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catalogs—check mailing list—check boatload o’ books—check giveaways: sick bags, t-shirts, postcards—check Ok, almost everything is packed for World Fantasy…except our clothes. I think we’re reaching the end of the line with the Sick Bags. We bought 2 or 3 hundred pill bottles and there will probably only be 30 or 40 left after this trip….

The prep for WFC is moving along, got most of the books packed but it looks like we’re going to need another suitcase this time around. We’ve got quite a few new books on the horizon and I’m beginning to feel an avalanche of editing slowly building that may burst down upon me in a…

I can’t believe World Fantasy (and Halloween!) are right around the corner. I’m looking forward to an early Halloween party this weekend. It’s been a long time since John and I had costumes for Halloween. Plus I’m hoping to bake up a few spooky treats for the party. We’re also supposed to pick up a…

We got the coolest package from cakeearthhead in the mail the other day. It had tons of waacky stuff but my favorite was this piece of art inspired by the forthcoming Play Dead by Mike Arnzen. This piece is so cool. I also loved the home-made packaging created from the box for a “Rampaging Scorpian…

The InDesign class is going well but sitting and listening all day without email or lj makes me a little crazy. I was thinking today about how the success of promo opportunities like the Horror of Writing workshop and the chats can’t just be measured by how many people showed up. The beauty of these…

The chat went great! As I expected Mike and Darren had lots of interesting things to say and Horrorwench & Bloody Mary asked a lot of in-depth questions…whew, I wouldn’t want to be an author facing their scrutiny. We gave away copies of 100 Jolts, A Dirge for the Temporal and Sick so it was…

I saw this handwriting analysis thing on blindsidepubs’s lj so I decided to try it myself. It’s pretty accurate and explains a lot about the way I do things with RDSP. Here’s the beginning, it’s long so I put a link in instead of posting the whole thing: Jennifer has a healthy imagination and displays…

The Horror of Writing was enormously successful! Check out the pics: http://www.angelfire.com/zine2/thedreampeople/rds/eventframe2.html Everybody seemed to have such a great time. The authors cleaned up so nice and had such intelligent things to say about writing, literature and horror. They really did me proud. John was an excellent moderator (he always asks the questions people are…

I’m looking forward to the Horror of Writing thing tonight. It will be good to see Brian Keene and the Warners again. And it’s always cool to hang out with Ron Malfi. Supposedly his brother, Darin, will be there wearing a Raw Dog Screaming Press/Fall of Never T-shirt. That is too cool! I hope to…

Ok, Sick has sold another bunch of copies through LSI this month which is great! But it’s also driving me nuts because I can’t understand the impetus behind all the sales. The book has been out for 10 months now. There are still occasionally reviews coming out like one that will appear in this issue…

The Horror of Writing Workshop is this Thursday! It would be cool to see some lj’ers there. Get all the info here. Plus, don’t forget the Horror-web chat with Mike Arnzen and Darren Speegle on Sunday. I’m really looking forward to both of these events. Authors really are pretty interesting people to talk to when…

I saw something interesting a few days back on tj_crowley’s journal (the person who runs Gothic.net) about how much it costs to maintain that site. He mentioned that in six years he’d never had more than $100 worth of advertising per month but he’d spent $120,000 total over those six years to keep the place…

One thing I’ve been worrying about it that Lightningsource/Ingram, our printer/distributor, is instituting a “new stocking strategy”. They used to keep at least two copies of every book on hand so that the books would be listed as in stock. It’s important for the titles to be in stock because a lot of customers won’t…

The bizarre horror issue of The Dream People is now online, go, read. Although this issue was rushed I think it actually came out great. This is the first time we’ve published Jon Hodges in TDP knowing_carrion also Craig Sernotti mr_graig as well as Holly Day, Lavie Tidhar, Ray Wallace and John Sunseri. I’m hoping…

RDSP calculates royalties at the end of September and the end of March so we spent part of the weekend crunching numbers and writing checks. The new financial program we have makes this so much easier! It’s a good feeling to be able to send out checks, even if they aren’t huge ones. It calculates…

If you haven’t heard about it already author Douglas Clegg is auctioning off the limited hardcover rights to his book The Abandoned on ebay. Check it out: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2492392403 The bid is already up past $1000 and apparently the auction itself is getting a lot of views. Clegg really knows how to stir the pot! I…

Frantically trying to pull things together for the Halloween issue of The Dream People thanks to last-minute contributions from knowing_carrion and darren_speegle we’ve pretty much got the contents set. Though we could use one or two more dark poems. The main thing missing is art. I guess it will all come together in the end,…

Bare Bone #6 will be available in October but unfortunately #5 didn’t sell as well as we’d hoped. We’ve been working on ways to make sure we’ll be able to continue putting Bare Bone out and have started selling a few ads in the back of the book. This will at least help offset the…

Just got in an excellent review from Nancy Jackson, aka horrordiva, for Everybody Scream!. As far as I know it’s the first one and it will appear on 4 different sites. The first place it will go up is Dream Forge but it will also be in The Midwest Book Review, Gothic Revue and The…

We’re pretty close to getting all the details worked out for another chat on Horror-Web.com. The first one, with John as the guest, was a big success and a really good time. Those people come up with the best questions and really research their topics! So it’s going to be Mike Arnzen and (hopefully) Darren…

I’ve been working on the layout for Play Dead and have been having lots of fun with pips; hearts, diamonds, spades & clubs. I should have a draft pretty soon to send to Mike. We’ve also been working on setting up an interview for Jeffrey Thomas with Dark Discoveries magazine. We wanted set up as…

Everybody Scream! was on the Shocklines bestseller list last week and this week too. The Fall of Never is number one over at Project Pulp even though it is only a pre-order. Too cool! We got the information for a distribution company yesterday which we would need if we did an offset print run for…

Somebody recently asked for our advice on how to approach publishers which got me thinking. I can only speak about the small press but after being on the publishing side for a little while this is how I would do it: Each press is an individual case so the best thing to do is research…

I made some much needed but minor updates to the web site yesterday. Plus I did the recommend thing for Everybody Scream! on Amazon.com. If anyone wants to go and recommend the book themselves the ISBN is 0974503142. Choose a book you think matches Jeff Thomas’ style and put the ISBN in the blank next…

Yesterday we met up with Jon S., the business half of Z. Malice, to pick up another batch of special editions. We had a great lunch chatting with Jon and Nadine about future projects and how Z. Malice got started. It’s always fun meeting people instead of doing everything through email. The special editions have…