Slashdot Mirror
Self-Published Zombie Titles Have Doubled Since 2012
An anonymous reader writes "For the second year in a row, the number of self-published ebooks with the word zombie in their title has doubled. The annual check is performed on Halloween in Amazon's Kindle Store, and this year discovers 8,052 ebooks (with titles like 'Jesus Camp Zombie Bloodbath' and 'Never Slow Dance with a Zombie...') — more than 12 times the number that appear in the Library of Congress. 71-year-old literary author Joyce Carol Oates — twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize — also named her 2009 novel about a serial killer 'Zombie (P.S.'", but most of the titles in the Kindle Store 'aren't as ambitious,' notes this article, which still applauds the self-published authors and their 'massive outpouring of new creativity, as people all around the globe start wondering what's going to happen in their own imaginary zombie scenarios...'"
...that most of them are autobiographies.
is because a real publishing house with editors would reject them as poorly written tripe.
(And that Oates went through her publisher, and was not self-published.)
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
so is quality control.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
Zombie lit, just like real zombies, is impervious to the fact that it's dead. (Same with vampires and vampire lit.) Funny that.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
...zombie novel, check out "Toothless" by J.P. Moore. It doesn't read at all like the author was merely jumping on the pop culture bandwagon.
Somehow she managed to win the 1996 Bram Stoker Prize for a "2009 novel". But the "(P.S.)" was removed by the time machine, and the protagonist was renamed from Zombie to Quentin P.
Can someone make a graph with the yearly occurrences of wizards (early '00s), vampires, werewolves (late '00s), zombies (early '10s) ?
Cross it with more standard fanfic (esp star wars from 99 to 05, star trek afterwards).
Wraiths, mummies and ghouls would like to know when they'll get their turn. (and don't tell me they're harder to write for, you can pull a Twilight and reinvent them completely, just keeping the name)
I thought one of our main defences against zombies was that they couldn't reproduce..
-I'm just sayin'
Right?
Something ironic about using the zombie concept used to exploit consumers as if they were zombies...
>It is also a fact that most major publishing houses in the West strongly align with Israel.
Thanks for saying this. It saved me the time of reading the rest of your comment.
Replace the word 'ebooks' with 'video games', and I would bet the resulting statement would still be pretty accurate.
Luckily, I wrote and published mine in Oct/Nov 2011... so I suppose that puts me ahead of the curve.
"The more pity, that fools may not speak wisely what wise men do foolishly" - Touchstone,Shakespeare's "As You Like It"
At first I thought it said:
Self-Published Zombie Titties Have Doubled Since 2012
>It is also a fact that most major publishing houses in the West strongly align with Israel.
Thanks for saying this. It saved me the time of reading the rest of your comment.
Thank you for pointing that out. It saved me the time of reading the rest of his comment.
0xfeeddead
Will there be a kind of Moore's Law of Zombie books that comes in to play?
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
I've been getting great feedback. Rather than the usual shotgun toting road warrior style hero, I decided to explore how a tech geek might approach the zombie apocalypse. Its been described as McGuyver meets the Walking Dead. Part 1 is available on Nook, Kindle, Smashwords, or download it for free directly from my blog. So far I've been getting 5 star reviews and very positive comments, but I would love to hear some feedback from the more technology savvy Slashdot demographic.
The Bolachek Journals
Zombie games are not "massive outpouring of new creativity" by and large. Rather it is "uncreative developers attempting to jump on a popular bandwagon." There are some good ones, but most are poorly done and very uncreative in design.
I'm a big fan of indy (aka self published) games but I can't think of any zombie ones that have caught my eye as good.
What the fuck is the deal with this fascination with zombies? Especially among relatively intelligent people (i.e. nerds). I don't get it. Fundamentally it's a dumb idea, at least how it's presented 95% of the time. The only time for me that it works is as parody or as allegory, but taken as a natural phenomenon it doesn't have legs, feet, torso, etc. to stand on. A few exceptions where the genre works, it is attributable to external agency (e.g,. supernatural, alien). Very little of zombie lore withstands even superficial scrutiny. Why always so hungry when lacking a functioning digestive system? How are limbs able to hunt without sensory organs? Or move without a circulatory system? Why be only an asshole to the living and not to your fellow zombies? Also, how do they decide who to eat and who to indoctrinate into the zombie horde? No, no. It's just plain stupid.
Wait a second. You went from, "King Kong / Planet of the Apes = anti-black" to "zombies = anti-black" with no logical link. Now, your KK/PotA argument is interesting on the surface, and it may be entertaining to explore it more, but your zombie argument doesn't even pass the sniff test. In my experience, zombie movies have a pretty normal representation of races among their zombies. I've never seen a zombie movie where all the humans were one race, and all the zombies were a very obviously different race.
If you really want to bring your victimization mentality into a discussion of zombie fiction, you should do it from the angle of, "zombies = poor people," or "zombies = sick people," or "zombies = liberals." At least each of those has some logical support that can be argued.... a little.
IMO, zombie fiction is great. It gets people to think about preparedness for natural and man-made disasters since zombies would pretty much be the ultimate disaster. Not surprisingly, that's why a lot of government agencies use it as a plot for their own disaster drills. Also, your "tactical readiness" should be independent of what you think the threat is going to be.
and I'd like to put in a plug for Hugh Howey's "I, Zombie". Hugh has made a good name for himself in the self-publishing arena and his success continues to snowball. Not the least of which is due to his amazing stories like Wool, Moly Fyde, and my personal favorite the underdog Halfway Home, but also because he seems to be a genuinely good guy.
As for I, Zombie ... it is not a human story about zombies. It is a zombie story about being a zombie. Check it out.
If you can't be good, be good at it!
I'll wait for the movie to come out.
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
...most of this is survivalist escapist fantasy garbage. Poorly written, poorly-defined characters. I suspect there's a therapy group for returning vets where the therapy goals are to write a zombie book and self-publish it. Never ever buy any book without a recommendation from someone you think you can actually trust. That means a recommendation outside the Amazon system.