Why not?
Why not have an omnibus of the Manhunters saga? The idea was to make available a master copy, a book that possessed the whole of the story under one title. This is not unique. How do I make it special for my readers? How do I make this more than a box set of the three books, make it something exciting my fans can enjoy?
The trend is to make a box set that is the complete collection of the series. Usually it is made into an ebook. To be fair, a lot of series out there are too big to have under one cover. The printing companies most of us work with have a maximum number of pages we can go to, and longer series cannot fit in the binding. My first question was, can I make it fit? Can we even entertain the idea of a paperback copy of the entire series?
We toyed a bit with the margins, with a half-a-point-smaller font size, and found we could fit the entire story in. And with space for more.
Why not?
Why not provide in this special publication unique things that are not in the main books, bonus features that cannot be found within the other publications.
I turned first to another well-respected writer, author of fourteen novels, seven collaborations with other respected authors, who has shorts in ten anthologies and can boast seven other publications in things like Magazines and RPG campaigns. I turned to C.T. Phipps, who had read The Manhunters and was willing to write a foreword touting the merits of the series.
I found four essays I had written during the creation of the series that spoke about things on my mind during the writing, the things I wanted my readers to know about the work and the world it is set in.
I had, in another book, the origin story of the character Konnon, who was a main character in Song. We fit that short into the publication with no trouble and I took a chapter from the upcoming series The Madness Wars and stuffed it in there as well.
With content beyond what I could ever dream of including in this omnibus, I decided to look further to find other ways of making this a special project.
So I went to my cover designer, Jenny Zemanek, and together we created a special cover to be found no where else but here. Because why not?
If with a bit more work, I can create a product that can excite my fans, why not do that work? Why not put as much as I can into an omnibus and make something special for my readers.
After all, they made me who I am.