I’ve gathered my first three zombie books into this handy boxed set. Over 800 pages of zombie goodness as Liam, Grandma, and Victoria explore the collapsing world of the zombie apocalypse. This version, titled as Zombie’s 1st Bite, contains Since the Sirens, Siren Songs, and Stop the Sirens. It makes a nice trilogy along what I call the “Grandma” storyline.
Fun fact: I changed the second half of book 3 just before release so I could continue the story. I didn’t quite have a conclusion for the entire mystery of the plague itself, but it would have explained a lot more of the detail behind the cause of said plague and how Grandma Marty fits in. I’m glad I changed it to read the way it does now.
New readers can save a few bucks by getting all three books in one.
As you might expect, a second boxed set it in the works, lassoing Last Fight of the Valkyries, Zombies vs Polar Bears, and Zombies Ever After.
After my experience in the Dark Humanity (NYT and USAT bestsellers) boxed set, I have an affinity for other compilations out there, including those where I know several of the authors. Once such beast on the prowl is called Dominion Rising. It has 22 brand new novels from bestselling fantasy and science fiction authors. A few were even in Dark Humanity with me.
If you get a chance, check it out. You can also enter a giveaway t0 win an Ipad Mini or over 20 paperbacks. That’s a big ol’ box o’ books!
Find the Science Fiction and Fantasy reads you’ve been craving! Whether it’s alien invasion or dark fairytales, heart-pounding galactic adventures or cyberpunk romance, Dominion Rising will satisfy with a thrilling mix of 22 BRAND NEW FULL LENGTH novels set in fantastical realms.
Sword and sorcery, far-flung galactic empires, alternative history, epic magic, slipstream futures: this collection of carefully selected, exclusive novels is sure to please and delight readers of speculative fiction.
Over five thousand pages packed with aliens, faeries, vampires, gargoyles, warriors, telepaths, space pirates, starship captains, hapless mercenaries, street urchins, robots, cyber-enhanced humans, badass heroines, and lost princesses.
This award-winning, New York Times, USA Today and International bestselling authors have left no stone in the science fiction and epic fantasy universe unturned to bring you the very best escape from planet Earth.
All the novels are only available in the Dominion Rising collection.
Readers, give them a look. You can’t go wrong for a buck.
Authors in scifi, post-apocalyptic, and dystopian, I’m looking for Newsletter swaps in May, 2017 (esp. May 15-19). You can also help the Dominion Rising team by promoting their boxed set. If there’s one thing I learned as part of Dark Humanity it’s that it helps to partner with other authors.
This book is one of my favorites. I spent a lot of my teen summers sitting in the backseat of our family’s Chevy Suburban as we explored the American West, from Glacier National Park down to god-knows where Arizona and New Mexico. On one of the longer vacations we drove from St. Louis all the way to San Francisco by way of Las Vegas. My sister and I still joke we can hear the Patsy Cline and Plácido Domingo cassette tapes my dad made us endure on those trips. Yikes!
One of the places that always stood out for me from that long trek was Hoover Dam. Back then (the 1980s) you could just walk around, take tours, and never worry about security. The bypass bridge wasn’t there, so traffic was madness, but it was all worth it for the views! The sheer scale impressed me so much that thirty years later I decided to write a book set in the same place.
The kid in me wonders what if the builders of Hoover Dam never stopped their construction? There were already numerous tunnels and endless digging, so how hard would it be to throw in a few extra rooms and then just keep going? Even if they only made a few chambers per year, there could already be a massive living space all set up for the first survivors of some kind of Armageddon. Wouldn’t that be cool?
But, alas, the adult side of me thinks it goes against human nature to prepare too far in advance. I’m as guilty as the next bloke (as Alex might say). No matter how bright the red marker on my calendar, I always find myself packing for camping trips the night before—then getting out there and wondering why I forgot my all-important camp utensils! I’m the idiot slurping his pork n’ beans right off the plate.
Speaking of forgetting, memory plays an important role in these books. I sat in that truck for two whole weeks and if I didn’t have pictures to jog my recall, it’s entirely possible I would completely and utterly forget almost every second of that trip. I certainly don’t remember what I did the day before I left, or the month after I got home. So much of what makes us who we are is left on the cutting room floor.
Still, this story tries to see the positive in humanity, even in the face of the endless boredom and dull routines of life. Because no matter how many times I forget stuff on those camping trips, I always commit myself to doing better on the next one. Sometimes I even get close to having everything I need.
But I, like humanity, have much room for improvement.
I’m honored to have been part of the Dark Humanity team these past several months. With 21 other authors we landed at #5 on the New York Times Bestseller List (#8 on USA Today list). I can’t thank my partners for the shared vision and dedication week after week to promote the boxed set and drive up those sales numbers. On release week we sold something like 22,000 copies!
We had a boxed set expert at the helm–Rebecca Hamilton–but getting onto the NYT list is harder than it looks. You’ll need to work hard, though that should be obvious. You can’t just write a good book, though that’s part of it. You can’t just throw money at marketing, though that’s necessary. Even getting a traditional publisher isn’t a guarantee of success. Even after hitting on all cylinders for the four months of build-up, the curators of the list may decide you aren’t “right” for their list. If they don’t favor you, then *poof* goes your chances. We saw this happen to peers several times in our quest. In the end, the one factor you’ll need but can’t control is luck.
There are rumors NYT is constantly making it more difficult for independent authors to reach the top shelf of the publishing industry. They’ve apparently eliminated some ebook-only categories, though it isn’t clear exactly what that means. Our set was ebook only, and it went through with no issues.
Getting credentials is wonderful, but at the end of the day they don’t mean much. It hasn’t made my writing suddenly better. I’m not magically going to make a million space bucks. It hasn’t made me popular on my street. There’s no secondary market for signed copies of my backlist. Mostly I see this as another reason to get up every morning and crank out five or ten thousand words in a day. I have to prove to my readers I’m improving my craft and living up to the accolades by creating new worlds with great characters having interesting adventures.
Nope, being a New York Times Bestseller hasn’t changed my life. But it may change my future. To that end, if you’ll excuse me, I need to crank out some words before breakfast.
EE Isherwood, New York Times and USA Today Bestselling Author
Are you on Facebook? Of course you are. It sucks us all in like a great story. And, hey, speaking of stories have you heard of the new Dark Humanity boxed set? It has 21 science fiction and fantasy authors working together to promote each other in a wonderful compilation of stories. It releases tomorrow, January 24, 2017 and we’re throwing a party!
Dark Humanity is a limited edition boxed set with USA & NYT Times Best & other amazon best selling authors of Science Fiction and Epic Fantasy. We’ve spared no great discovery, with inclusion of a diverse mix of existing titles and brand new content!
We will be partying all the way till January 28th. There will be giveaways along with author takeovers with their own giveaways throughout the ENTIRE event!
Check out the release party as each author will be taking over the page and giving away everything they can. Bring a friend!
I’m part of a group of authors in this epic boxed set. One of our number collected the first chapters from all the books and put them in a FREE Instafreebie preview for you. An appetizer of scifi and fantasy, this Instafreebie collection is a great way to meet all the authors and check out all the books you’ll discover in our boxed set.
If you love what you see, you can always pre-order our boxed set at your favorite retailer for 99 cents!
Dark Humanity is a compilation of 22 Full-Length Science Fiction and Epic Fantasy novels! It includes a diverse mix of existing titles and brand new content from more than twenty Award Winning and New York Times & USA Today bestselling authors!!
sword and sorcery
dark fantasy
military and AI science fiction
space opera
Over 1 million words!
*Estimated Total Page Count: 5,000+
Below you will find links to each platform where the book is sold.
Signed copies now available! I’ve had some people ask for signed copies of my first book but I don’t have a formal storefront to sell them. I let Amazon and other retailers do the heavy lifting of sales, but even they don’t handle signed copies very well. If you have any interest in buying a signed copy for $15.00 + a couple dollars shipping (US only, I’m sorry to say) please contact me via the contact form (top right corner of my website), or Facebook and we can work something out.
I’m honored that my first zombie book has garnered over 200 reviews in the year since I launched it. She’s come a long way in that year, mostly due to constant editing and improvement in my writing skills over that period of time. The very first version of my book, when I launched it on Dec. 15, 2015, was terrible when held to my current editorial standards. I was fortunate that my readers enjoyed the story enough to give me the benefit of the doubt on those editing snafu’s.
More importantly, the reviews have been excellent. It warms my heart to hear people are enjoying the story of Liam and his great-grandma and care enough to leave a review on Amazon. Those reviews inspired me to write more books in the series. Now I have six completed and I’m working on a seventh. There is still much to learn about the world of the zombies!
All six zombie books combined have over 300 reviews, and the average rating over the 300 is above 4 out of 5. My latest book, Zombies Ever After, has 15 reviews and 4.8 for an average. I’m heading in the right direction. As an independent author I don’t have the heart to read each review–5 star reviews can make you feel too big for your britches, while 1-star reviews can make you doubt if you aren’t destined to write technical manuals for garbage disposals–but I’m thrilled by those averages.
Since the Sirens is always free, and can be found on Amazon, Nook and iBooks, and Instafreebie. I put it out there for free as a sneaky way to get people to check out the series and get hooked. 😉
August was a busy month here in Zombie Book Headquarters. I wanted to get my novel to Audible, which meant I needed to give it one more good scrubbing in the form of an edit. It took me several weeks but I think the book is a much tighter read. I’m so pleased with how it turned out. Listening to the novel is a whole new experience for me. Very cool to hear the excellent narrator, Nancy Peters, bring my characters to life.
Hearing the story, as an author, really helps bring pieces of the story into focus that needed more emotion or clarification. Unlike a book, a listener can’t go backward (easily) to figure out who is speaking at a given time. If the text wasn’t clear, the audio is twice as muddy. That’s why the final edit needed extra diligence. In the end, it made the text book better as well as the narration.
I’m looking forward to putting my other books on Audible, but I need to take a break from the intensity of that project for a while before I do!
I would love to hear whether you listen to zombie books, or others, on Audible. I don’t know if this is typical, but I don’t listen to audio books. Part of this is that I’m never in my car–I’ve worked from home for the past 12 years. If I had to sit in my car every day I think I’d rather listen to a book than what passes for morning radio.
That said, now that I’m publishing to audio, I think I need to get in the game!
Book 1 in the six-book Sirens of the Zombie Apocalypse series. Independently published!
A little over a year ago I began my journey as an Indie author. My job in IT was downsized, I was tired of moving bits and bytes around, and I had little enthusiasm to continue working in the field. Twenty years was plenty. But what would I do to make money? How would I feed my two young children? Pay the mortgage? Ugh!
I wish I could say the light came on and I knew exactly what I wanted. That’s how it works in the movies, right? But what really happened was I decided I wasn’t going to be one of those unemployed guys parked on a sofa playing video games all day, just waiting for that dream job to knock on the door. I kept one foot in the IT world by doing contract web design work to keep some money coming in. At the same time I did a lot of reading online about how to author books and publish them. I had some books I’d written for fun, and I wondered if I could sell them…
In 2014 I wrote my first novel as part of the November edition of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoMo). I was so pleased with the result I began writing a second book in early 2015, and a third in mid-2015. By the time I was let go in August 2015 I was about halfway done with book 3. If I was going to be unemployed, I figured I’d use the time wisely and finish those books and publish them to Amazon Kindle. All the articles I’d read said it was super easy.
At the time I wasn’t necessarily thinking the books would make me any money. The simple act of writing them was satisfaction enough. Publishing was just my way of declaring them “real.”
In December 2015 I published Since the Sirens: Sirens of the Zombie Apocalypse, Book 1. In January 2016 I published book 2. February was book 3. Those were the three books I had already completed, minus editing. Once book 3 went out the door, and the series started to sell, I realized a) this WAS a way to make money and b) I needed to write more books!
Write all the time. Enjoy the process. Build on each success.
For me, #PoweredByIndie helped motivate me to write six books in my zombie series during 2016 — each title was close to 100k words. It was an exhausting process, but sales and reviews have justified the effort. Granted, I’m not making much more money than if I worked for minimum wage at a fast food establishment, but this is the foundation for a career I’m building. Being an indie means I have to learn the craft, learn how to write to market, learn what makes a good cover, become my own marketer, and most importantly learn what works (and doesn’t) for other indie writers. I’ve joined author communities like 20BooksTo50k — designed to help writers reach that magical place called “being an author” full time.
“Being an author” is hard work. It has been the hardest year of my life in terms of employment. I’ve spent weekends editing. I’ve spent Friday nights formatting print books. I’ve sweated deadlines and dealt with the pressure of not making enough to balance the checkbook. But, every ounce of sweat goes into my own business. It helps me improve my next book. It brings me closer to permanently working at the “job” I’ve loved more than any other in my life. After a year of banging keys, I’d say I’m almost there.
Now, I must get on down the tracks. I have another book to write!
I’ve gathered my first three zombie books into this handy boxed set. Over 800 pages of zombie goodness as Liam, Grandma, and Victoria explore the collapsing world of the zombie apocalypse. This version, titled as Zombie’s 1st Bite, contains Since the Sirens, Siren Songs, and Stop the Sirens. It makes a nice trilogy along what I call the “Grandma” storyline.
Signed copies now available! I’ve had some people ask for signed copies of my first book but I don’t have a formal storefront to sell them. I let Amazon and other retailers do the heavy lifting of sales, but even they don’t handle signed copies very well. If you have any interest in buying a signed copy for $15.00 + a couple dollars shipping (US only, I’m sorry to say) please contact me via the contact form (top right corner of my website), or Facebook and we can work something out.
