Take a break from blogging and the whole world changes in but a blink. Last fall, I remember listening to a reading from Tony Faville’s self published book, “Kings of the Dead”. Six months later, it seems that Tony got his book picked up by Permuted Press and went on sale last week. Where the hell have I been?

Tony’s a pretty awesome guy. I discovered him when I was trolling through Twitter back in the day and decided to check out who George Romero followed. Turns out that Tony was at the top of his list, so I was like, Hell Bells, I’ll follow him too.

A little detour – I’m not a big fan of Twitter. It tends to get awfully noisy, awfully fast. There’s a crap load of self promotion mixed with daily inanities that can be a little nauseating. Mind you, I’m not opposed to self promotion – when you gotta get the word out, you gotta get the word out – it’s the d-bag self promotion that drives me to drink. Describing it is kind of like describing the smell of dog poop. You can’t really describe it, but you know it when you smell it. Couple that with the asinine behavior of a twelve year being recorded by a television camera and you can see why I have little stomach for it. Thankfully, there are some good pockets of Twitter and I’m happy to say Tony’s right in the center of one, hanging out with other zombie writers and bloggers.

Tony’s a pretty down to earth guy who started writing on National Novel Writing Month and ended up with a published book out of it. Before Permuted Press picked it up, he self published it and did fine good job of it, attracting the attention of zombie heavyweight Jonathan Mayberry .

Five years ago – hell, three years ago – presses would not approach the self published writer, but now authors are getting deals out of them. It’s a pretty exciting time. Well, Tony pushed his book and caught a very nice head wind.

Still, it didn’t sound like all roses. Here’s what Tony had to say about it:

I have to admit, being a self-published writer was an incredibly huge roller coaster of an experience. I had such high ups and incredibly low downs. Writers and readers can be incredibly nasty at times just because your book is self-published. I even had one group of people that because they hated my book so much, mostly because of it being self-published, that they called my wife a name that I shall not repeat. Let me just say it is THE word a man should not ever call a woman. If not for the kind words of writers like Jonathan Maberry and David Dunwoody, I would have probably quit writing that day. I write for the fun of it and if my writing gets my wife insulted like that, then it is obviously no fun. With that being said, the majority of the people I have dealt with over the past year have been intelligent enough to recognize that the industry is changing and like it or not, there will be significantly more self-published authors out there in the years to come.

It’s disheartening to hear about other writers acting like that, but I guess there’s nothing like success to breed contempt. I’m glad Tony didn’t quit which to me is the mark of a successful writer.

Tony’s doing a giveaway over here, but I think I’m going to head over to Amazon and pick myself up a copy. You should too. :)

More to come.

Eric S. Brown chats with Tony Faville, author of “Kings of the Dead” (nakedsnakepress.net <- new window)