Amanda Hocking

As you may recall, I mentioned that my zombie series The Hollows was being adapted into a graphic novel. For the past several months, I have been working with Dynamite Comics and writer Tony Lee and artist Steve Uy, and now it’s finally being released as Amanda Hocking’s The Hollows: A Hollowland Graphic Novel, and I think it turned out pretty fantastic.

Now I am going to answer a few questions that you may have.

What’s the deal with it?
Welcome to the world of the best selling novel Hollowland as never seen before – adapted and enhanced by #1 New York Times bestseller Tony Lee (X-Men Unlimited, Doctor Who), with superb artwork by Steve Uy (Avengers Initiative, JSA Classified).

It’s Day One as a new pandemic sweeps the globe, and all over the world people are turning into mindless zombies. But for five people – siblings Remy and Max King, med student Blue Adams, rockstar Lazlo Durante and teenager Harlow Smith – it’s the start of a journey that they can never return from! Learn for the first time how the characters of Hollowland started their journeys as we go back to the very beginning of the story. Dynamite Entertainment presents Amanda Hocking’s The Hollows: A Hollowland graphic novel.
  
It’s really cool, because it allows people who’ve never read any of the books to jump in, but it also always fans of the series to see something different.

You can also read more about the whole collaboration from this piece at Publisher’s Weekly. 

How can I get it?
It will be a 10-part series, released in digital-only installments, but it will be out in one full print graphic novel toward the end of this year or early 2014.

Get Part 1 from Amazon
Get Part 2 from Amazon
Get Part 1 & 2 from Comixology
Get Part 1 & 2 from Dark Horse Digital

Here’s the release dates:
Part 1 & 2 are up now, with Part 1 being FREE.
Part 3 – June 12
Part 4 – June 26
Part 5 – July 10
Part 6 – July 24
Part 7 – Aug 7
Part 8 – Aug 21
Part 9 – Sept 4
Part 10 – Sept 18

Why did you do this instead of writing a third book?
This isn’t an either/or scenario. It’s like how you get presents for Christmas and for your birthday. One doesn’t cancel out the other (unless your birthday is on Christmas, in which case, I’m sorry). This was something that I did in conjunction in with Dynamite Comics during a period of time when I was not and would not have been working on a third Hollows book, whether there were comics or not.

I don’t like graphic novels. Is there another way I can read this?
I think these are amazing graphic novels and everyone should give them a chance, but I understand that some people don’t like them. But let’s put this another way. Let’s say you’re a huge fan of Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire book series, but you absolutely loathe TV, so while you want to read more books, you don’t want to watch True Blood. That’s okay. You can still enjoy the books without watching True Blood, but there really isn’t another way of getting the content from the TV show without watching it.

It’ the same way with the graphic novels. It’s an adaptation of the novels.

Most of you have probably seen the devastation from the tornado in Oklahoma. The footage of the tornado, and the total destruction left behind it is so completely mind boggling, I can’t begin to fathom how the people affected by the disaster are coping.

To help out, I am auctioning off books on eBay with 100% of the proceeds going to the Red Cross to help the disaster relief.

I have three different sets of books available at eBay:

Autographed Paperbacks of the entire Trylle series – Switched, Torn, and Ascend

Autographed Paperbacks of Wake and Lullaby

Autographed Hardcovers of Wake, Lullaby, and Tidal

If you’re not interested in the books, I would still encourage to donate or help in any way you can. Here are few places that you can help:

Regional Food Bank
American Red Cross
Salvation Army 
Shelter Box

You can also text STORM to 80888 to donate $10 to the Salvation Army, REDCROSS to 90999 to donate $10 to the Red Cross,  and FOOD to 32333 to donate $10 to the Regional Food Bank. 

I get this question a lot: “How do you get over writer’s block?”

But I decided to do the opposite and write a blog called “How do you create writer’s block?” It occurred to me to write this because I was feeling creative, about to do some work, and then managed to completely kill it.

So here are some tips on how to stifle the creative juices:

-Read reviews, of your own books perferably, particulary negative reviews, although positive cans freak you out, too. If somebody loved one of your books, it means that your next book has to be even better, because nothing’s worse than taking somebody who loves you and turning them into somebody who hates you. Oh, and confuse your books for yourself. When somebody says, “I didn’t like this book,” they really mean, “I didn’t like you, the author, and I think you, the author, are terrible and awful and this review is totally personal.”

-Read reviews of other books (or films or poems), especially your favorite books. Find a really scathing review of whatever book you consider to be the greatest book ever written, and then realize that if somebody hates the GREATEST BOOK EVER WRITTEN that much, what chance does your book every have?

-Read glowing reviews of fantastic books, and realize again, that there are truly, insanely, almost painfully brilliant books that exist in the world, and yours will never, ever, ever, EVER be anywhere close to that good, so why even bother?

-Check your sales rankings. If they’re low, obsess over why they’re low and fear what that means for future books, your career, the college fund for your children, and any other plans you’d thought of making for the future now that you’ll have to find a new job and everyone will laugh at you for being a total public failure. If you’re rankings are high, assume that it’s either a) a glitch, or b) your rankings can’t stay high forever, and soon they will plummet, and so now you begin to panic trying to come up with ways to sell books well forever, when in reality you never even really knew how you sold any in the first place.

-Think about money. How much you have, how much you don’t have, how much soliders and teachers make, how much money is wasted on crap things, how much spent on a pair of flipflops at Walgreens and then you didn’t even wear them because they were uncomfortable, and there’s people in Africa that don’t even have clean water, and millions of people die every day from starvation, and you put on 2 pounds last week, and the whole world is completely terrible and awful and you’re not doing enough to make it better.

-Check Facebook. Not for anything particular and most of the stuff you see will annoy/irritate/bore you, and you don’t even know why you’re looking or why you’re friends with a lot of these people, but you look anyway, compulsively. A few things amuse you, but most things won’t, but you. Just. Keep. Looking.

-Go on Twitter. Twitter is better. You like Twitter because it’s funnier, the links are smarter, and it’s just generally a better experience. This cheers you up after you’ve thought about how terrible your writing is, how bad your sales are/will be, how the world is ending, so it’s better than Facebook, which only depresses you. But just like Facebook, you check it compulsively and achieve nothing.

-Watch videos of Heath Ledger on YouTube. There really is no good reason to do this, but you find yourself doing it anyway, and getting sad remembering that he’s dead, and then getting sad remembering that River Phoenix is dead, and getting sad remembering that Joaquin Phoenix is getting weird, and how everything changes and time keeps on  moving and people die every day and are you really accomplishing anything?

-Wonder if everything you do/think/feel/love is terrible and pointless, and even as you wonder it, you know it’s true. In the scheme of things, all your obsessions and thoughts and worries are totally pointless, and in the blink of an eye, you’ll be dead, and everyone you know will be dead, and in hundreds of years, they won’t even remember you, and nothing you do really matters because you don’t do anything that matters. You could, but you don’t. And that should be liberating, and it is – a little – but then you get depressed again.

-Compare yourself to other authors. But don’t stop there. Compare yourself to all kinds of people. Celebrities, Noble prize winners, doctors, presidents, sick kids, the poor, the rich, Kanye West, your mom, a kid you went to high school with, a cashier at the supermarket, a walrus, Juliet Capulet – it doesn’t matter who it is, as long as you are comparing yourself to somebody and coming up lacking. And if you’re doing it right, you can come up lacking against anyone. Sure, Hitler was evil and awful and slaughtered millions of innocent people, but he took over most of Europe and he was a vegetarian. You ate chicken nuggets and complained about getting up before noon today.

-For bonus points, assume that all other authors hate you, that everyone who has ever read anything you’ve written hates the words you write. In fact every one who has ever thought of you or knows of your existence thinks you’re a joke and a hack and wants you to stop writing words.

Congratulations! You’ve killed all your creativity. Or if you haven’t, you’re a better man than I am, and let’s face it, you probably are. 

It’s also safe to say that since all of these things kills your creativity and also your will to live, that doing the opposite of those things will make you feel better. Don’t read reviews. Don’t worry about sales. Don’t compare yourself to other people. Turn off Facebook and Twitter and YouTube.

Better yet, don’t be a neurotic asshole like me, and write anyway, cause who really gives a crap what anyone else thinks?

According to the countdown I have on my phone, it’s only 17 more days until Tidal comes out (and only 80 more days until the final book in the series Elegy is out). I plan on having lots of stuff about Tidal and the Watersong series over the next 17 days.

And I’m starting with this – the new book trailer for Tidal:

Also, check out this awesome widget. You can add it to your blog/site, and it’ll make it easier to keep you up-to-date on all everything going on with the Watersong.  Plus, it looks cool.

Yesterday, I wrote this blog: My Reaction to the Gender Coverup, and in reaction to this piece by Maureen Johnson – The Gender Coverup – and also this piece by Deborah Copaken Kogan, and even this older post by Claudia Gray – “I’m not like other girls.” I absolutely stand by everything in the blog I wrote, but I want to clarify a few things.

The first thing is something that Kiersten White mentioned on Twitter. She pointed out – rightfully – that she writes books for teen girls, so her book jackets are marked for teen girls, and that’s okay. In fact, that’s as it should be. Book covers should be marketed to your audience, and hers – like mine – is predominately female, and predominately teen.

There is nothing wrong with covers like hers or mine, or pink covers, or ones with sparkles and unicorns and lollipops and puppies, if you are writing a book about those things for an audience that likes those things. And because you write for teen girls as opposed to adult males your book isn’t automatically inferior.

There are terrible books written for teen girls, but ZOMG there are terrible books written for adult males, just like there’s terrible books written on dog training and dieting and psychology and history and every thing under the sun. Some books are bad. Some books are good. The deciding factor about whether books are good or not has to do with how they’re written – not if they’re written by women or men or for women or men.

I take issue with is two things:
1. That books about serious subjects, like photographing the war, are given “girly” “chick-lit” covers and glib titles instead of serious covers and titles, the way their male counterparts would be.

2. That books with “girly” “chick-lit” covers and subject are considered less than nearly every other type of fiction on the market. Books about romance are considered less than thrillers or action-oriented novels, even though both can be equally compelling and equally trashy.

So that’s the moral of the story.

I was angry yesterday, and it makes me sad to hear how many people related to my experience in yesterday’s blog. But I do think progress is being made. Eventually, we’ll get where we need to be.