Interview and review by Heather McNamara

In case you missed it, Dead Roots was reviewed by queer/feminist blogger Heather McNamara. Her partner as it turns out is Zinnia Jones, a trans speaker and blogger. She gave the book universal praise, especially citing the attention paid to the female and gay characters.

After the review went up I was interviewed by her, which you can read here.

What I learned in my first year of self-publishing

Back in 2011 when I was getting ready to finish up my first book, I was starting the process of querying agents and learning about the book market. On the guidance of my older brother—he is making six or seven figures for an international bookseller, so I figured his advice was pretty solid—I decided to self-publish. From what I came to learn, self-publishing is an incredibly fertile industry to get into at this point in time, if and only if you’ve got the chops to be noticed.

After a year in the business, including free promotional downloads there are in the neighborhood of 1400 copies of my books in Kindles and Nooks and paperback out there in peoples’ hands. I’m not breaking any records or paying rent with it yet, but I’ll break down for you how I went about selling my books and what I’ve learned from my first twelve months.

Anyone who spends a little time in the publishing industry, even (especially) at the entry level, will know that it’s full of self-starters of varying degrees of skill and commitment. Writing is still and probably always will be perceived as a very romantic endeavor. There are no shortage of conferences and workshops where aspiring authors can write out a check hoping to uncover the secret of writing a really good book, or make much-coveted business contacts with gatekeepers. The Kindle store shelves are overflowing with handy get-rich-quick guides to making it big in self-pub, claiming they’ll teach you the magic formula to getting your work noticed on a large scale.

While some of the techniques learned from these sources can be helpful to apply to your strategy, for the most part the low level of publishing is a pool filled with sharks, eager and able to make good money on exploiting the big dreams and gullibility of wannabe writers. The adage is spend money to make money, but I am not the sort of person to make an investment unless I expect to get a return. It’s entirely possible to dump all of your savings on courses, conferences and power summits; books on how to write the next Harry Potter or skyrocket your Twitter follower count; or for the particularly shady, straight up purchasing the illusion of an audience by buying followers and Amazon reviews.

Building an audience, really building a following, is a slow and organic process. Unless your book looks and reads like complete trash (as unfortunately a ton of self-pubs do), chances are there is a healthy market out there for you to tap into if you get creative. What a ton of other indie authors don’t seem to grasp is that there is no quick route to success for the vast majority of us. I personally know a handful of indie pubs with ten times my twitter follower count, cultivated through diligent follow-backing and sniffing out potential customers via hashtags to go for hard sells; my sales are equal or even eclipse their numbers in virtually every case. I set up a ‘business’ Twitter account to try this approach, and it took me all of ten minutes before I realized I was doing little more than making myself look like an asshole. 

When was the last time you actually clicked on a banner ad? How would you react if some stranger came at you over Twitter with an Amazon link? Visibility is important, but I’ve found hard sells to be effectively useless. The vast majority of customers find their entertainment through word of mouth. For me, at least, the key to success on social media has been through the lessons laid down and frequently ignored in How to Win Friends and Influence People. Act like a human being rather than a spambot and people are far more likely to engage—it’s slow, but it works. On whatever platform you’re using, make it easy for people to find your books and website via a few clicks and then just join the conversation. It is indeed a good idea to find new people to follow by searching hashtags or mentions of your favorite authors or subjects—just follow people and then wait for an opportunity to converse with them rather than immediately inundate them with your shit. You have to remember you are dealing with other humans with their own wants, needs, and ambitions, and helping you to become a bestselling sensation is not high on their list of priorities. Is your primary motivation to make money, or to entertain people?

My biggest kicks in publicity came from approaching people with built-in audiences that were willing to point their fanbases in my direction, even briefly. I lucked out early in Dead Roots’ life by approaching author Neil Gaiman to retweet a link to my book and help me make some money to buy groceries. A little shameless, sure, but I wasn’t lying—I really was broke as hell. I got about forty sales on the day from that retweet, but the publicity from it has followed me since. I still run into people on Goodreads or self-pub forums that say they found my book on Neil Gaiman’s Twitter. Some of the sales I get now are still those people who put it on their wishlist or tucked the name away in some corner of their memory for later. If you can find influencers with strong audience crossover like this they can be invaluable for getting your foot in the door. 

I’m always on the lookout for new ways to reach the audience. I booked a table in the back room of a small horror convention in Sacramento, timing it with a KDP Select free weekend and riding on the back of Neil Gaiman’s shout-out to a fantastic number of downloads. I am a big fan of the Silent Hill video games, so I approached the admin of one of the biggest Silent Hill fansites about potential promotion; they were gracious enough to give me not only a front page blurb, but also invited me to appear on their podcast, getting me firmly in with a large number of like-minded fans. Some of them even read! Creativity, opportunism, and most importantly tact are the key to getting influencers to help you out.

The successes I’ve had with my books have required me to have rock-solid confidence in my abilities and my product, as well as always keep in mind that it’s not all about me. Networking is about leaving your comfort zone and embracing new friendships. Pestering people, going door-to-door with the sole intent to hard sell them your garbage has never been the way to success, and I suppose it’s just the nature of things that this simple tenet of business will continue to be ignored by the majority.

When I’m not writing, I’m reading. I turned my flaky reading habits into a steady diet of novels and short stories in all genres. It’s an extremely common piece of advice that you need to read a lot if you want to write; but sometimes people leave out the fact that you can’t only read what you’re familiar with. Make a Goodreads profile and try something that somebody else is reading. Look at how other authors do things and take the techniques you like. Read poetry, it’ll make your prose better. Study the bestsellers and the cult hits. Figure out what you can give your audience that’s unique and interesting. 

What it all boils down to is that success in self-publishing requires striving to be a better and stronger person. You have to embrace the unfamiliar. You have to be creative. Don’t settle and don’t compromise with yourself. Make yourself excellent. Write honestly, write something amazing that means something to you, not to please a market.

If you want to break into publishing, then kick the fucking door down. What are you waiting for?

The Moss House

There are places on this earth that one must never go. One of those is the old duplex on Marigold Crescent, in my hometown of Hinkley, South Carolina. One Halloween my best friend and I did anyway.

I suppose we got the idea while we were out looking for dead animals in the meadow, the two of us in our cheap costumes. I was the Batman and William was something the name of which escapes me, a creature from the African folk tales his grandfather had brought with him across the ocean, and had told William about and helped him in making a costume. I couldn’t name it but the getup involved much straw, and a wooden mask that he propped on top of his head since it didn’t have eyeholes.

We couldn’t find anything out in the thickets, and then William suggested it.

“Let’s go lookit the Moss place,” he said. A curious tightness wrapped around my chest and I didn’t look up, at first.

“You reckon?” I suggested.

“Yeah,” said William. “My dad says no such thing as monsters and shit. Probably nothing’ll happen.”

Probably? I admit I was intrigued. Though the sun was dipping behind the hills and the sky had tinted orange, it was still light out. Surely nothing awful could happen to us in the daylight. I tightened the straps of my plastic mask and we set off towards the suburb’s far end, where the Moss place waited like the silent ruins of a forgotten civilization.

I say that we got the idea while we were out there scraping around in the dirt and grass instead of trick-or-treating with the other kids, but it would be more apt to say that the germ was formed over several years. My parents had never told me to stay away from the place, and neither had William’s, but we supposed it must have been common knowledge, the way that the warning trickled down from the adults to the school kids and spread around the playground each October like a bad cold.

“Don’t go near that big house at the end of the road near Roger’s place,” warned Harry Stockton, as he did every year. “It’s haunted.”

“No such thing as haunted houses,” William would answer, and Harry would come back with a ‘Is so’, or ‘Yeah-huh’. The year previous he’d called William a vicious word that he must’ve learned quite recently, and they had it out on the blacktop to our classmates’ baying. I am sure it was in keeping with that grudge that William decided this year would be the year we went and saw this big house near Roger’s for ourselves.

The Moss place was an apt name, for the thing loomed like a massive gravestone covered in twisting vines, to say nothing of the dirt and sun-bleaching from too many years in disrepair. On the way there I’d consoled myself with the assumption that if anything harrowing were to occur, surely a neighbor on the street would notice and come to our rescue; but as we closed in on our destination a sucking, black emptiness surrounded me. It was a dreadful feeling, as though the neighbors, if in fact there were any, would sooner feed us to whatever lay within the Moss duplex, speed us to our fate rather than try to pull us back.

I heard an owl hoo somewhere near us, but couldn’t see it. Time seemed to dilate on the walk to that place, for by the time we reached it the sun was gone and all the light’s protection had drained from the world.

“I’m kind of scared,” I told William. He frowned, but I could see from the contour of his round cheeks and the way his gangly neck gulped that he was too.

“I’ll knock on the door,” he said. “Just walk up with me.”

Nailed boards covered one entrance to the duplex, and so we chose the other, a beaten white monolith with chipped brown lines and cracks like spider-webs on its face. The path was soft, strong with the scent from weeds that scraped and brushed our shins as we walked.

When we reached the door I gripped tightly the hem of my sleeve, like a sailor holding fast to a rope in a storm at sea. My heart thumped so loud I wondered how William couldn’t hear it, and he brushed the door with his fingertips.

“Just an empty ol’ house,” he said.

He took a deep breath, one so quiet he must have been trying to hide it from me, and knocked.

Nothing happened. Relief washed through me like a broken dam. William rolled his eyes, and laughed, then lifted his fist to knock again.

The door flew open on a phantom wind, and where there should have been shadow it was only white. A flowing ivory curtain shaped like a madman’s parody of a person, with two sockets as deep as death that must have been its eyes; it brandished its nub limbs and menaced us, chanting hatred in some ancient forgotten tongue.

William shrieked and fled in an instant, but I was shocked to the spot, warm urine flowing down my gray cotton trousers. I was almost driven mad in that couple of seconds, locking eyes with the white thing for an eternal moment before finding my legs and tearing off screaming from those tomb-like stairs.

I chased after William. He was much further out than I, already halfway down the street, sandals clapping on the pavement in his flight. I made to follow, but was stopped by a creaking hand on my shoulder, covered in cobwebs and bleached to the yellow of rotten teeth. A smirking skull loomed over me and parted its teeth to guffaw, every breaking ‘Ha, ha, ha!’ buffeting me with fresh horror that sent agony and strain through my knees. I collapsed, and knew that I had soiled myself again as I tumbled into an inky abyss.

I did not know when I caught sight of William running away from the house that it would be the last time I ever saw him. None of the other schoolkids seemed to know for sure where he had gone, only that his family had moved away less than a month later— when it was repeated, they never quite clarified that William had in fact gone with them when they did.

I have not gone near the Moss duplex again, nor do I ever intend to. To say that I am content to stay inside each Halloween would infer that I am happy, and I am not; when I seat myself by the window, staring out at the waist-high ghouls and goblins, superheroes and characters from old films, I would rather say that I endure. I endure every season of jack-o-lanterns and leaf-yellow sky, in a cresting cycle of nightmares where the specters of that place threaten to visit me again.

“Ha, ha, ha! Ha, ha ha!”

It's comin'.

Dead Roots and Blood Mother now on Nook

Been a little bit, but I'm still pushing along! Check out my Tumblr if you haven't.

Dead Roots and Blood Mother are now free of the KDP Select contract and are available on Barnes & Noble Nook.

Don't forget, both books are available in paperback copy from Amazon. 

Why you might like The Analyst (tumblr crosspost)

Crossposting this from my tumblr - woodfiction.tumblr.com

You may have seen me or some of my followers posting about this series already. If not, hello there. If so, hello again!

While my self-published horror series The Analyst has been enjoying some modest acclaim, it feels like I’m having a hard time getting new readers to sit down and give it a look— largely because (in my estimation) on the surface it may appear to be little more than derivative pap that rides the coattails of existing series like The Dresden Files. I’ve been playing my cards close to the chest hoping that the series’ merits would come out on their own, but now I think maybe it’s time I talk a little bit about what I’m trying to achieve.

1. I don’t have to cater to a market. Self-publishing means I get to write what I want, how I want, and I don’t have to insult the reader’s intelligence. I don’t have to spell everything out for the reader, and I don’t. Events and relationships are left open to speculation.

2. The story is about people. While The Analyst is a horror series, it takes place in a grounded world without magical solutions or perfect heroes. Along with the fantastical dread and monsters, I write about race, mental illness, divorce and sexuality. The horror plays off of the characters.

3. The cast is eclectic. By the end of the third installment, King of Men, the rotating main cast will include male, female, black, white, Asian, gay, bi, and trans characters. There are no token roles; I’m not trying to appease a demographic. These are fully realized and explored personalities.

4. The horror elements are not Judeo-Christian. Aren’t you tired of vampires, fairies, demons, zombies and the Devil? Me too. What I really love is J-horror, and all of my monsters are run through a filter of Silent Hill- and Junji Ito-style filth. Many of the named creatures are drawn from eastern mythologies including Japan, China and India. Any werewolves, vampires and ghosts are run through a grinder until they’re barely recognizable.

If you’d like to pick up one of my books, you can get them for Kindle or in paperback (Blood Mother paperback coming shortly).

Dead Roots now available in paperback

Dead Roots can now be bought from the CreateSpace store for $12.99, and the physical copy should be showing up on Amazon next week. I can confirm that it does have 'new book smell'.