Kindle, My Mad Crush, and General Insanity

It shouldn't be too long now, but soon As The World Dies: The First Days will be available for the Kindle. We were not going to go this route at first, but after several conversations with Indie Authors and hearing about the good response to this format, we went ahead and dove in. It was a total bitch to format, but thanks to April Hamilton's wonderful pdf on the subject, we sorted out the issues. We loaded it up last night and hopefully it will be available for any Kindle owners out there shortly.

Update: The Kindle version of the book is now for sale! Yay!!!

Back in April, I wrote about my mad crush on Morris Rosenthal. He wrote a very good book about self-publishing and has a very informative blog as well. I make sure to read it every week and it always gives me a lot to think about. Yesterday, he gave me a little shout out on his blog, which I thought was very cute. Of course, I just write about vampires, I'm not one myself (thank God! I'm Italian! I need my garlic!), but it was pretty damn funny. It actually made my day. Yeah, yeah, I'm easy to amuse. I'm low maintenance that way.

I have to say that both April Hamilton and Morris Rosenthal had a huge impact on me when I decided to go Independent and I am grateful for the advice they doll out on a regular basis to writers who want to see their words in print, but have battered themselves bloody against the gatekeepers of the publishing industry.

Today I was speaking with a colleague from one of our Dallas office and he was very intrigued with the news of my decision to be an Independent Author. He spoke of how he knows many musicians who spent years and years sending out demo tapes to recording companies. Now, they don't give a damn about the recording companies and are doing it on their own terms thanks to the new media. The Internet opened a gateway to a new form of success and many musicans have grabbed onto it.

Authors have been a little slower to adapt to the new media. My colleague even said, during our conversation, that many of the writers he knows have given up on their dreams of publication. "They gave up. They got too beaten down."

I was recently talking to Andrea Dean Van Scoyoc, a very successful Independent Author, via Myspace. We had spoken years ago when I was supposed to be polished by a small publishing house. Kody Boye had brought her up in a conversation and I remembered her almost instantly. I touched base with her again about her Twisted Dreams magazine and one of the things she said to me was that she was back to being an Independent Author after working with publishing houses the last two years. It was a reminder, once more, that the path I have chosen is a good one and it's up to me to make it work.

Meanwhile, promotion and the Kindle formatting nightmare has consumed a lot of my recent time, but I am making progress on the rewrite of As The World Dies: Fighting to Survive. The tangled mess is untangling slowly, but surely. It does feel good to be writing new scenes with my old familiar characters. Jenni had me giggling out loud the other night. Calhoun amuses me to no end.

In fact, I have come to realize Calhoun really does know where the zombies came from. He's just so batshit crazy, the way he describes things muddles it all up. But he knows far more than anyone around him realizes and that is much more to him than meets the eye.

Anyway, progress is progress...

Surrounded by Zombies

Strange how I ended up with a zombie trilogy, a zombie novella, and a series of zombie short stories considering my first and foremost love is for the vampire. Though, if I consider my past carefully, I realize that my love for the vampire was born out of my stark fear. They were my childhood bogeymen. They were the things I feared most appearing outside my window. Vampires were my night terror, my personal demon, my greatest fear. The only way I could make peace with that fear was to embrace them, to write about them.

I suppose, in a way, that is what I have now experienced with the zombies. The first time I saw Day of the Dead as a kid, I threw up. It terrified me. I refused to watch anymore zombie movies until an old boyfriend talked me into watching Night of the Living Dead with him. I had such terrible nightmares afterward, again, I swore off watching zombie films.

When my husband and I first started hanging out, we realized quickly we had a lot in common. We were constantly together and never bored, so I suppose it was inevitable we would end up together. For some reason, we decided to watch George A. Romero's Zombie Trilogy. I fell utterly in love with the movies. They scared me to death, but I loved the characters in the stories. I winced for those I cared about when they fell and cheered when ones I hated got their comeuppance. I tried watching a few other zombie movies after I was done with the original trilogy, but none had the feel or the emotional resonance that Romero's did.

I did enjoy the remake of Dawn of the Dead, but again, I only truly cared about whether or not one character lived or died (and he was bitten right before the boat). I feared the zombies, but I just didn't care too much about the characters.

I'm not sure why I wrote that first short story (Tiny Fingers). Maybe it was to gain control over a bad nightmare I had. Or just to try something different. I remember just wanting to get the story into words and posted for people to see. I had read a lot of online zombie fiction before I wrote my own story. And like at lot of the zombie movies, I just didn't really care about the characters or the situations they were in.

As The World Dies: The First Days is exactly what I wanted it to be. A strong zombie story with lots of action, gore and characters you care about. I would never claim to be the master story teller George Romero is in his wonderful tales of the undead, but he definitely inspired me to find the heart of the story and embrace it.

I still love my vampires. I will be returning to them. I admit I was rather snobbish about my vampire novels and treated my zombie story like the red headed stepchild in the beginning. But I have learned to embrace both sets of monsters and the worlds they inhabit.



I'm okay with being not just a writer of vampire fiction, but of zombie fiction as well.

But those werewolves....man...that's a whole other story...

The Other Gatekeepers

I was recently asked if I have tried to contact agents about my novels in the comments of another post. The answer is absolutely yes.

The first thing I did when I decided to try out traditional publishing was look up the publishing houses I thought my novel might appeal to. Over and over again, under the submission guidelines, it was made clear that without an agent, don't bother trying.

This ran counter to some of the advice of successful authors who said to represent yourself and keep going without an agent. But a whole other set of publishing professionals said that without an agent you're a dead duck.

So, last year, instead of sending out a bazillion submissions to publishing houses, I sent a bazillion submissions to agents (well, maybe not THAT many, but you know what I mean...) Relatively quickly, the form letter rejections came in. "Not what we are looking for," they read. Over and over again.

I actually wasn't bummed out over the whole thing. I expected it because by now I realized that as hard as it is to get published by a major publishing house, its just as hard to find an agent unless you have an in road to one (an author friend refers you, etc). It was rougher on my husband. He was annoyed by every rejection that came in. He had, after all, read my novel and liked it a lot and he doesn't read my genre! My mother and husband took it harder than I did.

I had now read enough about the publishing world to realize it could take eons to make any headway. I was also involved in a writer's group and saw that if you did not master the art of writing a query letter, you were screwed. One of the other writers helped me with my own query letter and when I showed my husband her notes, he was flabbergasted. He was annoyed enough over the fact I spent several months trying to figure out how to summarize my novel in two pages. He watched me begin to agonize over the query with just as much fervor.

When the last rejection letter came in ( I didn't know it was the last, some agents just didn't respond), I didn't care anymore. I had been reading enough blogs of successful writers to understand that the traditional publication route was very long and, at times, soul crushing. Its hard to stand in a bookstore looking at a book full of typos and a plot you've seen a million times on Lifetime that you cannot read past a few sentences without thinking "Mine is better!" and not feel frustrated.

Toss in a very supportive fan base who can't understand why the first publisher you approached didn't throw a million dollars at you to publish the story they love so much and you can imagine my feelings.

As I researched endlessly on the world of traditional publishing and read a ton of contradicting articles about how to get published, my husband read up on independent publishing by using the publish on demand technology.

One day, he walked up to me and said, "I think you should self publish your books and take back control."

And here I am, declaring myself an independent author, and striking out on my own. The fans are happy their book is coming out and I'm happy to be back in creative control.

Of course, I have a few things to my advantage. I know several kick ass artists to do my cover. I know a former professional editor. My husband is a tech geek. I have fans waiting for the novel.

As the World Dies will not be a roughshod novel when it comes out. It's my responsibility as an Independent Writer to make sure it is the best possible product.

I owe it to myself and my fans.