Zombie City: Episode 4: first draft finished! & cover reveal

So, I've finally typed in the last word of the first draft of Zombie City: Episode 4. It's been a bit of a struggle to find the time and energy to work on it since starting the job I started back in January, but I'm riding high now that I've got a complete object to refine. It clocked in at just over 31K words, though I don't know what it'll be once I've finished editing it. My plan is to give it a quick preliminary polish--I know there are a couple of plot points that need to be put in line--and then send it through to my brother to get some feedback (he served as beta-reader for all of the previous episodes, and is a pretty insightful dude). I'm not sure when I'll have it ready for publication--I've gotten a bit fed up with myself for making predictions that turned to be pretty far off base--but hey, one step closer.

The offer I mentioned in previous blog posts is still on the table: sign up for my newsletter (by putting your email in the white box on the right) and I'll send you a coupon for a free copy of the story on Smashwords when I finally hit the publish button. If you're not signed up for Smashwords and don't want to sign up, let me know when you get that coupon email, and I'll find some way to send you a PDF. (The episode will go live on Amazon, but I won't be able to make it free there.)

Thanks!

Zombie City: Episode 4 UPDATE

Here's the bad news: it's the end of February, and ZC4 isn't finished.

But wait! There's good news too! Episode 4 is almost finished, like 80% of the way there. And it's got all kinds of crazy stuff in it: punks and hippies and bikers and squatters and inter-group conflicts and urinary catheters and nearly-naked women shooting people with shotguns and someone getting smashed/electrocuted/burned-to-death by a toppled light tower... and more!

Perhaps the best news of all is this: after having put ZC on the backburner last November because I didn't realize people were actually reading it, I've now managed to reconnect with the story and the main character. You see, for nearly two months I didn't write or re-read or even think about Zombie City--all of my creative energies were being put into other projects, primarily my murder-mystery Dry Shores--and I kind of fell out of touch with Shane and his world. In January, just a few days after discovering that Zombie City was developing an audience of its own, I began trying to write the next episode. But between starting a new job, and coming down with the flu, I didn't get much done. And what I did write took tremendous effort because I'd sort of fallen out of touch with the story.

Well, I'm back in the Zombie City groove now and I'm having a lot of fun brutalizing Shane and destroying San Francisco. My hope is that I'll be able to stay in the groove after finishing Episode 4 and move right into Episode 5, which I'm guessing will be the final act that wraps everything up.

The apology-offer I mentioned in my last blog post is still on the table: you can get a free copy of Episode 4 by signing up for my email list in the white box farther down on the right. Sorry, again, for taking so long to get ep4 out there, but I'm hoping you'll think it was worth the wait.

Where the hell is Zombie City: Episode 4?

Back in December I mentioned I hoped to have the fourth episode of Zombie City out by the end of this month. Well, the end of the month is here, but the fourth episode isn't. I'm still working on it, and have a long way to go before it's ready. Why so far behind schedule? Work and the flu, to put it plainly.

Anyway, I'm sorry I'm behind schedule, and I'm hoping that any readers waiting for Episode 4 won't hold it against me. At the risk of setting myself up for failure again, I'll offer a new tentative release date: I hope to have the fourth episode out by the end of February.

And to show my contrition is real, I'd like to make another offer: when the fourth episode is ready, you can have a copy of it for free. Sign up for my email list--see the white box farther down on the right side of this page--and when the episode goes live, I'll send out an email with a Smashwords coupon code for a free copy.

Sorry again about the delay.

Hurrah! Moving forward in 2014

Whenever I've looked at the sales information on my Smashwords account, I've seen reports of a few sales directly through their website, and a bunch of zeros for all the other places they distribute my books. I assumed this meant that the books weren't selling any copies anywhere else. And then, yesterday, I realized there was a little 2013 button showing up on the page. I clicked that button, and saw that copies of the books have been selling, especially Zombie City, especially through Nook. It was a wonderful, and significant, surprise.

See, I'm a pretty insecure guy, and even though I've been writing for almost 20 years now (since I was 15), I still sort of tend to think that no one out there is going to want to read my stuff. It hasn't stopped me from writing--indeed, writing seems to be a sort of compulsion that I can't stop doing, no matter what--but it has inhibited my self-promotion efforts, and impacted my motivation.

Up until yesterday, I'd figured the Zombie City series was a failure. I'd sold about a dozen copies through Amazon, and just a few more than a dozen through Smashwords, in the three months since I'd published the first episode. I figured people weren't that interested in it. I didn't try to promote it, or to find any reviewers willing to rate it. I'd even decided to put it on the backburner for a while, to see if I could come up with a different story that people might want more.

But yesterday I found out that people have been buying it. There have been about 55 Smashwords affiliate sales for Zombie City, mostly through Nook.

I know, I know: 55 sales is pretty small potatoes. Still, I was excited, especially by the third episode sales. I reason that if people are going on to buy the third episode, they're pretty invested in the story. Not everybody keeps going, but more than half of the people who bought the second episode also went back to buy the third.

For me, that's validation I can use to beat back the paralysis my insecurities had given me about that project. It tells me that there are some people out there who want to read what I write.

So here's my plan:

1) I'm going to jump back into the Zombie City series. I hope to finish Episode 4 before the end of January, and maybe wrap it up with a fifth episode sometime in February.

2) I'm going to try to get Episode 1 to price-match for free on Kindle. Right now it's free everywhere else, but Amazon hasn't price-matched it yet, and I haven't really made any effort to get them to do it (cause I figured no one wanted to read it anyway).

3) I'm going to start trying to promote the series. Most importantly, I'm going to start contacting reviewers, in hopes that I can get a few ratings to show up for it. Right now, none of the episodes have any ratings, and I get the feeling that people are much less likely to try a book if they don't think anyone else is reading it.

4) I'm going to get more active in my efforts to build a mailing list. So far, the only thing I've done to get people to sign up is post a widget link on this blog, which hardly anyone reads. I'm planning on including a link to the sign-up in the books themselves.

Basically, in general, I'm planning on working harder at this whole self-publishing thing. There's definitely a lot more effort I could put in, and seeing that there are people out there who want to read my writing has motivated me to try harder.

the problem with Woody Allen's new movie

I've watched Woody Allen's last five movies in the theater, and I'm not big on going to theaters. In other words, he's on a roll as far as I'm concerned. Every movie has been a cut above the usual stuff that I can't be bothered to shell out $10+ to go see, and some of them (Vicky Cristina Barcelona, for example), made five-star status in my book.

But his newest movie--Blue Jasmine--is a bust.

It's so much of a bust that I forgot all about it less than twenty minutes after walking out of the theater. In fact, the movie made so little of an impression on me that I only just now remembered it existed, and that I saw it.

I had high hopes going into it, too. The reviews were good, peppered with Oscar buzz for Cate Blanchett, and accolades for Allen himself. One critic went so far as to claim the movie was a "quantum leap" for Allen. Consider that claim for a second. Old Woody's been making movies for just shy of 50 years. His films have earned 23 Oscar nominations, and 4 wins. Sounds like he's already got things pretty figured out, and now a critic is claiming this new film is a "quantum leap" above the rest of Allen's stuff. What the hell does that even mean? Does the movie reveal the meaning of life, or something?

Just in case you were wondering: the movie doesn't reveal the meaning of life. And it doesn't live up to the hype, either. Not even halfway.

Here's why: remember that roll I mentioned earlier, the one that Allen is on? One key element of it is the way Allen uses the settings of the movies like actual characters. The culture of each place becomes integral to the plot. In fact, the city-settings are so important they're mentioned in the movie titles: Midnight in Paris, To Rome With Love, Vicky Cristina Barcelona. The hype about Blue Jasmine was that he'd been giving San Francisco that treatment. But then he didn't.

Have you seen the movie? It's a New York movie, filmed in San Francisco. The Mission District is Allen's stand-in for Staten Island--you hardly even see any Latino people, and definitely don't hear a word of Spanish. Union Square becomes Park Avenue--a bunch of rich shoppers, not a tourist in site. There isn't even a single Asian character, and more than half the people who actually live in San Francisco are Chinese!

Instead, you've got all the New York stereotypes plugged into a San Francisco setting: loud-mouthed, blue-collar Italian-American characters; snobby blue-bloods for those blue-collar boors to clash with; people jumping in and out of Taxi cabs. All of that is New York.

In the real San Francisco, the Italian-Americans are actually Italian. They hang out in North Beach, wear fancy suits, and speak with Italian accents. The old-money blue-bloods are a marginalized group relegated to Nob Hill, with relatively little presence in the wider city. San Francisco's real money-class is the dot-com startup CEOs.

And that points to a crucial thing about San Francisco that Allen's movie missed entirely: its love of the new, the innovative, the exotic. San Francisco is a city that has always been in love with the wider world. New York is a city in love with itself.

Because of the writing I've been doing recently (my new series is set in San Francisco) I've been thinking about this stuff a lot, trying to understand what San Francisco is, what it means. I lived in San Francisco for more than a third of my life, and I still think a complete understanding of its nature is beyond me. But one thing I will say, with no hesitation whatsoever: my writing comes closer to the real San Francisco than Woody Allen's film does... even if the San Francisco in my stories is being overrun by zombies.

And you can tell Woody I said so.

Zombie City: Episode 1 is now available!

What would you do if all the hipsters turned into zombies?

Shane moved to San Francisco to write, following in the steps of his Beat Generation heroes. Twelve years later he's pushing thirty, flirting with alcoholism, and not writing at all. His life revolves around his dead-end job as a janitor at a tech startup, cleaning up after work-obsessed hipsters who dress like artists but think like yuppies. On the day Shane realizes he needs to get out of the City or give up on being a writer, a horrific infection breaks out amongst the startup workers, plunging San Francisco into a nightmare of cannibalism and murder.

San Francisco is dying. Welcome to Zombie City.

This is the first episode in what will be an ongoing horror-fiction series. It comes in at about 25K words (about 100 pages), and costs 99 cents. It's available now from Smashwords in pretty much every ebook format (including PDF, Kindle, Nook, and Kobo formats). It's also available on Amazon, if you want to buy from your Kindle or direct from their store.

The book should be available everywhere else (Nook Store, Kobo Store, iTunes) in a week or two. There are currently no plans of releasing the book in print format, but if you really hate reading from a screen, the PDF version at Smashwords is easy to print.

Thanks!

Blood Brothers Kindle exclusivity ends, & other news

When I put Blood Brothers up on Amazon I enrolled it in their Kindle Select program, which meant Amazon had exclusive rights to the eBook for three months. Yesterday, that exclusive period ended. I'm now in the process of making it available elsewhere--starting with Nook (which I uploaded to today) and planning on Kobo and the Apple store and maybe Smashwords.

Before the Kindle-exclusive period ended, I made Blood Brothers available for free download on two additional days--Monday and Tuesday of last week. Amazon gives you five free-download days when you make a book exclusive, and I'd already used three days shortly after the book went live. The book got a lot more interest this time, with about three times more copies being downloaded and a high-ranking of #6 on the Epic Fantasy bestsellers page (and this despite the fact that I didn't pay for any sort of promotion, like I did the first time). I'm guessing the greater interest resulted from the number of positive reviews the book has received.

Still, I don't think the free days helped me. There wasn't any bounce-over to the paid bestsellers list, there haven't been any greater than normal sales, and there haven't been any new reviews. If free-download days have the potential to help boost sales, Blood Brothers must not be in a position to benefit from it yet.

In other news, I've noticed that the price discount Amazon had been offering on the print version of Blood Brothers has slowly began to shrink away. At it's best, Amazon was selling the book for nearly 20% off the cover price. As of this post, that discount has dropped to about 13% off. If you're interested in buying a print copy, you might want to do it now--the price might keep going up. Click here to go to the Amazon page.

Also, I'm almost ready to start publishing my next project, a zombie-horror story set in San Francisco. Originally I'd planned on releasing it as a novel, but the story ended up developing in a way that made it work as a series of novellas. I've been rewriting it to fit that format, and plan on releasing the first part of the series sometime in the next two weeks. The working title is Zombie City, and here's a cover I've put together, using a picture taken by Gianluca Ramalho Misiti.