Welcome to My New Site
Welcome to my new website. A couple of months ago, I visited my author friend Steve Berry and his wonderful wife Elizabeth in their St. Augustine, Florida, home. (Steve’s new book The Columbus Affair will be available very soon.) We got to talking about websites. Steve showed me his recent one. We compared it to the previous version of my website, which was ten years old. It didn’t take long for me to realize, with Steve’s kind urging, that it was time for me to have an update, and I hope you agree that the result is splendid.
The idea is to provide the feel of a magazine and to show you as many facets of my interests and my career as possible. In the process, I went through old photograph albums and was thrilled to find images I didn’t remember, such as the one with me rappelling off a Wyoming cliff while I was doing research for one of my novels, Testament, with the National Outdoor Leadership School.
A lot of new things have been added: pages for Rambo, writing advice, interviews I’ve given, and so on. For each of these, I include all kinds of information and links to where you can find additional information. For example, I wouldn’t have become a writer if not for Stirling Silliphant’s scripts for the classic TV series, Route 66. In this new website, I now have the room to include information about the series and my debt to Stirling, with whom I eventually worked when he was the executive producer of the NBC miniseries adapted from my novel, The Brotherhood of the Rose.
My new website makes me think about how much technology and publishing have changed in recent years. E-books have become a major part of reading, to the extent that there are about 100 million e-reading devices (iPads, Kindles, Nooks, Kobos, etc.) in the United States alone. In a few years, more than fifty percent of book sales will be in an e-book format.
From time to time, I’ll offer my thoughts about these changes. For starters, let me say that e-books provide a big benefit when it comes to an author’s backlist. This is my fortieth year as a published author (my debut novel First Blood, which introduced the character of Rambo, appeared in 1972). Publishers tend to be interested in what’s new and often are reluctant to reprint older titles, which means that over the years, various of my books have gone in and out of print. But with e-books, my out-of-print novels are now permanently available for e-readers.
Similarly, over 40 years I wrote many short stories and essays. The anthologies and magazines in which they appeared are often difficult to find, but with e-books, they are readily available. With that in mind, I created The David Morrell Short Fiction E-Collection and The David Morrell Non-Fiction E-Collection. I’m especially pleased to make the essays available: in-depth revelations about popular icons such as John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe, analyzing the significance of their careers. You’ll learn as much from these long essays as you would from reading several books about these fascinating, troubled figures.
