Looking to practice what he preaches about digital media, Michael Wolf, v-p of research at GigaOM, a technology news and analysis blog, has launched Bstsllr.com, an e-book publishing house specializing in crime and mystery fiction. The house released an anthology, West Coast Crime Wave, in October and plans a new anthology of East coast crime writers in Spring 2012.
GigaOM is a technology blog founded by tech writer Om Malik in 2006. In an effort to compete with analytics firms like Forrester Research, GigaOM hired Wolf as media analyst in 2009. In addition to writing about digital media, Wolf also helps run the GigaOM paid content group.
Wolf said Bstsllr.com is really a personal passion for him but it allows him to get hands-on experience in digital publishing that he can use to inform his work at GigaOM. “My job is to look at the future of media and I like to do things and learn about them. I’ve been writing about digital publishing, so now I can practice it. Publishing the book has been a lot of fun; now I’m trying to grow the imprint.”
“I’ve always been interested in mystery and crime fiction,” Wolf said, noting that novelist Brian Thornton, former president of the Northwest chapter of the Mystery Writers of America, is a friend and also editor of West Coast Crime Wave. “I had a lot of writer friends and I knew I wanted to do something in fiction, so we decided to try an anthology.” WCCW is published as an original e-book through Amazon and Barnes & Noble selling for $3.99 and features 18 stories by such writers as Thomas Hoop, Terrill Lee Lankford and David Corbett.
Wolf said he’s looking to see if a book of mid-list “semi-well known authors” will work in the digital book market. Although the book features established writers like Nick Mamatas, there are also “three or four writers who have never been published,” Wolf said. All the writers were paid a flat fee to be included in the anthology.
Although he declined to give exact figures, Wolf said the book has done “fairly well, it shot up a little at the beginning but it’s dropped down a bit since then.” West Coast Crime Wave is the first of a series of mystery anthologies Wolf has planned for Bstsllr.com and he plans to issue future volumes as enhanced e-books, adding audio interviews with authors he’s done for his Podcast/blog Eliz.com, where he interviews “media disrupters,” like Red Lemonade publisher Richard Nash, SmashWord founder Mark Coker and self-publisher/marketer Seth Godin. The enhanced e-book editions will eventually be available through iTunes for Apple devices and on the Nook Tablet.
“We’re not going to put out a ton of books,” Wolf said, “but it’s a great way to learn and to practice what I preach.”
