This time out, things are better.  There is an “About us” page, a contact page, and a symmetry to the layout that was lacking before. Instead of audiobooks and eBooks and print books being separated, there is one page per book, and on that page you can purchase whatever formats are available.  The books, instead of being organized just by genre, are separated by author now, making it possible for some coupons and sales we hope to try in the New Year.

We remain a DRM free digital publisher.  You can read our books on just about any reading device, and we’ll be happy to help you figure out how to get the books ON your device if you need assistance.

Over at the Crossroad Press blog, http://www.crossroadpress.com we are nos serving up news and updates, including the most recent Crossroad Press bestseller list – the top ten from our 78 Audible.com audiobooks.

So check us out at the newly revamped CROSSROAD PRESS STORE … use the coupon code welcomeback for a one-time 25% off savings.

If you don’t see me, I’m writing – I have a Donovan DeChance novel to finish…

-DNW

Traditionally publisher paid advances.  At Crossroad Press we don’t do that.  We have opted to keep our overhead as low as possible and to give the lion’s share of all money made to the authors.  We do not charge for covers.  We do not expect authors to kick in on anything, in fact.  Authors create, and publishers provide that creativity to the public – hopefully to make money first for the author, and THEN for themselves.  If this is skewed the other direction, you can pretty much rest assured that the “publisher” has their own interest at heart.

So, just to be clear, there is a message here.  If a publisher wants to publish your work, it is THEIR job to get the cover, convert the book, edit the book – not yours.  I actually heard today of an e-mail from a publisher who claimed it was no longer the responsibility of publishers to market the works of their authors?  Really?  How then do you suppose money will be made?

Just as the Internet has created a lot of authors, it has created a lot of “publishers”.  Make sure you know your own goals when you approach them. If all you want is a book with your name on it, publish it yourself and keep what little return you get.  If you go with an actual publisher, don’t pay them to publish you – that’s the same as doing it yourself, except more expensive with less return.

End very short rant.  I guess I just don’t understand greed very well.  I recognize it, but I don’t understand it.

-DNW

Anyway…through those years, and all of those between (decades) John has been writing stories and novels and finding them homes.  He may be the single most dedicated writer I’ve ever met.  He’s always working on a story, reworking an idea, searching for flaws where too many other writers would hit send and move on…and he has produced some remarkable stories.  He has appeared in literally hundreds of magazines and anthologies, and has a number of novels to his credit, and I’m hoping this little nudge will encourage you to check some of them out.

I will point you specifically at two Sci-Fi novels that we have published at Crossroad Press.  Both of these were previously published, but we were fortunate enough to pick them up.  John writes novels on a sweeping scale.  There are messages and socially significant sub-themes in his alien cultures, and deep emotional insights in his romance.  While they qualify, probably, as space opera, they go beyond that.  Here are the two we’ve published to date.  Read them and let me know if I’m not right!

A SENSELESS ACT OF BEAUTY

Aaron Okonkwo, a Nigerian scientist, travels with a crew in the 24th century to evaluate Viridis, which proves to be a beautiful and fabulous world. There, Aaron discovers a strange, alien species and amazing machines and technology left in a vast underground complex by a mysterious race called the Creators.

Aaron soon falls under the irresistible, seductive spell of Nightsong, a green alien female with ominous and bewitching powers. However, an even greater danger rises. He will be forced to fight for the planet’s survival against a ruthless invasion of many ships to conquer and enslave the planet – just as Africa itself was once enslaved. Aaron knows it’s A Senseless Act of Beauty to try to reclaim his ancient warrior heritage and fight back against such overwhelming odds, but he knows he must try.  - $2.99

ALIEN DREAMS

Killer angels are roaming outer space looking for their messiah. If Captain Latimore can’t make them believe he’s the one, everyone on his crew – and many more besides – will die.

Captain Eric Latimore leads a four-person crew to Lagos to investigate a previous team’s mysterious disappearance. Once there, he discovers that an ominous alien presence is invading their dreams. Each member of his crew has the same dream – huge, seductively beautiful “angels” speak to them telepathically.

The creatures strand his crew on the planet and only Latimore can free them – if he survives.  $2.99.

-DNW

Currently reading:  City of Knives – Unpublished (until I publish it) novel by International bestselling author William Bayer.  VERY good book, with tango, and nazi weapons collectors, and mystery in Buenos Aries … good stuff.

Currently listening to : The Sufferer’s Song – by Steven Savile, narrated by Andrew Randall

Currently writing : Kali’s Tale – or I will be after I write the final chapter tonight of the origin story of Donovan DeChance.  For those Donovan lovers out there, and those who WANT to be…this is must-read entertainment.

So…back to it.  Miles to go before we sleep…

-DNW

For one thing, I’m writing the flashback with no more of an outline than a brief synopsis.  This freed me up to add in a lot of details.  That turned what was to be a chapter, maybe two, into five, and then six.  I chose a familiar setting for the story – the western town of Rookwood, but before the days of Hallowed Ground.  In fact, SIlas Boone is a boy, as is the eight-fingered piano player McGraw.  There is still life and love and mystery in the town.  In Hallowed Ground it’s the dying husk of a settlement that’s purpose – supplying things to those traveling west – had left it all but a ghost town.  In 1842, it was very much alive.

I’ve answered a lot of questions.  Donovan’s age.  How he met Cleo, his familiar…why he does what he does, and how he discovered it…this has opened up a hundred years of adventures I can come back to, while maintaining the modern-day line of books simultaneously.

Kali’s Tale will likely not include this flashback.  It’s simply too long.  It will be either a short novel on it’s own, or a novelette, and it will be released before the new year.  Kali’s Tale I return to in a day or two, once this “flashback” that became a book is in the can.  I’ll leave you with a short excerpt…

The old wagon smelled of sweat, leather, cheap liquor, and a miasma of spices, herbs, and chemicals that would have driven a bloodhound crazy.  Donovan leaned back into a pile of old rags and tried to peer out through the crack between two of the wagon’s warped boards at the passing countryside.  He knew they were getting close.  Whenever they neared a town, or a settlement, Rathman picked up the pace.  The two old ponies scented fresh apples and hay, and the old man scented whiskey and women.  Donovan knew he would work long into the night, but hoped, in the end, it would mean a hot meal.  Sometimes, if he could keep his distance from Rathman and find an hour’s work sweeping, or scrubbing, or shoveling out a stable, he could earn a decent meal before the old man’s screeching, bullying voice dragged him back to the wagon.  At least it was something to hope for.

The town they expected to run up on next was called Rookwood.  Donovan had never seen the place, but Rathman remembered it from many years back.  Donovan hoped it was a lot of years, because the old fraud was seldom welcomed back to a place a second time if anyone remembered his previous visit, and it wasn’t easy to forget.  For one thing, the decrepit old wagon was painted over with brilliant, garish designs.

“Dr. Hugo Rathman, Healer, Mystic, and Clairvoyant” was painted dead center in paint so bright and so red that circling buzzards had mistaken it for blood more than once and spiraled down to have a closer look.  More than once Donovan had peered out into the driver’s seat of the wagon to be certain the carrion feeders weren’t after Rathman himself.  The old man could drink himself into a death-like stupor so deep that he seemed dead.

Finally they passed by the first small grouping of board and tar shacks.  Donovan caught sight of a think boy with wild hair and no shirt.  For just a second he’d have sworn the kid met his gaze, right through the boards.  A second later, the boy was off, flying barefoot across the desert toward town.  Apparently visitors weren’t common in Rookwood.  Donovan frowned.  The rarer they were, the more likely someone would remember Rathman.  It was possible that the old man hadn’t cheated anyone on his last visit, but that would make this a rare visit indeed.  At least three lawmen were watching out for the wagon because ill townsfolk had taken one or more of Rathman’s potions and either fallen deeper into their illness, or died outright – poisoned.

Whatever the situation, Rathman didn’t hesitate.  He aimed the wagon dead-center down the main road of the town, bumping through potholes and jarring Donovan’s teeth with each jouncing yard they progressed.  The wagon creaked and moaned, but it held together.  It always managed to hold together.  Like Rathman, it seemed there was no force on the road or in the desert that could put the final nail in its coffin.

“You ready, boy” Rathman grated, turning so that his unshaven face, wild dark hair and red-veined eyes glared back into the shadows.  There was no way he could see into the interior, but he still managed to stare directly into the particular shadows where Donovan rested.

“Yes sir,” Donovan said.

Rathman stared a moment longer, then nodded.   He turned back to the reins, steered around a corner a bit too quickly, nearly tilting the wagon up on two wheels, and a moment later they came to a halt.  Donovan rose, stepping up to the front of the wagon and peering out around the edge.

It was an alley between what looked to be a stable, and a taller wooden building that might have been a saloon or hotel.  Rathman dropped the reins, stood, and stretched, pressing his knuckles tightly into the lower half of his back.  He’d been sitting in the same position for nearly thirty miles, and Donovan knew it would take more than an hour for the stoop to leave him.

“I’m goin’ to see about getting the horses taken in,” he said.  “You get this wagon ready – hear?  We’ll be settin’ up in the morning, and there’s no time for delays.”

Rathman seemed to drop almost into a trance then, as if listening to a voice Donovan couldn’t hear.  Then he turned back.

“Put out the books, and the rheumatism tinctures.  Arrange some of the other cures behind.  Then get this place presentable and set up my table.  I believe the spirits might just speak to me here. There’s something in the air.”

Donovan thought that all there was in the air was dust.  He thought, very briefly, of his father, sickly and barely able to carry himself to work in a mine so dark and deep it swallowed men whole.  He thought of his mother, though he could barely remember her face.  He thought of the tiny room that had been his, the bed that had grown too short to contain his long, lanky legs, and he sighed.  At that moment, he’d have traded half his life to be back there, caring for his father – assuming the old man hadn’t passed on – and getting ready to take his own turn in the mines.

“Apprentice,” was the title he’d been granted so long ago.  “Assistant to a man of books and medicine.  A learned scholar with the ear of the spirits and the mind of a professor.  What it had boiled down to was the life of an indentured manservant.  He’d learned to read, but only by his own dogged effort, and stolen moments with Rathman’s precious books.  When he proved he could earn a dime or two by reading from the old tales to those who passed by, the good “doctor” had taken an interest and taught what he could between drunken binges and fits of curse-spewing malevolence.  He was obviously torn between the fear of teaching too much and having Donovan run off on his own, and the greedy desire for his apprentice to be able to shoulder a share of the burden of making their living.  It was also true that no listener had ever asked for their money back, or threatened to run Donovan out of town on a rail, and likely Rathman held that against him too.

 

1. Narration is an art.  It requires an ability to act.  It isn’t the same thing as a live reading at a convention, and it isn’t the same thing as a radio broadcast or a podcast.  It has to be learned, and if you go in with the arrogant notion you can just “do it” you probably won’t get many jobs.  As a rights holder and publisher you have to be familiar enough with audiobooks to tell the difference, and to choose a voice that will benefit your project.

2.  Sound quality is very important.  Your book will be competing for sales with professional studios in the market place.  If someone spends a membership credit on Audible, or plops down the money to buy your book, and it’s full of background noise, computer fans, humm, or barkind dogs they aren’t coming back, and you’ll end up with some bad reviews.

3. Presentation matters.  Cover art, the intro and outro to the book, and the marketing copy are important pieces of the whole project, and should not be ignored.

4. Note to narrators. The audition script isn’t optional.  If you run through ACX and drop your professional demo tape in on a thousand jobs, my guess is you’ll get zero.  Take the time to scope out projects that are right for you.  Study the script provided and submit an audition that is appropriate and that demonstrates how you are right for “that” book.

Specific to ACX is the royalty share option.  I’ve seen sides being drawn on this issue recently.  Here’s the thing…while it takes a good bit of time to narrate and edit the audio for a book…as an author I can tell you it takes a good deal of time and work to write the book, and some to publish it as well.  Authors and publishers have always had to wait for sales and made their money from royalties.  In the new publishing paradigm, I can see this shift happening for voice talent as well.  Over time, as you develop a body of work, you begin to receive royalties on all of them each pay period, and it develops into a revenue stream.  If you are paid up front, it’s also a gamble.  Say you do a project for $150-$200 a finished hour, and you sit back to watch the book sell ten thousand copies.  A royalty share contract would include you in that success…and honestly, it seems to me it would give you the incentive to do an even better job on the book.  On the other hand, if the book is by an unknown author, the up-front payment might be the way to go.  It’s always a gamble, but at least in a royalty share it’s a shared gamble.

My last point here, before I link to a few of our ACX titles, is that there is still value in having someone like Crossroad Press handle your book.  For one thing, we work with our own established sound engineer.  This adds a level of quality control most authors and agents just aren’t qualified to add on their own, unless they happen to be sound engineers on the side.  We provide good quality cover art.  We have an established market, growing every day, that draws people to our new titles.  These are important, but here’s a kicker.

There are two awards important to audiobooks.  The Audie, which is issued by the APA … and the golden earphone, which you get through reviews in Audiofile Magazine.  WE have an established arrangement to get our titles into the review process at Audiofile.  We are members of the APA.  The only way to nominate a work for the Audie is to pay the APA for each nomination, and even as a member we pay $100 a title for those that are included.  This can be very important step in getting people to listen to your book.

None of this is to say that you can’t sign onto ACX and make your own book…you can, of course, and if you are careful, pay attention, and listen to advice, you can probably make a quality book.  On the other hand, if you’re a writer, you can get someone like Crossroad Press to handle it, and get on with writing, because the biggest problem form writers in this new digitized world is that most of the advice tells you to do everything yourself.  It can really cut into your writing time if you aren’t a full-time, stay at home writer, and even then it calls for several unique skill-sets  Publishers aren’t dead…they just have to change.  Crossroad Press has been dedicated from day one to giving most of the money to the people who create the stories.  Being an author, that’s important to me.

If you’d like to check out what we’ve been doing through ACX…you can find all of our ACX titles here:

CROSSROAD PRESS & ACX

Here are links to a few of our titles: Just  click the images.

BAD MOON BOOKS is about to release my novel MAELSTROM in trade paperback, and a very limited hardcover edition.  The hardcover will be printed only in the quantities ordered during the reservation period.  A few of those who pre-order the HC limited will win copies of a a hand-bound story set in Lavender, California, where the action in the novel takes place.  It is POSSIBLE that those people will have their names included in the story as well.  It is PROBABLE that no more than five or six copies will ever exist…anything is possible.  Details will be released as I have them, but for now … Go pre-order the book!

Signed, Limited HC : $55

Trade Paperback:  $18

Cover art by the talented Alex McVey

Something in Lavender, California is waking up. Rituals not properly completed for centuries are coming together. Nothing is what it seems.

When Nick Leatherman, his girlfriend Ruthie, and their buddies Flash and Weasel invade Shady Grove Cemetery for a “ghost hunt” on their way home from a concert, they are drawn into a web of darkness and intrigue that threatens to consume them. Nick and Ruthie witness a gruesome murder, and Nick’s pocketknife shows up at the crime scene the next morning. Nick has had problems in the past, and Inspector Kendall Straker remembers. He remembers Ned Leatherman, Nick’s alcoholic step-father as well, and he doesn’t believe the boy is a killer. The problem is that the knife – emblazoned with the name of the band Maelstrom – is the only clue he has.

Horace Goldbough is the local pastor. He’s built a huge following and a beautiful church, but there are things about the good reverend that the town doesn’t know. In particular there is his relationship with a dark woman named Beauchane, and a certain book he keeps hidden from the world.

With local reporters, and a television talk-show host hounding his every step, Straker attempts to unravel the series of grisly killings terrorizing Lavender, while simultaneously protecting Nick. Nick, in the meantime, has begun his own investigation, feeling trapped and needing to clear his name.

Ritual words are being spoken, and a power that has been denied access to the Earth for centuries is poised to strike. The clock is ticking. Can Straker, Nick, and Maelstrom find the answer to the killings and put an end to them before the final ritual takes place, or will a horror be unleashed on the unsuspecting town of Lavender beyond their comprehension?

The novel Deep Blue finds its origin in the novelette by the same name published in an anthology titled Strange Attraction.  In Strange Attraction, all the stories were inspired by the “Kinetic” Art of Lisa Snelling, each author choosing one of the characters on an intricately detailed Ferris wheel sculpture.  I was honored to be among authors such as Neil Gaiman and Gene Wolfe in presenting our separate visions of what lay buried behind her art.  From the images presented, I chose a harlequin, hanging by a noose from the bottom of one of the Ferris wheels seats.  I took the image, made it the wallpaper on my computer, printed it out and carried it around with me, and let it sink in.  I could have written any number of stories that would have sufficed, but somehow I knew there would be more to this work, and so I waited.

The publishers of the anthology, Vince and Leslie Harper, invited me to have dinner with them one night when my mundane job took me to Washington DC.  We met for Mexican food and went together to see the movie PI which, at the time, was newly released.  On the way to meet the Harpers, I walked down into a shadowed subway, and I was assaulted by some of the most haunting saxophone music I’ve ever heard.  It bordered the blues, walked down old jazz roads, and I never saw the musician.  That set the mood for what was to come.

I reached the restaurant without further incident, and we spent a pleasant hour scalding mouths and stomachs with jalapenos and washing them down with beer.  Then came the movie.  I won’t go into detail about PI, but I’ll say it’s a black and white film, very surreal, filled with symbolism, and it left me visually and emotionally stunned.  I parted company with Vince and his wife, found my way back to the subway and my hotel, and called it a night.

The next day, a friend of mine and I set out to visit The Holocaust Museum.  I have always wanted to see it, but I was not prepared for the intensity of the images, the displays, and the words I would find in that short hour visit.  I purchased a book of poetry written by the victims, and left with so much bottled up inside from those two days that I thought it would be the end of my sanity.

That night, I started to write.  I started to write about The Blues, and how deep they might really get.  I wrote about pain, not my pain, but the pain bottled up inside the world, as the pain had been bottled up inside me, and I wrote a way out.  That was Brandt, his guitar, and his blues.  The story, like the pain, refused to be bottled up in just the few lines of that novelette, and so I released it into the novel you now hold.

Everyone comes to their crossroads eventually – the defining moment of life.  As Old Wally, one of the novel’s main characters tells us – “Crossroads, or the crosshairs.”  Forward or back, but you can’t stay stagnant – that way lies madness.  I give you . . . Deep Blue.

Not going to put descriptions here…click the links!

The Birth of the Dread Remora – US ORDERS - INTERNATIONAL ORDERS

The Second Veil – By David Niall Wilson – Due July 15th 2011 US PREORDER / INTERNATIONAL PREORDER

Homegrown by Elizabeth Massie - US ORDERS / INTERNATIONAL ORDERS

The Ravens of Falkenau – by Jo Graham INTERNATIONAL ORDERS / US ORDERS

We have tons more on the way…including this last…a preorder for our very first hardcover novel – HALLOWED GROUND – by myself and Steven Savile.  You can preorder this also wat http://store.crossroadpress.com – there are several options including signed, international, and others…get your copy reserved now.

Author’s Introduction

A lot of authors of dark fantasy and horror will cite H. P. Lovecraft, William Hope Hodgson, Hugh Cave, and Manly Wade Wellman as influences on their writing.  Clark Ashton Smith is another name you’ll hear, and in this volume, you’ll find my tribute to that great talent, as well as a number of others that dip into the wells of darkness and magic – a world I’m familiar with from endless hours of reading, dreaming, and spilling my own words onto the page.

I have never considered myself a huge fan of Lovecraft.  Pulp writing, in general, appealed to me when I was much younger, and in the middle years of my writing career, I pushed it aside.  I was, of course, deluding myself.  When someone pointed out to me that I actually had a body of work loosely fitting this sub-genre of horror / dark fantasy that was probably enough for a book, I laughed.  Then I looked.  Then I stopped laughing.  What I found was that these writers – these storytellers I grew up with and believed I’d left behind me – were responsible for a huge chunk of my output as a writer.  There are elder gods, ancient evils, and everything that attends them walking the corridors of my creative consciousness, and that reader was correct.  There was more than enough to make a book.

I also note that, of all my works, most of my favorites, and some that have garnered critical notice, are among the stories you are about to read.  “The Call of Distant Shores,” the title piece of this collection, is one of my most popular stories to date, and Cockroach Suckers, which is more recent and set near my current home town in the fictional Old Mill, North Carolina, could not be more Lovecraftian without being set in New England.

Anyway…there are a lot of words ahead – a lot of images – a lot of nightmares.  I hope you’ll enjoy them, and I dedicate them to those authors who have gone before, paving the way for an ever-widening realm of new worlds and deep-rooted fears.

Welcome to my nightmares.

-David Niall Wilson

4/9/2011