There’s been talk of this for a couple of years, and now it looks like it’ll finally happen. My novella Murdered by Human Wolves will be re-released as a trade paperback, with new cover art. This is good news for a few reasons.

First, Kirk Alberts is doing the new cover. Kirk is the man behind the covers of Shara, Call to the Hunt and, most recently, Seven Days in Benevolence. Even better, Kirk showed me an early version of the new cover yesterday and I think he’s outdone himself. It’s just an amazing bit of art that’ll blow your mind. He’s still doing some tweaking, and what I saw was only the front. He’s doing something for the back that I haven’t seen yet. (By the way, if you haven’t put your paws on a copy of Seven Days, you really need to if for no other reason that to see what Kirk did with that back cover.)

Libraries don’t want to deal with saddle-stapled chapbooks. That means the local libraries, even here where I live, won’t shelf the current incarnation of Murdered by Human Wolves. With the TPB, that’ll change.

And finally, the main reason this is such a good thing — three years after its first publication the book is still selling well enough that the publisher at Scrybe Press wants to quit having to assemble the books himself and switch it over to a new printer. In other words, it’s still selling well enough to be a big chore to print as a chapbook. Thank you, thank you, thank you to all the readers who have made that happen.

I know a lot of people really like the black-and-white cover by the very talented GAK. I like it, too. GAK is a fantastic artist. The change isn’t being made to do away with his art at all. The black-and-white cover of MbHW is just a stark contrast to the full-color covers of the rest of The Werewolf Saga. We want the series to have a uniform look. Plus, a trade paperback with a black-and-white cover would just look … odd.

Any other changes? Probably. I added a couple of chapters to the manuscript. They’re short and meant mostly to deal with what some readers felt was a rushed ending. Okay, and I felt like they’d make good scenes in the film when I wrote the screenplay.

I haven’t heard anything from the producer who said he wanted to do the screenplay in quite some time. I think he’s tied up on other projects that are actually paying his bills. Last I heard, he was looking for financing to do MbHW.

When will the new version be released? I don’t know. I think Nathan at Scrybe mentioned putting it out about the same time Ulrik is released, which is supposed to be late this fall. Of course, I’ll let you know.