Happy Anniversary, TZC!

On September 1st, 2008, I took a leap of faith. I decided to put the first draft of my novel, The Zombie Chronicles: Escape, up on the web as a podcast novel. I was nervous, scared and excited. Having discovered podcast fiction in April of 2008, I thought it was a pretty cool way to get my writing out to people and perhaps receive a little feedback. As the first episode rolled out on that Monday morning, I held my breath…

The response was overwhelming, to say the least. People commented, sent me emails and I even got a phone call or two. They liked it! They really liked it! Whew…now I could breathe a sigh of relief.

By Thursday of that week I had a sponsor for the podcast in the way of Permuted Press. I had no idea that it would be a relationship that would turn in to my novel being in book stores nationwide.

They sent out a press release and my website got hammered, receiving more than 500 hits on the Friday as people flocked to see what all the fuss was about. They liked it, too! Then Scott Sigler played my promo on an episode of Nocturnal. More people came. Most of them liked it as well.

Two months later, in November of 2008, I signed my very first publishing contract. Thanks to the success of the yet unfinished podcast and truth be told, yet unfinished novel (I had around 25,000 words written at the time), Permuted Press made me an offer to bring all three books in the trilogy to print. That made me the world’s first podcast novelist to get a publishing deal off an unfinished manuscript. Not just one book either, three books. Cool.

The feedback kept coming in the form of emails, comments on the blog and iTunes, twitter, facebook, MySpace and voice mail. People either loved it or hated it. I understood (still do) why people disliked it. It was, after all, a first draft. I’ve always said that if I had to go back and do it all over again, I would wait until the novel was finished and edited before I started to podcast it. Oh well. More people liked it than hated it, so that was okay by me.

Then I got a phone call that I will never, ever forget. It was probably the absolute best phone call I have ever received. It was a Thursday night, June 18th to be precise. Jacob Kier from Permuted Press told me that Simon and Schuster was going to be publishing 7 of their titles through the Pocket Books imprint and that mine was one of them. Oh. My. God. We talked for 30 minutes, discussing the details. The Zombie Chronicles would be going out to stores nation wide under this co-publishing deal, with 25-30,000 copies being printed.

My dreams had come true. Something I had wished for since I was a kid was finally happening. I called my mom. She cried, I cried, then I got drunk.

All this might sound a little narcissistic, like I’m patting myself on the back. You know what? I am. I’m damn proud of everything I have accomplished in the past year. Most writers wait years, moving their way up the ladder by first publishing short stories, before someone will even take notice of their novel, let alone agree to publish it. It’s a new day, though. It’s a new media world and things happen faster than ever these days.

I make no apologies.

However, I am not so blinded by the past year to know that I did not do it all by myself. I had help along the way. Without a few thousand people cheering me on, none of this would have happened. YOU, the listener, is why all this happened. YOU supported me. YOU kept waiting for the next episode to come out. YOU showed me that I was doing something special and YOU made the publishing world stand up and take notice. Without YOU, who knows where I would be right now?

So from the bottom of my heart, THANK YOU!

Also, thank you to the the many other podcast novelists that have helped me out along the way. Namely, Matthew Wayne Selznick, Mur Lafferty, J.C. Hutchins and Scott Sigler.

It’s been a hell of a year. At the time of me writing this, The Zombie Chronicles has 315,000 downloads. I’m currently writing the second novel in the series, INVASION and things are progressing just fine.

I don’t know what the next year will bring but I’m looking forward to it. I’m looking forward to seeing my novel on the shelves of bookstores everywhere and seeing you guys holding copies of it in your hands. Really, that’s all I’ve ever wanted.

So let’s celebrate, you and I. Let’s have a party, tell some jokes and watch as that guy in the corner gets shot down for the third time.

Happy Anniversary to The Zombie Chronicles!