Oyster picks up pearls with comics, priest thrillers and Posh shorts

Ebook subscription service Oyster has signed up a couple of interesting publishers to add to their titles on offer.

Andrews McMeel has some great comics, such as Patrick McDonnell’s series of Mutts books, which sadly do not seem to be available as ebooks so probably won’t be available through the Oyster deal.

However, the firm also publishes the classic comics Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson and Doonesbury by G B Trudeau which are available as ebooks and should provide a big draw for Oyster.

It also features the backlist of priest turned thriller author William Kienzle who quit his Catholic calling in 1974 after 20 years as a priest because he was at odds with the church’s refusal to remarry divorcees. He promptly married and turned out a couple of dozen crime novels until his death in 2001.

His novels feature a Catholic priest who investigates crimes and his debut book, The Rosary Murders, set in Detroit, was turned into a film with the distinction of having the screenplay written by Elmore Leonard.

Andrews McMeel, which was set up in 1970, also has a lot of good looking cookbooks and a great Pocket Posh series covering all manner of things from tips for poker players and travellers to love poems and calorie counters.

New Word City is another publisher being added to the Oyster service and it bills itself as Intelligence on Demand. The company specializes in short-form ebooks on a variety of topics, such as biographies, business, fiction, food, history, sports, and travel.

It looks like a good fit with Oyster as its website says: “New Word City is continuously seeking new and unique distribution opportunities for our books.  We’d love to hear from you if your company has a way to distribute our ebooks.”

Oyster has also linked up with Globe Pequot Press, one of my favourite travel publishers. I wrote about that deal a few weeks ago and you can read the details here.

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