Pimping the Book Week 6: Clinging to the Bestseller List

Good news on the Monstrous-Affection-pimpage front here in Week Six. Monstrous Affections is holding on by its claws at the Horror Mall's pre-order best-seller list, for the second month in a row. It has slipped a bit - it came in at #6 for May, in spite of having been only available starting May 28 - and now it's #9. Two months on the bestseller list is something to crow about. And so I crow.

But the clock does tick, yard-apes, and in between crows, I hoarsely note that there is a month to go before the collector's edition goes off-line and off to press. The official word is the sale of hardcovers stops "late July." I do not know what that means any more than you do. Except that from August on, all you'll be able to get are mushy, damp soft-covers.

Here are some links to help you make up your mind:

The Monstrous Affections Pimpage Page

The Monstrous Affections Sale Page

The Inevitability of Earth on Pseudopod

The Sloan Men on Pseudopod

The Nice Thing Peter Watts Said About Monstrous Affections

The Nice Thing Karl Schroeder Said About Monstrous Affections

My Interview With Claude

Pimping the Book Week 4.5 - the kraken lends a tentacle

The last story I read by Peter Watts made me blind for the afternoon.

Click on the link to understand that last sentence, and also see the blog posting by my friend and fellow cephalopod-fancier Peter Watts that sent the number of hits on the Monstrous Affections pimpage page literally into the hundreds over the past couple days. No shit, yard-apes. The rift-chimps (some of whom are no doubt reading now) are legion, and they have stormed our yard, no doubt to see what Dr. Watts meant when he said "The last story I read by David Nickle left me impotent for a week." A good half-legion stuck around to browse the free samples. I like to think some significant fraction of legion marched over to the Horror Mall and pre-ordered the book.

Well, let me return the favour. The last story I read by Peter Watts didn't precisely leave me blind. It did remind me why he was on the Hugo ballot couple years back for his novel Blindsight (don't judge it by its cover) --



-- which you can buy right here, but which Peter would rather you download for free from his website.

I warn you: he is a pessimist, and empirical about it. Blindsight encourages you to stare right into the abyss, and poses the question: What if the abyss isn't staring back -- and what if the thing that's staring into it isn't really you? If that doesn't get to you, he's also included (and superbly rationalized) a vampire to sit at your shoulder for the ride.

To see just how superbly rationalized a vampire can be, check out his Vampire Domestication talk.

So go. And say hello to the rift-chimps for me. Even if you can't see them at first...

Rest assured, yard-apes. They're there.

Pimping the book week 4: Spotlight on "The Webley"

Last fall, dedicated yard-apes may recall a promise I made to finish up a story called "The Webley" that would dive into the nougatty middle of Nickle family history. Well, that story's finished, and has found its way to one of the two anchor spots in Monstrous Affections (which is now into week four of its pre-orders).

There is (as you'll see if you click the above link) a multi-media aspect to all of this. And so it was that I duplicated that aspect in a new page to the Monstrous Affections block of The Devil's Exercise Yard. Which you can check out, right here.

You'll also note that a morsel of Michael Rowe's gracious introduction, "The Geniality of Monsters," is now included in the chocolate-box of samples on the main pimpage page.

So there you have it. Week four. I'm reliably informed that sales of the collector's edition have been relatively brisk out of the gate. Now we're heading towards a home stretch. The collector's edition will only be available for pre-order until late July, so if you've been thinking about placing an order...

... well, there's less time now than there was last week.

You can buy it here.

Pimping the book week 3: Monstrous Affections gets its own cell-block

It's been a relatively quiet Week 3 in the Book Pimping department, although not an insignificant one. Bought a small ad in the programme book for Polaris, but there's no point in mentioning that here now because nobody sees it until the pedal hits the metal at the convention itself.

Which takes place a month from now, July 10-13 at the Sheraton Parkway North Hotel and where I will be a guest, apparently talking about Vincent Price and Edgar Allan Poe (click here for rates and info).

Ahem.

I also did a bit of fooling around over at The Devil's Excercise Yard website, and put together this Monstrous Affections sampler page.

It is devilishly simple in concept: a vaguely obscene pitch combined with the vaguely obscene cover, followed by the new never-before-seen Table of Contents of the book, and the first paragraph or so of each of the thirteen stories. That weren't enough, it also has links to all the various online iterations of the stories. So there are stories you can read in the Yard, there's one you can read where it was originally published at the ChiZine webzine, and there are audio podcasts of two of them over at Pseudopod.

Oh. And the banner's based on the ad design I put together for the Polaris programme book. July 10-13. In Richmond Hill. The town where I grew up. If you go we can talk about Poe.

Pimping the Book: Week 2

It's been a good Week 2 for Monstrous Affections, my story collection that isn't available for anything but pre-order, but has been that since May 26. There have been shout-outs and an interview and other shout-outs, and a shiny new banner, and all of it has served to propel the book to number six on The Horror Mall's May Pre-Order Best Seller List. Despite having only been available for six days that month.

Here's a run-down of what we did:

• Co-ordinated with Pseudopod.org to launch about the same time as the podcast for "The Inevitability of Earth," a story in the collection, went live.
• Attracted the attention of Cory Doctorow, who made a note of the story and the collection on boingboing.
• Conducted and posted a weird author-to-author interview with me and fellow CZP scribe Claude Lalumiere at BSC Review, which Brett Savory thought was funny.
• Received kind benediction from pal and erstwile collaborator Karl Schroeder, on his blog.
• Created this banner (also visible at the bottom of the blog) which anyone who wants to can put on the bottom of their blog (PLEASE!) along with a link to Horror Mall.

Which is, if I may say, very good for the first week. So thanks to Brett Savory and Matt Moore, publisher and publicist respectively at ChiZine - Cory and Karl and Claude and Pseudopod - and also to Erik Mohr, the cover artist (who might be getting tired of all this fawning by now, but screw 'im) who has produced the hands-down most tangible draw for the book: its fantastic, nightmare-inducing cover.

A cage-match interview with Claude Lalumière...

...and me, is live now here.

It's actually more of a meta-interview over at BSC Review, in that Claude and I interviewed one another, despite the fact that both of us are furiously pimping our story collections. Claude's, Objects of Worship, comes out a month before mine, Monstrous Affections. Both from Chizine Publications.

While I was on expedition scouting a new hell-skull...

... Cory Doctorow was kind enough to give Monstrous Affections the collection and The Inevitability of Earth the pod-cast a shout-out at boingboing, right here. Elevated my mood seriously, particularly after I learned that this infernal beauty wasn't for sale.



(lolskull photo by Karen Fernandez)