Barnes and Noble recently launched the Nook device and are also launching, this summer, a new competitor to Amazon.com’s Digital Text Platform, called PubIt. I’m hoping the two outlets won’t differ too much from each other, as figuring out the finer points of all this takes a bit of time; but the potential for adding another huge market for my book will probably be too tempting to resist.

I found PubIt while surfing at random, everything from www.mensvitamin.org to Audible.com. It was a nice little discovery.

I must say that the potential of this market has really motivated me to get serious about writing to completion. Driving home from Torah study tonight, I finally solved the ever-present problem of how to introduce my main character to my readers.

There are, of course, several methods. Harry Kemelman, for example, showed Rabbi David Small interacting with his fellow Jews, defining how he saw his role as the rabbi. His first chapter ran for well over ten pages and the murder didn’t happen until a few chapters in, as Kemelman used the first few chapters of FRIDAY THE RABBI SLEPT LATE to establish character under normal circumstances before introducing peril into the situation. However, Kemelman’s debut was publishing nearly fifty years ago, and audience preferences and expectations have changed. How radically? That’s the question.

With Fletch, Gregory McDonald used a light-hearted but character-revealing approach, using very little descriptive text but placing Fletch into a witty, quick, give-and-take dialog that hints that something odd is up. I love the bare-bones approach, but have sometimes felt that while it worked for McDonald, it might not be quite right for me.

With Along Came a Spider, James Patterson chose to use a tantalizing prologue from a killer’s perspective to entice the reader’s interest; the first chapter narrated directly by Alex Cross contains a lot of self-explaining first-person narration – something my creative writing teachers always used to say is a no-no, but it sells. However, overall, Patterson’s method introduces the peril quickly as a plus, but as a minus it reduces Alex Cross to a somewhat reactive character.

Which way will I be taking with my new book and potential series?

I’ve decided to mix some of the elements of all three in an attempt to forge my own storytelling style. We’ll see how well it works.