Canister X – A.P. Fuchs: Zombie, Paranormal Romance and Superhero Novelist, Blogger, Artist, Publisher

This weekend I created the Blood of my World Boxed Set for Amazon Kindle, a collection of my paranormal romance series containing Discovery of Death, Memories of Death and Life of Death. It is Volume Two of the A.P. Fuchs Library, with Volume One being books from The Axiom-man Saga (coming this week). These boxed sets are a great way to grab a bunch of my titles and/or complete your collection for a great price. It is also on Smashwords, Drivethru Fiction, and should start showing up on the Nook and iPad shortly.

I wrote an introduction to the Blood of my World Boxed Set and want to share it here.

Hope you check the collected book sets out.

The intro:

Blood of my World Boxed Set Introduction
by
A.P. Fuchs

It seems to me that there is a direct correlation between love and horror, the both of which are two sides of the proverbial coin. They are extremes, where one is light and bliss, filled with goodness, hope, stability–physical, emotional, mental. The other is darkness, danger, pain and untold suffering. They also have a tendency to gel, namely in the arena of romantic relationships.
One can’t help but wonder how much different our world would be if these two elements–arguably one element–were not present. I suspect life would look more like a simulation than an actual experience, with folks walking around conducting business mechanically, without nuance–robotic.
Is it not true that human life as you and I know it are birthed and lived from either horror or love or a mix of both? Is not every other human emotion rooted in one of these?
Love is an especially dangerous thing. Beautiful, yes, but dangerous. While ascending to new heights with your lover, when during those early stages all is well in the world and inner peace is achieved–the fear of it all slipping away always lingers a little or a lot until, perhaps, that fateful day comes and your fear becomes reality. The darkness descends, hope is abandoned, and searing pain rips through your chest until you can barely stand. Once you collapse, you think it’s won and the hot coils of loss’s embrace will finally leave you, but instead, it continues to ravage you in waves, bringing you to the brink of apathy and beyond, into self-destruction and mental chaos. Life is looked at through fogged glass. All other emotions are felt through the jagged pieces of a broken heart. Cynicism sets in, walls go up and survival kicks in full gear and you do all you can to fill the void and repair the damage your loved one has done.
Love and horror. Life and death. It’s what defines us. It’s what’s defined my fiction since I wrote my first book twelve years ago. In fact, my entire career was born out of this bizarre relationship between love and horror, and if you’re a reader of my work, you would have noticed that everything I’ve written touches on this in some way, whether a little or a lot.
There’s my novel April, written under the pen name Peter Fox, which is a firm statement about how people get to you and you fall in love because they touch that secret part of you no one else has.
There’s A Red Dark Night, a tribute to B-horror summer camp movies in which the main villain is a creature comprised of blood and evil–the blood you shed when your heart is broken and knife is brought to skin. For some this is metaphorical, for others, it is not.
The Axiom-man Saga, my superhero opus about a man without self-esteem who, as one of the motives for donning a pair of tights, is simply to prove to himself and others that he is indeed something of value after a lifetime of always feeling rejected and second best.
My zombie fiction–books like Blood of the Dead and Zombie Fight Night–utter indulgences into the world of the walking dead. Is this not what we become after love has crushed us? Is not survival our primary concern? Do we not find folks who are fighting just like us, whether in our relationships or even through the music we listen to so we can feel better?
These are more, but let’s move on to what you hold in your hands.
This boxed set, Blood of my World. Three novellas. Three aspects of love and horror–Discovery, memory, life.
Vampires are the horror world’s romantic hero. They are the regular world’s romantic villain. They embody life and death, love and horror unlike any other creature in fiction.
I set out to tell a story about two romantics whose love for each other was thicker than blood and just as red with passion and devotion. The reader must know, I decided, that there are others out there who live in love’s stream, who have gotten burned yet who also have lived and are living because of it.
Who have grown.
The vampires in the novellas you’re about to read are ruthless. There is blood and pain and indifference to human life. They are monsters.
The people in these novellas are you and me, folks living in two worlds: the past and present; light and darkness; love and horror.
I want to thank you for reading these as you join Zach and Rose on their journey of love’s joy, love’s pain–
–love’s horror.

- A.P. Fuchs
Winnipeg, MB
February 25, 2012

On the 5th of January, I put my book, Zombie Fight Night: Battles of the Dead, up for free at Amazon after joining their Amazon Exclusive program. Right now, the book is still free even though it was meant to be a five-day promotion, which should have ended yesterday. Perhaps they’re keeping it free and will eat the cost of paying me from today onward? Or maybe it’s just free and I won’t make anything. Regardless, I don’t mind it being free right now as, to me, it’s one of the geekiest and coolest books I’ve ever written and I simply want to share it with people. If you as a reader want to support my work–I do feed my family off my publishing–then by all means please check out the Kindle books on the left of this page, or the paperback versions on the right. Thanks, if you do.

Since the 5th, and as of 1:07CST today, Zombie Fight Night has been downloaded 1377 times across all Amazon platforms. Not bad at all. I’ll have to see how the free thing goes behind-the-scenes and if Amazon’ll start charging for it or if I’ll have to manually do something. Regardless, now’s a great time to get a couple free books from me, no strings attached.

What’s the other free book? It’s book one of my Paranormal Romance series, Blood of my World, called Discovery of Death. Memories of Death and Life of Death are the sequels. Discovery of Death became a freebie in September of 2011 and has been downloaded 15,976 times, and that’s on Kindle only never mind Nook, iPad, etc. I plan on keeping it free for now as it’s helped move copies of its sequels.

Here’s the point: I’m fortunate to have been writing long enough to have enough of a backlist that I can put books up for free while still earning a living off the other ones. Ever since I started writing, money has never been a motivator. The only “motivation” dollar-wise was to be able to make enough to live on so I can write and publish fulltime. Also, by having a large backlist, this enables me to conduct these experiments without taking too much of a hit or any at all. Like I posted last time, I try these things out on myself first before considering adopting it as part of my business model for those I publish so as to ensure it’s worth doing so on the money front. To short change an author with their own work . . . yeesh. No, thanks.

Will the risk of offering Zombie Fight Night for free pay off, or will it be a loss monetarily but a gain readership-wise? Time will tell. Watch this space.

I’m conducting a publishing experiment with Zombie Fight Night: Battles of the Dead and between now and the 9th–the 9th being the last day–it will be free on Amazon Kindle. And it is also only available on Amazon Kindle as I hooked up to their exclusive program for this eBook.

As both an artist and publisher, I need to find good ways to promote not just myself but also my authors. However, to suddenly take all the books I’m responsible for and do a campaign like this one, which is essentially a gamble, it would be unfair to take away 5 days’ worth of royalties from my authors without knowing if it’s to their benefit in the long run.

Anyway, I just got online now after being offline all day and at about 5:30PM CST, my Kindle rank in the free store for Zombie Fight Night is #604. That’s pretty good considering I haven’t promoted anything yet. Can we hit #1? I don’t know, but you’re more than welcome to help by clicking on the book cover above and downloading a copy. It’s free, and will only take you around 30 seconds. If you don’t have a Kindle, then a whole host of free apps are available here for your iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, PC, etc.

Here’s the story:

In 2027 A.D., the Zombie Apocalypse took the world by storm and no one was prepared. Countless lives were lost as humanity battled to regain control of their planet. Eventually, they did, and out of the ashes of fallen civilization rose a new world, one bent on revenge against the hordes of the undead that took everything from them.

Enter Tony Sterpanko, entrepreneur extraordinaire who found a way to capitalize on humanity’s thirst for vengeance against the zombie. He created Zombie Fight Night, a worldwide craze where the undead men and women who remained from the apocalypse faced off against people and beings that once existed on Earth or were existing for the first time.

It is ten years later and at Blood Bay Arena, fortunes are won and lost. Men are made millionaires over night. Others are not so lucky and find themselves broken and destitute.

Mick Chelsey is one such man: gambling addict, lousy husband and Zombie Fight Night fanatic.

Except now, in order to still watch the fights and try to win back all he’s lost, he needs to bet fast and big otherwise death will come for him.

Let the battles begin.

Zombies fight Bigfoot, werewolves, vampires, Axiom-man, Bruce Lee, samurai, kickboxers, robots and more in this ode to blood-and-guts action from Blood of the Dead author, A.P. Fuchs.

You ready to get it on?

I now present to you what I think is one of the most coolest books of my career, Zombie Fight Night: Battles of the Dead, for free.

Enjoy, and thanks for downloading.

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-926712-90-1 eBook ISBN: 978-1-926712-91-8 “Fuchs is an exceptionally fluid writer with a keen inventiveness and proficiency sadly lacking in the works of many writers of today.” – Nicholas Grabowsky, author of Halloween IV and The Everborn Many summers ago, an evil presence known as a Bloodan visited Camp Silverway, a peaceful summer camp for teenage girls, and nearly killed a young girl named Shelly. Mary Thompson, a girl on a bunk bed near Shelly, watched as the creature made from blood and darkness, began to sink into Shelly and begin to feed. Through tears and cloudy vision, she also saw her friend rescued by a stranger in a black cape, with blue fire blasting from his hand. Never forgetting that night, Mary was tormented for years by the memory of what she saw, and now, twenty-two years later, she has returned to Camp Silverway as a camp counselor, trying to face her fear. However, what starts out as a fun summer soon comes to an end when not one, but several Bloodans return to the camp and begin killing again. As before, the man in the black cape, Tarek, reappears, yet he hasn’t aged a day since he rescued Shelly long ago. Shock upon shock ensues as Mary learns not only where the creatures and her hero come from, but also when. The Bloodans enclose the camp in a liquid red dome made of blood, and as everyone around her gets killed and the monsters multiply, Mary, her friend Sarah, and Tarek are left with no place to go. Except for maybe one.

Available as a paperback at: Amazon.com Amazon.ca Amazon.co.uk Barnesandnoble.com Other On-line Retailers Available as an eBook at: Amazon Kindle Drivethruhorror.com Mobipocket.com Smashwords

The Last Coscom Entertainment Release: Eternal Unrest: A Novel of Mummy Terror by Lorne Dixon
For the Entire Coscom Entertainment Monster Fiction Catalog, please go to www.coscomentertainment.com

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-926712-88-8 eBook ISBN: 978-1-926712-89-5 Under intense aerial bombardment by the German Luftwaffe, the British government arranges for the most valuable exhibits in the British Museum to be shipped to the Smithsonian for safekeeping. Charged with shepherding the priceless artifacts across the ocean is archeologist Priscilla Stuyvesant. Leaving Great Britain on the Limpkin, an aging freight vessel, the ship is overrun by a gang of Nazi deserters loyal to a doctor exiled from Germany for conducting genetic experiments on his own people. But the desperate deserters aren’t the worst terror on board: three of the exhibits from ancient Egypt return to life. In life, they were the Pharaoh’s most skilled assassins. In death, they are something far more dangerous: undead warriors with mesmeric powers and a thirst for revenge that defies the centuries. Book Trailer: What People Are Saying: “Intense, sharp, and gut-wrenching, Eternal Unrest sucks you in and holds you tight. I don’t normally read war novels, but this one I couldn’t resist. Dixon knows how to blend horror (mummies!), history, and humanity together to create a powerful merging of the three. Highly recommended!” -Elizabeth Massie, author of Sineater “Buckle up, folks… On the heels of putting his stamp on werewolf (Snarl) and zombie (The Lifeless) lore, Dixon now gives us a memorable mummy tale that spans centuries and continents, provides Hollywood-sized action, and shows the author’s aptitude to draw well-developed characters. Eternal Unrest is Dixon’s most ambitious work yet.” -Harrison Howe, author of R.I.P. “No longer will the Mummy be an over-looked horror trope, I foresee many trying to emulate what Lorne Dixon has created here with Eternal Unrest.” - Keith Gouveia, author of Animal Behavior

Available as a paperback at: Amazon.com Amazon.ca Amazon.co.uk Barnesandnoble.com Other On-line Retailers Available as an eBook at: Amazon Kindle Drivethruhorror.com Fictionwise.com Mobipocket.com Smashwords

Also by Lorne Dixon:

The Last Coscom Entertainment Release: Bigfoot War 2: Dead in the Woods by Eric S. Brown
For the Entire Coscom Entertainment Monster Fiction Catalog, please go to www.coscomentertainment.com

The first Bigfoot War book took the cryptozoological horror world by storm. Now Eric S. Brown unleashes his follow-up, Bigfoot War 2: Dead in the Woods, with faster, meaner, more terrifying bloodthirsty sasquatches unlike any you’ve seen before.

This ain’t no Harry and the Henderson’s remix. This isn’t even like Sasquatch Mountain. We’re talking hordes of lean, mean killing machines covered in hair, with razor-sharp teeth and claws that’ll have you running for the door before you even finish the book.

The story:

Mere hours after the Babble Creek massacre, the beasts strike again, rampaging across the American Southeast. A small group of survivors in Jackson County, North Carolina, fight to stay alive as things get worse. Bigfoot is everywhere, terrorizing the citizens of Jackson County, tearing them

limb from limb and feasting on their flesh. Even the powerful US military stands in awe as the enormous beasts take their stand against them, going toe-to-toe with some of man’s most lethal technology.

Just when the survivors thought it couldn’t get any worse, death kicks into high gear as the dead begin to rise, hungry for the flesh of the living.

The military, tasked with restoring order and destroying the beasts, now find themselves racing to contain a virus that could mean the end of the human race. Colonel Drake and the small unit of tanks under his command are trapped inside the quarantine zone as the war between man and beast is

joined by the undead.

The body count rises. Humanity is on the run. The night is filled with terror, the vicious growls of the Sasquatch and the haunting moans of the living dead.

Are you ready to join in the fight?

Paperback:

Amazon.com
Amazon.ca
Amazon.co.uk
Barnesandnoble.com
Other On-line Retailers

eBook:

Amazon Kindle
Nook
Smashwords
Drivethruhorror.com
Mobipocket

The last Coscom Entertainment release: Blood of my World Vampire Series by A.P. Fuchs

For our full list of books, please see: www.coscomentertainment.com