TLDR; no-one else would, so I did it myself.
TLDR2.0; my wife told me to.
Rock Zombie has quite an interesting past. Once upon a time, it was scheduled to be published before The Book and the Blade (my debut), but due to a variety of reasons, it never quite worked out.
In preparing for this blog post, I checked my trusty spreadsheet, which is my equivalent of Stephen King’s ‘nail on the wall’, but instead of spiking publisher rejections on a nail, I organise them in a table and highlight in red when a story gets the brush off.
Like Rock Zombie, there is a lot of red.
So, let’s see. Rock Zombie has been submitted to:
- 23 publishers
- 8 said no
- 10 didn’t respond
- 3 said yes
Of those 3; 1 turned out to be a vanity press and wanted an author contribution of $4500 (now there’s some small print!), 1 pulled the plug during a run of edits because they didn’t want to risk the song lyrics (since removed), and 1… well, it just didn’t work out. I was gutted about the last one… to the point where I wanted to give up completely, but my wife told me to suck it up and self-publish. I dwelled on it for a long time, submitted to a few more places, tweaked the word count to try and force it through the door of others, and eventually came to the unerring (and some would say, obvious) conclusion that my wife was right.
There are other reasons to self-publish – not just matrimonial harmony – chief among them is complete creative control. I had a LOT of fun writing Rock Zombie and I wanted it to be a certain way. Various back-and-forths with publishers showed me that might be a little tricky. Everyone had a different idea of what this story was.
At it’s core, Rock Zombie is a shlock horror. Cheap thrills, big scares, gross humour, and a little heart. I’m aiming for an ’80s high-concept film style – terrorists seize tower, soldiers attacked by alien, three men take care of a baby – in this case, a ghost and a zombie come from the same body.
Rock Zombie should be a quick, entertaining read… a knackered and worn paperback stuffed in a back pocket and pulled out on a train… or abandoned in a pub after a quiet night suddenly gets out of hand. I want the cover to be ringed with beer stains and the pages to be turned down from over use. An easy, quick distraction in a world of bollocks.
Don’t get me wrong, I might not have accomplished that, and it certainly won’t please everyone, but this version of Rock Zombie (the one releasing on Halloween) is the story I wanted to tell all along. It’s a love-letter to the ’90s, to my childhood in the north east, to high concept films, grunge, and reading Stephen King when you’re far too young!
I hope you enjoy it. If you do, please let me know.
Cheers,
Al