Tor editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden talks about John Scalzi‘s next novel, his latest installment in the Old Man’s War series. The newest book will be called The Human Division.
Nielsen Hayden tells readers that the book “will be an experiment: an episodic novel, released initially in digital, serialized form. Currently the plan is to publish these episodes weekly in, roughly, December 2012 through February 2013. Like the episodes of a good high-end cable drama, each one will have enough internal integrity to work as an enjoyable chunk of story on its own, but each will advance a ‘season’-long storyline as well.
“Ultimately the entire work will be published as a normal printed book and a normal e-book, in the late spring or early summer of 2013. And we’ll be doing our best to make it so that buying the book in serial form costs about the same as buying the full e-book. There may be some small extra material in the full-length book, because we’re like that.
“A digital cover by John Harris will accompany each individual installment.”
He also notes, in the bigger scheme of things, that “this is all part of a broad front of Tor/Macmillan ‘Let’s Try Some Stuff’ initiatives in digital publishing.”