The Rat Bastards Series is Now on the Kindle!
Well, I haven't read this paperback yet - my interests shifted a little from my WW2 fixation last summer and I never got around to it. But just yesterday, some helpful anonymous poster informed me that Len Levinson, the author who wrote The Rat Bastards as well as other men's adventure titles during the 80's, has put out many of his works as Kindle ebooks.
Not wasting a moment, I went and took a look, and there they are! Len is definitely a smart cookie, as he's pricing the books competitively, even selling the first book in the series cheaper than the rest to lure in potential customers. I picked up Hit the Beach! without a second thought, and once I'm done with my current novel (I'm reading Ian Fleming's Moonraker right now) I'll be diving into Levinson's WW2 madhouse.
It looks like Levinson was able to either acquire the rights to most of his old titles, or he was a wily fellow back in the day and managed a contract that gave him back his rights relatively easily. A good portion of his work seems to now be digitized, and everything looks well put-together (I'll only nitpick that the silhouette on the cover of the Rat Bastards books is holding an MP-5, which puts him a few decades out of date with the WW2 timeframe, but whatever...).
I've said it before many times, and I'll say it again. The ebook format is the perfect vehicle for the short, punchy, quick-to-write genres such as men's adventure fiction. Even Gold Eagle, something of a dinosaur in the field and the last great Men's Adventure publisher left standing, is finally selling their titles as ebooks. I can only see this genre growing by leaps and bounds as the ebook market grows in kind.
Len, thank you for doing this, and if you find this post, feel free to leave a comment and say hello.
