July 2012 Bestsellers lists

Quiet Houses, by critically acclaimed British writer Simon Kurt Unsworth, has been simmering away on our Top Five lists for the last couple of months, and in July it appears to have reached full boil, topping both our e-book and paperback bestsellers lists for the month. Andy Taylor’s e-book short story collection The Drunk and The Dead and Sylvia Shults’ literary mash-up The Taming of the Werewolf make their debut appearance on the e-book list, an occurrence that I attribute to their smiling faces having been front and centre on Dark Continents’ dealer’s table at FandomFest early in the month.

Top Five Bestselling e-books for July 2012

1. Quiet Houses by Simon Kurt Unsworth
2. Phobophobia edited by Dean M. Drinkel
3. The Taming of the Werewolf by Sylvia Shults
4. Inkarna by Nerine Dorman
5. The Drunk and the Dead by Andy Taylor *

(* = from the Darkness and Dismay series)

After being eclipsed in May by new releases, horror short story readers’ favourite, Phobophobia, reasserts itself on both charts. An interesting development is seeing The Caretakers in the top five paperbacks alongside more recently released titles. The Caretakers, by Dark Continents’ founding member Adrian Chamberlin, was one of the titles with which we launched the company over a year ago. What with electronic and POD publishing, we are no longer constrained to the old model of publishing, which limited many titles to a limited print run and brief shelf life. Now, high quality novels can remain available to readers indefinitely.

Top Five Bestselling Paperbacks for July 2012

1. Quiet Houses by Simon Kurt Unsworth
2. Snareville II: Circles by David Youngquist
3. Inkarna by Nerine Dorman
4. Phobophobia edited by Dean M. Drinkel
5. The Caretakers by Adrian Chamberlin

 

 

Sylvia y su perros

BY: Sylvia Shults

You know how, when you get older, you’ll be talking to your kids and you suddenly realize that you’ve turned into your parents?
That’s happened to me.
Only I don’t have kids.
I have dogs.
Yes, you read that right. My dogs have managed to turn me into my parents.
And the really sad part of it is, I talk to the girls as if they can talk back. Thank goodness, they can’t. (That would really complete the child analogy, wouldn’t it? Especially when they got to be teenagers. But it would freak people out, too. So it’s just as well.)
When I’m talking to my dogs, I find myself repeating a lot of the things my parents would say to me as a child. My mother spent her grade school years in Argentina, and when she and my father were dating, he picked up a lot of Spanish from her (at least, I’ve always assumed that’s where he got it from). So when I need the girls to get a move on, I’ll say, “Vamonos!”, just like my dad did to me. Or if I need to get them out of the room, I’ll say “Aus mit Sie” (or “Aus mit Sie, kleine Hunds!” if I’m feeling froggy). (My dad threw a lot of German around too.) Sometimes the things I inherited from my dad for use with my dogs turn out to be disturbingly literal, like when the dogs are in the front yard to do their business, and I recycle my dad’s expression of “shit or get off the pot!”.
My grandmother creeps into my speech too. If the dogs are taking their sweet time in the yard, I’ll say “Get with the program,” and I can hear the echo of Grandma Ruth in those words. Most alarming, to me, is when Eureka (the dimmer of the two dogs) is whining for no reason at all, which happens with depressing regularity. When I’m fed up with her noise, I’ll burst out with, “Quit your crying, or I’ll give you something to cry ABOUT!” Then I cringe and feel like digging a hole, crawling in, and pulling it in after me.
But I do use a favorite phrase of my grandmother’s, one that she used with her own dog. Whenever I leave the house, I say goodbye to my girls first. Their parting phrase, the one that signals to them that I’m about to take off, is this: “Be good doggies, and Mommy will bring you an ice cream cone.”
Sometimes I even make good on that promise.

Daily Routines

BY: Sylvia Shults
Humans are creatures of habit and routine. Routines give our days structure, and let us know that all is in balance in our little corner of the universe. I’m human myself, so I really like my routines. Get up, brush my teeth, put my contacts in, do my exercises, get dressed, go to work. Come home, feed the dogs, take them out, go to bed. On Thursdays, I’ve usually got some spare time in the afternoons, so that’s when I get a lot of writing done. It was a predictable life. It was my life, and I was content.
Then, last summer, a friend of mine blew that comfortable routine of mine right out of the water. All it took was one innocent little question.
“Hey, Sylvia, how’d you like to help me start a publishing company?”
And just like that, my comfortable routine was shattered into a million little pieces.
Of course, I didn’t give David a response right away. (Didn’t want him to think I was that easy.) It took a bit of cajoling on his part, as well as a lot of peer pressure. “John and Ade and Tracie are doing it too. Come on, take a chance.” But the more I thought about it, the more the idea appealed to me. Be part of a publishing company? One that specializes in horror and dark fiction? Hey, why not? Sounds like it could be fun. That’s how they get you, you know. That’s how they suck you in. First taste is free.
Then they made me a board member. I had a title – “Publicity Director”. (I still think they gave me that title because I have no sense of shame or moderation when it comes to promoting my work.) We got stationery with my name right on it – in ink. Suddenly I was no longer just a writer. I was no longer responsible just for my own work. I was a member of a company, with, you know, duties and stuff. What on earth were these people thinking?
Then David dropped the biggest bombshell of all on this routine-loving, homebody little librarian. “Oh yeah, we’re all going to the World Horror Convention. In Austin Texas. Yes, ALL of us.” Even me, who would much, much rather stay home and read a book (or write one) than go out on a Saturday night. I sighed. This would take me even farther out of my comfortable routine. I don’t even like going out to downtown Peoria, which is half an hour away. And David wanted me to go to Texas? Yeesh! But, I figured, if the folks from Britain and flippin’ Australia could make it, I suppose I could be there too. I left the dogs with my husband, took time off from work, and made the trek to Austin. (And that’s a whole ‘nother blog post…)
And something happened there in Austin, in the dealers’ room at the World Horror Convention. Something strange, something wonderful. I was standing behind the table, waiting to jump on the next soul who wandered past (“Here, have a pen! And a bookmark! And a catalog!”), when I glanced down at the books on display. Now, I’ve been to book signings before. I’ve sold books before, sometimes with other authors. We’re always good at tag-teaming each other, passing off potential customers to each other. After all, if SOMEONE makes a sale, it’s all good, right? But at the end of the day, each writer has their own books to sell.
But. But! When I looked down at the table loaded with books in front of me, something occurred to me. Whether I sold a copy of The Taming of the Werewolf, or Snareville, or The Left Hand, or Pray – it all benefitted the company. And in the end, no matter which book I ended up selling, it would benefit me. And if Tracie sold a copy of my novel Price of Admission, that would benefit her. We were all in this together. I could feel a grin spreading across my face. Boy, there really was something to this whole cooperative thing after all.
So this trip to Austin jolted me out of my routine. So what? It’s good to shake things up once in a while. And things have stayed shaken, that’s for sure. I can now call myself a member of a respected publishing company. I’m the Publicity Director for Dark Continents Publishing. I have, you know, duties and stuff.
I still would rather stay home than go out, though. And I still like to hole up and write on a Thursday afternoon.

Back to Blogging!

2011 has been a great year for the Dark Continents Publishing Company!

In April at the World Horror Convention in Austin, Texas Dark Continents was proud to hold the official Launch Party for thirteen debut books! The DCP Vice President Tracie McBride came all the way from Australia to join in on the celebration and help promote her novel, Ghosts Can Bleed. We celebrated by hosting a Bat Cruise Launch Party at sunset on beautiful Lady Bird Lake in downtown Austin. Our guests were treated to a buffet supper and open bar, a special Audio Sample Presentation of our entire line of books read by the talented voice narrator, Wayne June, as well as a fantastic view of the famous Austin Bats as they left their caves for the evening. Three special cruise guests each won a lifetime membership guarantee of one free copy of all future Dark Continents publications, so long as they keep in touch and let us know where to mail the books!

In other exciting news, author Dave Jeffery’s novel Necropolis Rising Kindle version has enjoyed remarkable success in the UK, where it reached #1 in the Amazon Horror chart. Since this time the novel has maintained a top-ten presence in the Amazon Occult chart, where as of this writing it is currently #8.

 

David M. Youngquist, Sylvia Shults, and John Prescott participated in a whirlwind book signing tour in Illinois this June, stopping at three bookstores in two days. Many people turned out for the signings, and many books were sold. But, most exciting of all, Barnes and Noble and Waldens (so sorry to see you go, Walden’s!) have begun displaying our titles as end caps. End caps  are the equivalent of the Holy Grail for authors – having books we have loved and nurtured majestically displayed at the end of a row. Nirvana!

John Prescott’s PRAY novel made it into the top 100 Horror Novels in the Amazon US Kindle ratings in July, and we’re expecting  a bigger reception for the second novel in the series, HELL, set to debut on Black Friday November 25, 2011.

Sylvia Shults continues to do research on her as-yet unnamed novel about the Bartonville, Illinois Asylum for the Incurable Insane, a very haunted and very cool old abandoned place. Sylvia and S.L. Schmitz spent a wonderful afternoon on the grounds of the asylum, taking photographs of the graveyards and the main building in preparation for her research!  

John Irvine and his wife, Maureen Irvine, are in New Zealand enjoying all of that LOTR’s scenery and working on two joint collections called Collected Haibun and Echoes of Exotic Places. Maureen’s novel (set in Greece) is called Bitter Olives, and is slated for DCP’s 2012 new imprint collection. If you can’t wait to sink your teeth into the next Irvine publication, you simply must check out the gourmet short stories, poetry and recipes (yes- recipes!) in Blood Curry, featuring that most unique of ingrediants; fresh animal blood!

Also in July, the newest edition of the DCP Book Catalog became available for distribution. Additional books now added to the collection include S.L. Schmitz’s dark and mysterious Let It Bleed; the upcoming launches for John Prescott’s HELL and Snareville II, the chilling sequel to David M. Younquist’s fast-paced zombie thriller, as well as Phobophobia, an anthology of short stories about the secret world of human fears and phobias edited by Dean M. Drinkel.

Dark Continents Publishing will host an official launch party of several new publications at the British Fantasy Society’s FantasyCon in Brighton on Saturday October 1, 2011 at 8:00pm. Huzzah! Simon Kurt Unsworth will be debuting his highly anticipated Quiet Houses novel, and Dave Jeffery’s haunting new collection of short stories Campfire Chillers. Adrian Chamberlin will be there as well, with his excellent novel The Caretakers, and if all things go as planned DCP’s President David M. Younquist will be journeying from the USA to join in on the fun.

On a more somber note, we were sad to lose Serenity J. Banks from the Core Board of Directors, but welcomed Julia Messina as our new Senior Editor and member of the Senior Board. Serenity will now participate as a Junior Board Member – looking for a good vampire novel? Check out her novel The Left Hand.

Over the next six months, stay tuned for more blog posts as the madcap Dark Continents Authors travel to such places as the FantasyCon in Brighton and Archon 35 in  St. Louis, MO. There will be updates on bookings, podcasts, interviews, author appearances, blogging, and a VERY BIG Press Release announcing some VERY BIG author news…. So stay tuned, “LIKE” us on Facebook, and sign up to receive blog updates!

We are Dark Continents Publishing…. Horror Just Got Scarier