I’m fond of this cover art because I think it encapsulates the bleak , flat and grey landscape for my forthcoming YA post-apocalyptic thriller THE NORTH. I wrote it three years ago and it’s been through a hell of a lot of revision since I penned it during NaNoWriMo. It’s the zombie apocalypse, or rather, six months past Day Zero – the day when the old world ended … but the zombies aren’t the primary antagonists, they’re just another hazard for my group of teen soldiers as they fight their way out of a city ruled by the dead in a pair of barely serviceable armoured personnel carriers and into open country where a bigger, more sinister danger threatens to end them.

THE NORTH is the first of three books, I plan to release the second installment in October 2015 and the final book in October 2016. I’ve decided to self-publish the first one in spite of the fact that I had a perfectly good offer on the table from a respectable independent publisher of zombie/post-apocalyptic books. Why?

Because I didn’t see anything they could offer that I wasn’t able to do myself.

There was a higher than standard ebook royalty offered, I turned it down. I was offered the rights back if it didn’t hit the top 100 in the first six months. (For post-apocalyptic books). I was offered the cover art even if it didn’t work out. And after spending two weeks humming and hawing about it, I politely declined.

My experience after five published works is that authors are continually in a cycle of self-promotion. Sure, the publisher has 20K likes on their Facebook page and likely a built-in fan base for their books, hell, I’d probably get a nice initial bump in sales from that. But then I spent some time on Amazon and researched post-apocalyptic books including the ones with zombies … there are some huge sellers there and a heck of a lot of them are self-published and priced competitively.

I can still do a blog tour. I can still giveaway e-arcs (which I will be doing in the next couple of weeks so email me at info AT sean DASH cummings DOT ca if you want one for review). I can still post it to Facebook and Twitter. I really didn’t see how this publisher’s marketing efforts save for the 20K likes on their Facebook page would be any different from what I and thousands of other authors do every single day.

And one final thing: I have control of the price. Had I signed on, that would have been gone. (Not to mention world rights, translation rights, etc, etc, etc.)

You know, it’s a great read. I had one publisher with some big bestselling books under their belt love the story to death and want very much to publish it, but they were worried it wouldn’t sell because the market is flooded with zombie books. (Even though this isn’t exactly a zombie book, but I digress and the numbers of sales for self-pubbed zombie books would indicate there’s still a very strong market, so perhaps he was thinking bookstores as opposed to online?)

Anyway, it’ll be an adventure. I hope it sells. I hope it sells so much that I can get new hair, a fur coat and a 1967 Mustang. It might not sell, but then again it might not sell if it was traditionally published. I know the risks. I know it’s on me now.

And that’s just fine.

It’ll be released on October 6th for epub, Kindle and print via Create Space. Oh, and you can pre-order it today …how cool is that?

Here we go!

PS. I am in love with the cover art for this one 🙂