Brooklyn independent publisher Akashic Books is launching Akashic Digits, a digital promotional effort that will offer free extended e-book excerpts of Akashic titles each month. Akashic Digits will be offered in the ePub and Mobi formats, highlight frontlist and backlist Akashic titles and offer exclusive links to purchase discounted editions of Akashic e-books and print editions.
The new promotion will launch today at the Akashic Books website, offering free downloads of the first Akashic Digits promotional e-books. The program will start with three Akashic Digits: Joe Meno Digits, which includes excerpts from five Meno novels, among them Office Girl, Hairstyles of the Damned and The Boy Detective Fails ($4.99 for each Meno backlist title until October 28); Historical Digit, with excerpts from When Johnny Came Marching Home by William Heffernan, including historical fiction and other titles; and Jamaican Digit, released to mark Jamaica’s 50 year anniversary of independence, with excerpts from Kingston Noir edited by Colin Channer, The Baker’s Son by Lowell Hawthorne and other titles ($4.99 each for a limited time.).
Aaron Petrovich, Akashic production and e-book developer, said Akashic Books has a 130 title e-book backlist and Digits will release new excerpts each month eventually offering discount access to the entire backlist. Excerpts are about 20 to 30 pages and offer links to various retailers (Akashic sells its e-books through about 12 differernt vendors) who all offer the full-length titles in print and digital at a variety of discounted price points.
Petrovich said that Akashic produces and designs its e-books in-house, “We use conversion houses also, but much of our e-book production is in-house, we want our e-books to have a singular style.” Petrovich said Akashic Digits is an effort to “make our list instantly discoverable; we can use them to show readers other titles in our backlist. Since we design our e-book in-house, we have all these pieces of e-book available and it’s a fluid and effective way to position our list and appeal to our readers.”
