Today is the last day to pre-order Mari Adkins’ fantastic anthology of Appalachian horror: Harlan County Horrors.

Why pre-order? Pre-ordering insures that you will receive a signed copy of the book. Thanks to many of the contributors, the editor, and the artist being regional talents, we’re hosting a release party at Morris Book Shop on October, 24th, in Lexington, KY. At this release party, all these fine people will take time to sign your pre-ordered book. This will include Mari Adkins (editor), Billy Tackett (cover artists), Jason Sizemore, Earl Dean, TL Trevaskis, Geoffrey Girard, Maurice Broaddus, Debbie Kuhn (and possibly a couple more contributors).

Also, pre-ordering is a great way to help support Apex as that 40% of the retail cost we usually have to give to bookstores or wholesalers, we get to keep!

Pre-order link: http://www.apexbookstore.com/collections/books-for-pre-order/products/harlan-county-horrors

Get down with some wild hillbilly horror!

Our reissue of Elizabeth Engstrom’s first book, When Darkness Loves Us, is now availabe in a multitude of electronic formats via Fictionwise.

http://www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/b95480/?si=0

It’s also available for the Amazon Kindle:
http://www.amazon.com/WHEN-DARKNESS-LOVES-US-ebook/dp/B002P8MQ5M/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=digital-text&qid=1254185572&sr=1-1

And as a PDF at DriveThruHorror:
http://horror.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=64469

We’ve been threatening to do this for months: to update our tired, boring web store design to something a bit…sexier. Finally, we pulled the trigger and this is what shot out.

Do you like it? (apexbookstore.com)

Apex would like to thank the design and development team at AmberCouch. They took our ideas and brought them to life. They were fast, efficient, and professional. Also, we’d like to thank our old web mistress, Deena Warner, for the great work she’s done on the Apex websites over the years.

To celebrate, we’re offer the following coupon code good for 20% off your entire purchase: NEWDESIGN. The coupon is good through October 5th.

Halloween is drawing near. Wouldn’t now be a great time to order some Harlan County Horrors at a discounted rate?

Michele Lee has posted her detailed review of Gene O’Neill’s dark fiction collection, TASTE OF TENDERLOIN, on her fiction review blog Book Love. Here’s what she had to say about “The Apotheosis of Nathan McKee”:

“With “The Apotheosis of Nathan McKee” O’Neill ties the people of the Tenderloin and the stories in this collection together firmly, making each minor, barely mentioned character the owner of their own story. Nathan, interchangeable with the attack victim in “Bushido”, discovers a beating has left him not only for with a complete lack of desire for the booze he used to drug himself, but it’s given him a unique ability. Only he’s not quite sure what to do with it. The first overall positive tale, without a bittersweet touch, it possesses a delicate aspect of intriguing urban fantasy.”

Read the entire review here!

Congratulations to Samuel B. Prime. He is the winner of the signed poster and authentic Harlan, KY merchandise!

We’ve (finally) updated our Wholesale page to reflect the change in fulfillment agency.

There is also a new edition of our catalog of titles. Enjoy!

David Agranoff with Monster Librarian has posted his review of Gene O’Neill’s TASTE OF TENDERLOIN! Here’s a bit of what he had to say about his reading experience:

“The stories themselves are varied and diverse. The thread that holds tightly together is the setting of the Tenderloin neighborhood. The Tenderloin Business Association probably won’t endorse this book, but I certainly will. O’Neill is a a talented writer who drilled almost every single one of these stories straight out of the park.”

Read the rest of the review here!

STARVE BETTER: SURVIVING THE ENDLESS HORROR OF THE WRITING LIFE
Nick Mamatas and Apex Publishing Join Forces to Tell the Dirty Truth of Life as a Writer

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

[Lexington, KY – September 18, 2009] STARVE BETTER is a writing handbook with a difference—no promises of bestsellerdom, no feeding the dangerous daydreams aspiring writers have. This book is about survival: how to generate ideas when you needed them yesterday, writing dialogue and developing plot on the quick, and most important of all, what the competition in the slush piles of the world looks like. For non-fiction writers, STARVE BETTER offers writing techniques such as how to get (relatively) high-paying assignments in second and third-tier magazines, and how to find gigs that pay NOW as the final notices pile up and the mice eat the last of the pasta in the cupboard.

Humor, essays, and some of the most widely read blog pieces from Nick Mamatas, award-nominated author and editor, come together for the first time in a writers’ guide that won’t teach anyone how to get rich and famous…but will impart the most valuable skill in the business: how to starve better.

STARVE BETTER: SURVIVING THE ENDLESS HORROR OF THE WRITING LIFE releases from Apex Publications in summer 2010. Updates and information available at www.apexbookcompany.com.

NICK MAMATAS is the author of two novels: MOVE UNDER GROUND (Night Shade 2004, Prime 2006) and UNDER MY ROOF (Soft Skull Press, 2007), two collections: 3000MPH IN EVERY DIRECTION AT ONCE (Prime 2003) and YOU MIGHT SLEEP… (Prime 2009), and the novella NORTHERN GOTHIC (Soft Skull, 2001). He is also the editor of several anthologies and formerly co-edited the online magazine Clarkesworld, which was nominated for the Hugo and World Fantasy awards. His fiction has appeared in literary journals, slicks, and genre publications, and has been nominated for the Bram Stoker awards three times, the International Horror Guild Award, and Germany’s Kurd-Laßwitz Preis for science fiction in translation.

Nick currently edits Japanese science fiction novels in translation and books associated with Oscar-winning filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli for VIZ Media. Follow Nick’s blog at http://nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com and visit his website at www.nick-mamatas.com.

APEX PUBLICATIONS (www.apexbookcompany.com) is a small press dedicated to publishing exemplary works of dark science fiction and horror. Owned and operated by Jason B. Sizemore, Apex publishes the critically acclaimed Apex Magazine. In 2006, Apex Publishing branched into producing novellas, collections, and anthologies, earning a Bram Stoker Award nomination for the AEGRI SOMNIA anthology in 2007, and another for the collection MAMA’S BOY by Fran Friel, published in 2008.

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Press Contact: Jason B. Sizemore
jason@apexdigest.com

One of our March, 2009 stories, “The Puma” by Theodora Goss, is this week’s discussion subject for Torque Control’s Short Story Club.

Go join the conversation about this excellent work.

While we here at APEX have always known that APEX BOOK COMPANY and Paul Jessup (OPEN YOUR EYES)  are practically synonymous with forward-thinking technology, world-wide news organizations are starting to catch on. Apex Books and Apex author/once editor Paul Jessup have appeared together in an article on CNN’s tech website! The subject at hand is e-books and the trends in publishing, so naturally, being a bit ahead of the curve, Apex and Paul have some important perspectives!

“Paul Jessup is an avid reader who is increasingly turning to e-books to feed his love of the written form. It’s not just ease of use that draws Jessup to books in a digital form, it’s the potential e-books represent.

‘It’s much better for looking things up, since any e-reader’s search function is 10 times better than flipping and looking and searching on my own’ in a printed book, said Jessup, an Erie, Pennsylvania-based writer.

He is one of a growing number of bibliophiles, spurred by new reading technologies like Amazon’s Kindle, who are gravitating to the digital realm.”

Read the whole article here!