Next month a press conference will be held at the Frankfurt Book Fair announcing the pending launch of HELLstalkers, which is that super secret project I’ve eluded to several times both here and on my personal webpage.  More information on the project itself – what it is, who’s publishing it, how people can get it – has been posted on the official series website, http://www.hellstalkers.com.

I’m not going to repeat all of that here, but instead take RockYourWritingCareer.com members behind the scenes and into the birth and production of the series itself.  How did it come about?  What hurdles did we have to go through to get it approved?  How are we incorporating mobile and web technology to expand and build upon the text of the novels themselves?  We’ll be examining these and other issues over the next few months as decisions are made and the project is launched.

So let’s begin with the most obvious question – how did all this come about?

In order to answer that, we have to go back a few years.  My second novel, HERETIC, was released in 2005 by Pocket Books.  Just a month before it hit the streets, my editor left S&S and moved to Random House to handle non-fiction, leaving me effectively “orphaned.”  (Orphaned means you have no in-house champion to fight for you or your work.)  My lack of internal support left me hanging high and dry and as a result, Pocket passed on picking up books two and three in the series.

My career might have ended then and there if it wasn’t for the fact that I’d already been cultivating overseas contacts.  An editor from Droemer-Knaur made an offer for all three book in the Templar Chronicles and I’ve been writing for them ever since.  (December will see the launch of my fourth novel for them, with at least two more still under contract.)

Why am I telling you all this?  Because it is the fact that I was writing for a German publisher, and enjoying some decent success while doing so, that made the HELLstalker series possible.

You see, a few months before the 2008 Frankfurt Book Fair, I was doing some research on publishers who planned on being in attendance so that I could suggest editors for my agent to meet with at the Fair.  I stumbled upon an article about a multimedia company in Vienna called Blackbetty MobileMedia GmbH that was going to be launching a new mobile books platform for the German market.  The same article also noted that the company intended to expand into the US six to twelve months later.

Given that I had a bestselling series currently on the shelves in Germany at the time, I tracked down the company’s website and, unable to find an email address, used their contact form to send the following message:

I’m an American author published in Germany through Droemer-Knaur.  I’m interested in speaking to someone about having my German works available through your company.  Could you let me know who I should have my agent contact?

To my surprise, the company CEO wrote back that very evening, stating that he was familiar with my series and asking that my agent get in touch so that they could talk about licensing it for the mobile phone platform.

Several months went by, with discussions taking place between Blackbetty and my publisher, Droemer-Knaur, but nothing solidified during the process.  While all that was going on, I began corresponding with Blackbetty’s VP of Development, talking about the mobile books industry in general and Blackbetty in particular.  I knew that I wanted to find a way to do business with them and while chatting one day I asked if they might be interested in having me write something original for them instead of licensing my already existing work.  To my delight, they jumped at the opportunity.

What, they asked, did I have in mind?

Stay tuned for Part Two, where I pull a story out of my, uh…hat right there on the spot.