Category: Books

Where should I start?

Posted on by Thomas

I’ve had eight novels published, all of them by Snowbooks. I get asked a lot of questions about my writing—where I get my ideas from, being one, very common query.

But another I’ve been asked frequently is: “In what order should I read your books, Thomas?”

Well, here’s the order in which they were published:

  • Maneater
  • Skarlet
  • Prey (the sequel to Maneater)
  • Zombie Britannica
  • Krimson (the sequel to Skarlet, and the second part of the trilogy)
  • Pandemonium Road
  • Pariah
  • Kardinal (third in the trilogy that began with Skarlet)

You could read them in the above order, of course.

But if you do read Maneater first, you might then want to read Prey, since it continues the story of Laura Greenacre.

You might want to start with Skarlet if vampires are your thing. You’ll then, probably, want to see how the story ends by reading Krimson and Kardinal.

If the undead grab you, you could start with Zombie Britannica.

So there’s the order for you; where you begin is up to you… enjoy.

Read Chapter 1 of Judgment Day, the final part of The Prophet Wars

Posted on by Thomas

The fourth and final part of my Young Adult series “The Prophet Wars” will be published on KDP on September 22.

Called “Judgment Day”, it brings to a close the story of Billy Kingdom, the boy who ca see the future, and Tawny Lang, the girl who can part the waves.

I’ve been writing it over the last month, trying to hit 7,000 words a week, using the progress grid I write about in “How To Write a Novel in 6 Months” to keep track of my writing.

Here’s the grid:

It’s taken just under a month to write the first draft, and now I’m starting the revision process.

And Chapter One is ready. Click here, and you can read it. Hope you enjoy.

You can also pre-order Part 4, here.

The prophets are back…

Posted on by Thomas

Hello friends, readers, reviewers, writers, vampires, demons, ghosts…

First, I should say happy new year. We’re well into it now, but this is my first email of 2020. Hope it’s going well for you so far. And if it’s not, I hope it gets better.

Volume 3 of The Prophet Wars, my young adult dystopian thriller (it’s “gripping,” according to reviewiers) will be published on February 28. It’s titled “Battle In The Caves”. Does that suggest action to you? Well, if it does, you’d be right to think that. It’s “action-packed”. You know me. I try to make my stories as exciting as possible; page-turners, I hope.

Of course, I’m making some advanced reader copies (or ARCs, as they’re called) available.

If you’re a blogger, a reviewer, or a reader who’d like to let the world know what they think about the book, you can download a copy here at Bookfunnel.

Formats available include Epub, Mobi and PDF.

Remember, there are ARCs available on the same site for Volumes 1 & 2 as well, if you havne’t read them and would like to leave a review.

Volumes 1 & 2 are available on Amazon (here for UK; here U.S.; other territories too) and here (Smashwords) if you prefer epub or other formats. There’s also Barnes & Noble for epub versions.

Thanks again for your support, and we’ll speak soon,
Thomas

The wonderful world of werewolves

Posted on by Thomas

An anthology of werewolf stories is published in January — and I’m very proud to say that one of my stories is featured. Editor and author Graeme Reynolds (High Moor) contacted me last year and asked me to contribute a tale to the collection. The criteria was that it had to be based on an already-created werewolf universe.

My horror-thriller Maneater was published by Snowbooks in 2008, and introduced Laura Greenacre – the tagline was “Meet Laura. She’ll eat you alive.” She wasn’t the troubled, sweet-natured, “I-don’t-really-want-to-hurt-people” type of werewolf that had started to plague fiction and films at the time (and that kind of werewolf still does). She was animal. And she went down well with readers. You can read more about her here.

And here’s just one review, by Sheila Merritt of Hellnotes:

“Laura is gory and gorgeous, beauty and the beast, the stuff that dreams (and nightmares) are made of. Male readers will find her extremely attractive, and women readers will admire her for her attributes and attitude.”

Couple of years later I wrote a sequel, also published by Snowbooks, called Prey. Went down well, too.

So when Graeme commissioned me, there was only one place to go — back to Laura.

My story’s called The Hunt and elaborates on an event mentioned in Maneater that took place when Laura was a teenager. The story also flashes back to Roman times, 60AD, telling the story of how the Maneater werewolves came to be, their history, their culture.

This week, I’ve just received the proof — and it looks great. That’s the cover, above. I’m really excited to be featured in this collection alongside some top horror names such as Paul Kane, Ray Garton, Jeff Strand and David Wellington.

You can pre-order Leaders Of The Pack: A Werewolf Anthology, here in the UK, here in the U.S.

The Prophet Wars continue…

Posted on by Thomas
Volume 2’s cover art

Volume 2 of my young adult novel The Prophet Wars will be available as an ebook on October 31. Apt, eh? Halloween.

It’s going to be downloadable in multiple formats. Kindle, epub, PDF, and will be available on Amazon, Smashwords, Draft2Digital, Barnes & Noble, iBooks… I could go on.

You can pre-order your Kindle copy right now. Here if you’re in the UK. Here in the U.S.

Meantime, if you’d be happy to review it, you can download a free advanced reader copy (ARC) in various formats right here at BookFunnel.

After you’ve read it, it would be great if you could leave a review on Amazon (after publication day), Smashwords, Goodreads, YouTube, your blog, the local paper. The first volume ARC is also still available, by the way, just in case you’ve not had a look.

If you don’t want to sign-up at BookFunnel, but you want to review the book, email me at info@thomasemson.com and I’ll mail you a PDF. No bother.

Thank you, as usual, for your support. And if you’ve not already done so, you can sign-up to my newsletter here – and you’ll get a free story and an extract from How To Write A Novel In 6 Months.

Coming soon…

Posted on by Thomas

I’ll be self-publishing the first volume of my dystopian/sci-fi/fantasy/YA-but-suitable-for-grown-ups novel The Prophet Wars in the next few weeks.

This book’s been through the mill. I wrote it back in 2015. We were very optimistic it would find a home. My agent liked it; lots of readers I asked to look over it liked it.

But the publishing industry is unpredictable. To quote William Goldman, the screenwriter, “Nobody knows anything.” I certainly didn’t. The Prophet Wars did not find a home. Yes, people liked it a lot, but… always a but.

Usually these days “buts” are related to uncertainty. Publishers aren’t as willing to take risks – although to be honest we didn’t think The Prophet Wars was that risky. However, here’s the pitch:

Britain 2026. Crime is rife. Unemployment soars. There is hunger, there is misery, there is devastation. Our world is on the brink of catastrophe. Earthquakes, storms, wars and plagues blight the planet.

And dark forces are gathering…

The future looks bleak. And 15-year-old Billy Kingdom can see it coming. He dreams about disasters – and days later, they happen.

Through social media, Billy learns that other kids are experiencing similar visions. Online, he grows close to a girl named Tawny Lang.

But one night Billy, Tawny, and other youngsters from across Britain with the same gifts, are kidnapped by armed men. They are taken to an underground compound called The Caves run by Ruby Bleak and her teenage nephew Robin, a child genius lacking any empathy.

Holed up in the subterranean complex, Billy and Tawny develop a bond. The Caves, however, hides a sinister secret. The kids quickly learn that they are only guinea pigs in a plot to control the future. But Billy isn’t having any of it and plots his escape.

But will his desire to see his family again tear apart the trust and friendship he has forged with Tawny and create, for himself and the world, a deadly enemy?

An action-packed story set in the near future and dealing with themes such as family, relationship, trust, and the environment, this is the first volume of Thomas Emson’s Young Adult thriller.

Volume One, which is titled Project 9:6, is available for pre-order here (UK) and here (U.S.).

If you’re a book reviewer or blogger, or just a fan of YA fiction who’d be willing to review the Prophet Wars when it’s published, you can download an ARC (advanced reader copy) on BookFunnel.

If you would like to read an extract, here are a few pages…

Zombie Britannica among Ezvid Wiki’s top choices

Posted on by Thomas

Really delighted to hear from the fabulous people at Ezvid Wiki this week telling me that Zombie Britannica has been included in their recently published wiki, Books with Inventive Takes on the Zombie Genre.

You can see the list here. There are some great zombie books selected. Very proud to have been chosen.

Zombie Britannica is a very “love-it-or-hate-it” novel. What we call Marmite here in the UK. As you’ll see from the reviews, opinion is polarised. But I’m glad to say that the “positive” column has the edge.

One of the criticisms doled out was that everything happens so quickly. But you see, that’s the whole point. Partly, the idea for ZB sprang from the research cited at the beginning of the novel – and it is actually a real study.

Carried out by a group of University of Ottawa mathematics students, it says a zombie outbreak would be devastating – and rapid.

Unless we “hit hard and hit often”, the researchers say, we would be very quickly overwhelmed by the undead – and civilisation would collapse.

So really Zombie Britannica is realistic in that regard. It is backed by science.

Anyway, thanks so much Ezvid Wiki. And if you’d like to know what happens after Zombie Britannica, a sequel, in the form of the short story “Where Moth and Rust Destroy”, can be found in my collection The Trees And Other Stories.

The Trees and Other Stories in paperback

Posted on by Thomas

TheTreesWPMy short story collection The Trees And Other Stories has been on Kindle for a while now, but in the next few weeks it will be available as a paperback. Here’s the cover. What do you think? I’ve published most of my books in the mainstream way – get a publisher; they do all the work. But I’m a big fan of DIY, these days. Self-publishing in the past was a precarious business. You dished out lots of money to firms who sometimes didn’t have your best interests at heart, and you’d probably have to schlep a pile of books around the stores, hoping the manager would take a few copies; hoping they’d sell a few copies. But Amazon changed all that: first with Kindle; now with CreateSpace. I know people are snooty about Amazon, but I’m not. They’ve democratized the publishing industry, and made the big, powerful players sit up and think. An way, I enjoy working on my books for Kindle and CreateSpace; I like doing covers and formatting – I’m a bit of a geek like that. In fact, I enjoy it so much, I’m thinking about providing a cover-design service. Have a look at the cover I designed for The Trees and see if you think I’m talking through my hat.