Game-changer: Will the Kindle Fire Ignite Tourism?

Blind Fate is the first Kindle tourism novel
with an interactive travel guide inside the book.

As Amazon's first color touch-screen model, the $199 Kindle Fire is sure to shake up the publishing world—but many have not discovered its most important feature: as a gateway to tourism through e-novels.

Imagine Kindle novels that are set in real tourism attractions. Then imagine readers clicking on links from inside the novel and instantly browsing the color websites of the real places in the story. Only ereaders like the Kindle Fire can let readers do that. The concept is called tourism fiction: fiction that is written to directly promote tourism to specific attractions.

Haven’t heard of it? That’s because there are only a few novels in the world that are taking advantage of the technology. Right now there is only one novel on the American Kindle market that has a tourism guide inside the book: Blind Fate by Patrick Miller.

Read an excerpt of Blind Fate by clicking here.

In the past, Kindles only offered web browsing in black and white, so the tourism guide in Blind Fate could only show the websites in black and white. The Kindle Fire will change all that in a month, making the tourism appeal of Kindle tourism novels much stronger.

A tourism link from inside the novel Dixie Noir.

What will happen when tourism novels hit the market in large numbers? They will turn the entire national economy around by getting millions of new tourists traveling the country to new places. Imagine how much fun it will be for readers to visit the places they just read about in their favorite stories. Aren’t they the perfect potential tourists to market to? A tourism novel captures potential tourists' full attention for two hours and lets them engage emotionally with the characters—and the places.

What will be the economic impact of millions of new tourists spending their consumer dollars in places all over the nation? You guessed it: finally, a light at the end of this dark economic tunnel that the nation has been driving down for too long. Tourism fiction is the game-changer that will let our nation turn the economic corner at last.

The tourism fiction market won't take long to heat up in America; I have already teamed up with southern writer Kirk Curnutt to produce an online tourism guide for his steamy novel Dixie Noir. The Kindle edition of Dixie Noir also has a live link to Curnutt's website, which has links to the websites of settings in his novel. Curnutt has already said he will include a full tourism guide inside his next Kindle novel.

One more thing: the iPad and iPhone already have a Kindle app, meaning you can experience the nation’s first Kindle tourism novel in color right now on an Apple device. There is even a Kindle for PC app and for just about any smart phone out there. So try out the future by ordering a copy of Blind Fate here. The tourism guide for Blind Fate is at the end of the novel, so jump to the end to see how it works. Then, jump back to the beginning and enjoy a fast-paced suspense story from the “unique” perspective of a blind violinist.

What is USA Today saying about Kindle tourism novels? Find out by clickng here.
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