Making History: The Gag Reel

I’ve always taken great pride in my outside-the-box thinking, and it was that spirit of creativity that led me to try something absolutely, positively, completely ludicrous in The Malta Escape. Something I’ve never seen any author do before. As crazy as it sounds, I decided to put a gag reel at the end of my book.

That’s right, y’all. I made history!

On the surface, a gag reel makes absolutely no sense in a novel. I mean, it’s not like my characters do take after blooper-filled take until they nail a scene. Unless, of course, you count all the rewriting that I do when I’m polishing a manuscript. (Or, if you consider my heritage, should I say Polishing?) And yet, when I reached the conclusion of
The Malta Escape, I wasn’t ready for it to end. So I decided to tack on some extra pages in which my readers get to see my characters in a series of short comedic scenes that didn’t quite make the main storyline.

Truth be told, I wasn’t sure if readers would like the concept or not. All I knew was the absurd, off-the-wall scenes made me (and my editor) laugh out loud, so I decided to take a risk and release it to the public. I figured, if readers ended up hating it, I could always delete the section in future editions of the book.

Thankfully, that doesn’t seem necessary. The response has been sooooooo unbelievably positive that my only regret is not thinking of it sooner!

So what did you think? Did you like the gag reel or not?