Introducing The Sugarman Bootlegs.

A few years ago, I made the decision—based on the way the book industry was trending—to switch from fiction to nonfiction, with happy results (see my memoir of my year on the canine agility circuit, Dogged Pursuit, now in paperback—and my upcoming Italian opus, Seven Seasons In Siena: My Quixotic Quest for Acceptance by Tuscany's Proudest People, due June 21 from Ballantine).

But fans of my novels (I wrote seven between 1992 and 2007) still regularly petition me for something new, which has made me realize that while the market for fiction may have contracted, demand is still there—just not in the kind of numbers that make traditional publishing viable.

So I'm taking my fiction directly to my readers, via the rapidly expanding—in fact, the goddamn exploding—world of e-book publishing.

This week my eighth novel, The Sugarman Bootlegs, went on sale on both the Amazon and Barnes and Noble websites, as a digital download for their respective e-readers, Kindle and Nook.

And what is The Sugarman Bootlegs...? It's a Hitchcock story for the YouTube age. It starts with two friends discovering old video of an unknown saloon singer, which they try to pass of as archival footage of a long-lost cabaret legend. But their prank backfires when the viral sensation takes on a vivid—and lethal—life of its own...and as its fame increases, so does the body count.

Basically, it's the bastard child of All About Eve and Frankenstein—with the biggest mid-story twist since The Crying Game.

AND...it's only $2.99.

So join me in this little experiment, and together we'll see whether my fiction (hell, fiction in general) can come roaring back to life in this crazy new samizdat format.

(Oh, and check back here in a month or so, for some news about those old, out-of-print novels of mine. 'S'all I'm sayin' for now.)