Open Road Expands Its Catalog of E-Riginals

-Alan Dean Foster is a New York Times–bestselling and award-winning author of more than 100 science-fiction, fantasy, horror, detective, Western, historical, and contemporary fiction books. Foster’s PREDATORS I HAVE KNOWN is an adrenaline-fueled memoir of his adventure travels around the world, taking readers through the heart of the Amazon on the trail of deadly tangarana ants, riding on the back of an elephant on safari in India in search of the elusive tiger, and face to face with Great White sharks off the coast of Australia. PREDATORS I HAVE KNOWN will go on sale in January 2011. (Literary agent: Vaughne Lee Hansen, Virginia Kidd Literary Agency)

-From the real value of the Jolie-Pitt baby pictures to the competing business models in the Paris Hilton–Kim Kardashian rivalry, veteran entertainment journalist Jo Piazza offers a penetrating look at the business of being famous. CELEBRITY INC. uses the tradition of the Harvard Business School case study format to reveal the true economics of the celebrity brands that drive the film, television, music, magazine, and Internet industries. Piazza, a former gossip columnist for the New York Daily News, and now columnist on AOL’s PopEater as well as a contributor to the Wall Street Journal, will have the ability to update her text in the “living” ebook with additional case studies on breaking celebrity stories and scandals. CELEBRITY INC. goes on sale in February 2011.

Open Road will optimize each author’s online presence to connect them directly with their readers and will produce original videos to be distributed through the company’s proprietary digital marketing platform. Open Road has worldwide electronic and physical rights to each title, and Jeffrey Sharp, award-winning filmmaker and President and Cofounder of Open Road, will work with each author on the exploitation of additional media rights for their books.

Brendan Cahill, VP and Publisher of Open Road, said: “We are proud to launch Open Road’s E- riginal list with such a diverse range of established and up-and-coming authors from the worlds of politics, journalism, science fiction, mystery, and literature. We strongly believe that books should live on all screens across the world and are excited to talk to international publishers and potential partners for TV and film production at the Frankfurt Book Fair.”