Kindle Serial McFALL by Scott Nicholson launches with Kindle Fire giveaway

Visit my new website to enter a contest to win a free Kindle Fire and other prizes!

AuthorScottNicholson.com

(I'll be moving my blog over there eventually. Here's the "official third-person press release")

McFALL

International bestselling author Scott Nicholson returns to his supernatural roots in the new serialized novel McFALL, launching Sept. 3, with new episodes releasing every six weeks.

The supernatural thriller, from Amazon’s 47North imprint, features characters from THE RED CHURCH, a Stoker Award finalist and alternate selection of the Mystery Guild Book Club, and DRUMMER BOY, a ghostly coming-of-age tale. The stories are set in the rural Southern Appalachian Mountains where Nicholson lives and are inspired by actual local legends.

“I enjoyed working with Amazon’s Thomas & Mercer imprint for my Fear series, and I had been mulling a return to the world of my first novel,” Nicholson said. “When 47North offered the opportunity to write a serial, I jumped at it. I am always eager to experiment, and Amazon is proving progressive in its digital publishing approach. I’ll still be writing McFALL as it goes live so it’s a bit like walking out on a tightrope in flaming underpants over a canyon full of cobras. Or perhaps it’s just another day in cyberspace.”

Although it’s exclusive to Amazon, McFALL will be published in paperback and audiobook later this year.. New episodes are automatically emailed to the Kindles of those who order the first episode. Learn more about the project at http://www.hauntedcomputer.com/mcfall.htm.

The serial is $1.99 at Amazon.

McFALL

"If Evil had fortified secret strongholds across the globe, the red church was certainly one of them."

When wealthy developer Larkin McFall moves to the small Appalachian Mountain community of Barkersville, generations-old tales of supernatural phenomena, sudden deaths, and odd disappearances resurface. Larkin laughs off the stories as superstition, while promising to bring a bright new future to the dying town.

Sheriff Frank Littlefield senses a diabolical motive in McFall’s good intentions. High school friends Bobby Eldreth and Ronnie Day also suspect that an evil menace has invaded Barkersville, but both soon fall under McFall’s spell. Has the sinister presence that once infiltrated the abandoned—perhaps haunted—red church spread to the community as McFall turns the family property into a luxurious subdivision?

When those who oppose Larkin McFall’s ambitions begin to die horrifically—or even worse, become the man’s biggest supporters—Sheriff Littlefield’s investigation uncovers a man with no past and no fingerprints.

A man who destroys people by giving them exactly what they want. 

    *****

Author Harry Shannon

Author Harry Shannon is a talented guy and I was lucky enough to win a copy of his first collection BAD SEED way back when we both had darker hair. Since then, he's piled up the properties. A musician, counselor, filmmaker, author, family man--and guy.

 

What is the working title of your next book?The Hungry 3: At the End of the World, co-written with Steven W. Booth. The novel should be out in February, 2013. It concerns the further adventures of Sheriff Penny Miller of Flat Rock, Nevada, who is still braving the Zombie Apocalypse.

Where did the idea come from?

The first book The Hungry began as a short zombie story written for a charity anthology. Steven and I had so much fun doing it we continued on and finished the novel version on a lark. It sold very well, so The Hungry 2: The Wrath of God followed in August. We're still not sure if this finishes a trilogy or if we'll feel compelled to do more.

What genre best defines your book?

Zombies, baby! And tongue in cheek horror, I guess.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie? 

The actress featured on all three covers of The Hungry books is the lovely Ms. Gillian Shure, who co-starred in my micro-budged ode to 80's horror Dead and Gone back in 2007. She has become so connected in my brain with redheaded Sheriff Penny Miller it has become difficult to imagine anyone else playing the part. Our fans tell us Norman Reedus, who plays Daryl on The Walking Dead, has simply got to play her biker friend Scratch.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Sheriff Penny Miller and her friends hide out at a hunting lodge in the snowy mountains of Colorado, hoping to escape the zombie plague. It is not a Merry Christmas.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

All three of The Hungry novels are published by Genius Books, which is owned by my co-author Steven.

How long did it take you to write the first draft?

We do an outline first, emailing back and forth, working out just the key beats of the story in rough chapter form. Once that is set, Steven generally does the rough, I rewrite that and send it back. Once we get going the actual first draft (one pass for each of us) generally takes us about three months.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I suppose we'd be considered a mix of drama and comedy. We have loads of redneck humor, a touch of Zombieland or Shawn of the Dead, but the satire is mixed with genuinely creepy scenes similar in tone to the zombie work of Jonathan Maberry and Joe McKinney. Joe and Jonathan are friends of ours, and fans of Sheriff Penny Miller. In fact, Joe wrote the introduction to the first book.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I've always loved zombie lore, particularly the George Romero school and the 1970's classic Night of the Living Dead. I'm from Nevada, and often set stories and novels in that state. When we were writing the charity story, it just tickled me to combine those two and see how a redneck Sheriff in a small town might react to facing a horde of the undead. We began in the jail, in a salute to Rio Bravo, and it took off from there and became a series.

What else about the book might pique the reader's interest?

You can read The Hungry: At the End of the World by itself come February, or buy and read the first two now and start from the beginning. Either way, be sure to make a very, very big bowl of popcorn, dim the lights and be prepared for a mix of laughs on scares. These novels have been a ton of fun to write, and we think anyone who loves shambling monsters is bound to enjoy reading them.

~

The Home, #1 Kindle horror bestseller: Win a Kindle Fire, Nook, or Kobo Glo

Thanks for making The Home a Top 100 bestseller on Kindle and Nook and kicking in that BONUS eREADER giveaway! The Top 20 for the third bonus eReader is harder. I can't do that alone, but you guys can make it happen! Thanks for your support. Because of you, the interest in the movie script by North of Seven Productions is heating up, too! I briefly bumped my buddy Blake Crouch off the #1 horror spot but he's rock solid. We're not finished yet, though...

You can drop by the book blogs listed to the right and read exclusive excerpts, and there are easy contest entries from the blogs, too. The price will be going to $2.99 (and then $3.99 later on) but different markets roll it in at different times, so better grab it fast!
Amazon 
Amazon UK
Barnes & Noble 
Kobo

Experiments at a group home for troubled children lead to paranormal activity--and the ghosts are former residents of the home's past as an insane asylum. In development as a feature film.

To celebrate the launch of The Home, you can win your choice of a Kindle Fire, a Nook HD 8G, or a Kobo Glo (two separate winners total). Other prizes include MP3-CD audiobooks of Liquid Fear and Chronic Fear, and signed copies of Chronic Fear, Monsters Inc., Drummer Boy, If I Were Your Monster, and Dirt. I'll also be randomly selecting Twitter RTs for a $20 gift card each Sunday that use the #HomeForHalloween hashtag. If The Home hits the Top 20 on any of the ebook outlets during October, I'll give away a THIRD device of the winner's choice.

If you don't use social media, you can enter by emailing bigkindleboogie@yahoo.com. Thanks and good luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

 

P.S. Congratulations to Hugh Howey for hitting #1 in the overall Kindle store with Wool!

You can't go home again, but you can call your book "The Home"

After much deliberation and debate (mostly consisting of reading tea leaves and sacrificing a goat to the oracle of smart marketing), I've decided to release THE HOME under the title of ...tah dah, drumroll...THE HOME!

While that may seem like a no-brainer, there are several good reasons to go with my preferred title of "Troubled" (which is the title I used for the non-US ebook release, since I held all rights except US/Canada.) Now that all rights are reverting to me, I can call the shots. I didn't like the publisher's title because I felt it was rather uninspired, although many people say The Home sounds creepy and mysterious.

And of course, it's kind of a horror handle to put "The" in front of everything. The Fog, The Ward, The Orphanage, The House, The Asylum, The Mall, The Gas Station, etc. (If you read October Girls, you can see me having a bit of fun with this, with movies titled things like "The Bloodening.") Tip of the cap to Bentley Little, whose market my original publisher was obviously chasing.

The main reason to stick with The Home is to support the movie script being shopped by North of Seven Productions. So The Home it shall be until a better reason comes along. Already available for Nook, Kobo, Smashwords and Amazon UK, the U.S. Kindle release will be at the end of September.

Since you're special and rare, you get a free advance ebook copy if you like. You don;t even have to write a review, although I will follow up with an email with the link once the book is live, in case you feel so inspired. I don't expect to make this free anywhere else at any time, so it may be the best chance to grab it. To get your copy before the red carpet rolls out, bang an email to hauntedcomputer AT yahoo.com.

Oh yeah, about the book...controversial experiments at a group home for troubled children stir up paranormal activity...and the ghosts are former residents of the home from its days as an insane asylum.
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The Red Church - Ten Years After

Ten years after.

This month marks the tenth anniversary of the release of THE RED CHURCH, my first novel. And although I had some short story sales before then, I generally consider THE RED CHURCH the start of my professional writing career as well. Ten years. A lot of books. I'm torn between feeling like a worn-out geezer and a guy finally figuring out what he wants to do with his life, but the reality is I am probably in the "middle age" of my writing career.

Today, with the whirlwind of digital books, foreign translations, eBookSwag.com, and basically running a tiny enterprise as a mad-emperor/demi-god, I have a hard time remembering the freshness of that feeling of accomplishment. I can still remember receiving the phone call from the year before, when the editor told me he wanted to publish the book, and the subsequent search for an agent. I remember the careful planning I put into preparing for the book's release (which I outlined in a monthly series leading up to the book's publication--boy, how times have changed!) I can't remember much about my life at the time, although it was fraught with self-inflected personal troubles.

But the thing that stands out clearly is that feeling of writing the book, the way I entered that fantasy land and followed the story from beginning to end, walked in Ronnie Day's shoes (and ran, in some cases), meeting the peculiar folk of Whispering Pines. The book felt fresh when I typed it, felt fresh when it was published, and still feels fresh today. Perhaps that is why it is still my bestselling and most popular book, even after 10 years.

I'm not even sure how many copies have sold, but it's probably around 80,000 now--not a knockout bestseller but the Little Engine That Could (well,  it was out of print and not on sale for half of its life...but that's another blog post for another day). It was a Stoker Award finalist (lost out to The Lovely Bones!), and an alternate selection of the Mystery Guild and in the Doubleday Book Clubs back when mail-order was a force more powerful than Amazon. It's been translated into Spanish, Chinese, Italian, Polish, and soon Portuguese and German. It's been around the block. It's been equally slammed for being a Christian novel disguised as a horror novel and a horror novel disguised as a Christian novel. It's inspired theological essays and critical analysis and a Bentley Little blurb, and the heady but rather commonplace Stephen King comparisons. Perhaps its greatest feat was impressing my daughter when she saw THE RED CHURCH on the Kindle charts ahead of Stephen King and C.S. Lewis...

THE RED CHURCH. Ten years, and I can still smell the dusty hay when I open that creaking church door...

I still feel the chill of the river fog laying low over the Appalalachian valley...

I still hear the rustle and slither of that shadow in the belfry...

Ten years after, I still live in THE RED CHURCH, and I always will.

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DIALOGUE Blogtalk interview: Audio Archive, June 28

Free Scott Nicholson books on Kindle:

June 28-30: Creative Spirit (UK edition only)

June 29-30: Scott Nicholson Library, Vol. 5 (Amazon UK only)

June 29-30, July 1: Mad Stacks (Amazon US Amazon UK)

Creative Spirit: Bonus Edition With Screenplay By Scott Nicholson

If you've known me a looong time (at least in Internet years), you may remember a little mass-market paperback called The Manor. If so, you are one of the few, because it didn't sell a whole lot of copies. I worked very hard on the book, although I may have over-edited it in a misguided attempt to "broaden my market appeal." In short, I took out all the cussing and sex. I thought it would be the book that would launch my career, because they used to say the third book was the make-or-break point for a writing career. (Turns out a lot of what they used to say was wrong, but I was too dumb to know it.)

Seven-plus years and a rights reversion later, I get to find out if the book is truly not that good or if I was simply a victim of bad circumstances. The publisher did what publishers do, and the bookstores probably ordered like they always do, based on the previous books' sales, and the system worked the way the system worked. And The Manor was just one book of many, there for a couple of months and gone, pushed aside for the next run and never heard from again.

Until now.

I revised it, restructured it slightly, and generally went through to make sure I was happy with it. Yes, I am still happy with it. Maybe it's not Stephen King or Dean Koontz or James Herbert, but it is solidly Scott Nicholson. I didn't insert any cussing or sex in it just for fun, but it has a few "hells" and a romantic conflict at the core. It has some ghosts, a little violence, a lot of suspense, a fairly big cast of characters, shifting third-person viewpoint, and a little metaphorical theme that I didn't even figure out until years after it was published. I like it. It's part of my family and now it's back in the fold after a long journey abroad, sequestered by strangers in an unforgiving land. It's home again.

Creative Spirit (my preferred title) has been out for the UK Kindle for a year and is one of my bestselling books there. Now it's time for the U.S. release. I just released the bonus edition for Kindle with the novel, my screenplay adaptation, and an article about the real manor (you can read the article here.) I am putting out the basic novel, at a temporary lower price, after Thanksgiving if you prefer to wait, or you can get it at BN.com for Nook, all formats at Smashwords, or at Kobo

I believe readers will like this. Seven years later, I don't think the book is dated, because it's a modern Gothic removed to a remote location (it doesn't matter if the characters don't have a cell phone or wi-fi). And I have this goal: I intend to sell more copies of Creative Spirit than the publisher did.

The publisher had its chance. Now it's my turn. And your turn. Thanks for your support.

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Writing the Dark Half

Stephen King's fictional character Thad Beaumont in The Dark Half has a great description of what happens to a writer. So anytime you think you have writer's block (i.e., laziness), just remember all you have to do is start the mechanical act of writing and soon you will be lost in the fictional world. Of course, that entire book is an allegory not just of King's writing half, but the addictions he overcame:

"But he learned that, if he kept at it, if he simply kept pushing the words along the page, something else kicked in, something which was both wonderful and terrifying. The words as individual units began to disappear. Characters who were stilted and lifeless began to limber up, as if they had to loosen their muscles before they could begin their complicated dances. Something began to happen in his brain; he could almost feel the shape of the electrical waves there changing, losing their prissy goose-step discipline, turning into the soft, sloppy delta waves of dreaming sleep."

Another analogy I often call to mind is Hemingway's Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea, where the old man starts out rowing in the early dawn all stiff and miserable but knows he will soon row himself warm. Sometimes it really is as simple as dipping the next oar or planting the next word. Over and over.

Don't forget gift card and giveaways here for Be Nicholson's Agent:

Sat, Sept. 10: Insatiable Readers ...Nicholson's Ghost Stories

Sunday, Sept. 11: Fang-tastic Books ...Ethereal Messenger

Tuesday, Sept. 13: Motherlode ...These Things Happened

Tuesday, Sept. 13:  My Reading Room ...The Skull Ring

Thursday, Sept. 15: Bookhounds 

Thursday, Sept. 15: Rex Robot Reviews ...October Girls

Monday, Sept. 16: Castle Macabre...American Horror
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