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Showing posts with label Mark Edward Hall. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mark Edward Hall. Show all posts
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Secrets of Best-Selling Self-Published Authors #1 - Mark Edward Hall
Hi everyone - hope you are all well and enjoying life as much as possible. For those of you readers who sometimes wonder what all the hullabaloo is about self-publishing vs traditional publishing, this is the first in a series of exclusive interviews with best-selling self-published authors. The interviews will pretty much reveal all you need to know (plus more!) about why some authors choose to publish their work independently (as opposed to traditionally). For authors (and prospective authors) thinking of self-publishing, or wondering similar questions, I hope that this series of interviews will offer you some valuable tips and advice from these best-selling self-published authors, that you can use to navigate and hone your own adventures in today's exciting digital publishing world. Without further ado, let's kick it all off with this fantastic interview with best-selling author Mark Edward Hall.
I was the only outlier. I did a tremendous amount of self- promo and soon I was receiving fan mail, some from as far away as Australia and the UK. By 2004 I had written two more books, The Haunting of Sam Cabot and The Holocaust Opera, both horror stories. I self-published them both. In 2009 I got an email from a new small press publisher called Damnation Books who wanted to publish my work. They subsequently republished all three of my novels. I signed away my rights for five years. I wish I never had. The royalty rate was a little higher than most traditional publishers but still terrible. That was about the time kindle exploded on the scene. Damnation did very little for me other than put my books out there and let them go stagnant. I was sorry I’d given my rights away.
In the meantime, I wrote three more novels and several novellas. These I self-published. No way was I ever going to let another publisher have my books. Apocalypse Island came out in 2012 and has done amazingly well. Soul Thief, its sequel, came out the following year and is doing very well also. I’m publishing the third in the series (Song of Ariel) as a serial novel simply because my readers are demanding more now.
I know this is a long answer to your short question. The simple answer is, this is my publishing history. I never sent out queries to hundreds of publishers like so many other writers did. I’m independent and love going it alone. Damnation Books was my one fall down and I’ll never let that happen again. By the way, I received the rights back to The Haunting of Sam Cabot last September, and have sold more copies in five months than I did in five years with a publisher. I get the other two books back this year. That’s it, unless I am offered millions of dollars from a major publisher, I will never ever consider signing with one again. And I will never sign away my digital rights for any price. This is the future and any author who doesn’t retain his or her digital rights is a fool.
For more of this fascinating interview, please visit Self-Publishing Successfully for full transcript.
Where do you get your
inspiration from for your writing and for the way you brand yourself as an
author?
As a writer my inspiration comes
from the world around me. I’m a news junkie and I like to use current events as
inspiration. I’ve also done a lot of reading in my life and use historical
events in the mix. My
unique author branding comes from a mix of genres. For the most part my novels
are hard to categorize. They’re a mix of crime, scifi, horror, fantasy and
apocalyptic. Some say this is the kiss of death but it’s been very successful
for me. There’s
always a little romance (and sex) in there as well, because to me it can’t be
real without the tensions of love, the single most important driving force in
human history. You have to remember that love and sex were here long before
money and greed. I do
write some straight horror, and I love it, but the supernatural thriller is
where I’m most at home.
Did you try to get
publishing contracts for your books early on with traditional book publishers?
If so, did you have any success there or if not what was it that made you
decide to self-publish the majority of your work?
My first novel, The
Lost Village, was completed in the late nineties. At the time the Scott
Meredith agency in New York had something called the Discovery Program. You
send them four hundred bucks and they promised to put your book at the top of
the slush pile and get back to you within a few months. They were a major
agency with a great reputation, so I said, why the hell not and sent it along.
They were true to their word. Within sixty days I heard from a kind editor who
told me the book was amazing, that I had a promising future as a writer, but
The Lost Village was too long and therefore unpublishable. He said there wasn’t
a publisher on the planet who would publish a 258,000 word novel from an
unknown. He said if I was King or Patterson, no problem. But I wasn’t King or
Patterson. Please send something else along that’s at a more appropriate
length, say 90 to 110 thousand words. This
was in 2002 and I said screw it and published it myself. Back then, there
weren’t any kindles or nooks so I went with one of those vanity presses. The
book came out quite well. It was in hardcover and paperback and I was happy
with it. I joined the New England Horror writers, did some group signings and
actually sold quite a lot of books.
To the chagrin of some of the other members who were all traditionally
published authors.I was the only outlier. I did a tremendous amount of self- promo and soon I was receiving fan mail, some from as far away as Australia and the UK. By 2004 I had written two more books, The Haunting of Sam Cabot and The Holocaust Opera, both horror stories. I self-published them both. In 2009 I got an email from a new small press publisher called Damnation Books who wanted to publish my work. They subsequently republished all three of my novels. I signed away my rights for five years. I wish I never had. The royalty rate was a little higher than most traditional publishers but still terrible. That was about the time kindle exploded on the scene. Damnation did very little for me other than put my books out there and let them go stagnant. I was sorry I’d given my rights away.
In the meantime, I wrote three more novels and several novellas. These I self-published. No way was I ever going to let another publisher have my books. Apocalypse Island came out in 2012 and has done amazingly well. Soul Thief, its sequel, came out the following year and is doing very well also. I’m publishing the third in the series (Song of Ariel) as a serial novel simply because my readers are demanding more now.
I know this is a long answer to your short question. The simple answer is, this is my publishing history. I never sent out queries to hundreds of publishers like so many other writers did. I’m independent and love going it alone. Damnation Books was my one fall down and I’ll never let that happen again. By the way, I received the rights back to The Haunting of Sam Cabot last September, and have sold more copies in five months than I did in five years with a publisher. I get the other two books back this year. That’s it, unless I am offered millions of dollars from a major publisher, I will never ever consider signing with one again. And I will never sign away my digital rights for any price. This is the future and any author who doesn’t retain his or her digital rights is a fool.
For more of this fascinating interview, please visit Self-Publishing Successfully for full transcript.
Mark Edward Hall, Secrets of Best-Selling Self-Published Authors, Self-Publishing, #selfpub, Writing, Amazon Best-sellers, Selfpublishing vs traditional publishing, Mark Edward Hall, William Cook, Joe Konrath, Hugh Howey, David Gaughran
MARK EDWARD HALL - 'SOUL THIEF' - NEW RELEASE ANNOUNCED
I first met (albeit online) Mark when we shared a TOC in a horror anthology (Masters of Horror) back in 2010. Since then, we have remained online friends and I'm pleased to announce he has a new novel out called Soul Thief, which is the follow up to his fantastic novel Apocalypse Island. Anyway, without further ado here is the lowdown on the enigma that is Mark Edward Hall.
Mark Edward Hall has worked at a variety of professions including hunting and fishing guide, owner of a recording studio, singer/songwriter in several rock n' roll bands. He also worked in the aerospace industry on a variety of projects including the space shuttle and the Viking Project, the first Mars lander, of which the project manager was one of his idols, Carl Sagan. He went to grammar school in Durham, Maine with Stephen King, and in the early 1990s decided to get serious with his own desire to write fiction. His first short story, Bug Shot was published in 1995. His critically acclaimed supernatural thriller, The Lost Village was published in 2003. Since then he has published many books including his bestselling novella, The Haunting of Sam Cabot, his bestselling independent ebook, Servants of Darkness and his acclaimed thriller novel, Apocalypse Island. Soul Thief is his latest novel and is available now.
Soul Thief is the second novel in the Blue Light series. The first novel is Apocalypse Island. Although Soul Thief is a stand alone novel, it would be best if you read Apocalypse Island first.

Here’s a description of Soul Thief:
The Brotherhood of the Order is one of the oldest and most mysterious organizations on earth. Its primary mission is to protect one of the most carefully guarded secrets in human history, an object so enigmatic and powerful that in the wrong hands it could wreak havoc upon the earth. In the right hands it just might have the power to save humanity from its own destructive impulses.
Doug McArthur, hit in the face by a young friend at the age of seven, is suddenly able to see a supernatural creature who calls itself Collector. Doug’s life is turned upside down when he realizes that it’s not just the creature he sees, but the atrocities it commits.
Since marrying Annie his visions have been quiet and Doug is grateful. Now Annie is pregnant with their first child—a child that promises to be special—and their world is in the process of coming apart, beginning with the destruction of their home and forcing them to run for their lives, back into the world of Annie’s childhood, the De RochĆ© dynasty, to a murdered mother and a cruel and enigmatic father.
Doug, whose love for Annie borders on the obsessive, has a deep and abiding hate for her father. He is nearly insane with grief over their plight, but soon finds that De RochĆ© is the least of his worries when he begins to hear the pleading voice of a lost child that he cannot possibly save. And then, in the midst of Annie’s mother’s funeral, Doug is given a strange artifact, along with a dire warning by a dying priest. He must leave Annie and his unborn child and begin a sojourn into the darkest regions of the human heart.
In his attempt to save his wife and unborn child, Doug finds that there is much more at stake than the lives of two people, perhaps the very salvation of the human soul.
Soul Thief is the second novel in the Blue Light Series, a supernatural thriller that will keep you guessing until the stunning conclusion.
Look for On the Night Wind, the third book in the Blue Light Series, scheduled for publication in 2014.
Check out the following links for other great titles and interesting information about the man himself.
Twitter: markedwardhall
Facebook: Facebook profile
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=66893456&locale=en_US&trk=tab_pro
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/markedwardhall
Blog: http://www.markedwardhall.com
Mark Edward Hall, Writer, Author, Feature, New Release, Amazon, Kindle, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace
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