After St. Martin's Press successfully reintroduced author Francine Pascal to her now-older audience, with March's bestseller Sweet Valley Confidential: Ten Years Later, the publisher wanted to experiment with its follow-up. Hoping to test a new model, SMP publisher-at-large Dan Weiss is overseeing an e-serial by the author that will, if it works, replace the format that Pascal built her career on: mass market.

Pascal got famous writing about twins Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield in the 1980s. Her series about the California high schoolers launched in 1983 and ran for 20 years. The books were, as Weiss noted, your classic mass market hit. "My belief is that we can, in some ways, replicate many attributes of mass market publishing in e-books." With that in mind, the e-books in the forthcoming line will carry the hallmarks of print titles in a mass market series; they will be inexpensive, relatively short, contain cliffhangers and be released on a regularly monthly schedule.

Because the mass market business has dropped off precipitously, Weiss is hoping SMP can create a mass market hit in digital, building off of the success of Sweet Valley Confidential: Ten Years Later. The e-line will be targeted at the readers of Ten Years Later, namely women in their 20s and 30s who read the original Sweet Valley books as teenagers. The e-line will pick up a few years after Ten Years Later and SMP currently has plans to do six e-books, or, as Weiss is calling them, "episodes."

The e-books, which are tentatively scheduled to start appearing in May, will be between 20,000 and 25,000 words and priced between $2.99 and $3.99. Weiss is also planning on doing more e-serials, but said he could not speak to any specifics now.

The Pascal e-serial experiment will also be given the chance to expand in other markets. Writers House, which represents Pascal, will be selling foreign rights to the e-books in Frankfurt. A rep for the agency, who works in the foreign rights division, acknowledged that digital-only title will not be easy to sell outside of the U.S., since so many countries lag in the digital book business. But there are opportunities, nonetheless. The rep said: "The electronic market does exist and seems to be picking up, especially in Germany, and we are hopeful that this will pique their interests."