Category Article

Jan 18 2012

A Writer Experiences Arisia

This convention write-up by NEHW member, Kendra Saunders, for the Pure Textuality wesite.

A Writer Experiences Arisia

by Kendra Saunders

Arisia in Boston has a longstanding history for being the conference where geeks, nerds and steampunk enthusiasts can party and battle snowstorms. Arisia 2012 was remarkable in many ways, but most strikingly, because the skies overhead were blue and snow-free.

Your intrepid reporter (intrepid? No, that’s a lie. A bit overtired, over-excited and over-caffeinated), left snowy and icy New Hampshire on Friday morning with about three bags full of clothes, writing supplies, books and her well-travelled Loki action figure, and hit the road for southern New Hampshire. After connecting with a considerably more famous author, Elaine Isaak (The Singer’s Crown, The Bastard Queen), the journey continued southwards.

As soon as we hit the MA border, the ice and snow disappeared and the skies turned blue and the clouds fluffy, as if we had stumbled across a lovely summer afternoon. Well, maybe not summer, as the temperature was freezing and the winds quite raw.

The convention geared up late in the afternoon as participants threw their belongings in hotel rooms and rushed to get in line for registration. The lines were a bit long and crowded, and the whole matter was disorganized, but once registration was finished, the guest was free to wander at will. A Starbucks and bar/grill stood guard on either side of the hotel’s lobby, providing caffeine or beer, depending on your mood.

Costumes on Friday night were muted compared to the rest of the weekend, but even so, you might easily find yourself sipping coffee with Robin Hood, a Jedi and three young Victorian chaps. Bowler hats and goggles popped up more frequently as dinner-time loomed, and panels about role playing, writing, corset-design and gender gave way to several spectacles on the ground floor of the hotel. A disastrous but amusing showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show held my interest for ten minutes, but I soon joined the crowds of people that flooded out of the room due to DVD malfunctions (yes, really). Wandering down the hall from the movie room, I heard pounding Goth synths and investigated only to find a dark room of dancing witches, Vikings, teenagers, middle aged steampunk guys and a few curious passersby.

It must be said that if you will ever, ever, ever feel comfortable in the knowledge that you can be dressed in PJs and have curlers in your hair, and you won’t be the weirdest thing on the dancefloor… it’s probably at Arisia. I found myself dancing (badly) to songs by Lady Gaga and Blutengel. The DJ was phenomenal.

After passing out at 2:30 a.m. and waking up around 6 a.m., getting dressed in my diesel punk outfit (20s crossed with futuristic/steampunk inspired fashions) and wandering down into the hotel lobby, I discovered rather quickly just how creative the people who attend these conventions really are. Everywhere I looked, women strolled by in Victorian garb, giant hats, skimpy lace outfits and elaborate animal costumes. The men were dressed in a variety of fashions, though many of them seemed to stick close to the steampunk aesthetic. It was gorgeous. And most of the costumes were made by the people who wore them.

Early in the day, the women of Broad Universe hosted a book reading for women writers in the organization. I was among the readers, and after a bout of nerves, I managed to deliver a chapter of my book with all of the glee and grade-A ham that any of us frustrated actor/entertainers harbors inside. Everyone laughed when they were supposed to, clapped when they were supposed to. KT Pinto gave a spirited reading that had everyone nearly in tears with laughter.

Most of Saturday was dotted with various panels for attendees, but perhaps the greatest draw was the never-ending parade of fabulous costumes in the lobby. Batman posed for pictures, Sherlock Holmes wandered the halls, the 10th and 11th Doctor made multiple appearances, a Dalek drew gasps and Tony Stark smirked while he posed for pictures with hot women. The masquerade ball was allegedly one of the best in the history of Arisia and was talked about loudly for the rest of the weekend.

KT Pinto’s book-signing that evening culminated in one enthusiastic fan kneeling in front of the author’s table for a copy of her upcoming book (shhh!) A cancelled party sent hordes of too-sober nerds back into the lobby, most of them choosing to drink and mope and converse in grumbles about their party being cancelled. A few found solace in watching the football game. And let me tell you, there’s nothing like a bunch of men in Ren-fair clothes yelling at a TV screen and cheering on their favorite football team.

Another late night rolled into a somewhat later morning than the one before it. Sunday at Arisia boasted just as many costumes, but a bit less energy as the alcohol and lack of sleep caught up to the attendees.

Broad Universe and Spencer Hill Press hosted a hugely successful book launch for the Spencer Hill Press anthology, UnCONventional. A dragon cake was consumed, fans were able to get autographs from many of the anthology’s writers and much conversation floated around the crowded room.

Arisia attendees were fed a steady diet of somewhat appropriate food offerings—dry, stale bread, butter, a few bruised fruits, assorted cheeses and crackers and endless tea, coffee and hot chocolate. The food was laid out on multiple tables and left to be picked over by the sleepy maidens, grumpy young peasant children, stiff anime characters and confused men in crumpled business suits. I couldn’t help feeling that it was fitting and, for that reason and that reason alone, clever. So yes, I mostly lived off of stale loaves of bread, warm butter and cups of black tea… just like any good waylaid steampunk girl stuck in a great valley of dragons, street vendors and magicians.

And then more than once I hit up the bar/grill in the lobby for their delicious curry. If you stay at the Westin, try the curry. It’s surprisingly addictive, with or without the suggested French fries. Don’t mix it with Guinness though. I already did that for you, so I could warn you. Awfully kind of me, yes?

JA Starr was on hand to take lovely professional photos and he generously shared some of his honey mead with me. Delicious!

By Monday, most everyone was scurrying about to hug their new friends, say goodbye to old friends, get contact information or just figure out what the heck they did with their (keys, bag, purse, child, etc). I had fallen victim to a nasty bout of vertigo, thanks to the elevators and far too little sleep, so admittedly I was rather happy to see things winding down.

All in all, I suggest Arisia highly for fans of fantasy, fans of role-playing, costumers, steampunk enthusiasts, and writers in the Northeast. It’s a great chance to meet fans, make friends, meet heroes, dress up in your old ballgown (everyone has one, right?) or just gawk at the most creative people in the world (fans, of course!) While I didn’t find the panels to be quite as interesting as I was expecting them to be, the pure spectacle of the costumes and fandoms and vendors are enough to justify attending. And the conversations! Oh, you’ll have conversations with all sorts of people.

Included are pictures of the event and some of my favorite costumes from Arisia. Enjoy!

For more about Broad Universe, a world-wide organization that supports and promotes female writers, visit www.broaduniverse.org.

For more about Spencer Hill Press or UnCONventional, visit www.spencerhillpress.com.

For more about one of the incredible vendors at the show, visit www.etsy.com/shop/EmrysFynery.

For books by Tim Lieder visit http://www.amazon.com/Dybbuk-Press/lm/R1LB59CKVHK136.

For more information on me, visit my fancy-dancy, newly updated website, www.kendralsaunders.com

Jan 17 2012

Facebook Gave Me Writers’ Block

This article originally appeared on the Guardian website.

Facebook Gave Me Writers’ Block

by Tom Cox

For Tom Cox, the creative isolation of living in the country was punctured by a constant babble from social networking. So in 2012, he’s decided to go cold turkey

For Tom Cox, the creative isolation of living in the country was punctured by a constant babble from social networking. So in 2012, he's decided to go cold turkey (photo courtesy of Tom Cox)

To see in this year, I did two things I’ve been meaning to do for a long time: I challenged myself to put on as many coats as possible at the same time during a lull in a New Year’s Eve party, and I deactivated my Facebook account. The coats challenge didn’t work out quite as well as I’d hoped: I ran out of arm space when I got to six, and I’m not sure one – a pinstriped, Yardbirds-style blazer owned by my friend Pat – strictly counted. The Facebook experiment, however, has so far been a success. Ten days in, I no longer reach for the Facebook icon on my iPhone in the night as one might reach across the bed for a departed partner, and, as I approach two weeks of cold turkey, the “virtual phantom limb” feeling that kicked in around day three is dissipating.

I was far from the most active Facebook user I know, but my decision to quit came from a long cold look at just how many hours I’ve devoted to it in the last couple of years, and a strong accompanying feeling that, were I to devote the same amount over the next couple, I would want to put on some spiked gloves and repeatedly punch myself in the nose really hard. No matter how positive you feel about Facebook or Twitter and the ways in which they’ve enhanced your life, it is unlikely that anyone will ever lie on their deathbed and say, “You know what? I’m really glad I spent all that time social networking!” Additionally, I’m starting to write a new book, and attempting to feel more focussed.

It’s easy to picture a country writing retreat and imagine that its sheer remoteness naturally leads to the kind of mental peace that breeds creativity, but these days that’s not the whole story. I live in Norfolk with lots of greenery around me but in 2012 rural life doesn’t mean “isolated life”. One of the hardest things about writing for a living is being at your keyboard and feeling that everyone else is out having a party. Facebook and Twitter make that party non-stop and put it constantly in your house, in your face, in your bag, in your pocket. I can convince myself that the two of them are friends in the background, gently egging me on through my creative hermitry, but by doing so I’m being too easy on myself. I already spend far too much time going for coffees and beers with my real friends when I should be writing.

A sensible way to combat such interference would be to switch my router off for a few hours or download one of the increasing range of software packages that lock you out of Facebook and Twitter – or, like Sean French, one half of the bestselling crime writing novelist duo Nicci French — build a writing shed just out of broadband range. But I’m not sensible, and, after a bout of pre-Christmas creative block, I decided to take more extreme measures. Last week, in addition to deactivating Facebook, I drove from my own rural writing retreat to another, even more rural writing retreat, 360 miles away: an almost impossibly idyllic fire-warmed one-bedroom cottage called The Bothy, half a mile down a muddy track just north of Dartmoor, with no internet and only intermittent phone signal.

With a “new year, new start” mentality, I got down straight to business, and held my laptop up against the bedroom window in an attempt to piggyback onto the wi-fi from the main house where the owners of The Bothy live. Having failed in this mission, and fielded some text messages from friends asking why I wasn’t on Facebook any more, which soon extended into conversations I would have previously had with them on Facebook, I read a book about witches and fell asleep, hoping that the witches would get together in the night with the half-formed witches in my own book and make them more vivid.

The next morning I felt more motivated, but I was also a bit hungry, so before working I drove out to the nearest supermarket, ten miles away. This being rain-sodden rural Devon, and the roads being narrow and flooded, the journey took me the best part of 45 minutes each way, and Richard, one of the Bothy’s owners, very kindly accompanied me in his four by four for the first stretch, to make sure my ailing Toyota Yaris got through the floods.

These are the factors the author seldom accounts for when buying into the myth of “getting away from the world”: the two hours that it might take to find an interesting sandwich, the potential hour waiting on a dark roadside for the RAC. Back at the start of the last decade, when I lived in Finsbury Park, in London, traffic noise and nextdoor’s Stereophonics albums were problems, but a carless existence and plenty of nearby conveniences contributed to a simpler working life in a way I took for granted. Also, the pet cats in London were mostly cynical loners, while Bertie, one of the happy, gregarious ones living next to The Bothy, wouldn’t leave me alone, and I couldn’t quite bring myself to stop laying in front of the fire with him on my chest.

When people talk romantically about dreams of rustic artistry, nobody warns you about this stuff: just like when I moved into my house nobody warned me that a man would come to the shore of the nearby lake and shout “COME ON THEN, LET’S BE ‘AVIN YOU!” at the ducks every morning, just as I tried to write the day’s most difficult sentence.

There could probably be no better place to write than The Bothy, if you were a perfect writer, disciplined in his solitude. I, however, am an imperfect modern one, struggling with an attention span that has been torn into strips by the internet and who likes being around people a bit too much.

I managed to work there in the end, but will probably remember it less for what I achieved and more as the place where I found the discipline to almost properly start my seventh book, and finally faced up to the fact that the true distractions stopping me from doing so at home were not external, but internal: that the rabbit hole universe available to us online is far more of a distraction than any physical “bustle” could ever be and the authors really getting down to the best work aren’t the ones telling you about it on the internet.

In fact, I have an impulse to tweet that right now, but I’ll probably leave it.

Tom Cox’s latest book, Talk To The Tail, is published in paperback by Simon And Schuster this month

Jan 16 2012

Amanda Hocking, the Writer Who Made Millions by Self-publishing Online

This article originally appeared on The Guardian website.

Amanda Hocking, the Writer Who Made Millions by Self-publishing Online

by Ed Pilkington

A couple of years ago, Amanda Hocking needed to raise a few hundred dollars so, in desperation, made her unpublished novel available on the Kindle. She has since sold over 1.5m books and, in the process, changed publishing forever

Woman makes millions from self published books

Amanda Hocking: 'I didn't have a lot of hope invested in ebooks'. (Photograph courtesy of Carlos Gonzalez/Polaris)

When historians come to write about the digital transformation currently engulfing the book-publishing world, they will almost certainly refer to Amanda Hocking, writer of paranormal fiction who in the past 18 months has emerged from obscurity to bestselling status entirely under her own self-published steam. What the historians may omit to mention is the crucial role played in her rise by those furry  wide-mouthed friends, the Muppets.

Switched: Book One in the Trylle Trilogy

To understand the vital Muppet connection we have to go back to April 2010. We find Hocking sitting in her tiny, sparsely furnished apartment in Austin, Minnesota. She is penniless and frustrated, having spent years fruitlessly trying to interest traditional publishers in her work. To make  matters worse, she has just heard that an exhibition about Jim Henson, the creator of the Muppets, is coming to Chicago later that year and she can’t  afford to make the trip. As a huge Muppets’ fan, she is more than willing to drive eight hours but has no money for petrol, let alone a hotel for the night. What is she to do?

Then it comes to her. She can take one of the many novels she has written over the previous nine years, all of which have been rejected by umpteen book agents and publishing houses, and slap them up on Amazon and other digital e-book sites. Surely, she can sell a few copies to her family and friends? All she needs for the journey to Chicago is $300 (£195), and with six months to go before the Muppets exhibition opens, she’s bound to make it.

“I’m going to sell books on Amazon,” she announces to her housemate, Eric.

To which Eric replies: “Yeah. OK. I’ll believe that when it happens.”

Let’s jump to October 2010. In those six months, Hocking has raised not only the $300 she needed, but an additional $20,000 selling 150,000 copies of her books. Over the past 20 months Hocking has sold 1.5m books and made $2.5m. All by her lonesome self. Not a single book agent or publishing house or sales force or marketing manager or bookshop anywhere in sight.

So let the historians take note: Amanda Hocking does get to Chicago to see the Muppets. And along the way she helps to foment a revolution in  global publishing.

I’ve come to Austin, legendary birthplace of Spam (the canned as opposed to the digital version), to find out what this self-publishing revolution looks like in the flesh. I can report that, from the outside, it’s surprisingly conventional. Hocking no longer lives in that pokey apartment, but then she’s no longer a struggling would-be author. She’s bought herself her own detached home, the building block of the American dream, replete with gables and extensions, its own plot of land, and a concrete ramp on which to park the car.

But step inside and convention gives way to a riot of colour. It is just before Christmas, and Hocking has decorated the house with several plastic trees bedecked in lights and two large Santa stockings pinned expectantly over the mantelpiece. The sofa is scattered with animals, some of the cuddly toy variety and others alive, notably Elroy the miniature schnauzer and Squeak the cat (apparently they get on very well).

She greets me at the door and, without preamble, we talk for the next two hours about her extraordinary rags-to-riches tale and what it means for the future of the book. At 27, and with only a few months in the limelight, she is patently new to the fame game. She seems nervous at first, answering my questions in short bursts and fiddling with her glasses; but gradually she relaxes as we discuss what for her has been the central passion of her life since an infant.

She was brought up in the Minnesota countryside on the outskirts of Blooming Prairie about 15 miles north of Austin. Her parents divorced when she was young, money was tight and there was no cable TV to wallow in. “So I read a lot. I would go to the library, or get books at rummage sales. I got through them so quickly I started reading adult books because they were longer. I remember my mom giving me a box set of five books to last me all summer; I devoured them all in two weeks.”

By the age of seven she was reading Jaws by Peter Benchley and anything by Stephen King. Michael Crichton, JD Salinger, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac, Kurt  Vonnegut and many others fed an insatiable appetite.

It was a way, she now thinks, of coping with the depression that troubled her childhood. “I was always depressed growing up. There wasn’t a reason for it, I just was. I was sad and morose. I cried a lot, I wrote a lot, and I read a lot; and that was how I dealt with it.”

What went in had to come out. The child Hocking began telling her own stories before she could walk. She was forever inventing make-believe worlds, so much so that the counsellor to whom she was sent for depression concluded that her incessant storytelling was an aberration that had to stop. Fortunately for Hocking, and for her many fans, her parents took her side in this argument, and she was never sent back to see him.

At 12 she had already begun to describe herself as a writer and by the end of high school she estimates she had written 50 short stories and started countless novels. The first that she  actually completed, Dreams I Can’t Remember, was written when she  was 17. She was very excited by the  accomplishment, and printed it out for friends and family, as well as sending it to several publishers.

“I got rejection letters back from all of them. I don’t blame them – it wasn’t very good,” Hocking says.

Hocking went on to develop an intimate relationship with rejection letters. She has somewhere in her new house a shoebox full of them.

Yet she would not give up. She wrote unpublished book after unpublished book. “Sometimes I’d say: ‘I’m done, I’m never going to write another book,’ but then a couple of months later I’d have another idea and I’d start again. This time it was bound to work.”

In 2009 she went into overdrive. She was frantic to get her first book published by the time she was 26, the age Stephen King was first in print, and time was running out (she’s now 27). So while holding down a day job caring for severely disabled people, for which she earned $18,000 a year, she went into a Red Bull-fueled frenzy of writing at night, starting at 8 p.m. and continuing until dawn. Once she got going, she could write a complete novel in just two or three weeks. By the start of 2010, she had amassed a total of 17 unpublished novels, all gathering digital dust on the desktop of her laptop.

She received her last rejection letter in February 2010. Hocking says she hasn’t kept the letter, which is a crying shame because it would surely have been an invaluable piece of self-publishing memorabilia. As far as she can remember, the last “thanks-but-no-thanks” came from a literary agent in the UK. If that agent is reading this article, please don’t beat yourself up about this. We all make mistakes …

April 15 2010 should also be noted by historians of literature. On that day, Hocking made her book available to Kindle readers on Amazon’s website in her bid to raise the cash for the Muppets trip. Following tips she’d gleaned from the blog of JA Konrath, an internet self-publishing pioneer, she also uploaded to Smashwords to gain access to the Nook, Sony eReader and iBook markets. It wasn’t that difficult. A couple of hours of formatting, and it was done.

“I didn’t have a lot of hope invested in it,” she says. “I didn’t think anything would come of it.” How wrong she was.

Within a few days, she was selling nine copies a day of My Blood Approves, a vampire novel set in Minneapolis. By May she had posted two further books in the series, Fate and Flutter, and sold 624 copies. June saw sales rise to more than 4,000 and in July she posted Switched, her personal favourite among her novels that she wrote in barely more than a week. It brought in more than $6,000 in pure profit that month alone, and in August she quit her day job.

By January last year she was selling more than 100,000 a month. Being her own boss allowed her to set her own pricing policy – she decided to charge just 99 cents for the first book in the series, as a loss leader to attract readers, and then increase the cover price to $2.99 for each sequel. Though that’s cheap compared with the $10 and upwards charged for printed books she gained a much greater proportion of the royalties. Amazon would give her 30% of all royalties for the 99-cent books, rising to 70% for the $2.99  editions – a much greater proportion than the traditional 10 or 15% that publishing houses award their authors. You don’t have to be much of a mathematician to see the attraction of those figures: 70% of $2.99 is $2.09; 10% of a paperback priced at $9.99 is 99 cents. Multiply that by a million – last November Hocking entered the hallowed halls of the Kindle Million Club, with more than 1m copies sold – and you are talking megabucks.

The speed of her ascent has astonished Hocking more than anyone. She was so elated to receive her first cheque from Amazon, for $15.75, that she didn’t cash it and still has it pinned up on a noticeboard above her desk. “It went from zero to 60 overnight,” she says. “Everybody was buying my books and it was overwhelming.”

In internet-savvy circles she has been embraced as a figurehead of the digital publishing revolution that is seen as blowing up the traditional book world – or “legacy publishing” as its detractors call it – and replacing it with the e-book, where direct contact between author and reader, free of the mediation of agent and publishing house, is but a few clicks away. There is certainly something to that argument. The arrival of Hocking onto the Kindle bestseller lists in barely over a year is symptomatic of a profound shift in the book world that has happened contiguously. Her rise has occurred at precisely the moment that self-publishing itself turned from poor second cousin of the printed book into a serious multi-million dollar industry. Two years ago self-publishing was itself denigrated as “vanity publishing” – the last resort of the talentless. Not any more.

A survey carried out last year by the book blog Novelr found that of the top 25 bestselling indie authors on Kindle, only six had ever previously enjoyed print deals with major book publishers. With e-book sales reaching $878m in the US in 2010, an almost fourfold increase from the year before, some 30 authors have already sold more than 100,000 copies through Kindle’s self-publishing site. That’s the kind of statistic that made Penguin’s chief executive, John Makinson, say recently that he saw “dark clouds” gathering in 2012.

But Hocking’s new-found stature as self-publishing vanguardista is not something she welcomes. “People built me up as a two-dimensional icon for something I was not. Self-publishing is great, but I don’t want to be an icon for it, or anything else. I would rather people talk about the books than how I publish them.”

She also resents how her abrupt success has been interpreted as a sign that digital self-publishing is a new way to get rich quick. Sure, Hocking has got rich, quickly. But what about the nine years before she began posting her books when she wrote 17 novels and had every one rejected? And what about the hours and hours that she’s spent since April 2010 dealing with technical glitches on Kindle, creating her own book covers, editing her own copy, writing a blog, going on Twitter and Facebook to spread the word, responding to emails and tweets from her army of readers? Just the editing process alone has been a source of deep frustration, because although she has employed own freelance editors and invited her readers to alert her to spelling and grammatical errors, she thinks her e-books are riddled with mistakes. “It drove me nuts, because I tried really hard to get things right and I just couldn’t. It’s exhausting, and hard to do. And it starts to wear on you emotionally. I know that sounds weird and whiny, but it’s true.”

In the end, Hocking became so burned out by the stress of solo publishing that she has turned for help to the same traditional book world that previously rejected her and which she was seen as attacking. For $2.1m, she has signed up with St Martin’s Press in the US and Pan Macmillan in the UK to publish her next tranche of books. The deal kicks off this month with a paperback version of Switched. It’s a fast-paced romance featuring changeling trolls called Trylle who are switched at birth with human babies. The novel cannot be classed as literary, but then it makes no pretensions to be so. It is precision-targeted at a young-adult audience, and is surprisingly addictive. Once the Trylle trilogy is out, Hocking’s new series of four novels, Watersong, revolving around two sisters who get caught up with sirens, will be released from August in hardback and e-book simultaneously.

Hocking’s editors on both sides of the Atlantic point to the deal as evidence that traditional and solo digital publishing can live in harmony. “There’s a lot of talk about publishers being left out of the loop,” says Jeremy Trevathan, Macmillan’s fiction editor. “But this whole thing is an opportunity for writers and publishers to find each other.” Or as Matthew Shear, publisher of St Martin’s Press, puts it: “It’s always been the same since the days when people self-published from the back of their car – cream will rise to the top.”

There’s something peculiar about all this: one of the leading figures in the self-publishing revolution is now being vaunted by major book houses in London and New York as evidence that traditional publishing is alive and kicking. Hocking is very aware of the paradox, which she observes with a wry writer’s eye. “A lot of people are saying publishing is dead,” she says. “I never did, and I don’t think it is. And they want to use me to show it isn’t.”

Switched, the first in the Trylle Series by Amanda Hocking, is out now in paperback and e-book formats, featuring previously unseen extra material. Published by Pan Macmillan in the UK and St. Martin’s Griffin in the USA. For further information, see www.worldofamandahocking.com.

Some of the other Kindle Million Club members

Stephen Leather

Widely hailed as Britain’s most  successful “independent” writer, two years ago Leather took three novellas that had been turned down by Hodder & Stoughton and issued them for the Kindle through Amazon. Last year, he put his monthly income from ebooks at around £11,000.

Joe Konrath

The Chicago-based author is both prolific – he has written seven thrillers, a horror series, and a sci-fi novel, each under a different pseudonym – and candid about the benefits of self-publishing. “One hundred grand – that’s how much I’ve made on Amazon in the last three weeks,” he boasted on his blog last month.

HP Mallory

The “urban fantasy and paranormal romance” author sold around 70,000 copies of her e-books in two months last year, and signed a three-book contract with traditional publisher Random House. She sums up her appeal thus: “If you’re all about fairies and witches and vampires (oh my!) … and you like men who get a little hairy during a full moon, I got the goods.”

John Locke

Last summer, the one-time insurance salesman from Kentucky became the first self-published author to sell 1m Kindle e-books. Alongside his lurid thrillers fans can download an advice book entitled How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months!.

Oliver Pötzsch

German novelist and film-maker Pötzsch has reached the highest echelons of the Kindle bestsellers list with the English translation of his historical novel The Hangman’s Daughter. It’s a big success story for AmazonCrossing, which identifies books selling well in other languages, and republishes them in English.

Jan 14 2012

David L. Tamarin’s Notes from the Darkside

COLUMN

David L. Tamarin’s Notes from the Darkside

Break a Leg, My Life in Film

It was so cold that at the last moment the actor said he couldn’t do the scene. All he had to do was reach through a wall and grab a girl by the throat and pull her through the hole. Because he was a zombie, he had to be shirtless, with makeup on his arms. We were filming in the third floor basement of an abandoned gigantic train depository in Buffalo, New York, in the Winter. It was beyond freezing. One of the reasons the building was closed down was because it was filled with asbestos, which I inhaled regularly for two weeks on the set. We were restricted to the first three floors, so naturally when I wasn’t shooting I was wondering around the forbidden higher floors of the mammoth structure, where giant blocks would fall from the ceiling leaving a mushroom cloud of asbestos. I didn’t have anything to cover my mouth and filter my air, so if I get some type of asbestos poisoning at least I know I did it for art. For horror.

So I volunteered to play the Zombie Arms.  I took off my sweaters and jacket and was freezing, and when they began to apply the icy cold makeup I thought my blood was going to freeze and my fingers would fall off and shatter on the hard ground like icicles. For two miserable hours a team of make-up artists transformed my arms into hideous deformities. I’ve worked with makeup effects many times and these people were excellent. I was literally shaking and trembling from the cold, which didn’t make their jobs any easier. But this was easier than my ordeal several days prior to this, when I had played a zombie and spent 7 hours wearing just my boxers getting a full body zombie makeover, followed by an extremely long and cold shoot that lasted a full 12 hours, during which I shattered a toe, followed by two hours of makeup removal.

I was running, chasing after a scream queen, and we were in these very spooky tunnels underground that looked like they were part of a dungeon. I was barefoot, it was completely dark, and I kicked a rock. It was so cold I felt nothing, but the next morning I woke up several people in the motel screaming. The pain was massive, indescribable – and I had not even noticed on set because of the Arctic-like conditions.

On set at the filming of Prison of the Psychotic Damned (courtesy of David L. Tamarin)

When I did the zombie arms, my toe was broken, and had been three days, but I did not know it yet and the cold prevented me from feeling everything. Back at the hotel, alcohol helped. When I was ready they set up the shot in this underground sub-basement room that looked like it was an ancient execution site. It was the perfect environment for the film, which was a horror zombie gore-fest, but a terrible place to spend all of your time for two weeks. We would all hover around little gas heaters in between takes. Except me, because my makeup was highly flammable, so I could not even stand near the little heaters. Of course, no one told me I was flammable and I had spent a couple of hours by the heaters, almost putting my hands in the flames to gain some feeling back. Then the cinematographer went to light up a cigarette and someone screamed “Don’t light that! David is covered head to toe in flammable material!” I jumped back from the heater and stayed away for the rest of the shoot.

As instructed, I reached through the hole in the wall and grabbed the actress by the throat and began to pull her back.

It was at this point that I realized what a unique business this is. I didn’t want to hurt her, and wasn’t pulling hard enough, and the crew was trying to get me pumped up so they could get the shot and move on. So ten people started screaming at me. “Choke her!” “Squeeze her neck harder!” “Don’t worry about whether you’re going to hurt her you’re a zombie act like you want to fucking kill her!” I felt like I was re-living the scene in The Accused where a bunch of drunks cheered on a rapist. Everyone was screaming at me to choke this woman, choke her and yank her entire body through a hole in the wall. I can’t think of any other job where people would be screaming at me for not choking a woman hard enough, and would be critiquing my choking techniques.

It was only after the actress told me I was a wimp and to get over it so we finish and get out of this icy chamber before we started losing fingers to frostbite that I was able to give a satisfactory performance.

On set at the filming of Countess Bathoria's Graveyard Picture Show (Photo courtesy of David L. Tamarin)

Cut to six years later, in a Canadian barn. There’s this device you put cows in to get them pregnant, and my head was locked into one, my body twisted in a terribly painful position. Now the tables were turned. That same actress was now directing me in my own murder scene, and this time I was the one who was going to suffer. My head is knifed open by an evil doll, and my brains dumped into a plate, which she sips up with a straw. As with the other film, I was one of the writers and had a real emotional attachment to the film and would do what it took to let my words turn into visual mayhem and scare or repulse the audience.

The film debuted at Fantasia Film Fest, but there was one slight problem: someone called a bomb threat into the movie theatre and halfway through the film, a nervous woman came onstage and in a Canadian accent asked that we all leave the building as quickly as possible so that the police could search it for bombs. Feel free to add your own “that film really bombed” pun at this point, but trust me I’ve probably heard it. “I bet they were worried when they heard your film was a real bomb” is the one I hear the most. But luckily, it was a theatre full of devoted fans. And the vast majority waited outside in Quebec way past midnight for over an hour until they cleared the building and let us back in to finish the film. And far from being a bomb, the film kept the audience spellbound despite the bomb threat. As for why someone called in a bomb threat, that is another story for another column.

David L. Tamarin is an attorney, writer, and actor along with being a NEHW member.  This is his first column for the site.

Jan 11 2012

Pictures from the Steampunk Bizarre Exhibit

Pictures from the Steampunk Bizarre Exhibit

by Jason Harris

The 2011 Steampunk Bizarre Exhibit at the Mark Twain House and Museum ends Sunday, Jan. 15 with a showing of Stream Driven: The Movie, and a panel of artists talking about their work being shown in the exhibit from 12 p.m. to 4 p.m. The event is free and refreshments will be provided. Musician Eli August will be performing during this event as well.

A brochure at the event describes Steampunk as “an art movement inspired by great literature writers such as Mark Twain, H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Mary Shelley to name a few.”

The exhibit is curated by local Connecticut artist Joey Marsocci, proprietor of Dr. Grymm Laboratories to bring together 21 international Steampunk artists of all styles and mediums to celebrate one of the greatest writers and ‘inventors’ of time travel, Mark Twain,” the brochure said.

According to the Mark Twain House and museum website, “Dr. Grymm and the gang will offer one last chance to socialize among brass bolts, bubbling brain tanks, fantasy paintings, fantastic weaponry and backpack-borne Tom Sawyer fence-painting gear, all inspired by quotations from America’s bad boy author — you have to see it to believe it.”

The website quotes Steampunk aficionado Miss Kitty that “Steampunk is the future as imagined through the eyes of the past. It is mechanical gears and boilers, dirtiness mixed with the shininess of brass and copper with the deep red of cherrywood. It is a time for tea and gadgets, airships and ether.”

Mark Twain made out of Legos

"Fish Boy"

"Steampunk Zombies"

"Catherinette Rings - Canada"

Steampunk Boba Fett

"The Edgar Allen Poe Nightmare Inducer"

"Game Changer"

"Rumination"

For more information, check out the Mark Twain House and Musuem website.

Jan 10 2012

The HWA Announces 2012 Recipients for Lifetime Achievement

The HWA Announces 2012 Recipients for Lifetime Achievement

by Jason Harris

The Horror Writers Association has announced the 2012 recipients of its Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Rick Hautala (photo courtesy of his Facebook page)

The two recipients of the award are NEHW member Rick Hautala and Joe R. Lansdale.

Hautala and Lansdale join previous recipients such as Stephen King, F. Paul Wilson, John Carpenter, Thomas Harris (no relation), Anne Rice, Charles L. Grant, Harlan Ellison, and Ramsey Campbell to name a just a few of the people who have been honored with this award.

Hautala, who recently had his first novel, Moondeath, rereleased by Evil Jester Press and is in the NEHW’s first anthology, Epitaphs, released last year, said that receiving the award was “unexpected.”

Lansdale’s novel, All the Earth, Thrown to the Sky and the e-book, Bullets and Fire, were released last year. His newest book, Edge of Dark Water, comes out March 25.

“Truthfully, I am more humbled than excited by it,” Hautala said. “There are so many other writers who, I think, are much more deserving. I feel like Carrie White at the prom.”

Lansdale “was surprised” and “maybe even shocked” when he heard about the honor, he said.

Joe R. Lansdale (photo courtesy of his Facebook page)

“It’s an honor to be given this award along with Rick,” Lansdale said.

According to the HWA website, “the Lifetime Achievement Award is the most prestigious of all awards presented by the HWA. It does not merely honor the superior achievement embodied in a single work. Instead, it is an acknowledgement of superior achievement in an entire career.”

A committee chooses the recipients for the lifetime achievement award instead of it being voted on by the entire associations’ active membership, the website said. By having an committee, it “prevents unseemly competition” and the “impression that there are any losers in this category.”

Hautala said, he will “accept the award with humility and — yes, a measure of pride.”

He feels better “sharing the stage with Lansdale, who has been a great friend” for many years.

“As Harlan Ellison says: ’Becoming a writer is easy. It’s staying a writer that’s hard.’ So this award should be an inspiration to young and aspiring writers everywhere … If you stick around long enough, eventually they have to notice you.” Hautala said.

Lansdale agrees with Hautala’s sentiment about having to be noticed when “you have been around long enough.”

“… I like to think we’ve contributed to the field of horror and dark suspense, and that there’s someone out there who became a fan, or writer of horror, because of something I wrote, or something Rick wrote,” Lansdale said. “Again, it’s a great and respected honor.”

Jan 6 2012

Author Talks ‘Suicide’ with the NEHW

Interview with Author J.P. Freeman

by Doug Rinaldi

J.P. Freeman (photo courtesy of Freeman)

Q:  First off, please introduce yourself and tell us a little about who this J.P. Freeman guy is, where he’s been, and what he’s done.

A: Well, first off let me say I really appreciate this opportunity to say hello to the New England Horror Writers. I’ve never been too good at these types of things but I’ll give it my best shot. A little bit about me … I was born in Maine and I have lived here my whole life. I have always been interested in arts and entertainment. In high school I started to play around with music, joining multiple underground heavy metal bands. I continued down that path for a few years after high school until, I finally realized that it wasn’t something I wanted to do, or could do for that matter, for the rest of my life. I also knew that a regular nine to five [job] wouldn’t work for me. I needed a way to express my creative side. There were too many ideas locked in my head looking for a way to escape. So I picked up a pen and started to let them out. At that point I started to look into horror anthologies, hoping to get a few of my shorts published. I managed to get a few of them published, one of them being Suicide Man, which ended up being the seed that Things Better Left Unsaid sprouted from.

Things Better Left Unsaid cover (photo courtesy of J.P. Freeman)

Q:  What is the story and concept behind “Things Better Left Unsaid”?  Why the name change from Suicide Man to Things Better Left Unsaid?

A: Things Better Left Unsaid is the story of a man named, Dale Hicks. Dale is a man at the end of his rope. With nothing left to live for, he decides to end his miserable life. Only, things don’t go exactly as planned for Dale. He wakes finding himself in a strange place surrounded by strange people. Unable to find a way out Dale hits rock bottom. Just when things seem like they couldn’t get any worse, a chance encounter with a little girl turns Dale’s existence upside down.

Suicide Man is the name of the short story in which Things Better Left Unsaid is based, but the two stories are very different. I think when you pick up the first issue and see the first page you will see why Suicide Man was an easy first choice. In the end I just thought the comic should have a name of its own so I went with Things Better Left Unsaid.

Q:  Most obvious question, why did you choose the comic book medium for this tale?  Did Things Better Left Unsaid exist in any other more traditional formats prior to this decision?

A:  As I mentioned earlier, this was originally a short story I did called Suicide Man. I set out working on a collection of short stories and Suicide Man was the first or second story that I came up with. As I tried to move forward I kept thinking about how I could link these new stories to Suicide Man, or how I could have used these new ideas to make that story even stronger. So my collection of random short stories started to become a book of stories about the same group of characters and they all tied in at the end. There was just something about these people that kept calling to me to tell their tale. It started to seem like Dale didn’t want to die after all, like maybe he had a bigger purpose.  To me it seemed like a television show on paper more than a collection of short stories. Then I thought “man, this would be cool as a comic book.” I didn’t really think a comic book would be possible because I can’t draw all that well. So I put out an ad to see if I could find anyone that would be interested in illustrating for me. I got over a hundred applicants! I was pretty amazed by the response. I sat and looked through all the drawings people sent in and narrowed it down to a handful. After that I contacted the few that I was interested in working with and Kelsey Ranallo stood out among the applicants and I quickly signed her on as the artist for the comics.

Q:  Tell us a little something about the artist you have turning Things Better Left Unsaid into a work of visual art.

A: Her name is Kelsey Ranallo. She’s the best. I came into this project not knowing and proper terminology or specifications, nothing. She had to take the time to explain things as we went along (which I’m sure wasn’t fun for her) and keep me from losing my mind in the process. She had me script out my story into comic book pages and panels and describe in detail my character concepts. The next thing I knew the people in my head were coming to life on paper! That has been the coolest part for me, actually seeing my characters in action.

Q:  How many issues are you aiming for with this story?  What are the plans for it once it reaches its conclusion?

A: There are going to be 8 issues. Once they are all finished the series will be released as one graphic novel.

Q:  What’s the release schedule look like for this series?  What are your plans for getting your story out to the masses?  Any publishers or comic book imprints looking to scoop this up?

A: As of right now it looks to be quarterly. I hope to get them out faster but for right now that is the plan. The first issue will be out January 13th. Each issue will be twelve pages and the graphic novel will be 96 pages when completed. I plan to self release the comics via www.comixpress.com and I will be offering signed copies on my website at www.jpfreemanpresents.com. I am also looking into making it available in digital format but that will be down the road a little bit. So far I haven’t submitted it to any publishers, but if you know of anyone interested send them my way!

Q:  What’s next for J.P. Freeman?  Tell us about your plans after Things Better Left Unsaid?  If it’s successful, do you see yourself sticking with this medium or going back to a more traditional form of storytelling?

A: There are a few things in the works for me. I plan to continue writing short stories and to put out a collection of them in the near future. I would also love to sit down and write my first novel this year. If Things Better Left Unsaid catches on I would definitely like to continue writing comic books as well (as long as people want to read them). I am really enjoying working on a project with a continuing story arc.

Q:  Any advice for aspiring writers who want to challenge themselves and the status quo of genre fiction writing?

A: Even though it feels like everything has been done before, it’s important to come up with something original. Make sure to put your own little twist on anything you try to create. Don’t follow the rules of writing. Make your own rules and push the envelope. Be sure to write everything down. All your ideas, as small as they may seem at the time, may come in handy in the future. A lot of Things Better Left Unsaid came from bits and pieces of multiple stories and ideas fused together. Don’t ever completely scrap anything. That idea that seems terrible today might not seem so bad after all in the future. I can’t count the times I woke up in the night with a bit of a story stuck in my head. I sleep with a notebook next to me so I can jot down any ideas that come to me in slumber land. Also don’t show anyone what you’re working on until it’s finished. If you let someone close to you read a work in progress they may steer you in a direction you didn’t intend to go. Don’t let others corrupt your baby.

Q:  Anything else you want to tell us?  Advice?  Comments?  Shameless plugs?  Go for it!

A: I just hope everyone stops by and says hello on one of my sites or pages. I would really appreciate it if people would like my author page on Facebook, www.facebook.com/jpfreemanpresents and stop by my website at www.jpfreemanpresents.com. There will be links there for Things Better Left Unsaid as well as my other available projects. I enjoy interacting with other writers and fans so don’t be shy.

                                                                     ~

Doug Rinaldi is a member of the NEHW and a part of the publicity committee.

Jan 6 2012

Jeers of a Clown: Exploring the Balancing Act of Black Humor Writing

This entry originally appeared on Adrienne Jones’s website.

Jeers of a Clown: Exploring the Balancing Act of Black Humor Writing

By Adrienne Jones

Back in college, a bunch of us got called into the dorm lounge one day to receive some bad news—one of our dorm mates had attempted suicide. He was fine, they were able to save him, but he wouldn’t be coming back to school. A terrible thing, of course. We all sat mournful and appropriately shocked at the news. Then my buddy Al asked the dorm director how this kid had…you know, done it. Turns out he’d taken an overdose of Sudafed.

I went into one of those inappropriate snicker fits, the kind that happen in church or in a meeting with your boss, where laughter is the worst option. I was weakened by it, sliding off the chair, unable to stop while the others stared on in horror, like I was a monster. Come ON! The guy tried to dry his sinuses to death.

Since I started publishing fiction, my brand of humor as been repeatedly called “dark” or “black,” which recently led to pondering the source. Does a dark sense of humor come from the viewpoint of an author, or does the world regularly present us with these scenarios that only a certain personality type recognizes as humorous? Is it the same thing? And where do we draw the line between dark humor and a simple lack of taste?

The late Roald Dahl considered this endlessly, as evidenced in this quote: “If a bucket of paint falls on a man’s head, that’s funny. If the bucket fractures his skull at the same time and kills him, that’s not funny, it’s tragic. And yet if a man falls into a sausage machine and is sold in the shop at so much a pound, that’s funny. It’s also tragic. So why is it funny? I don’t know, but what I do know is that somewhere within this very difficult area lies the secret of all black comedy.”

I think most will agree that Roald Dahl found that balance in his own work. I wonder if his was based purely on speculations, or if he too felt plagued with darkly humorous scenarios thrust before him in daily life. This reminds me of another incident that happened while I was skiing with a group of friends at Killington Mountain. We spotted a man with no arms, expertly swishing down a mogul field, and thought, “Wow. That is incredible.” There was nothing funny about it. We certainly weren’t juvenile and callous enough to laugh at a no-armed skier. We looked on in awe and admiration of his courage.

Yet two hours later we spotted the same man in the ski lodge, casually watching the television as he had lunch with a companion. My friend nudged me and signaled to the TV screen, on which played out the Black Knight scene from Monty Python and The Holy Grail. The knight continued to fight King Arthur even as both his arms had been hacked off by Arthur’s sword, jumping and kicking as fake blood gushed dramatically from his stumps. Dear God, I thought, why are you doing this to me? I mean, what are the odds of watching a no-armed man watching a comedy scene about a no-armed man? I don’t want to laugh at the no-armed skier! The universe is NOT playing fair.

There is a certain safety in laughing at such things in the realm of entertainment, and it would stand to reason that suspension of disbelief or the fiction buffer is the key. But there are just as many staunch haters of Monty Python’s brand of humor as there are fans. I’ve seen people come to blows over this topic. Which brings back the theory that dark humor is about viewpoint, in observer and creator alike.

Since I can’t dig up Roald Dahl and ask him, I participated in a discussion with some living writers of black humor about their life view and how it affects their writing. Author Aurelio O’Brien used to make his living on the big budget animated kiddie films, but crossed over to the dark side with his first novel Eve, a blackly humorous tale of genetic tampering gone awry in a dystopian future.

“For me, so much of life is observably funny and this automatically feeds my writing. When I was creating my all organic, genetically designed future, things like McDonald’s characters directly inspired me to go further than I might otherwise think to go…The little giggling McNuggets are really chunks of dead fowl flesh with cute little smiles carved into them. I find these kinds of things to be so twisted and humorous and odd. Most people don’t think about these characters beyond their surface appeal. So, when people tell me my Lick-n-Span© is gross, I think, is it really any grosser than having a hacked-up chicken giggle at you?”

I agree with O’Brien on this, most consumer icons are creepy. Like the Tidy Bowl man and Mr. Clean. Why is it always a little fantasy man helping the lonely housewife with her daily chores? Strange men coming up out of the floor and the toilet? And why does the housewife always keep them a secret from her husband? Notice the way Mr. Clean winks at her when hubby walks in? And what’s the actual purpose of that little hand guy from Hamburger Helper? What’s he really helping her with?

Speaking of sex and animation, most people know Gary K. Wolf as the creator of Disney’s Roger Rabbit, but he’s also a novelist, and one of the masters of dark humor. For Wolf, the humor definitely comes from a unique way of seeing the world, and is more second nature than calculated creativity.

“There’s something unfathomable about humor writers that compels them to look at a situation or a character, twist it, turn it, squeeze it, squash it until it’s a round peg that fits into a square hole and looks funny doing it,” says Wolf. “Good stand-up comedians have the same ability, taking everyday situations and making them funny. They do it verbally. Most of the humorous writers I know, me included, aren’t very funny in conversation. In fact, I’m so boring I could suck the laughs out of a hyena convention. However, give us a blank page and a pen, and we’ll have you in stitches. I’ve been applauded by editors, critics, and readers for the humor in my work. All well and good except they were talking about what I consider to be my serious work. What I’m saying is that there’s something perverse about the way I look at reality or, in the case of science fiction, unreality I see a situation, I make it funny. Can’t help it. Don’t do it intentionally. That’s just the way I write.”

Gary makes a good point here about stand-up comedians, which prompted me to speak with one of my favorite and darkest comedians, winner of the 2009 Boston Comedy Festival, Dave McDonough. Dave, who’s confessed to needing roughly 70 jokes written for a half-hour set, has a “serial killer on Valium” kind of delivery, and pushes the envelope with some wince-worthy jokes, but he’s booked solid most weeks, so the man has found his groove, and his audience.

“There is a balancing act but you can’t make everyone happy,” says McDonough. “I cross the line sometimes but that’s half the fun. I don’t have any material I draw the line at except Muslim jokes, because I need my head. I tell a Jesus Christ/abortion joke and a male-inmate rape joke that often get applause breaks, so there’s a way to make the darkest of topics palatable to the public. I’m nowhere near as dark or as crazy as the freak I play onstage, I’m really a positive, introverted person by nature who happens to believe that the world is coming to an end.”

So writers and entertainers alike seem to reiterate my previous theory, that black humor is a personality trait, an inherent point of view within the creative mind before the material ever reaches the page, or the stage. But in the spirit of point/counterpoint, I figured there had to be a dark humor writer who didn’t necessarily see the real world through gore-colored, Groucho Marx glasses. Someone calculating, a mere craftsman, crazy on the page but with a solid, normal worldview—author Jeff Strand.

If you’ve read Strand’s popular, horror/humor brand of fiction, you’re now scratching your head and saying, “Did she just call Jeff Strand normal?” Especially after reading excerpts like this one from his book Disposal, which shows off his talent for making gore and violence a casual affair.
“We’ll finish slicing up my husband’s body, then we’ll get rid of the chunks, then we’ll take a long shower, and then we’ll get some sleep–and no, you can’t spend the night–and then I’ll pay you.”

The reason I thought I’d get calculated normalcy from Jeff Strand obviously didn’t come from the content of his fiction. But having had many writing-craft related discussions with Strand, I always end up shaking my head at the logic he applies to the structure of writing, putting himself completely outside the whacky content in order to plot his scenes with almost mathematical precision. He’s like the Professor on Gilligan’s Island, fixing the radio while everyone else is running around throwing coconut cream pies.

But I was wrong. While Strand recognizes more conventional logic about the crux of black humor, in the end he too opts for the warped theory.
“We’re living in dark times, and one theory is that because it’s difficult to cope with or even comprehend some of the horrors around us, we use them for comedic effect to help us better deal with them,” says Strand. “Which is a good theory. But at the same time, I think most of us are just sickos. The college student who creates an elaborate online animation of The Puppy Blender isn’t doing it as a defense mechanism. We’re all warped!”

Though like Roald Dahl, Jeff finds himself balancing that delicate line between humor and bad taste. “If I can come up with a genuinely funny angle that’s more than just ‘Oooh! Look how tasteless I can be!’ then my only off-limits material would be specific real-life people suffering tragedies. Cancer itself is acceptable. A real-life person dying of cancer is not. I wouldn’t necessarily feel the need to make something funnier just because of the uncomfortable subject matter—it would just have to be handled in a way that justified the material.”

And so ends the cage match, the popular vote going to the theory that black-humor writers have an inherently twisted perspective, a real-life view of the world that powers the motor for creating the dark funnies. Limitations are applied when putting pen to page, balancing the scales of humor and darkness to make the mix palatable for human consumption. If the mix is just right, the audience will laugh. Or at least some of them. Because as all humor is in the eye of the beholder, it’s inevitable that part of the population will always stare slack-jawed, horrified as you giggle maniacally at the boy who tried to dry his sinuses to death.

Jan 5 2012

The Pros of Publishing Short Stories on Amazon

This entry originally appeared on NEHW member Mark Edward Hall’s website.

The Pros of Publishing Short Stories on Amazon

by Mark Edward Hall

I get asked a lot, mostly by newbies, how I can make money by publishing .99 cent Ebooks on Amazon. First, my .99 cent books are all short stories. I make .35 on a short story that would otherwise be lost in my computer forever. I have twelve of my shorts out there now with more to come and it actually amounts to a tidy bit of extra income each quarter. Most all of my shorts have been previously published, so anything I make on them now is a bonus and welcome extra income. By the way, I also publish these same stories on Smashwords and Barnes & Noble.

All my novel-length works are 2.99 or above. On Amazon you receive 70% of anything priced above 2.99. On a 2.99 Ebook I receive 2.05. Not too bad when you consider that the stuff I have with a publisher (three books to be exact) only nets me 17.5% of list. The publisher likes to word it as 40% of net, which doesn’t sound too bad when you sign the contract, but in reality it figures to just about 17.5% of the purchase price.

I’m not here to trumpet the virtues of independent publishing over legacy publishing, although I might do that in a future post. Writers have to make up their own minds about what’s best for them. I only know what works best for me. I have two new novels coming early next year and I can tell you this, they will both be independent books. I hire my own editor, commission the cover art from some very good artists, and I’m pretty good at doing the formatting. (Better than my publisher actually) So when you take into consideration the profit difference between doing it yourself and putting it in the hands of a publisher it seems like a no-brainer to me. I wish I’d thought that way years ago.

By the way, I also offer some of those same .99 cent short stories as a collection entitled, Servants of Darkness, for $2.99. Readers who want to sample my work can buy a .99 cent short and if they like what they read they can buy an entire collection for 2.99. In this digital age I think writers are nuts if they don’t use every opportunity available to them.

Also, I am in the process of offering all of those same short stories on my website for free. Yes, you heard me right, FREE! If someone wants to save the .99 cent kindle fee and doesn’t mind reading on the computer, they can read my short stories without paying anything. Maybe I’m nuts but I believe it’s the right thing to do.

But to answer the original question: How can you make money by publishing .99 cent Ebooks on Amazon? Just ask John Locke. If you’re a writer and you haven’t yet heard of John Locke, then you’ve been living under a rock. John Locke writes the Donovan Creed book series and he prices all his novel-length books at .99 cents. He sold a million of them in five months and they’re selling at the rate of one every seventeen seconds.

In summary I think the future is very bright for those writers who have the courage to be creative.

———

Mark Edward Hall has worked at a variety of professions including hunting and fishing guide, owner of a recording studio, singer/songwriter in a multitude of rock n’ roll bands. He has also worked in the aerospace industry on a variety of projects including the space shuttle and the Viking Project, the first Mars lander, of which the project manager was one of his idols: Carl Sagan. He went to grammar school in Durham, Maine with Stephen King, and in the 1990s decided to get serious with his own desire to write fiction. His first short story, Bug Shot was published in 1995. His critically acclaimed supernatural thriller, The Lost Village was published in 2003. Since then he has published five books and more than fifty short stories. His new novel, a thriller entitled Apocalypse Island is due out in early 2012.

Jan 3 2012

Interview: Joining Trent Zelazny on the Dark Side of Fiction

This interview originally appeared on NEHW member Erin Underwood’s blog.

Interview: Joining Trent Zelazny on the Dark Side of Fiction

by Erin Underwood

You might have seen him around. His name is Zelazny. Trent Zelazny. If you read dark fiction he’s someone you want to know, or more to the point, he’s a writer that you want to read. Some people write from the heart, but Trent Zelazny leaves his blood on the page, creating fiction that feels like you’re living an experience while tucked safely in your own cozy home. He is definitely making his mark, writing some terrific pieces–most of which have just been published this year.

Perhaps one of the most impressive things about Trent Zelazny is his ability to keep moving despite the obstacles thrown in his path. Troubles aside, Trent had continued to produce some excellent heart pounding stories that are likely to worm their way into your “To Be Read” pile until you’ve got nothing left from him to read–at which point you will join the rest of us who are waiting for more. Luckily, he’s agreed to give Underwords an interview so that we have a little something to tide us over for now.

~

Drummer. Writer. Movie buff. How would you describe that guy people call Trent Zelazny?

Reserved. A bit neurotic. Still healing. My life has taken a lot of twists and turns. 2009 and 2010 were both pretty much one big downward spiral, filled with alcohol and the death of my fiancée, bouncing aimlessly around Florida, staying in flophouses and some nights on the street. Thankfully, with the help of family and friends, I was able to pull out of it. The 2011, the new Model T is a vast improvement, though it still clinks and clanks when it runs.

What can readers expect when they pick up your newest publication Destination Unknown?

Hopefully a story with characters they can relate to. Hopefully it’s exciting to them, too. A far-fetched scenario but one that, I think, is quite plausible, even moreso possible. To me it asks the question: Can you stick together if you’ve already fallen apart?

What literary (or other) influences have been the most powerful on your development as a writer?

Horror was the big one at the start. Matheson, Bloch, King, Koontz. Over time this evolved into crime and mystery, especially the old pulps from the 40s and 50s, and Film Noir. And not to come off as pretentious, but you have to sound pretentious when you use the word, existentialism, especially Sartre and Kierkegaard. The best mentor I’ve had is Jane Lindskold. I seriously doubt I’d be as far along as I am without her. I’ve kind of let that friendship slip away, and deeply regret that, knowing it’s mostly my doing.

Your fiction is a mixture of horror, noir, crime, and comedy in varying degrees. As a writer or reader, what attracts you most to this combination of literary genres?

It would be more as a reader than a writer, I think. They are typically my favorite things to read, so I guess it would make sense that they’re the things that come through most when I write. Dave Barry and Donald Westlake can make me laugh so hard that I practically wet my pants. Joe Lansdale has the mind-boggling talent to frighten you, make you cringe, and laugh out loud, all at the same time. I also really love heavy drama. Judith Guest’s Ordinary People was and is a personal favorite, as is the movie. I’d love to be able to write something like that one day.

You’ve worked with a variety of the darker genres, but haven’t touched much on the fantastic. Since fantasy and horror often go hand in hand, do you think you’ll explore this combination of these genres?

I have a little. When I was younger I wrote a lot of fantasy and some science fiction. As time went on, however, I found that, overall, I just wasn’t very good at it. I think, with my father being who he was, I kind of thought that that’s what I was supposed to be doing. I have fantastical elements in pieces, usually dark. The book I’m working on now has a big supernatural subplot, and I have a sort of fantastical story coming out in the anthology Fantastic Stories of the Imagination. I try to let the story tell me what it is. Often not, but at times it waves its arms and says, “Hey, there’s some fantasy in this one.”

What story or scene has been the most challenging for you to write or pushed you the furthest outside of your comfort zone?

The book I’m working on has done that a good amount. Fractal Despondency would likely be the biggest so far, I think. Semi-autobiographical. My fiancée had only been dead four or five months when I wrote it.

[sample chapter of Fractal Despondency]

If you had one chance to ask anyone (alive or dead/real or fictional) one question, what question would you ask? Why that question?

At the moment of this interview, it would probably be Kierkegaard. I’d wanna ask him why the hell he had to say “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” Because it is one of the truest things I’ve ever heard and, to me, it’s not an all-together pleasant thought.

In an interview with Darrel Schweitzer for Fantasy Magazine in which you were answering a question about your father’s (award winning author Roger Zelazny) influence on your writing, you said, “He gave advice and helped with certain must-knows, but he always encouraged individuality.” Looking back, how has that encouragement helped to shape your fiction into what it is today?

Well, it almost contradicts what I said above about feeling like writing fantasy was what I should be doing. Last thing he ever wanted was to turn anyone into a literary clone of himself. I have an older brother and a younger sister—I’m the Jan Brady. Whatever any of us took interest in, he encouraged. He encouraged my music, my writing, my drawing. Anything I seemed to take a real interest in. He wasn’t a cheerleader, but an encourager. I’m pretty sure he did that with my brother and sister as well. When he saw that I was gravitating more and more towards writing, we’d sit in his office and talk about it. He rattled off a few things that every writer should probably read (Shakespeare, for example) but otherwise told me more about fundamentals. He used favorite books of his as examples (Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, which is an amazing book, comes to mind), but he never told me I had to read them. He wanted me to find my own way.

In another interview that you did with Gabrielle Faust, part of your advice to new writers was not to be afraid to write something unpublishable. Why do you think this is so important?

This is often where writer’s block comes in, I think. Not that the words won’t come, but more a fear that the words will be bad, or wrong, and this will somehow, in some way, confirm that you don’t have what it takes. That you’re not a real writer. I still write stories that are beyond help. Am I let down when I finish? Yes. Am I glad that I wrote it? Yes. It’s a little like blowing your nose, clearing the gunk and crap out so you can breathe, and sometimes you’re really stuffed up. You may have to go through an entire box of tissues, but eventually you’ll breathe better, and you’ll be glad you got rid of all that snot.

Within the last year you have published a solid stream of fiction. What are you working on next?

    • Destination Unknown – print & e-book (Dec 2011)
    • “Snow Blind” in Stupefying Stories – e-book (Dec 2011)
    • A Crack in Melancholy Time – e-book (Sept 2011)
    • Shadowboxer – e-book (Aug 2011)
    • To Sleep Gently – e-book (Aug 2011),
    • A story in Kizuna [Fiction for Japan] – print & e-book (Aug 2011)
    • Fractal Despondency – e-book (Apr 2011), print (Jun 2011)
    • The Day the Leash Gave Way and Other Stories – print (Aug 2010)

Currently working on a new novel, as well as a short novelette for a shared world anthology, and a project I’m not allowed to discuss (tease, I know). I’m sure a short story or two will pop up soon enough. With 2009-2010 being what they were, I was at least blessed this year with a bit more publishing success.

~

Trent Zelazny is the author of Destination Unknown, To Sleep Gently, Fractal Despondency, Shadowboxer, The Day the Leash Gave Way and Other Stories, and A Crack in Melancholy Time. He was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He has lived in California, Oregon, Arizona, and Florida. He currently roams throughout the country aimlessly. He also loves basketball. You can visit Trent on Facebook, Twitter, and on his website.