To be honest about it, I'd resisted the move to e-publishing. I guess I really didn't feel it was appropriate for nostalgic and hopefully period-correct novels about the fifties. Besides, I've always liked the feel of a genuine book in my hands. It's just not the same experience on an electronic pad. But then one of my buddies came up to me on a race weekend—like me, he's getting to be a bit of a greybeard these days—and told me I absolutely had to come out with an e-pub version. When I asked him "why?", he gave me an answer that was easy to understand and hard to ignore: "because I can press a damn button and make the typeface bigger!" That made a lot of sense to me. Plus we've seen our shipping costs on overseas sales escalate until they're almost half again as much as the books! Sure, I'd still rather send out a signed-and-personalized, wood pulp-and-pages copy, but offering the alternative of E-book versions that can be downloaded instantly (and economically) anywhere there's internet access make a lot of sense, too.
So why did it take so damn long to get it done?
Well, the new, e-book versions of the second and third novels represent edited and revised editions. I had an opportunity to edit and polish the first book—which it sorely needed!—when St. Martin's picked it up after we'd sold two self-published printings out back in 1996. A lot of people seem to think that the St. Martin's version is heavily abridged, but that's just not true. In fact, there's one scene in the St. Martin's edition (the blue-collar, blow-out Italian wedding of Julie's best friend Serafina Massucci) that isn't in the original book and one scene in the original version that doesn't appear in the St. Martin's edition (and I'm not telling you which…you gotta figure it out!). But the rest was just cleaning things up, throwing about forty pounds of adjectives and adverbs over the side and trying to keep Buddy's voice from flip-flopping back-and-forth between "wide-eyed kid in the moment" and "grizzled, world-weary old veteran reminiscing in flashback." And that meant taking out those first few pages of introduction right at the beginning of the book, even though I kinda loved them.