HELLstalkers is coming!
A press conference was held yesterday at the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany to announce my latest project, HELLstalkers. This new series is being written in conjunction with my friend and fellow writer, Jon Merz, and what makes it so new and interesting to us is the fact that it is being written for the mobile phone market.
Yes, that’s right, I said the mobile phone market.
Reading novels on a mobile phone has been exceedingly popular in Asia for several years now and they are slowly making their way into the European and American markets. Jon and I have teamed up with Blackbetty GlobalMedia GmbH, a Vienna based multimedia small screen publisher and Vodafone, a telecommunications giant, to bring this new series to life.
HELLstalkers revolves around an accident at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, a mysterious organization known as Project Cerberus, and a group of military operatives formed into a team known as HELLstalker One. The team is led by Captain Memphis Stone, US Army, who soon finds out that there are some things that military training just doesn’t prepare you for…
Sample chapters will soon by available for download directly to your smartphone both at the official HELLstalker website and at the company website (Mobilebooks.com). We’re also going to be making use of QR Codes, mobile tagging, and social networking to provide behind-the-scenes information, sneak peeks, and other multi-media activities to make it an experience unlike reading your average print novel.
In fact, here’s the first piece of the puzzle for those of you who have been following along:
(If you don’t know what the symbol above actually is or what to do with it, you might want to drop by this post. There will be more of them in the future, each one with a little something different for the story.)
Jon and I are very excited about the series and hope that you’ll spend some time with us as it unfolds over the next few months. If you like, you can join our Facebook page or get on the mailing list so you don’t miss out on any exciting announcements!
This sounds very intriguing. I love CERN – and with Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons bringing it into the limelight so recently, that should be another shot in the arm for the book. Looking forward to seeing how this plays out.
DNW
Astonishing how marketing will find a way! Go for it, Joe (and Jon). This keeps up I’m going to have to switch from smoke signals and tom-toms to Alexander G. Bell’s invention. How about we push for authors to make house calls to read their stuff? Or maybe it could be a boon for hitchhiking — just hold up sign HEADED FOR ____. WILL READ CHAPTER OF MY LATEST NOVEL ALOUD ENROUTE. And while I’m marveling at all these new methods of circumventing outmoded ways of communicaiton, I realize I’m writing this with voice activation software…
– Sully