Low Tides: A Halloween Story of Strange Shaldon
My short story, Low Tides, is online at the People’s Republic of South Devon, just in time for Halloween!
Read online, or download the PDF!
Seems Only Right at Dead Lines Magazine
Back in 2008 I won the British Fantasy Society’s short story competition with my entry, Seems Only Right.
But it sort of got lost… it wasn’t announced at the Fantasycon Awards of that year, and maybe somebody read it in the BFS’ New Horizons journal in which it appeared, and although I read it at a couple of Horror Reanimated nights my gut feeling is that very few people know of its existence.
I’m happy to say that Dead Lines an American online horror fiction magazine has picked the story for its latest issue, together with the wonderful illustration that Robert Elrod crafted to accompany the piece. The magazine also has fiction from Graham Masterton, JF Gonzalez and John Everson, amongst others, so I’m in good company.
Check out Seems Only Right here.
Win the latest horror!
Over at Bookdagger there’s still time to win a copy of John Connolly’s latest novel The Whisperers, and its soundtrack CD.
And over on Horror Reanimated you’ve got until the end of the month to win a copy of the awesome Apartment 16 by Adam Nevill.
And if you REALLY want that John Connolly book, there’s also a chance to win it at Bookgeeks.
Challenging times for UK genre magazines
There’s something afoot this side of Christmas: dark skies over real-world book retailing, and a black vein of change for UK genre magazines.
Maybe this change can be referred to as evolution, or as some might say, a devolution. But would anyone go so far as to think of the developing situation as an opportunity?
The future of the Borders book chain is looking less than rosy. This affects me on both a professional and a personal level. I for one will miss that particular quirky retail experience. There was always the possibility of finding something new and interesting on the genre shelves, and the magazine section, well, I’d regularly hotfoot it down to pick up the latest issues of HorrorHound, Fangoria, The Darkside, Rue Morgue and Death Ray, have a flick through Interzone (as I’m a horror boy and subscribe to Black Static), and generally nose about the imported titles until I sniffed out something new. That small high street pleasure is denied to me now, (and I’m sure there are others out there like me).
Viral marketing, word of mouth
My day job is website design, build and strategy, although I’m not one of those talented designer/coder types – just responsible for the management and strategic approach of such projects. Happily I also get to work with several publishers.
This week a few thoughts of mine are featured in The Bookseller, the trade magazine for the UK publishing industry.
The article is reproduced here, and the paper version also includes a ‘baker’s dozen’ of my viral marketing tips for UK publishers. The cover of this week’s issue is nice and gory, and within the article I managed to sneak in the words ‘vampire’ and ‘zombie’ and namedrop the ongoing Stephen King Under the Dome viral campaign. A tiny victory for the genre…
Social web
