Messages Both Intended and Subconscious.

I was thinking of my writing output recently and what it's about. I recall a couple of writers I spoke to over the years mentioning that even if you don't actively want to engage in delivering a message, you still often do. That is, even if what you intend is to deliver pure pulp fiction, or just an entertaining yarn with no undercurrent of philosophical or political content, your subconscious dictates that you will do exactly the opposite.

What struck me in thinking specifically of my novels and stories was of how many of them deal with racism. Sometimes with intent, but often just a product of ideas percolating out of the subconscious and ending up on the pages.

The only time I actively wrote a book with an intentional undercurrent of commentary on racism in the USA is my book THE EMISSARY. I wanted to write about the subject in a way that I could treat with it over the course of a story in a horror novel. What I wanted to do was actively write a book with an overt delivery of the problem of racism in the US.

But many of my other books have dealt with some aspect of racism, which I think is far and away the most awful part of our national history. It's always there, and won't go away, existing persistently decade after decade since the times before our nation even existed.

Years ago I was writing zombie novels. And while on the Internet to promote one of those novels I went from bulletin board to bulletin board to make connections and see how I should go about promoting my books there. What I thought I would find I did not, and what I did discover horrified me. Pretty much every public bulletin board devoted to zombie fiction onto which I logged was weighted heavily with racists, many of them neo-Nazis. These guys would post links and you'd find yourself looking at boards promoting hatred and white-race "superiority". I saw vile imagery and threats of violence and extermination spelled out in plain terms.

Frankly, after that, I didn't want to write anymore zombie novels and decided not to engage in promotions of my work on any of those boards. When one of my publishers asked me to write them another one I at first refused. But then I recalled a short story that I'd written that had later been produced as a comic story. The idea of turning it into a novel had occurred to me for years but I had never followed through. I agreed to an advance and set about writing it.

Thus was born the expansion into novel of my short story THE NEW ECOLOGY DEATH. I thought about what I wanted to do with it. I never once mentioned racism or anything directly related to it. I set about burying any mention of anything attached to the subject in an atmosphere both cold and hopeful, and also cautionary.

But two things that I actively did was make all of the principle characters Jews. And I took guns and gun-play totally out of the picture so that I would rob the reader of what I have come to think of as gun-porn. There is the reference to distant gunfire once in the book, and an actual scene with a firearm is played out near the very end with unintended consequences. I specifically set out to create a zombie novel with almost none of the plot elements that most racists lust for in their zombie novels. I made it so that the tables are turned and the setting is one in which zombies are all but defeated and are only a marginal and fading threat. The main characters are a Jewish family. There are almost no guns, and none of the jargon that gives gun-loving racists a specific thrill (which I am convinced is sexual).

It was the worst-selling book I ever wrote. I don't know how many copies it sold, but not many. It never came anywhere near to earning back its advance. The only feedback I ever got on it was from a couple of racists raging about how there were no guns in the book.

Someday I'd like to get it back into print. Of all of the books I've written, I can think of nothing in it that I'd want to rewrite. It was pretty much everything I wanted it to be and which I set out to do. So getting it back into print would be easy on a technical basis (no rewrites). I'd just need to figure out how to get it into the hands of the right audience.

We'll see.

THE EMISSARY. A horror novel wherein racial and sexual hatred manifests itself as lycanthropy.

DEADLOCKED, a novel with major elements of race, philosophy, struggle, and hope.

My out-of-print THE NEW ECOLOGY OF DEATH. Returning to print one of these days. Maybe this year. (But maybe not.)

Audio Books

One of the last bits of reluctant advice I received from one writer was to have my books adapted to audio. "Audio books often outsell my ebooks," she told me.

So, one of the first things I did after that was look into the process. Very little effort was involved with it, once the task of conceiving, plotting, writing, and editing the novels (that's always a lot of effort). I did as she had told me and after figuring out how it works I jumped in, both feet.

I've been lucky landing excellent voice talent to read my books. Five have been done, with one having been held up in production for some reason and has yet to be released. Beyond that one glitch, it has been a relatively easy process, and sales have generally been better than I had figured.

Here is a listing of the four books that have so far been completed and released. (Still awaiting the approval of DEADLOCKED).

In no particular order they are:

FOUR FROM MANGROVE, my collection of four short stories of high fantasy, all set within the mythical city-state of Mangrove.

 

THE COALITION Zombie Trilogy. My three novels of the tales of Ron Cutter surviving in his post-apocalyptic world of zombie pandemic (now under one cover).

THE EMISSARY: A Novel of Fantasy and Horror. Set in Elijah, in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, Martin and Amy Braun find themselves surrounded by hatred manifesting itself as lycanthropy. All while trying to protect a mysterious foster child who may be an herald for that event, or somehow there to save them from it.

WORKING CLASS HERO: The Autobiography of a Superhuman. An affliction has struck a tiny few of humanity, giving them superhuman powers. The government steps in and recruits each of them as protectors of large urban areas around the nation. Once your powers manifest themselves you either work for Uncle Sam, or Uncle Sam puts you away. This is the autobiography of one such hero, Billy B; in his own words.

Putting the Books in Print

Well, I've spent the better part of the last few weeks putting several projects into print. One of the first things I've wanted to do was get my back-list into the light of day again. These are the novels that were once under the roof of different publishers and which rights have now reverted to me. So for the next few weeks I'll be concentrating on that project, maybe dropping another new title into the mix along with my latest, THE EMISSARY.

In this modern situation of book publishing, promotions has pretty much been on the shoulders of the author. Even with a major traditional publisher the home office expects the author to spend a hefty portion of their advance on advertising and promotions for the book they just sold. Fuck that. I would often arrange book signings on my own, but I'd be damned if I was going to spend my advance on expensive advertising (beyond sending out some review copies).

At any rate, in getting my older books back onto the market under the Last Hemlock Press imprint, I have to do my own advertising. So I went to a number of my writer/publisher friends to ask them how to go about it and what were the best venues for doing it. There was some interesting stuff to discover, but most of it seemed on the level and logical.

However, in doing my own investigations into the nature of this business of acting as the creator, the publisher, and the advertiser I quickly found out that a vast industry of ripoff artists has emerged and developed like a skein of pond scum. For instance:

Every book needs a cover. And you need a good cover. Fortunately, the big thing currently is that the most popular covers are created via photo manipulation which only requires some talent with a photoshop-type computer program, and access to various photographic images that can be purchased inexpensively for manipulation and alteration into a work of art that can become a book cover. It's a fairly cheap process that can be accomplished in quick order.

Except that there are uncounted numbers of outfits charging crazy prices to create covers. In casting about for decent artists to create my covers I talked with folk charging anywhere from $300 to $700 just to make a photo-manipulated cover. Keeping in mind that most books never earn out to the tune of a thousand bucks, paying that kind of cash for a cover is unreasonable. Fortunately, I found talented Photoshop artists willing to create covers for me for a fraction of what I was being quoted by the more vile of the lot.

My advice (which has worked well for me, so far) is to look for photo-manipulation artists who create good work for a tiny portion of what the more well-known are creating. They're just mucking about with arranging images. It ain't rocket science.

With advertising and reviews I would bump into requirements from both advertisers and reviewers who refused to look at the manuscripts unless I could prove that they had been professionally edited by one firm or another, needing to produce documentation that this had been done. Since I still had my files from when each of my books had been published previously (with my own revisions, additions, and corrections) this was something that had already been accomplished. But I'm not willing to jump through that kind of hoop, so I pretty much avoided any reviewer or advertiser who made such a stipulation. They remind me of those Komodo dragons who bite prey animals, knowing that most of those creatures will get away, but which will sicken and die from the lizard's toxic bite and provide meals for the greater Komodo dragon community. I chose to just avoid these drooling creeps.

After weeks at this new game I have educated myself and found some things that work, and some things that do not. I quickly found out that I should avoid the promotions opportunities that are very, very inexpensive. They might seem like a good deal, but they're really just a mild little scam that some guys have concocted to grab a few bucks from the millions of self-publishers trying to find fame and fortune.

Oh, well. This is a long learning process and I'm basically still a freshman in this. So I'll cast about as logically as I can until I either find a bit of success, or come to the conclusion that there are just far too many people doing this and that it's almost impossible to fight through the crowds. People keep telling me that about 6,000 self-published books appear every few days. I'm not sure if that's true, but for some reason it sounds right and is about as sobering and depressing a number and situation as I have ever encountered.

Keep on keepin' on, as my dad used to say.

DEADLOCKED, available in both ebook and paperback.

THE EMISSARY, ebook, paperback, and audio coming soon.

THE COALITION Zombie Trilogy collected under one cover. Now out in ebook and paperback.

Coming soon will be the reintroduction of WORKING CLASS HERO. It's still available in audio. But the ebook/paperback versions will be out soon, along with the sequel that I want to see in print. With a third book waiting in the wings.

Live at Amazon! THE EMISSARY!

I delayed the release of THE EMISSARY for pre-orders. Today, the book went live in ebook format and is now available for immediate purchase.

Perhaps the best novel I've written to date, it was certainly the most difficult to write.

THE EMISSARY by James Robert Smith.

Writing and Publishing.

THE EMISSARY sales will begin on Saturday, November 30th. Also going up at around the same time will be my novel of the zombie apocalypse, DEADLOCKED.

DEADLOCKED is the rewritten, re-edited, expanded version of my novel THE LIVING END that I wrote for another publisher some time back. I've rewritten and added sections to the book and cleaned up the manuscript somewhat. Also with a new, much more effective cover that better represents the book.

Coming in the next few weeks several more of my older books will come back into print under the Last Hemlock Press. All of these will be rewritten and re-edited to one extent or another. Some of them will have major revisions, while others will be only moderately changed. Also coming out will be my sequels to WORKING CLASS HERO, the series that was stopped in its tracks by my previous publisher. Expect BILLY B VERSUS THE TROUBLE BOYS in the next few weeks.

In addition to getting my back-list books back to the light of print, I'll also get my original projects scheduled as time allows.

At any rate, come what may, I'm stuck to this path for the time being.

The cover for my preferred author's state of DEADLOCKED, A Novel of the Zombie Apocalypse. Starring Roland Thompson and a large cast of supporting characters.

And, of course, THE EMISSARY is available for purchase on Saturday, November 30, 2019.

Reviews Needed!

In my history as a professional writer the toughest thing for me has been to get written reviews posted on Amazon and other online booksellers. These are important for the sales of a novel. Some of my past books did okay and I didn't have to push too much to get reviews.

But lately it has been exceptionally difficult finding people who have the time and inclination to create reviews for my work.

Thus, I am offering a free autographed paperback copy of my new novel THE EMISSARY to ten people who would like the book and would agree to post a review at Amazon if you enjoy the book. (If you don't enjoy the book, don't wreck my carrer and just keep the copy or sell it---Heck, I don't care!)

At any rate, review copies will be in hand here at the Smith House tomorrow and I can send them out as requests come in. Just email me at jamesrobertsmith at yahoo.com with your mailing address and I'll send you a copy (with autograph). Please be sure to put REVIEW COPY in the subject heading of the email so I'll know it's not spam.

Thanks!

THE EMISSARY, from James Robert Smith, author of THE FLOCK.

THE EMISSARY Goes Live!

The Kindle version of the new book is up and available for pre-order. The paperback should pop up in a day, maybe two. It's good to see a new book come to print, since it has been a couple of years since my last novel.

From the author of THE FLOCK comes THE EMISSARY, a novel of modern fantasy and horror.

In the North Carolina mountains the town of Jasperton has lost a fading enchantment that has protected it for almost one hundred years from an ancient curse. Martin and Amy Braun, separated, and their marriage almost at an end over the death of their young son, suddenly find themselves reunited to care for a lost child who bears a striking resemblance to their deceased boy. As the town begins to fall victim to the rising influence of an aged evil, they must decide if the child is an emissary for salvation, or for the malignant forces gathering within the town.

THE EMISSARY by James Robert Smith. I was very, very happy with the cover art!

Eating Crow.

In the past there has likely not been a bigger opponent to self-publishing than I have been. It wasn't merely the act of self-publishing that got on my last nerve, but the absence of quality in the material that is constantly being self-published. In those early days I would read book after book that was self-published, and never once did I read anything that rose above the level of the worst of a massive slush pile on a suffering editor's desk.

Thus, I hated the concept of self-publishing and not only wanted nothing to do with it, I wanted it to go away.

In the end the concept seems to have weakened an already emaciated traditional publishing marketplace. The number of publishers willing and able to dig through submissions has dwindled to the point that it's sad to watch because what one is seeing is the death of a very old industry.

And so, as I hinted some time back in an earlier blog post, it is time for me to eat crow (as they say) and do what I had not wished to do. And that is to join the ranks of the self-published.

Since those early days I have managed to find well-written novels whose authors have gone what is called the "indie" route. All right, then, I'll have to go down that road also. Over the past year I've tried a few short story efforts almost as advertising promotions.

Currently I need to get my older novels back into print. I recently got the rights back to all of my traditionally published novels with the exception of THE FLOCK from Tor-Forge Books. The rest are mine again and so I'll tackle publishing and promoting them on my own.

We'll see how it goes. At this point in my writing career, I have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Worst case, I'm at the same point I'm at right now.

And so it goes.

First up will be THE EMISSARY. It's a novel I had sold a couple of years ago, but the small press publisher who accepted it has apparently folded. THE EMISSARY is an important book to me. The ideas and themes for it occurred to me many years back and I kept struggling with the concepts for a very long time before I put it all together in a story that made me happy. I think I put more sweat and toil and thought into this novel than anything I have ever written.

In the North Carolina mountains the town of Jasperton has lost a fading enchantment that has protected it for almost one hundred years from an ancient curse. Martin and Amy Braun, separated, and their marriage almost at an end over the death of their young son, suddenly find themselves reunited to care for a lost child who bears a striking resemblance to their deceased boy. As the town begins to fall victim to the rising influence of an aged evil, they must decide if the child is an emissary for salvation, or for the malignant forces gathering within the town.

Appearing very soon in both ebook and print formats.