GREETINGS!

Hi everyone, and welcome to the March issue of the Shanville Monthly! As usual, I haver plenty to report in my latest online newsletter. I reveal a few tantalising details about what will hopefully be my next book release... there's a Hungarian Archibald Lox trailer to enjoy... I chat about the evolving and much-varied Darren Shan signature... it's not too late to book me for a World Book Day virtual event, and I outline how you can request such a visit... I have some practical publishing advice for young authors... and I explain where that doozy of a black eye came from!!! But let's start with that next book, as I HOPE that's what will be of most interest to you!

SCI-FI DASH

Early last month, I decided enough was enough. I’ve ploughed through a rough couple of months since my house fire in November, and dealing with the fallout of that has taken up a lot of my time. But I’m sick of logistics - time for some writing!!!

It’s been more than three years since I last released a Darren Dash book for adults, so I figured I should prioritise that, and get the next one out this year if possible. I have several first drafts of books that I wrote in my twenties, so I went back and picked the first one of those to grab my fancy, and launched myself into my first edit. I won’t give too much away at this stage, except to say that it’s a shortish sci-fi novel about time travel and a very powerful computer, and one of the characters, if memory serves me right, is a young Albert Einstein!! I can’t say for certain that this WILL be my next release — it’s been a very long time since I even looked at it, and it’s very different in style to my other work, so I’m not going to know for sure if it’s any good or not until I’ve got to the end of the first edit. But I’m reasonably confident that it will pass muster, and fingers crossed we’ll be seeing it in print before the end of the year.

More details to follow as work progresses and I figure out where exactly I stand with it.

ARCHIE TRAILER

Volume 1 of my Archibald Lox series goes on sale in Hungary on May 15th. The publishers have put together an informative post about the book, and also included a short video trailer for it, all of which you can check out by CLICKING HERE. (If you copy and paste the text from the page into Google Translate, you'll get a highly legible translation of the article.)

I'm VERY excited about this release. I must admit, after all the obstacles I faced while trying to get the Archibald Lox books published, and eventually having to go down the road of self-publishing with them, I never expected them to be translated. I'm absolutely THRILLED that my Hungarian fans are getting this chance to read Volume 1 in their own language, and hopefully the book will do well enough to enable the publishers to go ahead and also translate and release Volumes 2 and 3. But, even if that doesn't happen, the world is going to be one beautifully translated and packaged book fuller after May 15th, and I think that's a surprising and wonderful thing!!

If you live in Hungary and would like a copy of the book, you can pre-order now through the publisher's web site.

 A VARIETY OF SIGNATURES

A fan called ALFIE wrote to me recently. He'd bought a rare first edition of Hell's Horizon (the second book of my The City Trilogy for adults, which was published way back in February 2000). To his surprise and delight, he found the book was signed when he opened it, with my full, REAL name -- Darren O'Shaughnessy. But was it a genuine signature or a forgery?!? He wrote to me and I was happy to confirm that it looked like a 100% genuine signature to me -- hurrah!!!

My general rule of thumb, when signing one of my books, is to sign whatever name is on the cover, which is one of four candidates -- Darren Shan is the one I sign most often, of course, as it's the name I've used for all of my of YA releases, which have fared considerably better from a commercial point of view than my books for adults! On the adult front, I originally released two (Ayuamarca and Hell's Horizon) using my real name. Years later I then re-released those two (Ayuamarca was retitled to Procession Of The Dead) and City Of The Snakes as D B Shan. (They were later rebranded and reissued as Darren Shan books, as was Lady Of The Shades, a stand-alone supernatural thriller.) And these days I release my books for older readers as Darren Dash.

If you weren't aware that I wrote for adults as well as children, and are interested in tracking down some of my books for adults (nine released so far, with the tenth to hopefully see print later this year), the Darren Dash books are all currently exclusively sold through Amazon stores worldwide, either as eBooks or paperbacks -- you can find out more about them here: http://www.darrendashbooks.com/

You should be able to order the latest printings of The City Trilogy or Lady Of The Shades through your local bookseller, or an online site like Amazon -- as I said, those four books these days boast the name of Darren Shan on the covers.

If you'd like to get your hands on a first edition of any of those four books with a different name on it (Darren O'Shaughnessy or D B Shan) you'll probably be able to find them on a site like Abebooks or Alibris. Happy hunting!!!

SHANMANIA IN JAPAN

Although my books have sold in huge numbers around the world (somewhere in the region of 30 million at the last count!!), "Shanmania" (YES! that's a real word!!! OK, it's not, but it SHOULD be!!!) took quite a while to kick in. I didn't really start troubling the charts in the UK until The Saga Of Darren Shan was almost finished, and didn't enjoy a really big hit until Lord Loss. And although Cirque Du Freak hit the New York Times Bestseller chart when the first book came out, it was a bit of a slow burn after that, until word of mouth spread and the later books started selling in the same sort of chat-hitting numbers.

But in Japan it was an entirely different situation. The first Cirque Du Freak book had a modest enough first print run of 20,000 copies, but it found favour immediately, leading to first print runs of ten times (and more) that number for subsequent books in the series!! And it wasn't long before one of the sequels hit the overall #1 spot on the bestseller chart, outselling every book for adults as well as books for children!! Indeed, in Japan, my core audience was actually 18-30 year old women!!! Children read my books too, but adults latched onto them in massive numbers as well, which was why sales went so crazy so swiftly. Happy times!!!

The books first came out in hardback, but when they were eventually released in a paperback format, my publishers included a surprise bonus for collectors. The books came with lovely wraparound covers, but if you removed those covers, you found an extra illustration on the book within it -- and if you pieced all twelve of the books togetgher, as a fan has done in this photo, you ended up with a gorgeous massive one-piece picture. That's the kind of ultra-cool bells-and-whistles treatment that really only a bestselling author gets to enjoy! I was so, so lucky to experience all that -- I still sometimes look back on those days and wonder, "Was it really only in fact all a dream????"

SCHOOL EVENTS

PUBLISHING ADVICE PART 1

A fan got in touch with me last month to ask the following question: "I am about to publish my own work and I was wondering did you have to pay something to get your work published? or am I being scammed?"

By the way the question was framed, I assume she had approached what in the old days we called a VANITY PUBLISHER, which is basically a person or company who charges authors to publish (and sometimes market) their work. While some very famous authors have, in early stages of their careers, gone through vanity publishers in the past (and perhaps some still do), as a general rule of thumb my advice is to avoid them like the plague!! They're fine if you simply want a printing service and have a very defined audience -- for instance, if you write a family history, and want to print 50 or 100 copies of your book to give to family and some friends. But those who pretned to be REAL publishers, who tempt you with the dream of getting your work into bookshops and prominent placing on eBooks stores... the vast majority of those certainly WOULD qualify as scam artists in my opinion.

For me, there are two viable roads forward for any aspiring author, either one of which can lead to healthy sales and a growing, devoted audience. One is the way of the traditional publishers. You try to get an agent who will submit your works to editors at various publishing houses. If you find one willing to take you on, THEY will pay YOU and cover all publishing and marketing costs. You might not get paid very much, and you might end up disappointed if they fail to land your book on the bestseller lists, but you should NEVER have to pay them anything towards any of the traditional costs associated with launching and marketing a book.

The other road is that of self-publishing, and that is far simpler and cheaper than it has ever been -- and thanks to eBooks, some writers even enjoy huge sales and massive commercial success when self-publishing. I have two friends, both of who were struggling writers while they were traditionally published. They began self--publishing and both have become bestseller, earning life-changing amounts of money. BUT, as with those who go the traditional route, most self-published writers WON'T enjoy anywhere near that degree of success. As an example, take ME!! I've been self-publishing for a while now, first with my Darren Dash books for adults, more recently with my Archibald Lox series. I've learnt a lot, and got better at it, and managed to slowly grow my base and increase sales, but I haven't sold anywhere near as many books as I have through my traditional publishers, and earn nowhere near enough from those books to be able to write full-time if I was relying on their sales.

Both roads can be bumpy. Both have pros and cons. Self-publishing requires more research and trial and error, and some authors (like myself) just aren't natural business people and are more suited to traditional publishing, while others will thrive and quickly unlock the secrets of the online publsing world. But BOTH are preferable to paying money to be published by a vanity publisher. The reality is you'll almost certainly sell no more copies by going with a vanity publisher than you will by self-publishing, and you can have a lot more fun by doing it yourself, as well as save yourself an awful lot of money.

That's my view anyway, though if there are any authors out there who have had a different experience with vanity publishers, and wish to sing their praises, do please feel free to respond and tell me I'm calling it all wrong...

And that's it for March. I'm still smarting from the bash to my head -- although there was almost no pain the first day or two, it's been stinging a fair bit since then. My doctor says it will probably be several weeks before the bruising entirely clears, so I'm not going to be at my most picturesque when doing events this month!! Ah well, I was never much of a beauty to begin with, so I'm sure that won't be any great loss!!! :-) I'll hopefully see you all back here at the start of April. Until then, all my bloody best, Darren Shan. x x x

Follow Darren Shan on Facebook and Twitter. He also has a (very rarely updated!) YouTube page.

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