Cross-platform convergence is something games makers are getting increasingly excited about, and it's easy to see why; release a song, game, action figure set, movie or television series all at once all under the same branding and you can just sit back and watch the money roll in.

The novel based on a video game, however, is something of a strange beast. Literature ties in less well with gaming culture than other mediums – and a brief inspection of this Wikipedia list of books based on games shows that, for the most part, game fiction has been aimed solely at the science fiction and childrens genres.

Ubisoft and Penguin books hope to buck this trend with the release of Assassin's Creed Renaissance, a novel based on the popular slash-em-up series – an exclusive extract from which we'll be putting up on the Games blog tomorrow. The book will hope to tap into the ever-expanding Dan Brown historical fiction market, as well as add an extra touch of legitimacy to the Assassin's Creed universe. Combined with the Lineage set of short films released under the franchise, such projects could well be the tip of the iceberg for related projects across different media.

As you can see above, we've also got our hands on a new trailer for the game itself, to be released on 20 November – with the book following a week after. The first game received mixed reviews so hopefully the developer will have put as much effort into improving Assassin's Creed's gameplay as they have getting people talking about it.