E&P

from Editor and Publisher magazine, hitting newstands on June 1

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/magazine/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003591682

'Hooked' On a Feeling That a Digital-Age Novel is Needed

By Dave Astor
Published: June 01, 2007

When it comes to the digital age, Matt Richtel writes about it from allkinds of angles. Since 2000, he's covered technology and telecommunications as a New York Times staff reporter. Since 2001, he's written a United Mediacomic strip ("Rudy Park") set in an Internet cafe. And since June 1, Richtel has been a published novelist whose Hooked comments about the impact of thedigital age on personal lives.

Why all the Web themes? "You write what you know," replied Richtel. "I spend my days as a reporter immersed in this stuff."

But Richtel, 40, doesn't write only about digital matters. "Rudy Park" maybe set in an Internet cafe, but its characters have relationships, politics,and other things on their minds in addition to computers. And Hooked -- onlythe third release from Hachette Book Group's new Twelve imprint -- is a thriller that doesn't exclusively focus on what Richtel describes as "the hyper-fast way we digest information" in the 21st century.

Still, today's shorter attention spans helped inspire the book's format. Hooked contains 60 chapters in less than 300 pages, and many of the chaptersend with a "hook" designed to make readers want to continue on.

Richtel is a little surprised that he continued writing Hooked afterstarting it in 2004. "A book seemed daunting after I spent my life characterizing the world in 800-word chunks," he said, referring to his Times articles.

The reporter/author manages to also find time for the daily and Sunday "RudyPark" strip partly because the art is done by another person: Darrin Bell,who also draws and writes the "Candorville" comic for the Washington PostWriters Group.

Richtel joked that "Rudy Park" is "a labor of love and a vow of poverty,"though its client list of about 60 newspapers and Web sites isn't bad in amarketplace filled with so many comics.

The San Francisco-based writer, who scripts "Rudy Park" under the pen nameof Theron Heir, also delivers for the Times the monthly "VC Nation" columnabout the venture-capital industry. And he's about 100 pages into a second novel that, unsurprisingly, has some digital-age themes.