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Having made his fortune as creator of TV's CSI crime show franchise, Las Vegas valet-turned-TV mogul Anthony Zuiker recently invented a fresh outlet for his creativity in the form of an iTunes app that fuses text and video.
Zuiker's downloadable Digi-Novel format alternates the written word with video segments. The inaugural Digi-Novel, Level 26: Dark Origins ($13, link opens iTunes), dramatizes the pursuit of a serial killer (pictured right) so treacherous he's ranked by the FBI as an off-the-charts "level 26" menace to society.
Since the fall launch of Dark Origins, commenters at the Level 26 website have been weighing in with ideas for a 2011 sequel. In an e-mail interview, Zuiker (pictured below), a self-described "slow reader," describes how the community of roughly 30,000 Level 26 fans has impacted future storylines for the projected three-book trilogy.
Wired.com: The Level 26 website, created with the lonelygirl15 team of Eqal, invites visitors to submit suggestions for sequels to Dark Origins. Are you genuinely taking these ideas into consideration?
Anthony Zuiker: We're taking every submission seriously. It might take us a couple of books to get it right, to where we can work with the community and hand the narrative to them. We have forums where people can submit future characters, ideas for casting. As we begin to launch book two and three and evolve what a Digi-Novel is, we're doing the best we can to honor those submissions but we're also trying to perfect what the Digi-Novel is in the first place.
Wired.com: So reader feedback is proving valuable to your creative process?
Zuiker: Yeah. The community's impact has been incredibly valuable for one simple reason: They're honest. Sometimes too honest. I read all the feedback, take it with a grain of salt, and if one or two or three issues keep coming up from different sources, it's probably something that's bothering the masses so we'll take that into account. I would much rather have overly honest brutal feedback from a community than people "yes-ing" me to death and never quite knowing what went wrong.
Wired.com: Taking a step back here, how does the Digi-Novel work?
Zuiker: Every 20 to 25 pages that you read, you have the option to log in to a website and enter a code, which unlocks a piece of motion picture footage or a Cyber Bridge, which will bridge you from one chapter to another. There's about 20 of those inside the book.
Wired.com: Who figured out the technical stuff?
Zuiker: We partnered with Ben Satterfield and 23 Divide Studios early on to build and developed the Level 26 app for your iPhone or iPod Touch that integrates the book, videos, soundtrack, sound effects.
Wired.com: Is your Digi-Novel platform going to be licensed to other authors or is it exclusively connected to the Level 26 franchise?
Zuiker: If any authors want to work with us in creating a Digi-Novel, we'd be very interested in doing that. We've filed the appropriate patent and copyright paperwork with the intention that this will become its own genre over time.
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