Marketing a book is not like marketing a carton of milk because books don’t have an expiration date stamped on their cover. A reader may buy your first book when it’s newly published, or they may discover your work after you’ve written your twentieth novel. Additionally, online media has enabled readers to establish a closer connection with the authors they admire. Because of these phenomena, book promotion is fairly complex because it often caters to multiple audiences while promoting both the author and the book at the same time.

Book Promotion Takes Time

If you’re considering a dip into the waters of book promotion, the good news is that there is plenty of information out there for you to read. From e-books extolling the “tried and true” methods of marketing your book to free tips offered by book marketers, there is no shortage of friendly advice on the subject. Before you hop online and take advantage of the free tips that many book marketers are offering, I want you to place your book in front of you. Take a good, long look at the cover and think about how many hours it took you to write and edit that work. Then, ask yourself this question: How much time are you willing to spend to promote your book?

Because an effective marketing plan is a customized one, I highly recommend doing your homework so you can tailor your plan to fit both your time constraints and your personality. An easy way to customize your marketing plan is to play to your strengths and minimize your weaknesses. For example, if you’re not a social author, don’t force yourself to engage in online social activity. Instead, leverage online promotions that provide value for your new readers and reward your existing ones. If you are a social author, focus on building relationships with your readers and letting your personality shine through.

The key with any marketing plan built around your personality is to be yourself. Both you and your work are unique, so you owe it to yourself to pick and choose how you want to market you and your books.

There Are No Guarantees

Book promotions may fail and/or backfire for multiple reasons. One reason why a book may not sell is because the author (and/or publisher) treats the book with a set-and-forget mentality. Another reason a book may not sell is because the book wasn’t released with enough fanfare to get people excited about it. With any marketing effort, there is some degree of experimentation, which is why I believe in defining the boundaries of what you will (and will not) do in your plan. By setting goals for what you want to achieve with your book promotion, you can help yourself reach milestones in your career, provided you are realistic about those goals.

Of course, the truth is that even the most successful book promotion will not guarantee that your book sells. Just because your book trailer gets thousands of views on YouTube doesn’t necessarily mean those viewers are going to go out and buy your book. Like with any other promotion, marketing your book is about reaching the “right” people at the “right” time or place to enable the “right” course of action.

To some degree, you do have control over who falls into that “right” people camp by leveraging more personalized content for your devoted readers. However you decide to market your book is up to you, but in today’s market it is important to balance “selling” with “interacting” to establishing life-long fans.

Build Relationships, Not Just Advertisements

Constantly bashing your readers over the head with price or proclamations about how great your book is limits your ability to reach your audience. Remember, your book promotion efforts are really for two audiences — both new and existing readers. If you constantly talk about price or offer it for sale, you are cheapening the value of your book because you aren’t talking about its “production value.” If you saw a piece of handmade jewelry listed on sale every day, would you buy it for its intrinsic value or because it was cheap? If you bought it because it was cheap, would you remember the name of the artist to buy from them again? Focus on why your readers might be interested in your story and the ones that will want to read your book will.

In the long run, the promotions that’ll succeed are the ones that incorporate two-way communication methods rather than just one. Instead of throwing content “at” your readers, try leveraging their feedback and comments to build a relationship with them. This technique is the key difference between promotion for promotion’s sake and building a base of loyal readers. Of course, that’s not to say one-way communication doesn’t work because it most certainly can, especially if it’s in the form of paid advertising. If it’s within your budget, you might be wise to leverage cost-effective promotional solutions with paid ads to get the best of both worlds.

Take Ownership and Promote “Your” Book

Whether you decide to build an online presence for yourself or not, marketing your book will take time out of your day. Not every promotion will work for your book, because different books written by different authors require customized marketing methods. In most cases, your marketing approach will “sell” both you as the author as well as your book. If you recall the fable about the tortoise and the hare, it ended with this moral: “Slow and steady wins the race.” If you love to write and plan on making a career out of your efforts, think about your promotions for the longer-term and avoid a race.

Keep in mind that the reason why not every book promotion will work for your book is because you are trying to sell a time investment to your readers — not just a physical product. Thus, a reader needs a qualitative reason to buy (and subsequently read) your book. By putting together a marketing plan and incorporating which efforts will best suit your needs, you’ll ensure you are taking ownership over your book promotion to satisfy yourself and your readers for years to come.

About Monica Valentinelli

Monica Valentinelli splits her time between writing, working as an online marketer, and filling the role of project manager for the horror and dark fantasy webzine www.flamesrising.com. As a freelance writer for the gaming industry, Monica has over a dozen game and game fiction credits to her name including: Worlds of the Dead by Eden Studios, an award-winning fiction piece entitled “Promises, Promises” for Promethean by White Wolf, and her recent novella “Twin Designs” which was part of the collection Tales of the Seven Dogs Society for the game Aletheia by Abstract Nova Press.

Look for her horror short story “Pie” in an anthology called Buried Tales of Pinebox, TX at http://buriedtales.12tomidnight.com. To read more about Monica, visit her urban fantasy novel series located at www.violetwar.com or her blog located at www.mlvwrites.com, which is geared toward helping “new” writers embrace writing as a hobby or as a career.

Publisher: DAW
Publication Date: September 2009
Type: Novel
Reviewed by: Jennifer Brozek
Rating: 5/5

I am a great fan of writing and reading stories about protagonists in a heap of trouble digging themselves out to win the day. Rosemary and Rue is exactly that kind of book. In less than the first 100 pages, October “Toby” Daye, a half-breed Daoine Sidhe and former street kid, is cursed twice, loses everything she holds dear, winds up in a job she hates and has an unpleasant encounter with the King of Cats. Frankly, if I were Toby and I met Seanan on the street, I would punch her.

Yes, I really loved this book. Toby is a flawed protagonist in all of the right ways. She is scared, hurt, angry, and forced to do things she would have done anyway but resents the power that is forcing her to do exactly that. Every person Toby turns to for help she knows she cannot trust. Every person who loves Toby is hurt by this lack of trust. But, honestly, the reader cannot fault Toby. She is acting in a logical and emotional–if reactionary–manner to everything that is happening to and around her.

One of the best parts about Rosemary and Rue is the fact that while it is one step into the world of the Fey, changelings, pixies, trolls, and goblins, there is still a true sense of reality. Having once lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the story is set, I can imagine the world of Oberon’s court just beyond visible sight. The places are real. The emotions are real. The pain, loss, and infrequent joys are real. So real that sometimes this is a hard book to read. Fortunately, it is a harder book to put down.

Seanan McGuire’s funny, raw, and engaging style of writing has put her at the top of my “new favorite authors” pile. I highly recommend Rosemary and Rue as a fantastic debut novel and eagerly wait to see what comes next both in this series and from the author.

Jennifer Brozek, the creator and co-editor of the Grants Pass anthology, is a freelance author for many RPG companies including Margaret Weis Productions, Rogue Games and Catalyst Labs. Her contributions to RPG sourcebooks include Dragonlance, Castlemourn, Colonial Gothic, Shadowrun, and Serenity. She has also co-authored three books (A Player’s Guide to Castlemourn with Ed Greenwood, 2006; Dragonvarld Adventures with Margaret Weis, 2008 and Chill, 3rd Edition with Mike Callahan, 2008). She is published in several anthologies and is the creator and editor of the semi-pro webzine The Edge of Propinquity. When she is not writing her heart out, she is a loving wife to her husband, Jeff, and an indulgent ‘mother’ to their three cats while gallivanting around the Pacific Northwest in its wonderfully mercurial weather. You can visit her blog at http://jennifer-brozek.livejournal.com.

If you’ve been thinking about submitting a novel to Apex but you haven’t quite gotten around to it, yet, it’s time to kick your submission process into high gear. Apex Book Company will be closing to novel submissions on June 30th. Any novel queries we receive after that date will be deleted unread.

We’re looking for dark SF/fantasy and horror novels between 50,000 and 100,000 words in length. Please make sure to read our submissions guidelines before submitting. Learn them, love them, love them! The guidelines also include our novel submission e-mail address and what we would like submitted to us as part of your query package.

Good luck!

Publisher: Night Shade Books
Publication Date: August 2009
Type: Anthology
Reviewed by: Jennifer Brozek
Rating: 5/5

Vampires are the apex predator in fiction today. They are deadly, sexy, enticing, terrifying, and ideal as both a menace and an attraction. We love to read about these intriguing monsters. Love to defeat them. Love to be defeated by them. In By Blood We Live, John Joseph Adams has put together a collection of vampire stories that not only flows well together but shows off the best and worst aspects of our favorite creature of the night.

With over 200,000 words in this anthology, there works by old favorites such as Neil Gaiman, Anne Rice, and Stephen King. There are also works from new favorites like Elizabeth Bear, Jane Yolen, and Joe Hill. Every story fits with every other story but every story is original and fresh on its own. Frankly, there isn’t a clunker in the bunch and that made this anthology for review a real treat to read.

For me, there are three outstanding stories in this collection that shine above the rest. It is their writing, perspective, and originality that made these stories stick in my head long after I finished reading them.

“Child of an Ancient City” by Tad Williams – This story tells a tale of an ancient vampire from an Islamic point of view that brings to mind the tale of Scheherazade and the tales she told to save her life. The blackened skin of the terrifying, hunched creature eschews the seductive quality of the vampire while heightening its horror.

“Lifeblood” by Michael A. Burstein – This story tells the tale of combating a vampire with faith – Jewish faith rather than the traditional Christian faith. The use of song and prayer within the song is a brilliant reinterpretation of brandishing the crucifix.

“The Wide, Carnivorous Sky” by John Langan – A previously unpublished story about a group of military men who encounter a vampiric creature in the heat of battle is especially intriguing for many reasons: the psychic connection between the monster and the men, the origin of the creature, and the philosophical discussion between the military men on where the monster came from and why it was here hunting on Earth.

All of the stories in the anthology have something to recommend them. Harry Turtledove’s story “Under St. Peter’s” is delightfully blasphemous. Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s “The Beautiful, The Damned” is lush and vibrant with its references to The Great Gatsby, and who would not want to return to the ‘Lot in Stephen King’s nostalgic and creepy story, “One for the Road.”

I received a PDF version of this anthology for review and I plan to buy it as soon as it hits the shelves. Night Shade Books and John Joseph Adams created another winner with this anthology of vampires. It is one not to miss.

Jennifer Brozek, the creator and co-editor of the Grants Pass anthology, is a freelance author for many RPG companies including Margaret Weis Productions, Rogue Games and Catalyst Labs. Her contributions to RPG sourcebooks include Dragonlance, Castlemourn, Colonial Gothic, Shadowrun, and Serenity. She has also co-authored three books (A Player’s Guide to Castlemourn with Ed Greenwood, 2006; Dragonvarld Adventures with Margaret Weis, 2008 and Chill, 3rd Edition with Mike Callahan, 2008). She is published in several anthologies and is the creator and editor of the semi-pro webzine The Edge of Propinquity. When she is not writing her heart out, she is a loving wife to her husband, Jeff, and an indulgent ‘mother’ to their three cats while gallivanting around the Pacific Northwest in its wonderfully mercurial weather. You can visit her blog at http://jennifer-brozek.livejournal.com.

Now that I’ve had a book come out and another one on the way, I’ve become accustomed to the questions people like to ask authors. How do you think this stuff up? is a big one, as well as, How did you get published? I expected those questions and had heard other writers discuss—sometimes humorously—the ways they responded to those inquiries. But there’s one question I get that appears simple to answer but which always leaves me a little tongue-tied:

How long did it take you to write this?

Easy enough, right? Six months. Nine months. Two years. No problem. But do books really get written in such neatly contained blocks of time? I’ve been thinking about this because I’ve recently been reading the galleys for my second novel, The Girl in the Woods. (Coming in August. Buy a copy or two. Or five.) It had been a long time since I’d looked at the book or thought about it in any great detail. I turned in the “final” version of the book to my editors months ago and then happily moved on to other things, and when those galleys arrived they seemed like some sort of blast from the past, an old girlfriend with unresolved issues or a long-lost relative who needed to borrow money. “Hey, remember me? You thought we were through, but not just yet…”

I approached the galleys with a mixture of excitement—Here’s my book!—and trepidation—What if I discover it sucks? There’s a sense of permanence to the galleys. This is pretty much the way it’s going out into the world. It’s too late to change big things, too late to clarify characters, tighten the plot, enhance the setting, throw the whole thing away and start over. It is, however, an opportunity to avoid minor embarrassments. (I had a character drop a shovel and then drop it again four paragraphs later—without having picked it up in the meantime.) And sometimes it’s an opportunity to feel good about my writing, to come across a passage or an entire page that works really well, and I think to myself I might just have read this book of my own free will if I hadn’t been the guy to write it. But it feels like a time to let go, to sign off, to put it to bed as they say in the newspaper business…

Except that it really isn’t time for any of that because the book will come out and there will be signings and interviews and discussions and those are all part of the process too. A very important part. And then someone will come along and ask: So how long did it take you to write this? And I’ll look flummoxed because it’s such a tough question to answer.

I know that six or seven years ago I attempted this idea with a different and unwieldy cast of characters and a different supernatural element and after about two-hundred and fifty pages the story just kind of fizzled under the weight of my inexperience. Then about three years ago I tried again with a new protagonist—she stuck around to the version being published—and a different point of view and again it just wasn’t working. The Condemned came along, so I dropped the other story—a good decision—and became a published novelist who then needed a follow-up. And that story, that twice abandoned story, wouldn’t let go of me. I wanted to tell it. Needed to tell it. Even better, I had an editor saying, “What are you going to do next? I’d like to see something else.” So in a furious burst last spring and summer I wrote a completed draft and sent it in ahead of the deadline. Finished? Not quite. In the fall, there were revisions. And some more revisions. And then the galleys, which I consider part of the writing and revising process.

So if I added it all up—the fits and starts, the revisions and the proofing—I would say it took me about…fifteen months? Something like that. (I include the time spent on those older, abandoned versions because I had to know what the book wasn’t in order to find out what it is. Right?) But is that really all the time it took? What about the germ of the idea? It’s a novel about missing persons cases, and family, and small-town life, and the way people come and go from our lives, disappear either physically or emotionally, and can I really say how long I’ve been thinking about those things, or why and how they all intertwine in this one story? Wouldn’t that take years of therapy to decipher? And is a book ever really complete until it unfurls in the mind of a reader, a reader who will see things in the book I never intended or be moved or touched by things I had thought secondary or maybe even not important at all?

So how long did it take me to write The Girl in the Woods?

I don’t know. You tell me.

David Jack Bell is the author of The Condemned (2008) and The Girl in the Woods (August 2009), both from Delirium Books. His short fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from Cemetery Dance, Backwards City Review, and Western Humanities Review. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Kentucky University and can be reached through his web site at www.davidjackbell.com.

The first time someone called me hyeong, I had no idea what it meant.

Sure, I knew the word. It was one of the first Korean words I learned. It means, literally, “Elder Brother.” I had a vague sense of its deeper associations, the respect and the feeling of being able to count on and look up to such an “elder brother.” The idea that his longer experience in the world suggested wisdom one could turn to. Sometimes older guys would try to be my hyeong, dispensing advice or trying to set things up for me in a way they thought was proper.

But the only way to really learn the meaning of the word was through a relationship. It was despair that drove one of my friends to say to me, “You’re not my hyeong, if you give up. You’re just not my hyeong anymore.” I knew that I understood the word because it hurt in a way that summoned up strength in me, the desire to be that wise, calm Elder Brother. The kind of Elder Brother whose title would, in English, need capitalization.

That was when I realized I knew what the word meant. Maybe the context was weird; maybe a real hyeong could not be told he was no longer a hyeong. But in some way, I got it, the word had taken on a meaning inside me, and the translations I’ve offered above don’t really do it justice.

I suspect they can’t, unless you have been, or had, a hyeong.

Global SF has been on my mind lately. One Korean friend recently translated a novel by Heinlein into his native tongue, and is now translating one of my stories into Korean. One Western friend (whose Korean language skill drives me into seething bouts of envy) has been translating Korean flash fiction into English. I’ve talked to both about their respective translation projects, and also been reading about the Korean SF translation scene as well.

All kinds of questions have come to my mind, but they all boil down to a simple one: how translatable are a society’s dreams? How much transliteration is necessary? And does the line matter?

In one of my classes last week, we did a small analysis of the Korean SF/horror film Gwoemul (known in English as The Host). For my money, this is the most brilliant of all the Korean SF films of recent decades, with only Jigureul Jjikyeora (Save the Green Planet) even remotely in its league. In the class, we took up the idea of what the monster might represent. After all, rubber monsters are never just rubber monsters. King Kong ain’t just a big ape running amok in New York — he’s a big black ape with a white woman in his grasp. Godzilla, the critter in Cloverfield, the tons of giant bugs in postwar American film: they’re all expressions of one or another massive social anxiety.

With my class, we dug deep into Korean history. We talked about the dictatorships of the latter half of the 20th century. We discussed the Kwangju Massacre. We talked about the hyperaccelerated economic development through the dictatorships known as the Miracle on the Han River — which is the river from which the monster emerges, the river that bisects the city of Seoul, geographically but also in terms of wealth and relative social power. We discussed economic and political corruption, and talked about the anger of the poor and downtrodden. We talked about the dark side of the Miracle on the Han — the dark side that is so powerfully suggested by the maze of tunnels in which the characters hunt for the missing little girl.

I think, though, that even if you don’t know all this stuff about Korean history, you can enjoy The Host. It’s a bughunt, it’s a touching family story, it’s weird and so deeply Korean yet also so universal.

It’s a film, though.

Genre media is often pretty translatable. Take, for example, the Yeogo Gwoedam films. They’re a long-running series of Korean horror films, set in girls’ high schools. (The title of the series literally translates as something close to “Girl’s High[school] Ghost Story.”) To an outsider, this probably doesn’t seem all that peculiar. After all, Western media horror also plays on the hellishness of school life. One of my students — incidentally, my Korean tutor at the moment — is an enormous fan of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series; according to her, the show perfectly encapsulates the hellishness of high school in Korea. And believe me, if you think high school was bad for you, it could have been worse. Korean society is obsessed with education, in a way that a number of my Korean friends agree is unhealthy or even destructive. The stories my university students tell me (with affable smiles and quiet resignation) about physical and psychological abuse in dingy hallways at the hands of teachers, of their senior year spent doing nothing but studying for the university entrance exams that will hyperdetermine many of their adult lives, and the outright fascism of the high schools most of them attended — their stories are nothing short of horrifying.

Little wonder that not only the Yeogo Gwoedam, but also many other Korean horror films, revolve around high schools and high school children. I was not surprised too much when I was told that, while in the West we are obsessing about terrorists and fascist governments, Korean genre stories feature recurrent glimpses of classrooms and students and study.

Each society’s dreams and nightmares reflect its waking life. And with literary SF, when the nightmares and the dreams are more powerfully locked into the society’s preoccupations, which must, absolutely, make translating the stuff a herculean task.

This makes me wonder how some of my favorite novels — for example, John Brunner’s best novels (Stand on Zanzibar, say) or Maureen McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang, or Paul Park’s Celestis, or Bruce Sterling’s Holy Fire, would be received in Korea. What would Charlie Stross’s Accelerando look like when projected onto a Korean cultural context? It makes me wonder, too, how well Korean SF stories will be received in the Anglophone world, since there is now some stirring in the project of bringing at least a taste of Korean SF to the English-speaking world. When I read (mainstream) Korean literature in translation, I wonder how much of what makes sense to me would make sense if I knew nothing about Korea. Certainly, I would miss a lot of the deeper connections and meanings in these stories and poems.

But SF is a special case. SF isn’t only about history, and it’s not even just about what we dream. It’s also about about the ways in which we dream, about the ways we worry and hope and rage and laugh. A part of me believes that, as human as we all are, we dream about the same kinds of things, and our hopes and our terrors are absolutely translatable. But how difficult it must be, to transmute stories from a radically different culture, a radically different dreamscape, into your own, because while we dream about the same kinds of things, the forms that take sometimes are utterly alien.

It is with awe that I look upon the translators I know here, this strange little subculture of people who leap — sometimes gracefully, sometimes like action heroes — from dreamscape to dreamscape, transposing the music of one culture’s fantasies to another key. Me, I’m taking my pathetic little intermediate Korean lessons right now, hoping that someday I’ll be able to do my own little part in this project — not just to talk about these stories, or even just read them competently, but actually to be able to work the magic that my translator friends somehow work. Quietly, in my heart, I call them hyeong and nuna (which is how men refer to their Elder Sisters). Some of them are much younger than me, but in their mystical society, they have run for many miles where I still crawl, and often fear I may never even learn to walk.

But look at this world of ours! Our stories can travel across the lines of radically alien languages. It is difficult and perplexing, but I think this is one of those things we need. We Anglophones have too long seen SF as ours, and not looked or listened to the amazing things that people who are not quite like us have to say, while people the world over have been carrying the gospel of SF into their native tongues, evangelizing, waking up their societies to wonder.

I say it’s time for us Anglo SF fans, readers, and writers to sing this song of ours with our ears more widely open, and listen to all those dreamers singing back to us in their strange and wonderful tongues. Or, to go with a metaphor perhaps more natural to our era, it’s time to play this exchange game on the global scale, exchanging our horrors and hopes for the wonder of seeing the strange faces on bills from lands we may never visit, and seeing what it feels like to rub the strange little coins between our fingers.

We will all be the richer for it.

Gord Sellar is a Canadian SF writer who teaches at a university in South Korea. He has been published by numerous markets, including Asimov’s SF, Fantasy magazine, Apex Magazine, and the anthology Tesseracts Twelve. (You can read his story in Apex Magazine, “Cai and Her Ten Thousand Husbands,” by clicking on the title.) Visit his web site at www.gordsellar.com to lean more. You can read his con report (from which the second image above was borrowed) of the Seoul 2008 F&SF Festival here.

Being a first-time author, I didn’t know anything about the book-making business. I didn’t do much research, nor did I submit my manuscript to anyone. Looking back, I suppose I could have. Instead, I chose the route of self-publishing right off the bat. Why? I knew I would retain all rights to my work, I wouldn’t have to change my story, I would be able to choose my own cover art, and I would get a higher percent of the royalties! Granted, I would be stuck with the full financial burden of my endeavor, but people had been telling me for years that I was a talented writer. How could I possibly lose?

Since the debut of the first novel in 2005, the Chronicles of Shandahar has been a great success. I chose BookSurge Publishing to be the one who would guide me through the publishing process, and they have been great. My consultant, Roy Francia, is awesome. He has always made himself available to answer any questions I might have. With his friendly and professional guidance, I published Shadow Over Shandahar – Child of Prophecy. Two years later, I published Shadow Over Shandahar – Warrior of Destiny.

Not only have the people at BookSurge been wonderful, but the books they produce are just as grand. The novels are made from the best materials. The pages are printed on high-quality paper, and the text doesn’t smudge when the reader runs a hand over the words. The binding is tight, and the is glue thick, yet pliable. Out of the two thousand plus books I have purchased through BookSurge, I have yet to return a single copy!

This year, I will publish the third book in the chronicles through BookSurge. By the end of July, Dark Mists of Ansalar – Blood of Dragons should be in print and ready for readers to enjoy. All of the Chronicles of Shandahar books can be purchased from my web site www.worldofshandahar.com, from Amazon and other affiliated online bookstores, or from any science fiction/fantasy convention or renaissance festival either I or my co-author (T.M. Crim) might be attending.

To everyone out there trying to make a decision to publish traditionally or otherwise . . . go with what feels right for you. If you decide to self-publish, consider BookSurge Publishing. Regardless of which avenue is chosen, know that you will have to market the book yourself; no one will do it as well as you can. And enjoy the experience. It’s worth it.

Tracy Chowdhury is co-author of the Chronicles of Shandahar. You can learn more about the books, the authors, and upcoming author appearances at www.worldofshandahar.com.

There has been many a night when I have stayed up way past any sane hour contemplating why zombies have this natural need to eat human flesh, especially the brain. (I have a zombie blog. Is this line of thought really that strange?)

So lets go hypothetical, here. You are newly dead and suddenly find yourself up and about in the real world as a decaying corpse with little or no will or self-awareness. You shamble–let’s go classic, people–about looking like a cross between a Smurf after a bender and road kill.

You spy with your nasty, glazed-over eyes a few college students drinking and having sex on a nearby gravestone. (Let’s face it, that’s what all college students do in horror films, and they’re usually skewered soon after.)

What do you do? Do you hunker behind a gravestone and watch them go at it like a peeping zombie? Maybe get your zombie wank on? (Like I was the only one that thought of it…)

Does your fight or flight instinct kick in and you run away terrified? Do you attack the nubile and flexible teens with your slow undead body?

All of these seem like logical possibilities. But why would a zombie look at these people and say, “Wow, that blonde would look great with a little ranch dressing and some baby carrots”?

You can argue that zombies are little more than animals living on instinct, and procreation and eating are two of the most basic instincts. This is true, but eating is only an instinct if you’re hungry. Very few animals in the wild will kill its prey if it’s not hungry or storing food for winter. Lions in Africa don’t have a fridge to keep their rotting gazelles and their 40s of Colt 45. There is a balance in nature.

Zombies, on the other hand, will eat and eat and eat even though they have no functioning intestinal or stomach system. They will eat to the point that their stomachs literally explode, as told in World War Z. I don’t think a zombie is going to pass up on chowing down on a person just because he ate an hour before. “No, go ahead I am not going to eat you. I just had a trucker about an hour ago and I am stuffed. Can you come back around 5:30? I am sure I will be hungry again.”

I think the zombie’s drive to feed on human flesh is driven not by the instinctual need to eat, but the need to procreate. Zombies cannot procreate in the normal way, something I am more than a little grateful for. That’s one aspect that’s even too disturbing for me and something that should never be touched, even with a 10-foot pole.

The more plausible reasoning is that feeding on human flesh is connected to propagating the species. In every zombie movie made, zombies procreate by biting another person. It’s what makes them a threat. It’s similar to the way a virus will use a host. If you have a cold and sneeze in someone’s face, the virus can pass to them.

Zombies–and I hate the idea of a zombie virus because it is so cliché–transmit their virus, infection, magical fairy dust, etc. via their bite like some kind of zombie orgasm. So if it isn’t bad enough that zombies are the red-headed stepchildren of the horror world, they are also simply vessels for procreation. It almost makes you feel bad for them…until they try to eat you. Then all bets are off.

Brock Cooper is an Illinois zombie enthusiast who has created Zombie Theater, a blog full of zombie film reviews and musings. Visit his site for even more zombie films you never knew you needed to see!

There are huge changes coming to Cemetery Dance, starting with issue #61, and I want to thank Jason Sizemore for giving me some space to discuss them.

We’ve just posted the cover artwork for Cemetery Dance #61 on our web site, but we haven’t publicly announced it yet, so this link is a special exclusive for this blog:

http://www.cemeterydance.com/page/CDP/PROD/_cd061

If you clicked through, you’ve probably immediately noticed two things:

1. CD #61 is a special Peter Straub issue.


2. The cover features a beautiful Alan Clark painting but the design is different than you expected.

I’ll discuss that in a moment, but let’s start at the beginning.

The first change to Cemetery Dance is a big one: our great friend Bob Morrish is stepping down from his role of editor and designer. He isn’t going far, though. Now he’ll have more time to devote to his acclaimed “Spotlight on Publishing” column.

I’ll be taking on the position of Managing Editor, Andrea Wilson steps up to Assistant Editor, Mindy Jarusek continues as Art Director, and Kate Freeman will be handling the new interior and cover design. In addition, Norman Prentiss will have even more responsibilities in his position of Associate Editor and Richard Chizmar, as always, will continue to run the ship as Publisher and Executive Editor.

Our new production team has two main goals: get back on a real production schedule and continue to publish the best authors working in the genre.

To start, we’ve created a detailed production schedule for the next couple of issues. We’re working out the kinks as we go, but so far, so good. (It’s amazing that you can still be learning new things after 20 years, but that’s the nature of the business. We’re working with a lot of great new people and they’re all bringing exciting ideas to the table.)

In terms of content changes, as noted above, #61 is going to be our first “Special Issue” for an author in very long time. Peter Straub is the focus of this issue and he contributed some incredible material: a short story, a long excerpt from his next novel (A Dark Matter, which isn’t due out until next year), and an insightful interview. In addition, Hank Wagner wrote a wonderful essay called “The Peter Principles, Or Nearly Two Dozen Things You Need To Know About Peter Straub” and Bev Vincent contributed a long feature review of A Dark Matter. The stunning cover artwork for the issue is by Alan M. Clark and it represents a key scene in Peter’s new novel.

Other fiction in the issue includes “Monsters” by Stewart O’Nan (a beautiful novelette that was originally published as a 226-copy signed Limited Edition chapbook by my press, Lonely Road Books), “The Innocents at the Museum of Antiquities” by Douglas Clegg (part one of an original serial novella), and “Johnny” by Bruce McAllister.

There are also some big changes in terms of columnists. As you can see at the link above, there are a lot of returning favorites (Monteleone, Vincent, Marano, and Morrish!) and also some new (but familiar!) names that we’re thrilled to be adding to our list of Usual Suspects.

Here’s an overview of the new contributors:

Leisure editor Don D’Auria will be sharing his views and insights on New York Publishing. Mark Sieber is bringing a fan’s perspective to the table. Ed Gorman, one of our favorite people in this crazy business, is back with a brand new column. Ellen Datlow will be presenting a glimpse into some of her recent reads–and considering how much she reads in a year, the mix is always interesting! Nanci Kalanta, who has brilliantly run Horror World for many years, is now editing our Reviews Section. And we’ll finish each issue with a new feature called “The Final Question” where you’ll gain insights into how today’s best horror authors think.

Something else to note: Alex McVey created brand new “logos” for each of the columnists and they look really amazing. We can’t wait for everyone to see what he came up with.

And this leads to most obvious change to the magazine, which will be the new design. The cover and the interior are going to have an entirely new look to increase the readability and to help the magazine compete on the newsstand. In fact, we sent the new cover design to our distributors last month and they’ve already increased their orders by anywhere from 100 to 1000 copies. Kate Freeman–who has designed books including The Secretary of Dreams, The Devil’s Wine, Sides, Dark Forces, The Arthur Darknell Double, and dozens of others–handled the complete re-design and we couldn’t be more thrilled with the results.

Okay, here’s one last exclusive for this post. We have several more special issues in the works including:

• William Peter Blatty, who provided never-filmed scenes from his screenplays for The Exorcist and Legion, plus a 6000-word short story he wrote in the 1960s that the Saturday Evening Post refused to publish, plus he sat down for a career-spanning interview
• a Halloween special issue that will be packed full of Halloween stories by the genre’s biggest names
• and another Special Issue featuring two new stories by one of our favorite authors from the “old days.” I can’t say more, other than to give this one hint: if he agrees to an interview, it won’t be conducted by email.

As always, there’s a lot to do and we’ll keep working to improve the magazine, keeping what works and fixing what doesn’t. We’ve learned a lot and had a lot of fun during the first twenty years of Cemetery Dance, and we have a lot more we want to accomplish over the next twenty.

Thanks again to Jason Sizemore for letting me discuss the many changes coming to Cemetery Dance. We’re excited about everything we have in the works, and we can’t wait to hear from our readers as these issues are published.

Brian Freeman is Bram Stoker nominated author of Black Fire, Blue November Storms, The Illustrated Stephen King Trivia Book (with Bev Vincent), and numerous short stories. He has previously been the marketing director for Cemetery Dance Publications and the publisher of Lonely Road Books.

Zombie Strippers is one of the few zombie movies out there that has more saline implants than dead bodies–and there are a lot of dead bodies.

When I have driven past those exotic dancing establishments–because I never went in (wink wink)–and seen the LIVE NUDE GIRLS signs, I have always thought, “Duh, would you have dead nude girls?”

Well, in Zombie Strippers, that’s exactly what you get: hot women that happen to be dead dancing around a hopefully heavily disinfected pole.

Let’s start with the plot, and I use that word loosely. An elite group of commandos is brought into a top-secret research base to take care of a zombie problem. The U.S. government had created a virus that was meant to create a super soldier and reanimate dead flesh. The kicker is that the virus only makes women into the ultimate soldier or ultimate whatever profession they are in (can you see where this little plot device is heading?) and makes the men into mindless flesh-eating zombies–not unlike most men in strip clubs.

This elite commando force, made up of incredibly bad actors, go through this base shooting anything that moves and unleashing horrible one-liners until all the zombies are dead. In the turmoil, one soldier–the nerdy newbie–gets bitten and runs away to (can you guess where?) a strip club. Excuse me, exotic dancing establishment.

He shambles in just as the star performer (Jenna Jameson) is finishing up and he bites her. The owner (played by none other than God’s gift to the horror genre, Robert Englund) doesn’t want to deal with the lawsuit, so he locks the soldier in the basement, and Jenna dies only to come back as a super stripper.

There is something incredibly creepy, sexy, and just plain wrong about watching zombie women dancing on a pole. Sure, there are plenty of boobies-a-jiggling, but they are undead boobies-a-jiggling. Ick!

It’s obvious that you are not going to watch this movie because of its Oscar-caliber acting or Jurassic Park-like special effects. You are going to watch this movie for undead boobies-a-jiggling, and you will not be disappointed.

Just make sure that after you get done with your tissues–from crying because of the intense plot, of course–you disinfect your hands and feel bad about yourself for at least 15 minutes before putting in Zombies, Zombies, Zombies.

Brock Cooper is an Illinois zombie enthusiast who has created Zombie Theater, a blog full of zombie film reviews and musings. Visit his site for even more zombie films you never knew you needed to see!