ’12 called The Last Kind Words. I just finished the second in the series The Last Whisper In The Dark. My collection of horror/crime tales Futile Efforts will be made available for $.99 in the near future. And I’ll have a couple more books out in the small press via Apex and Creeping Hemlock.

BIO: Tom Piccirilli is the author of more than twenty novels including Shadow Season, The Cold Spot, The Coldest Mile, and A Choir Of Ill Children. He’s won two International Thriller Awards and four Bram Stoker Awards, as well as having been nominated for the Edgar, the World Fantasy Award, the Macavity, and Le Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire.

In celebration of October, Halloween, and a good scary story, Crossroad Press & Author Tom Piccirilli are dropping the price of Tom’s huge collection: Futile Efforts – to only .99 for a limited time. Spread the word and get your copy today!

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