Q: Why an ebook?

A: It’s the new technology. Trust me, I was skeptical at first too. The industry went ebook crazy back in the early 2000s, and Stephen King was leading the charge. But then it died down just as quickly. I even had an ebook attachment to my Just Say No!novel in 2001, called “Letter to a Loveboy.” So I’ve written a short ebook before. But this is something totally different. With me not being able to get a major hardback release contract in time for a publishing date in 2011, I’m now slated for release in 2012. Well, I told myself, that’s a little too long for me not to have anything new out on the marketplace. So, I asked myself, “What about if I put out an original ebook in the meantime?” just to give myself something to write and something do, and create a some hot buzz before releasing a new hardback in 2012. And whal-lah! There you have it. A serial ebook.

Q: And by “serial” you mean ongoing?

A: Just like a reality television show. I’ll give you one chapter of plot twists and turns a week, all about the players in the publishing industry. Because I understood that there was no way in the world I wanted to rush a quality book in a couple of months to release as one big ebook. But if I waited to publish it all at once, I would miss out on the summer reading season. So the solution was to release one quality chapter a week. But then, to make it more interactive, instead of using my professional editors, I said, “Why not just let the readers make their own comments on raw, unedited material?” Now that doesn’t mean that I won’t proofread the content for errors before I post it, but errors do occur. So I’ll see how sharp the readers are at catching those as well.

Q: Is that why you’re only charging them a dollar?

A: The other idea was to give the chapters away for free, but I don’t like that idea at all. There are far too many writings being offered for free nowadays. The whole world has blogs now, and if you start writing novels for free too, then what can you charge for? So I thought back to the 1990s when record companies would drop $1 singles to really push a record. I remember they did that with Shaquille O’Neal, the giant basketball player, turned rapper, and it worked! So, while you’re online buying the other ebooks of your choice, you simply add Omar Tyree’s CORRUPTED chapter to your shopping cart. Or, if you don’t want to keep doing that every week, then you go to my web site subscriptions page and register become a subscriber for $7.95 a month, where you can read every chapter and get to post all of your own comments on them.

Q: Now this CORRUPTED book is all about the publishing industry. Why would you find that topic to be interesting?

A: Well, it’s ironic, isn’t it? With all of the extra tools we have now to publish a book, verses when I first started back in the early 1990s, a lot more people are now interested in this arena. The publishing industry technology has grown by leaps and bounds. I remember when I had to print at least 1,000 copies at $3.30 a book in my self-publishing days. Whitehall Printers, out of Florida, wouldn’t deal with any print run smaller than that. But now you have places that will print up ten books for you, and quality books at that. You won’t make a lot of fast money that way, but you can put a book out and be happy with it. Nevertheless, the glamour of being a New York Times bestselling author at Simon & Schuster, Random House, HarperCollins or Putnam, has a whole other value to it. And with so many people who continue to read and write and who would love to be published by the big boys, now I have a story for them. So yeah, I do look at it as interesting. I’ve been there and done that, and I know all about it to share with the readers and the aspiring authors.

Q: How successful do you expect this book to be?

A: I have no idea. But I do know that I’m loving the process. There’s something very exciting about creating your own vehicle of art after being in a cocoon of the industry for years. Now you can really be creative without restrictions, if only for one night, as they say. Remember Prince did that online album and the music tour. Man, it was HUGE! But that’s Prince. He can get away with a lot of things. Now, I’m not saying that I’m no Prince, but the same excitement that I feel right now is surely what Prince and Stephen King felt years ago when they were excited to go a different direction. And now the industry and the consumers are a lot more ready for ebooks.

Q: What about the touring process? Will you miss that?

A: Oh, sure. But now I’ll have more interaction with the readers. By making an audience wait to read and dissect a chapter a week, they can now spend more time zeroing in on the action and telling me how they think about the work. Man, I love that idea! Because when you tour, a lot of times, the readers haven’t read the book yet, so some of them don’t want you to reveal too much. But with a serial ebook, since you have to wait each chapter with everyone else, now we can really discuss this book. Man, you have no IDEA how much that means to me. I wish I could go back and discuss ALL of my books that way, because I really care about everything that I’ve written. But sometimes people read too fast to lock in and then don’t care to discuss it.

Q: In looking through your marketing materials, CORRUPTED seems to have a lot of characters in it. How do you expect a reader to keep up with them all?

A: Stephen King had this movie called Needful Things, based off of one of his books. And it was like a million characters in there. And they were all charmed by this mysterious newcomer. Well, by the end of the movie, the whole town was going crazy, and I LOVED IT! It was hilarious, like those old-school horror and adventure movies where you start off with 50 people to get down to the last five or six. Now tell me you don’t like those kind of movies? That’s real character development. Now, I don’t have 50 characters in this book like a big movie, but if you really want to know about the publishing industry, I don’t want to just study one author, because there’s various levels, genres, genders, ages, races, and everything else going on. And I wanted you to see this monster from the various different angles. Otherwise, I wouldn’t really be showing it to you.

Q: You also write about more ethic and mainstream characters in this book than in your previous novels. Does that feel different? Was it different to write?

A: You mean writing about more white characters? Well, I need more white readers to be the judge of that. But it’s funny how the race of the writer can effect how the reader feels about the characters. Is this guy white enough? Is this woman woman enough? Does this old man act old enough? All based on your ideas about the writer. That’s fascinating to me, especially since I haven’t had a lot of white readers in the past. They tend to only want to read about their own race. That’s why James Patterson has had so much flack over his “Alex Cross” character. They even want him to be white. But James still gets the readers because he’s white. But I wrote a book called One Crazy Night in my Urban Griot series, where there’s only two main black characters, and twenty white characters in Western Pennsylvania. And for the people who have read it, it’s their favorite book. How about that? So I don’t have an issue at all with writing about white characters, and in the publishing industry, you better have them in there for it to be authentic. That’s like writing about basketball right now with no black people, or writing about boxing with no Mexicans.

Q: I forgot to ask you this, but I thought that you were retired,

A: Yeah, from writing “urban fiction”. But I haven’t retired as a writer. I still want to write, I just wanted to write about bigger subjects, and international books and then travel to do it. I was on some “James Bond” trip. But you have to have an audience and a publisher willing to follow you. So I flew down to Costa Rica and then over to Dubai in the Middle East to do my South American and Muslim research, and then came back to find that no one wanted to publish the great ideas that I had. Or at least I thought they were great. But if the industry doesn’t see how they can count the dollars from it . . . That’s why this ebook thing could become the new wave for me. If I create an a new audience who are willing to read, follow and discuss what my new intentions and adventures are, and they really care about the creative process and discovery of the work, then freeing myself from the cocoon of the industry may be a real career saver, especially since I love to write about new things. But first we have to see how CORRUPTED does.

Q: And what about your movie adaptations?

A: We’re still working on it? And that’s the most painful process ever. You have no idea how much I love movies. I still watch at least 100 movies a year, and in the THEATERS too. I love the whole feeling of being in the dark, watching previews of what’s to come, and then two to three hours of brand new plots, characters, action, special effects; the whole nine. I even write from vision, like a movie cameraman. I see everything to write it. So I’m dying to make movies. But sometimes you have to wait it out.

Q: Anything else you’d like to say?

A: Sure. Try CORRUPTED and see if you like it. It’s only $1, and if you like it, you buy the second chapter, and then the third, and so on. It’s that simple. And if that you’re no longer interested, you write me and tell me why on our FEEDBACK page. I love to learn in the writing game, and writing each new book is like starting all over again.

Learn more about Omar Tyree’s groundbreaking serial ebook and his previous novels all @ www.OmarTyree.com.