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In this Part II of my interview with Bram Stoker Award winner Jonathan Maberry, he talks about promoting his work and future projects. (Part One)
Are you still expected to do a lot of marketing and promotion on your own, or does your publicist/publisher take care of all the planning?
Unless you're king of the bestseller list, if you're an author you're expected to do a lot of promotional work yourself. Until just recently (when I hired a publicity manager) I had to set up my own signings, create my own swag (those cool giveaway items authors sometimes have), and so on. My publisher, like many in the business, will do a little but not a lot. It's an economic thing; plus they know that writers who want their books to succeed will hustle a lot of this themselves. It's not fair, but there it is.
The trick is get into the mindset where you enjoy the process. And I do; though I did hire the publicist because of time constraints. I have to write two and a half books per year, so my time is getting limited.
After Bad Moon Rising comes out next year I'll be writing fiction for another publisher, St. Martin's Press, and they've offered to provide me with a publicist. That'll be just dandy.
Would you like to share with our readers some of your current or future projects?
Aside from the books I already mentioned, I have a short story coming out in the anthology History is Dead, edited by Kim Paffenroth. It's an anthology of zombie stories set prior to the 20th century. My story, "Pegleg and Paddy Save the World" is a comedy about two moonshiners who run afoul of gangsters and zombies in the days leading up to the Chicago Fire. I'm collaborating with playwright Keith Strunk on a movie script based on the story.
I'm also shifting gears a little bit in fiction and am writing a bio-terrorism thriller, Patient Zero, for St. Martins Press. It's the first of a series of novels about a police detective, Joe Ledger, who gets recruited by a secret military organization to help stop a group of terrorists who are planning to launch a weaponized disease that turns people into zombies. It's not a horror novel, however, and I even have a decent medical explanation for how the zombies function. This book is tentatively scheduled for release in early 2009.
And I'm working on developing a couple of horror-related projects with collaborators, including a script for a graphic novel.
I'm also launching an online horror ezine, Cryptopedia Magazine. That's going to be great, with lots of top writers and artists involved.
Do you have a website/blog where readers may learn more about you and your works?
My main author website is jonathanmaberry.com; but I'm also co-founder of a writers education center, The Writers Corner USA, and we're just about to launch a number of online classes for writers. On MySpace I can be found at myspace.com/jonathan_maberry and myspace.com/cryptopedia.
